A note on THC and young children

A lot of people are getting concerned about kids finding the cannabis-infused edibles being sold legally in CO and WA retail stores. They want better packaging so that little Jane or Johnny aren't able to open Mom's "special" brownies and partake, since they wouldn't know or care that they have THC in them. Although the article portends a serious problem, the statistics undercut the point they're trying to make:

Compared with the 14 children who were treated after consuming marijuana, the hospital treated 48 children who had swallowed acetaminophen — the active ingredient in Tylenol — and 32 who had accidentally taken antihistamines during the same time period.

So just to put this in perspective: the kids who ate large amounts of weed brownies suffered zero side effects. The kids who eat too much Tylenol will suffer liver damage (it is the leading cause of liver damage in the US). The same thing is true for kids who eat too many (adult) vitamins. Iron poisoning from vitamins and supplements is the leading cause of poisoning in children under five.

In both cases, no sane person thinks we should outlaw Tylenol or iron pills. Instead, the packaging needs to be childproofed, and those who buy these substances need clear warnings on the labels. Then, every responsible adult will put their Tylenol, pre-natal vitamins, and their pot brownies together, either locked away, or high above the reach of a child.

Legalization might actually happen

After writing with some chagrin last July about how small a chance I felt there was that pot was going to be legalized in California, my outlook has brightened considerably.

Watch this ad by Yes on 19:


See the FAQ & Facts/Research by Yes on 19, their rebuttals of the No on 19 arguments and read Newsweek's The Conservative Case for Legalization too.

Psilocybin

I wrote about two years ago about the interesting research done on psilocybin. The NYT has a great in-depth article discussing the latest research efforts to measure the drug's effects on depression and anxiety. Fundamentally, it has the ability to melt away one's sense of self and this seems to have long-term effects elevating mood and perspective.

Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.

To make the experiment double-blind, neither the subjects nor the two experts monitoring them knew whether the subjects were receiving a placebo, psilocybin or another drug like Ritalin, nicotine, caffeine or an amphetamine. Although veterans of the ’60s psychedelic culture may have a hard time believing it, Dr. Griffiths said that even the monitors sometimes could not tell from the reactions whether the person had taken psilocybin or Ritalin.

The monitors sometimes had to console people through periods of anxiety, Dr. Griffiths said, but these were generally short-lived, and none of the people reported any serious negative effects. In a survey conducted two months later, the people who received psilocybin reported significantly more improvements in their general feelings and behavior than did the members of the control group.

The findings were repeated in another follow-up survey, taken 14 months after the experiment. At that point most of the psilocybin subjects once again expressed more satisfaction with their lives and rated the experience as one of the five most meaningful events of their lives.

Since that study, which was published in 2008, Dr. Griffiths and his colleagues have gone on to give psilocybin to people dealing with cancer and depression, like Dr. Martin, the retired psychologist from Vancouver. Dr. Martin’s experience is fairly typical, Dr. Griffiths said: an improved outlook on life after an experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear.

In interviews, Dr. Martin and other subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished. They found themselves reviewing past relationships with lovers and relatives with a new sense of empathy.

“It was a whole personality shift for me,” Dr. Martin said. “I wasn’t any longer attached to my performance and trying to control things. I could see that the really good things in life will happen if you just show up and share your natural enthusiasms with people. You have a feeling of attunement with other people.”

The subjects’ reports mirrored so closely the accounts of religious mystical experiences, Dr. Griffiths said, that it seems likely the human brain is wired to undergo these “unitive” experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage.

“This feeling that we’re all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity,” Dr. Griffiths said. “On the other hand, universal love isn’t always adaptive, either.”

Interesting, and definitely deserving of more follow-up work. What I don't like is this sentiment:

“There’s this coming together of science and spirituality,” said Rick Doblin, the executive director of MAPS. “We’re hoping that the mainstream and the psychedelic community can meet in the middle and avoid another culture war. Thanks to changes over the last 40 years in the social acceptance of the hospice movement and yoga and meditation, our culture is much more receptive now, and we’re showing that these drugs can provide benefits that current treatments can’t.”

The problem with that way of thinking is that it treats spirituality as this thing that is separate from the natural operation of our brains. No one doubts that science can study the natural operation of our brains, and so when Doblin describes a "coming together" he implies that there is some supernatural phenomenon that is outside of the purview of science. Bull. Spirituality is simply the mind being what the brain does, and what the brain does is chemistry. The more we learn about brain functions the more we can replicate and induce "spiritual experiences," proving them to be just another natural phenomenon that can be reduced to material causes.

A point about pot

In this article a doctor indicates he'd feel better prescribing marijuana for anxiety and sleep disorders than the current meds because of their far-higher addictive natures.

Legalization is probably not going to happen

After reading this article I felt depressed.  Despite earlier hopes, when the question of moving towards legalizing pot came up recently, Obama said, "No."  The case is made for legalizing and taxing marijuana to save the US billions by both bringing in more revenues (taxes) and reducing costs (law enforcement and the "war on drugs").

In the first part of this video, Calif. Assemblyman Tom Ammianomakes the case for doing it at the statewide level, as he has already sponsored a bill to do so:

The failure of the "War on Drugs" redux

I've said it before (and here), but Nicholas Kristof says it better:

June 14, 2009
Drugs Won the War
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

This year marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.

“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

For that reason, he favors legalization of drugs, perhaps by the equivalent of state liquor stores or registered pharmacists. Other experts favor keeping drug production and sales illegal but decriminalizing possession, as some foreign countries have done.

Here in the United States, four decades of drug war have had three consequences:

First, we have vastly increased the proportion of our population in prisons. The United States now incarcerates people at a rate nearly five times the world average. In part, that’s because the number of people in prison for drug offenses rose roughly from 41,000 in 1980 to 500,000 today. Until the war on drugs, our incarceration rate was roughly the same as that of other countries.

Second, we have empowered criminals at home and terrorists abroad. One reason many prominent economists have favored easing drug laws is that interdiction raises prices, which increases profit margins for everyone, from the Latin drug cartels to the Taliban. Former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia this year jointly implored the United States to adopt a new approach to narcotics, based on the public health campaign against tobacco.

Third, we have squandered resources. Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist, found that federal, state and local governments spend $44.1 billion annually enforcing drug prohibitions. We spend seven times as much on drug interdiction, policing and imprisonment as on treatment. (Of people with drug problems in state prisons, only 14 percent get treatment.)

I’ve seen lives destroyed by drugs, and many neighbors in my hometown of Yamhill, Oregon, have had their lives ripped apart by crystal meth. Yet I find people like Mr. Stamper persuasive when they argue that if our aim is to reduce the influence of harmful drugs, we can do better.

Mr. Stamper is active in Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, an organization of police officers, prosecutors, judges and citizens who favor a dramatic liberalization of American drug laws. He said he gradually became disillusioned with the drug war, beginning in 1967 when he was a young beat officer in San Diego.

“I had arrested a 19-year-old, in his own home, for possession of marijuana,” he recalled. “I literally broke down the door, on the basis of probable cause. I took him to jail on a felony charge.” The arrest and related paperwork took several hours, and Mr. Stamper suddenly had an “aha!” moment: “I could be doing real police work.”

It’s now broadly acknowledged that the drug war approach has failed. President Obama’s new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, told the Wall Street Journal that he wants to banish the war on drugs phraseology, while shifting more toward treatment over imprisonment.

The stakes are huge, the uncertainties great, and there’s a genuine risk that liberalizing drug laws might lead to an increase in use and in addiction. But the evidence suggests that such a risk is small. After all, cocaine was used at only one-fifth of current levels when it was legal in the United States before 1914. And those states that have decriminalized marijuana possession have not seen surging consumption.

“I don’t see any big downside to marijuana decriminalization,” said Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland who has been skeptical of some of the arguments of the legalization camp. At most, he said, there would be only a modest increase in usage.

Moving forward, we need to be less ideological and more empirical in figuring out what works in combating America’s drug problem. One approach would be for a state or two to experiment with legalization of marijuana, allowing it to be sold by licensed pharmacists, while measuring the impact on usage and crime.

I’m not the only one who is rethinking these issues. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia has sponsored legislation to create a presidential commission to examine various elements of the criminal justice system, including drug policy. So far 28 senators have co-sponsored the legislation, and Mr. Webb says that Mr. Obama has been supportive of the idea as well.

“Our nation’s broken drug policies are just one reason why we must re-examine the entire criminal justice system,” Mr. Webb says. That’s a brave position for a politician, and it’s the kind of leadership that we need as we grope toward a more effective strategy against narcotics in America

Also, two idiot Republican racists deserve mention today in South Carolina -- Trey Walker calls a gorilla Michelle Obama's "ancestor" and Mike Green says Obama will tax aspirin because "it's white and it works". Am I surprised? Nope.

Parent perceptions and teenage drinking

I read about a project by one of the Intel Society for Science contest winners in the NYT and it reminded me of a conversation I had last year with a drugs and alcohol expert. Ms. Jurman's research pointed out that when teenagers learn that their parent(s) crossed certain boundaries, it emboldened them to cross the same boundaries. I remember having a conversation with Jeff Wolfsberg last year about the myth of European culture having a dampening effect on teen alcohol abuse. Jeff shot that idea down, saying that the permissivity of European and Latin American cultures towards alcohol actually seemed to create more young alcoholics than in America, although he admitted we have a wider-spread problem with binge-drinking during college.

Jeff does support teaching teens preparing to leave for college how to drink (and how not to) using tips like these:

1. Never drink just for the sake of drinking, as a game or contest, or with the aim of getting drunk or forgetting troubles.
2. Don't drink on an empty stomach. Eat both before and while drinking.
3. Pace yourself. Until you are familiar with your own reactions to alcohol, don't consume more than one drink per hour. One drink can be a 12-ounce can or bottle of beer, a 4-ounce glass of wine, or 1 ounce of liquor in a mixed drink.
4. Remember that carbonated drinks get alcohol into the bloodstream faster.
   

Know when to say "when." Monitor your own feelings. Be wary of any changes in mood or perceptions.

I think it's difficult for reality-bound parents to ignore the fact that their children will learn how to use alcohol from them first, and then from culture if their parents don't teach them by example. I fully intend to drink responsibly around my child(ren) and show them by example how to ask others to drive and plan ahead and know your own limits. I think this is a far more effective teaching tool than scaring or controlling them into total abstinence (even if you could) during high school, after which, in college, they may find themselves passed out in a ditch in the first week. I guess one option is to ship your kids off to some "camp" to try to scare/train them off experiencing things.

I know I could've benefitted more from positive role models involving alcohol use, and I blame this absence partly for how I got so wild in high school. (Partly.) I ended up being told by AA people that I was an alcoholic (complete BS). By the way, AA sucks as a form of "treatment" and doctors are now realizing that there is no such thing as a binary solution for all people who abuse alcohol.

So while Ms. Jurman's findings indicate more teens will try alcohol if their parents did, it doesn't talk much about whether or not these teens use alcohol more responsibly than their peers if taught by example.

Last resort

I've mentioned before that I had a lot of friends involved in drugs when I grew up. One of the places they often went/were sent was to a Christian-based treatment program called Teen Challenge, as there was a center located only about an hour from my hometown. There are lots of resources out there debunking the statistics they claim about their "cure rate" but all in all the center near my hometown had a good reputation.

On the other hand, there are stories like this one from 2003, places where parents send "troubled teens" who end up getting abused or worse. I suppose when you're at the end of your rope, sending your teen off in handcuffs with strangers somehow doesn't seem all that scary...

...okay, I think these parents are dumbasses with too much money, but still.

Schism on "-isms"

There's been a modern divergence in thinking on how to treat various addictions to substances. The old 28-day treatment and AA ever-after absolute abstinence plan is completely without individuality or spectrum thinking. I was reading a piece in the NYT by an alcoholic on the holidays and how he avoids parties so as to avoid drinking, and saw his two references to the modern skeptics of AA/absolutism: Drink/Link and Moderation Management. Although it may be possible that some people's brains are too tuned to alcohol to enjoy it moderately (which he self-identifies with), it has to be true that there is a spectrum to the "disease" of alcoholism just as with any other. Those on the "less sick" side of it can almost certainly receive a different treatment method.

From my own background and the people I've known who have been on other substances than alcohol or pot, there is probably a very different truth about addiction to opioids and such. I would apply zero tolerance there, in fact, as these drugs don't have the same pharmacology and cannot be "enjoyed moderately" as pot and alcohol might.

(BTW: Jim Atkinson wrote two other interesting pieces on drinking here and here)

On a slightly tangential note (but still drug-related), last night my wife and I watched an interesting program called "Marijuana Nation" on NGC and I was fascinated and educated. It went through a number of issues on medical marijuana, the federal vs. state legal clashes, the way growers use state parks and trash natural resources, and inside a professional growing operation that has to be one of the most scientifically-advanced in the country. It almost makes one want to have another dance with Mary Jane, and if not with her, then an interesting evening with a toadstool.

Cannibas less harmful than tobacco or alcohol

Duh.

I've written more about it before, and it's a little complicated.

New WaPo article on Cindy McCain's drug addiction

I am inclined to agree with Barack that:

“Let me be as clear as possible,” said Obama, “I think people’s families are off-limits and people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of our politics."

On the other hand, a case can be made that when a politician's policies collide with their actions and personal beliefs, there is a hypocrisy to talk about. Kind of like Palin's denial to women who are victims of rape or incest the right to choose while claiming, straight-faced, that her daughter had "made the choice" to keep her baby: a choice she wants to deny to other women. Kind of like McCain's accusations that Obama was a "celebrity" with his own dozens of cameos, the TV memoir "Faith of my Fathers" and TV appearances. And so a politician, by their duplicity and stupidity, can drag their family into the middle of a serious discussion on issues.

Question to Barack from Balko

In the same vein as my mention of HR 5843, Radley Balko writes a column asking Barack some questions, and one is directly concerned with his stance on decriminalization:

In your autobiography, you admit to using marijuana and cocaine in high school and college. Yet you largely support the federal drug war — a change from several years ago when you said you'd be open to decriminalizing marijuana. Would Barack Obama be where he is today if he had been arrested in college for using drugs? Doesn't the fact that you and our current president (who has all but admitted to prior drug use) have risen to such high stature suggest that the worst thing about illicit drugs is not the drugs themselves, but what the government will do to you if you're caught?

Bingo. The number of people in our country who have at least tried pot is staggeringly high, with at least 15 million people in the US having smoked marijuana within the last month. This while the overwhelming majority of those people go on to lead completely normal lives drug-free later one (I am one). Why ruin their chances to have good jobs and educational opportunities [Federal law prohibits people who've been caught with pot from receiving financial aid]?

It's far past time to decriminalize, for a plethora of reasons.

Support HR 5843 to federally decriminalize pot

Barney Frank has introduced, with 7 co-sponsors, a bill in the House to reform marijuana criminalization. Basically, the bill would decriminalize possession of under 100 grams, or a not-for-profit transfer of up to one ounce of medical marijuana. Note that this is only a federal law, but it is a major step in the right direction.

This is a real chance to save billions of dollars of wasted government money prosecuting teenagers and college kids, as well as relieving the state of thousands of people imprisoned on probation violations or similar charges. Every day, child molesters and murderers are paroled due to lack of space, in order to make room for Jane and John Doe potheads...

Although Obama supports medical marijuana, he appears to have backed off earlier promises to work to decriminalize marijuana, probably because of the flak he took from admitting to have experimented in high school during the primary.

McCain still wants those damned kids off his lawn smoking that reefer.

HR 5843

On the screwed up state of our legal system: part 3 - the war on drugs

As Ed Brayton points out, people are arrested and sentenced to over 100 years for selling marijuana, while jackasses like Deric Wiloughby who abduct and prostitute children receive 8 years.

The failure of the "War on Drugs"

On a drug-related note, check out this piece in the LA Times today that summarizes the failure of the "war on drugs"...

Spirituality and drugs

Back when I was running Gator Freethought (AAFSA at the time), I was often pressed for creative material to use at our non-guest-speaker meetings. At one meeting, I decided to talk about the role of drugs in so-called "spiritual" or transcendent experiences, and especially drugs like psilocybin, after reading about it at world-science.net that previous week. The meeting went fairly well, I guess, although I admittedly wasn't as prepared as I should have been.

The long story short is that some drugs (especially psilocybin) seem to induce a state of mind akin to what Buddhist monks enter when they go into transcendental meditation, in that one loses all sense of self and an indelible sense of oneness with the cosmos emerges. That's also the report from a few friends of mine who have experimented with mushrooms.

Anyway, I was reminded of that as I read that in studies on those exposed to psilocybin, the effects on their mood and happiness have lasted a very long time -- over a year. Since my pipe dreams still include the FBI/CIA thing, I will hold off until that ship sails. After that, I think I'd like to see what transcendent experiences I can have with psilocybin.

On legal v. illegal drugs

The NYT has a fascinating news article today in which Florida state officials tallied the number of deaths caused by different drugs and found...unsurprisingly, ZERO caused by marijuana, almost 500 caused by alcohol, but a whopping 2300 caused by legal opioids:

The report’s findings track with similar studies by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which has found that roughly seven million Americans are abusing prescription drugs. If accurate, that would be an increase of 80 percent in six years and more than the total abusing cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, Ecstasy and inhalants.

The Florida report analyzed 168,900 deaths statewide. Cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines caused 989 deaths, it found, while legal opioids — strong painkillers in brand-name drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin — caused 2,328.

Drugs with benzodiazepine, mainly depressants like Valium and Xanax, led to 743 deaths. Alcohol was the most commonly occurring drug, appearing in the bodies of 4,179 of the dead and judged the cause of death of 466 — fewer than cocaine (843) but more than methamphetamine (25) and marijuana (0).

The study also found that while the number of people who died with heroin in their bodies increased 14 percent in 2007, to 110, deaths related to the opioid oxycodone increased 36 percent, to 1,253.

In November, I relayed my personal experiences with the epidemic of "hillbilly heroin" as I grew up and went through high school, and the fact that I know a few people whose experiences with oxycodone would have to match up against any horse or crack addict in terms of desperation and degradation. This study gives yet another reason to decriminalize pot: if a huge state like Florida finds ZERO deaths caused by marijuana among 170,000 deaths, the arguments that smoking dope can lead to debilitated mental faculties which, in turn, can cause death are undermined. I strongly disagree with complete libertarians with respect to drug policy who think that controlling substances is unnecessary/illegal on the part of the government, especially in light of drugs like Oxycontin(TM). That said, the legalization of marijuana is necessary, even if it may cause a slowdown of brain processing speed. I don't even smoke it (honest, not since high school, 1999), but it is definitely far past the time to de-criminalize it for a plethora of reasons.

Not the least of which being that at least 15 million people in the US have used it in the past month...and those stats are probably under-reported because of the well-known sampling bias when it comes to admitting to illegal behavior.

Don't forget, soon enough, I'll bet the government will be prosecuting people for possession on the basis of their sewage.

I would invite those of you who disagree to present a solid argument as to why marijuana should be illegal while alcohol and tobacco should remain completely legal. In addition, even if you could do that without incoherence (contradicting lines of reasoning about alcohol and tobacco), I'll bet you couldn't go a step further and argue why it should remain criminally-punishable, if it remains illegal. Keep in mind how hard it is to gain productive employment and thus remain a productive citizen with a felony on your record. Go on, I double dog dare you...

Wastewater Gumshoes 2, Pharma Water

Popular Science has a great article that forms a natural sequel to an article that I wrote about over two years ago (time flies) in Analytical Chemistry about how investigators are using wastewater (sewage) in measuring the concentrations of pharmaceutical and illegal drug byproducts and metabolites to gauge the drug usage by populations. As expected, the actual rates of drug usage by populations, as confirmed objectively in labs, is much higher than self-reported surveys tell us.

On a related note, CNN has an article about the levels of pharmaceuticals in our municipal drinking water sources. Although the levels of any one drug are very low, I do have to wonder about the multiplier effect and the issue of long-term exposure to human health. You can bet money that no one has ever conducted a study that replicates the cocktail of drugs we're exposed to over long periods of time. Maybe bottled water isn't so bad, after all...

Some politics notes

Ezra asks,

for whatever reason, our politicians seem achingly incapable of simply leaving Iraq. So it's worth asking if a military deployment is really the most cost-effective way to spend billions and billions in Iraq. This site, in fact, asks the question well. "The US budget for Iraq in FY 2006 comes to $3,749/Iraqi. This is more than double their per person GDP. It's like spending $91,000 per person in the US. Why not just bribe the whole country?" But seriously: Why not just bribe the whole country? If we're determined to commit an enormous amount of resources to the Iraqi people, why not let the Ghost of Milton Friedman take over and simply design some sort of program that offers enormous economic benefits in exchange for reductions in violence?

A win for progress in the war against "the war on drugs" -- the harsh crack sentencing guidelines are coming into line with those for powdered cocaine:

African-Americans were nearly 82 percent of defendants sentenced in federal court for dealing crack, but only 27 percent of those sentenced for dealing powder cocaine, according to 2006 federal statistics. Each year, federal courts handle about 11,000 cocaine sentences, which are roughly evenly divided between crack and cocaine cases.

The issue long has been a source of contention between government prosecutors and civil rights advocates, who argue crack dealers are often targeted for longer prison terms because that drug is prevalent in urban and minority communities, while the powdered version is more commonly associated with higher-income users.

I've said it before:

I strongly disagree with complete libertarians with respect to drug policy who think that controlling substances is unnecessary/illegal on the part of the government, especially in light of drugs like Oxycontin(TM). That said, the legalization of marijuana is necessary, even if it may cause a slowdown of brain processing speed. I don't even smoke it (honest, not since 1999), but it is definitely far past the time to de-criminalize it for a plethora of reasons.

I'd go further and point out that people who are convicted of felonies for using drugs are much less able to go on to lead productive lives afterwards due to their criminal record. This all but insures that they will remain trapped in a criminal lifestyle, and converts many formerly-productive citizens into drug dealers. I think many substances ought to be controlled by the government, but de-criminalized.

Remember, government-provided health care is terrible and will lead to a decline in quality, and Dick Cheney is proof of this!

The Dems have caved again, this time on the omnibus bill.

The dope on oxycontin & "pain doctors" in the NYT

This subject has a strong personal resonance with me; my hometown was featured in a Time article on March 28, 2005, detailing the epidemic of opoid abuse in our rural mining town. [It was not well-received, although accurate.] I have lost friends to overdosing on oxycodone, and I spent a lot of time with a lot of "pillheads" growing up (as we called them then). Just this past week, there was a shooting of a cop about one mile from where I live after a string of armed robberies involving pillheads (they were caught, of course). There is a long article in the NYT on an OD who got locked up after one of his patients died while taking...

...wait for it -- 5 80 mg OXYCONTINS IN 12 HOURS!!!!

Use of this magnitude is almost beyond my comprehension. I knew hardcore IV users who would not be able to do 400 mg a day. They could've tested this guys' wastewater for metabolites and found levels high enough to suspect a "safe house" operation was there when it was really just him...

These sorts of problems have been known for years, with an article in Time in 2001. I generally don't trust "pain management specialists", but perhaps my cynicism is simply a reflection of my personal knowledge of how many people use those doctors as avenues to addiction supply. I have first-hand experience with some of these sorts of medical experts, and by and large, my impressions are heavily tilted towards negative. They knew early on how bad oxy's were, but they kept dispensing them anyway, in part because of kickbacks. Purdue Pharma has to pay a huge amount of money ($600M) for its complicity in hiding the absurdly-addictive nature of the drug. Ignore shills for "big pharma" like Shandeek Kauship and the Cato Institute who try to pretend that all is well with that.

I strongly disagree with complete libertarians with respect to drug policy who think that controlling substances is unnecessary/illegal on the part of the government, especially in light of drugs like Oxycontin(TM). That said, the legalization of marijuana is necessary, even if it may cause a slowdown of brain processing speed. I don't even smoke it (honest, not since 1999), but it is definitely far past the time to de-criminalize it for a plethora of reasons.