Chris Christie Says He'll Sign Bill Making Medical Marijuana More Easily Available if the Legislature Changes the Law to Make it Kind of Dumb

Funny:

The other part is ease of access, i.e. how many doctors are needed to, er, “greenlight” a kid’s use. The haggling over whether one, two, or three should have to sign the prescription smells like pure politics: Current law says three, the new bill passed by Democrats says one, so Christie’s settling on two as a compromise so that Rick Santorum can’t call him a hippie or whatever at one of the 2016 debates.

Why the sudden conflagration of this particular marijuana-bundle? Well, it's because one strain of pot -- which, being very low in the psychoactive, intoxicating "fun" part of pot THC and very high in the non-fun non-psychoactive non-intoxicating CBD part, really shouldn't even be a controlled substance in the first place -- actually turns out to more or less cure an absolutely debilitating form of otherwise-uncontrollable childhood epilepsy which can produce up to 300 seizures... per week. Or 45 per day.

So it's about that.

It's also about something Sanjay Gupta mentions in his new pro-pot position. Pot is a psychoactive drug. Generally with psychoactive drugs, we test them on patients with stuff we haven't been able to cure to see if it helps at all. It's all trial and error, of course. Oftentimes no one has any idea a specific drug will work on any particular thing until it's simply tried and reports back a success.

But because pot (and other illicit narcotics) is officially verbotten, such otherwise commonplace "Well let's try this then" experiments don't happen with pot.

But, because pot is a psychoactive drug, we should not be terribly surprised if it turns out to have some useful effect on some brain or nerve related ailments. Actually, we'd be surprised if it turned out it had no such useful effects. Every drug, even hardcore hallucinogens, have some useful effects for some specific ailments.

It turns out that this almost-zero-high pot nearly cures a very terrible affliction which until now had no known cure.

Now, some will object and point out the obvious: The people who just want to smoke pot because they want to smoke pot are using this sort of limited-but-real-medical-usage of pot to advance their agenda, to get their foot in the proverbial door, so they can start getting pot prescriptions for such serious ailments as Stress, Occasional Restlessness, and Lack of the Munchies.

Which is... 100% true, and yet it also doesn't change the underlying facts. The politics of the thing, and the use to which the facts will be employed, doesn't change the facts.

posted by Ace at 06:28 PM

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