The Plumas County News wrote:Marijuana praised for medical uses, but its usefulness goes far beyond By Victoria Metcalf
Staff Writer
Vmetcalf@plumasnews.com 9-27-06
The Plumas County News<blockquote>
<i>If the United States and other nations legalized cannabis in all its forms-medicinal, recreational, agricultural, sartorial and nutritional-it would save the planet.</i>
</blockquote>
Sitting quietly at a wooden table, a Plumas County resident known simply as Skeeter, shared his beliefs, the research he's followed, and his knowledge of the plant. (At this point, Skeeter is more than willing to share his views and research about cannabis, but he asked to remain anonymous.)
Cannabis seeds are the most nutritious food source on earth. They contain every nutrient essential to survival, Skeeter said, shaping his fingers as if he indeed held one small round seed. "You can survive on a single hemp (another name for cannabis) seed a day," he said.
"Hemp is grown for a fiber from its bark," Skeeter added. In some places, growing hemp is legal for making rope and clothing, which are just a few of its practical uses. More uses are being discovered or created all of the time.
Indeed, the condemned "marijuana plant can provide sufficient clothing, oil, medicine, fuel, food and shelter for all the peoples of the world, if completely legalized and commercialized; and that hemp will prove to be the means of saving the planet (us) from acid rain, global warming and the depletion of our precious forests and fossil fuels," said George Clayton Johnson.
Johnson is the author of eight
"Twilight Zone" episodes, the movie
"Twilight Zone," the book and movie
"Logan's Run," "Star Trek," "Ocean's Eleven," "Kung Fu" and others,
Johnson wrote a preface to Jack Herer's
"The Emperor Wears No Clothes," hailed in some quarters as "the authoritative historical record of cannabis and the conspiracy against marijuana."
Herer has been one of the leading figures in the fight to legalize marijuana in the United States. One of his missions is to shed light on what he understands are the many benefits that the world can realize from it.
Rubbing the book's cover with his fingers, Skeeter said that Herer was a "straight military person until he used marijuana for the first time and it opened up his mind."
"The Emperor Wears No Clothes," is in its 11th edition. Skeeter's copy was released in 2000.
Skeeter's bible is a collection of research, history, medical information and much more that Herer has investigated in his decades of commitment to the legalizing and promoting of cannabis.
"I don't know if it will save the world, but it's the only thing that can," Skeeter said solemnly.
<b>Medical marijuana</b>
Experimenting with plants to find medicinal properties is not uncommon.
Digitalis is derived from foxgloves, morphine from poppies, taxol from the yew tree, to cite a few examples.
American Indians knew that if they chewed willow tree bark, it would form salicylic acid or an analgesic (painkiller) or an antipyretic (fever reducer), according to a Web site called "Growing Marijuana Seeds."
Skeeter suffers from asthma. When he was a child, he used inhalers and steroids as prescribed. Despite their use, he was hospitalized several times, sometimes for as long as two weeks when the attacks became severe.
Five years ago, Skeeter said that he began smoking marijuana, seeking relief for his asthma. "I haven't had as much as a cold for five years," he said about its medicinal properties.
"Since my first puff I haven't had to go back to inhalers, which were full of side effects," he said.
"Taking a hit of marijuana has been known to stop a full-blown asthma attack," Skeeter said. He knows this from personal experience, and there are people in the medical profession who support this information.
When asked how someone with lung ailments can smoke marijuana, Skeeter said that it stays in the upper respiratory areas, unlike tobacco smoke, which goes to the lower areas. "That's where you have all your lung problems," he said.
Considering another problem commonly associated with smoking tobacco, Skeeter said that there is "no cancer related to marijuana smoking."
"Cannabis is the best natural expectorant," Skeeter said. When people smoke it, they cough. This process clears or loosens phlegm and other contaminates in the lungs.
Treating asthma is just one of the many uses of marijuana on the medical front. It is also known to work for those suffering from anorexia, nausea, pain, peptic ulcers, alcoholism glaucoma, epilepsy, depression, migraines, anxiety, inflammation, hypertension, insomnia and cancer, according to the Drug Policy Alliance.
And there are studies to back up the benefits some sufferers of these conditions have realized.
In October 1988, The New York State Journal of Medicine discussed a group of people who smoked or inhaled marijuana as an antiemetic (stops vomiting) for cancer chemotherapy.
The 56 patients in the study showed no improvement with standard medications used to reduce or stop vomiting caused from chemotherapy.
When they were given marijuana to inhale, 78 percent of the patients showed relief with no negative side effects.
"I've seen a child as young as 5 smoking marijuana," Skeeter said. The child was seeking relief from the effects of receiving chemotherapy and radiation in cancer treatment. "It uplifts the spirit and gives you a will to live."
Numerous studies have found that when patients suffering from depressed appetites experienced with AIDS and anorexia and similar illnesses use marijuana it stimulates the appetite.
"There are more than 60 therapeutic compounds in cannabis that are healing agents in medical and herbal treatments," Skeeter said. "The primary one is THC (tetrahyrdrocannabinol)."
The amount of THC is directly related to marijuana's potency or concentration.
Six years ago, an estimated 2.5 million people in the United States had glaucoma, a condition of the eye where increased pressure leads to loss of vision and blindness, Skeeter said he's learned from his studies. Smoking cannabis could benefit as much as 90 percent of the sufferers. "Cannabis...is two to three times as effective as any current medicines for reducing ocular pressure," he said.
Cannabis "is proven to reduce the size of tumors," Skeeter said.
In 1974, government research on THC found that it reduced lung, breast and brain tumors. The Medical College of Virginia's research found amazing results when treating tumors with cannabis. When its information was turned over to the government, however, it was suppressed.
In more recent years, the program has applied for medical research grants concerning the effects of cannabis and has been denied, according to Herer.
Marijuana is also known to benefit those who suffer from sleep disorders, stress and migraine. "It can safely curtail or replace Valium, Librium, alcohol or even Prozac for millions of Americans," Skeeter explained.
When smoked, cannabis produces a calm, mildly euphoric state. "Sensitivity to sights, sounds and touch is enhanced," Skeeter said.
In these situations, cannabis opens arteries. In the case of headaches and migraines, artery spasms combined with over-relaxation of veins, cannabis use causes the covering of the brain or the meninges and the problems disappear, Skeeter said that he's learned.
According to High Times magazine, an extract of the cannabis plant called Cannador has proven effective in treating pain associated with surgery.
In that article, Dr. Anita Holdcroft of the Imperial College London and lead researcher with cannabis said, "Pain after surgery continues to be a problem because many of the commonly used drugs are either ineffective or have too many side effects. These results show that cannabinoids (chemical constituents of cannabis) are effective and may lead to the development of a wider range of drugs to manage postoperative pain."
In the United States, one of the common drugs used to relieve postoperative pain is morphine. While effective, it is an addictive drug, and when used over a period of time, patients must be weaned off from it.
Skeeter and other resources agreed that cannabis is not addictive.
Skeeter said that he's learned that medical patients who use cannabis the heaviest have the highest survival rate and experience the most benefits.
While smoking cannabis is one way to benefit from the drug, it can also be vaporized, made into tinctures, used as a butter, an oil for preparing foods or another oil for massage, and its leaves and roots can be used to make beneficial poultices and lineaments.
These are only a few of the positive uses of cannabis; there are many more.
When Skeeter was younger, he spent three years living and working on a medical marijuana farm in California.
Skeeter said the farm, at that time, had about 100 plants that were raised both indoors and outdoors.
At this farm, the "sea of green" method was used, in which the farmers were interested in using the tops or the buds of the plants. None of the leaves went to the patients.
It's the bud that is the most potent part of the plant. It contains the highest level of THC.
It's the female plant that produces the bud, and many growers are interested in producing a bud without seeds. This product is known as sinsemilla, the Spanish word that means without seeds.
Skeeter also doesn't like to use non-organic medicines.
"Medicine, in my eyes, must be organic," Skeeter said. "Commercially grown pot is with chemicals."
Marijuana for medical use in California, to remain within the legal guidelines for cultivation, must be grown "on your own land," Skeeter said.
Pointing to a recent cultivation raid in Caribou Canyon, Skeeter said that he didn't approve of that kind of growing. "Public lands are public for the public use, not for growing marijuana," he said.
Skeeter said that he's "run across bad grows in Plumas County," while out hiking. He said that once he nearly walked into the wire that the growers had strung around their plantation. They were also on site guarding their crop with weapons. Skeeter also doesn't approve of those tactics.
Skeeter is a legal medical-marijuana cardholder under the regulations of Proposition 215 that was passed by voters in 1996.
Currently, there is no known physician in Plumas County who will recommend the use of marijuana for relief, according to Skeeter and Plumas County Health Services.
A physician who, until about a year ago, would recommend the use of marijuana to some patients, has retired or moved the practice out of Plumas County.
Under Proposition 215 and its partner bill SB420, California counties are to issues cards to those who have physician recommendations to use marijuana.
According to Jocelyn Cote, lead nurse at the county health department, the agency is close to being ready to issue cards. She sees this happening within the next year.
PharmaceuticalsSkeeter also doesn't like supporting pharmaceutical companies, another major reason for turning to the medicinal benefits of marijuana.
With at least three or four kinds of commercially produced medicine for every ailment, the pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars annually from sales.
Professing to having a legal form of cannabis to relieve medical problems, Eli Lily manufactured Nabilone and Marinol, synthetic forms similar to THC, the active chemical found in hemp plant resin that is the chief intoxicant in marijuana.
Neither of the laboratory-produced forms of THC were as satisfactory to the users as real marijuana, according to a report in Omni magazine in 1982.
One of the major problems with using the synthetics, according to the report, was that users agreed they had to get three or four times as high compared to marijuana use, to experience any relief.
Skeeter said that those results still held true in 1999.
Skeeter agreed with Herer's opinion that Eli Lily had wasted nine years of research and millions of dollars in producing a synthetic that apparently doesn't work.
While Skeeter believes that pharmaceuticals in the United States aren't what they seem to be, he's very concerned about what the U.S. government allows the companies to sell to Third World countries that it won't allow here.
"The World Health Organization's conservative estimate: some 500,000 people are poisoned each year in Third World countries by drugs, pesticides, etc. that are sold to them by American companies, but which are banned from sale in the U.S.," said Herer. Skeeter agrees with him.
Skeeter believes that if marijuana were legalized in the United States and that legitimate research were allowed to continue on its benefits, the pharmaceutical companies would lose at least a third of their profits.
Such drugs as Darvon, Tuinal, Seconal, Prozac and many others, including muscle ointments and related products, would be displaced in the marketplace by cannabis medications and products, Skeeter said.
When he's looked into who the biggest anti-cannabis supporters are, pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco industry and the alcoholic beverage group are the ones who spend the most money, says Skeeter.
To Skeeter and others who believe in the use of marijuana for medical purposes, this lobbying is just another reason to steer clear of the big pharmaceutical companies.
Skeeter is also convinced that it's the pharmaceutical companies that are keeping a lid on research involving the benefits of marijuana and, where possible, its legalization.
"Remember in 1976, the last year of the Ford Administration, these drug companies, through their own persistence (specifically by intense lobbying), got the federal government to cease all positive research into medical marijuana," according to Herer.
Skeeter and others also blame the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency for the suppression of positive research that has gone into marijuana testing in the past. Skeeter said that if some firm wants to produce a negative report about marijuana, there is backing available, and those results will be made available to the public.
There is no financial backing from the government for anyone who wants to do what Skeeter refers to as legitimate marijuana testing. If the testing is done through a private source, he said that the DEA and other federal organizations suppress the information.
"Some 10,000 studies have been done on cannabis, 4,000 in the U.S., and only about a dozen have shown any negative results, and these have never been replicated," Skeeter said that he's learned.
"The Reagan/Bush administration put a soft 'feeler' out in September of 1983 for all American universities and researchers to destroy all the 1966-76 cannabis research work, including compendiums in libraries," he said.
When some scientists and physicians learned of the plot, Skeeter said, they ridiculed the censorship, and the plans were dropped.
Other items have been suppressed. One study that has disappeared is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's own "Hemp for Victory" film. That film was pro-hemp manufacturing, urging American farmers to grow hemp for the war effort during World War II. (Learn more about hemp in another segment of this series.)
This is the second in a series on marijuana and its impact on people in Plumas County. In other parts of the series, hemp production, the anti-marijuana side, marijuana cultivation and other related topics will be examined.