The Medical Freedom Channel

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has come down with another pronouncement from on high, if you’ll pardon the pun. (And for those of us who’ve always thought those nanny-statist twits must be on something, this might be conclusive evidence!) They have decided that “there is no comprehensive evidence to support medical use of the addictive drug [sic], marijuana.” They said that since “no medical benefits” could be ascribed to cannabis, it should “continue to belong to the Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act by being a drug:

* With high potential for substance abuse
* With no accepted medical use within the United States
* Having a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.”

The FDA further declared that “no sound scientific studies supported medical use of marijuana for treatment in the United States, and no animal or human data supported the safety or efficacy of marijuana for general medical use.”

As a story at the FoodConsumer.org website, from whose account of the FDA’s official manifesto we have liberally cribbed for this introduction, notes, “This statement was issued notwithstanding the fact that eleven states have legalized use of marijuana for medicinal purposes.”

However, with last year’s 6-3 Supreme Court decision (some call it abomination), authorizing the federal government “to arrest anyone found using marijuana, even for medicinal purposes as prescribed by a physician and within the states that have legalized its use for such purposes,” the FDA has apparently fallen into lockstep compliance with the rest of the Bushite Gestapo, although its spokesperson did say the agency was unlikely to take any regulatory action on this issue, leaving that in the hands of the DEA dragoons.

The FDA’s actions are tragic, indeed, since they represent one of the few channels through which some semblance of good sense on this issue might have been derived. We should have known better than to expect it, from an agency so completely under the thrall of Big Pharma corporations, not to mention their Big Tobacco and Big Liquor brethren. However, the fact that their collusion with the usual suspects has now been clearly confirmed on this matter, we are left only with the exploration of larger questions.

Which finally bring us to the thesis of this editorial: What IS this thing we call “medicine”? Is it something you ingest because it makes you feel better when you are ill? Is it something you take because it improves your performance in some area of life? Is it something that just relaxes you, and relieves stress? Is it just something that gives you an “attitude adjustment”?

Throughout history, medicine has been a part of human life – first as the province of soothsaying shamans and chemistry wizards (both Eastern and Western), then as the circumscribed purview of “qualified” physicians, and finally as the domain of bureaucrats who answer to nobody but themselves, like the FDA and its partners in obstruction, as we are seeing now in full force.

The FDA was initially created with the mission of controlling substances deemed dangerous to our health; then it progressed to controlling those not proven to improve it; finally it’s gotten to where anything that has not passed through a gauntlet of multi-year, double-blind lab-rat experiments (only affordable by the Big Pharma conglomerates, who then charge exorbitant fees for their patented results in order to regain the money spent on the research!) cannot EVER be allowed on the market. Even things that have been proven over generations to have a beneficial effect on our lives cannot be allowed to become legal, let alone be able to be vended as “supplements” (allegedly incapable of any medicinal effects whatsoever, or else they too would be banned).

So here we have marijuana, an herb that grows wild in just about every state of the union, and which has multiple uses as hemp – for clothing, fuel and other subsidiary functions. And despite the fact that there is no proof of its “addictive” properties, and no evidence of its deleterious effects, its demonstrated and documented curative and ameliorative powers for everything from glaucoma to pain to nausea to headaches to … perhaps other things we don’t even know of, go officially unexamined and suppressed.

Meanwhile even when entire state populations overwhelmingly support its limited use, to help those with chronic pain and terminal illness – people who cannot even swallow the prescribed legal medications that are administered to them to help them through the pain and suffering – these imperious boobs continue to play the game: it’s not “medicine” according to our definitions, so it must be suppressed and banned, and people locked away if they are found using it!

And so, in the name of those the state has murdered in this senseless War-on-Some-Drugs-and-subsidization-of-others (Peter McWilliams, et alia) and for those who have somehow survived the attempts (Steve Kubby, for starters), let us begin to visualize an end the FDA and the DEA and all the other Gestapo offshoots. As the saying goes, believe it is so, see it happening, and then move toward that place you can see so clearly.