Archive for July 8th, 2009

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars

Canadian doctor Ghislaine Lanctôt, author of the Medical Mafia, has underscored the lawsuit recently filed by Austrian journalist Jane Bürgermeister against the WHO, the UN, and several high ranking government and corporate officials. Bürgermeister has documented how an international corporate criminal syndicate plans to unleash a deadly flu virus and institute a forced vaccination program.

“I am emerging from a long silence on the subject of vaccination, because I feel that, this time, the stakes involved are huge. The consequences may spread much further than anticipated,” writes Lanctôt, who believes the A(H1N1) virus will be used in a pandemic concocted and orchestrated by the WHO, an international organization that serves military, political and industrial interests.

NORML

Hello Bob,

I’m sorry to read of this near conclusion of your run-in with cannabis prohibition laws in SD. Like you, I’d hope to see a suspended sentence, or a lower sentence all together.

With 98% of all criminal cases being plea bargained, I’m sure this Hobson’s Choice was a difficult one to make.

Being banned from public advocacy regarding something you–and clearly tens of millions of other Americans agree should be discussed publicly–maybe the cruelest cut of all. One that I suspect is ironically going to draw more attention/media awareness to your ‘run-of-the-mill’ cannabis bust than any cannabis possession case in your state’s history (if it has not already).

You may have to remain mum about marijuana advocacy (for a year), but groups like NORML never will, and where your voice has been temporarily silenced by a system (i.e., the mechanisms of cannabis prohibition) no longer worthy of public respect in America (and South Dakota), know full well that hundreds of thousands of your like-minded friends and fellow cannabis consumers will be LOUDLY protesting the continuation of cannabis prohibition from the halls of Congress, to Statehouses across the country, to the streets and parks in protest of both a failed public policy—and against any government or court mandates that seek criminal sanctions against citizens who disagree with prohibition laws, and will not allow them to share their views with the general public.

When a simple cannabis arrest turns into government restrictions on protected First Amendment speech and right of assembly, cannabis consumers and concerned citizens need to re-double their efforts to end our country’s expensive and destructive cannabis prohibition laws.

Godspeed Bob! Please remain in touch with NORML!!

Cannabem liberemus,

-Allen St. Pierre

NORML

On 7/6/09 9:40 PM, “Bob Newland” <newland@rapidcity.com> wrote:

6 July 2009

Hello everyone;

This will be the last email I send under the banner ‘South Dakotans for Safe Access‘ at least for a year.

By now, most of you know I plead to a felony count of possession of marijuana in May. Today I was sentenced.

In an hour-long sentencing hearing, Judge Delaney waxed reminiscent as he described his admiration for Muhammad Ali’s stance against an illegal war, which cost him millions of dollars and his peak performing years, during which time he did not complain, nor did he leave the country that so abused him for his beliefs.

Then, citing the fact that he (Judge Delaney) had to account for his actions to the hundreds of kids he sees in juvenile court, he sentenced me to a year in the Penn. Co. jail, with all suspended but 45 days. During the suspended part of the sentence I will wear a bracelet that senses alcohol use and I will be subject to arbitrary piss tests by a probation officer to detect illegal “drug” use. In addition I may have no “public role” in cannabis law reform advocacy during that year.

Work release is an option, but I have few marketable skills, especially in a time when everyone else is getting laid off. I’ll follow any leads any of you might have.

It was somewhat harsher than I expected, and probably less than I deserved. At least it did not cost me a career worth millions, and my peak performing years won’t begin until July 6, 2010. And that’s about all I feel comfortable saying about it. For a year.

I’ll turn 61 in prison, doin’ six weeks for smokin’ a joint. Mama cried.
*****

I will do my time beginning sometime in August. If I have a job of the conventional sort (you know, with a time to get there and a time to leave) I can get work release. So, if you have any ideas for me along those lines?…

Thanks again to all who sent letters to the judge, and to those who have sent messages of support to me.

For 40 years I have watched as dozens of people I know–and thousands I know of–go through this same, ummm?, procedure. Now it’s happening to me, and I feel the same frustration over the purposelessness of it all as I have felt for all those other people, many, many, many of whom were treated far more viciously than I.

Someday this war will be over.

So long for now,
Bob
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
For anything for which email is inadequate, contact sender at
24594 Chokecherry Ridge Rd
Hermosa SD 57744
605-255-4032

Found on High Times

Wall Street Journal

LOS ANGELES — Daniel Halbert moved here from Phoenix this year to invest his life savings in what he hoped was a golden opportunity: the medical-marijuana business.

But on Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council told him to shut down his dispensary, part of a broad crackdown against a growing and unregulated marijuana industry. More than 600 dispensaries have taken advantage of a loophole in city regulations to open shop here in the past two years.

The Rainforest Collective, a small Los Angeles shop, dispenses medical marijuana but it’s facing possible closure from the city council. Sabrina Shankman reports.

“They were like a rash,” said City Councilman Ed Reyes, who is leading the effort to shut down many of the dispensaries. He said a colleague told him that at one dispensary near a high school, the student crowds outside made the pot store look “like an ice cream shop from the 1950s.”

The planning committee has begun hearings to close the loophole used by dispensaries to set up shop with scarcely any paperwork or permits.

At the committee’s first hearings last week, it told 28 dispensaries to close or face a fine. This week, it was Mr. Halbert’s turn.

California legalized marijuana consumption for medicinal use in 1996.

In 2003, the state established legal protections for medical-marijuana users who were issued a doctor’s prescription. The law also created more solid legal footing for the cooperatives that distribute marijuana for medical purposes.

Dispensaries, which had numbered just a handful until 2003, began to grow statewide. By 2007, Los Angeles had 183 dispensaries.

That same year, the city attorney’s office issued a moratorium intended to block new establishments until the City Council created regulations, such as a ban on operating near schools.

But the City Council never got around to setting any rules on the dispensaries. Meantime, word begin to spread that dispensary owners could open new outlets, despite the moratorium, by filing paperwork claiming a so-called hardship exemption.

Some applications cited the raids by federal authorities targeting marijuana dispensaries as hardships. In other hardship applications, owners simply claimed they weren’t aware they needed permits.

The hardship applications went unchallenged by the City Council, and the number of dispensaries soared to its current level of about 800. San Francisco, by comparison, has about 30 dispensaries.

Mr. Halbert joined the rush in March. He was running a dating service in Phoenix when a friend pointed out an ad on Craigslist from Marc Kent, a former attorney, offering to help people apply for the hardship exemption for a $3,500 fee. He said he has helped people open up more than 100 dispensaries.

“It was pretty much a turn-key operation,” said Mr. Kent.

Mr. Halbert made three trips to Los Angeles and toured several facilities that had opened under the hardship clause. “I did my due diligence,” he said.

He settled on a storefront on Venice Boulevard in West Los Angeles.

He registered the business as Best Buds, but later changed the outlet’s name to Rainforest Collective. He placed a clapboard sign out front and advertised his services with a flashing neon sign in the window.

He decorated his shop with rainforest-themed murals. Clients could select from an assortment of marijuana strains for smoking, as well as “edibles” — pretzels and cookies with the marijuana baked inside. Total investment: close to $100,000, he said.

Mr. Halbert encourages customers to consume their marijuana on the premises and lures them with such offers as movie nights. “We don’t want them to just come here and get their medicine,” he said. “We want them to come here and maybe make some friends, have some fellowship.”

He said he now has about 1,000 customers, but declined to discuss how much the shop makes. Mr. Halbert said he might try to fight the city order to close and planned to stay open as long as possible. In his hearing before the planning committee Tuesday, Mr. Halbert produced letters of support from residents and local businesses.

Other neighborhood activists, however, have campaigned to shut down the dispensaries.

Cindy Cleghorn, a member of a neighborhood council in a another part of the city, complained her area is overrun.

“It’s out of control,” she said. Ms. Cleghorn said the new dispensaries violate neighborhood-improvement guidelines and operate in storefronts that are zoned for other uses. “It’s not about the marijuana, it’s about the land-use issues,” says Ms. Cleghorn, who brought her complaints to the City Council.

But because so many dispensaries had opened up without resistance from the city, Mr. Halbert said, “Any business person would assume that the city’s fine” with them.

By Dale Gieringer, Director, CA NORML

Like many medical marijuana users, Kristin Redeen needed additional prescription medications for her severe chronic pain. For seven years she had been treated at a private pain clinic in the Central Valley, where a doctor maintained her on Percocet, a semi-synthetic opioid. One day Kristin was unexpectedly asked to submit a urine sample.  

“They already knew about my medical marijuana use,” says Kristin, who contacted California NORML. “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”

When the test  came back, Kristin was informed that the clinic would no longer renew her prescription because she had tested positive for an illegal controlled substance. Her doctor at the clinic cited legal concerns, claiming –falsely– that DEA regulations forbid giving prescription narcotics to users of marijuana or other illegal drugs.

Kristin was cut off from her Percocet and began suffering seizures. She finally found a physician who was willing to prescribe her another opioid, Vicodin, but only at low doses insufficient to relieve her constant pain.

Kristin is one of a growing number of medical marijuana patients discriminated against by pain clinics. “I must have heard of 25 cases this year,” says Doug Hiatt, an attorney in Washington state. “It’s Jim Crow medicine.”

NORML has received a surge of complaints within the last six months.  Many medical marijuana users report that they can’t find a clinic willing to take them on.  Others, like Kristin, have been abandoned by clinics that suddenly adopted aggressive drug-screening policies.

Clinics say they are legally compelled to drug-test chronic pain patients so as to avoid liability for overdoses and diversion of prescription drugs, particularly opioids such as oxycontin –which have nothing to do with cannabis.

Chronic pain patients have good reason to object to being denied medical access to cannabis. Chronic pain is the leading indication for medical cannabis use, accounting for 90% of the patients in Oregon’s medical marijuana program.   More than 60 studies have shown cannabinoids to be effective in pain relief, according to a compilation by the International Association of Cannabis Medicine which includes four controlled studies of smoked marijuana by California’s Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.

Studies indicate that cannabis interacts synergistically with opioids in such a way as to improve pain relief [1, 2].    California medical cannabis specialists consistently report that patients are able to reduce use of opioids –typically by 50%– when they add cannabis to their regimen.  Cannabis can therefore be seen as a gateway drug leading away from opioid addiction.  Nevertheless, patients are being pressured to stop using cannabis if they want to get prescription opioids.

To their dismay, patients have to pay for the drug tests at their own (or their insurers’) expense.   Carol, a chronic pain patient who had been treated for seven years by the same clinic without any testing, reports that she was billed $325 for a urine screen. The balance of the bill, which totaled $1,601, was paid by her insurer.

Carol says her doctor told her that “the DEA requires him to drug test all his clients, that he has no choice, it is the law.”

In fact, there is no law requiring clinics to drug screen patients for marijuana.   “It’s BS,” says Hiatt.  Not a single case is known in which pain doctors have been sued or prosecuted for allowing medical marijuana use along with opiates.

Prosecutors have argued that marijuana might be obtained on the illicit market in trade for  prescription drugs, though such a scenario seems implausible in medical cannabis states. “It’s unwarranted paranoia,” saysGregory Carter, MD, one of the few practicing pain experts who recommend marijuana in Washington.

Given that cannabis is notably less toxic and addictive than other prescription narcotics,  it seems highly ironic that pain clinics are discouraging its use.  The prejudice against marijuana has nothing to do with medical science, but rather with political and legal pressures to crack down on prescription drug use. Non-medical use of prescription drugs has recently emerged as the nation’s number-one drug problem du jour.

A new government report, ominously entitled the “National Prescription Drug Threat Assessment,” reported 8,500 deaths in 2005 from prescription pain relievers (mainly opioids), more than double the 2001 total. “Diversion and abuse of prescription drugs are a threat to our public health and safety – similar to the threat posed by illicit drugs such as heroin and cocaine,” warned Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske.

The Pain Specialists’ Meeting
The 2009 American Pain Society Convention in San Diego included a panel on “Cannabinoids in Pain Management,” chaired by Dr. Mark Ware of McGill University. Dr. Andrea Hohmann, an expert on stress-level analgesia from the University of Georgia, presented evidence from rodent studies which showed that cannabinoids suppress nociceptive processing through both the CB1 and CB2 receptors, and that endocannabinoids, including 2-AG and anandamide, help suppress pain.

Donald Abrams, MD, of the University of California at San Francisco, discussed his studies showing that inhaled marijuana significantly reduced neuropathic pain experienced by HIV patients.  Cannabinoids and opioids interact synergistically on separate but parallel pain receptors, Abrams said. He is conducting another study on combined use of cannabinoids and opioids, preliminary results of which appear promising.

Dr. Ware discussed studies involving the variety of cannabinoid medicines available in Canada, which include dronabinol, Sativex, Nabilone, and herbal THC. All of them have demonstrated efficacy in pain relief.  Cannabis is now recognized as a “third line” agent for neuropathic pain in Canada.  Noting that that its adverse effects are mild to moderate, Ware concluded that “cannabinoid analgesia is the real thing.”

During the question session, your correspondent asked why it was that, in light of evidence that cannabis was so useful in pain therapy, there appeared to be an upsurge in drug testing to prevent its use.  The panelists could offer no explanation.

We moved on to the exhibition hall, where drug testing companies were conspicuously displaying their wares.  Their exhibits showed how well their products could monitor usage of opiates.  The exhibitors seemed surprised when we told them that their products were being used against medical marijuana.

One of the more sophisticated exhibitors was Ameritox, which boasted panels for distinguishing a dozen different opioids plus numerous sedatives, tricyclic anti-depressants, barbiturates, and stimulants as well as “drugs of abuse,” among them marijuana.  Their saleswoman seemed surprised to hear that the Ameritox test was being used to screen out medical marijuana patients.  She said that clinics could easily order the screens without the marijuana if they wanted.
Another company boasted how their test could be administered at the doctor’s office, thereby allowing the doctor rather than the lab to collect the bill.

Finally, we spoke to a legal expert on pain medication, Ms. Jennifer Bolen, a former prosecutor turned defense attorney, who has a useful website devoted to the subject:
www.legalsideofpain.com.

Ms Bolen pointed to three recent developments that have increased the pressure to conduct drug screening of pain patients.  First,  pain doctors have suffered a string of stinging legal judgments for over-prescribing opioids to patients who subsequently overdosed. One notable example involved Dr. Thomas Merrill of Florida,  whose life sentence was sustained by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals last year.

This February, a prestigious panel of the American Pain Society issued “New Guidelines for Prescribing Opioid Pain Drugs” which counsels that “diligent monitoring of patients is essential. “ The report specifically recommends periodic drug screens for chronic opioid patients at risk for aberrant drug behavior, though it doesn’t mention cannabis.

Lastly,  under  legislation that took effect this year, the FDA has new authority to require pharmaceutical companies to implement “risk management” programs to prevent consumer drug misuse.

Medical cannabis patients have no easy remedy to the current drug testing onslaught. In the absence of dire bodily harm, malpractice suits are of no avail.  In general, pain clinics have no legal obligation to treat anyone.  They commonly require patients to sign contracts allowing them to conduct drug screening at will.  Nonetheless, patients may have good grounds to complain to their state medical boards.  This is particularly the case where they have been abandoned by their doctors after being made dependent on prescription narcotics.

The ultimate recourse is to educate doctors, many of whom remain woefully ignorant of the literature on medical marijuana and chronic pain.  At the APS convention we encountered a distinguished pain specialist from San Diego, who joked about having enjoyed the marijuana muchies with his son,  but averred that he wouldn’t let his patients use it, on the grounds that it wouldn’t be useful, and anyway smoked medicine is bad for the lungs. Like most convention attendees, he had missed the panel on medical cannabis, where Dr. Abrams had discussed the use ofsmokeless vaporizers.

Still,  good physicians should be open to persuasion from patients. Cynthia, a severe chronic pain patient. had frequented the same clinic for 10 years when she was confronted with a surprise urine test.  In addition to prescription opiates, she had been using medical marijuana, though her recommendation was four years out of date.   The test cost her $100  and her insurer $500 more.

On finding her positive for marijuana, her doctor informed her that she would have to reduce her cannabinoid level to zero.  After a heart-to-heart  talk, in which she explained to him how she had been able to reduce her opiate use to minimal levels thanks to medical cannabis, her doctor relented. “I feel really lucky,’ says Cynthia,  “You have to feel out the doctor. We have a special relationship.  I don’t think he plans to do this with all his patients.”

REFERENCES
[1] Lynch and Clark, “Cannabis reduces opioid dose in the treatment of chronic non-cancer pain,” Journal Pain Symptom Management, (2003) 25(6) 496-8.

[2[ Narang et al., 2008 Efficacy of dronabinol as an adjuvant treatment for chronic pain patients on opioid therapy, J Pain. Mar;9(3):254-64.