SAN DIEGO, California (AP) -- A California university has received final approval from the federal government for a study on medical marijuana.

Two professors of neurology at the University of California at San Diego Medical Center plan to study the effects of marijuana on patients with multiple sclerosis and those who suffer neuropathy, or nerve pain, associated with AIDS.

The studies will be the first to emerge out of the university's Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, a program created by the state Legislature in 1999.

Since California became the first state to approve medical marijuana in 1996, six other states have followed suit. Federal law, however, prohibits the sale of marijuana for medical uses.

The Drug Enforcement Administration granted the final approval Wednesday, saying it hoped to introduce some science into what has been an emotionally charged debate. The agency maintains that past studies have shown no medical benefit to smoking marijuana.

"The question of whether marijuana has any legitimate medical purpose should be determined by sound science and medicine," DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson said in a statement.

www.cnn.com

Too true. The plant itself has so many great uses, other than smoking, that I think certain strains, at least, should be legalized. There are plenty of plants out there that don't naturally contain any THC at all. Hell, it's better than cutting down acres of ancient forest for our paper. It beats shaving animals for our clothes. Oh yeah, and isn't cannibis like a ridiculous producer of oxygen by photosynthesis? I mean, besides smoking, that stuff's got some great uses.

Now, for why we should legalize it for smoking purposes, or at least decriminalize it. Its pain-killing effects <i>are</i> beneficial, and a damn sight more attractive than vicodin or morphine. It's easy to control, damn hard to overdose, and has no real interaction problems with pretty-much anything. Oh yeah, and it feels really good. As a recreational drug, it's relatively benign. Those who reserve its use for once or twice a month don't suffer any long-term memory effects, and I've never seen a single case of 'reefer madness', either. If marijuana were legalized for recreational smoking, I think we'd see grades of varying-quality marijuana sold in licensed shops for reasonable prices. Overall quality of the plants would improve once steps were no longer necessary to hide their production. A small sin tax on the stuff would also do wonders for the nation's coffers, as there are already an estimated 15,000,000 users in the US.

Now why the heck not?

---
This is all AFAIK. Anyone who has evidence to the contrary, please post, as this is just heresay at this point and not actual research.

Does anyone know why MJ was made illegal in the first place?

Legalize it, shut the pot heads up, and tax the piss out of it. I'm sick of getting gigged for the war on drugs.

Use hemp to solve all the worlds problems. If it doesn't, tell the pot heads we knew they were full of shit and just wanted to get stoned. Hold up Twinkee and Doritos production for a week as punishment for being full of shit and just wanting to smoke pot without getting busted. If they don't like it, they can have a million stoner stagger in Washington (but, it will probably end up in Ogden, Utah due to technical difficulties . . . LOL).

If hemp DOES solve all the world's problems like www.hempwillsavealltheworldsproblemsanditsnotthatw ealljustwanttogetsoned.com (brought to you by Frito-Lays and the Krystal Corporation) talks about, then hell, I'll be happy to retract all the pot head remarks, and you call all come over to my house and watch Cheech and Chong movies for the weekend.

But one thing . . . if that pot-gas doesn't run in my Mustang, I'm kicking some stoner ass . . . be warned now.

:D :D :D

Use hemp to solve all the worlds problems. If it doesn't, tell the pot heads we knew they were full of shit and just wanted to get stoned. Hold up Twinkee and Doritos production for a week as punishment for being full of shit and just wanting to smoke pot without getting busted. If they don't like it, they can have a million stoner stagger in Washington (but, it will probably end up in Ogden, Utah due to technical difficulties . . . LOL).

That was ****ing hilarious Dave. I love that.

I by no means think pot will be our savior, but I do think it is silly to keep illegal, and the POSSIBLE uses it has that are beneficial are something that should in the very least be SERIOUSLY looked into.

And yeah, tax the shit out of it. I agree 100% on that.

Jwrek- Many will say it is our government looking out for us. Others will say it has to do with some serious lobbying by the lumber industry in the early 1900s. Like Chris said, MJ plants can be used to create paper at a much more effective rate than can trees. At that time the lumbering industry had a pretty big hold. Steel and Oil stard to get into the scene too. This pushed it over the edge. Ford had made a car that was made out of MJ fibers and plastics. This thing was stronger than steel, and could be gotten rid of fairly harmlessly (unlike steel). He also was expiermenting with hemp oil driven cars.

Yeah, aside from smoking, the stuff's got some boffo uses. I think it's kind of ridiculous to take a material like hemp that can be so widely applied to improve our world, and just lock it up because one of those uses may be harmful to the mind. They never made paint thinner illegal, and people drink that shit!

Asa Hutchinson and the DEA can go phuk themselves..


The reason why it was outlawed..


1898: The Spanish American War erupts. During the war, the marijuana-smoking army of Panco Villa seizes 800,000 acres of prime Mexican timberland belonging to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. The timber from this land was used to manufacture newsprint for Hearst's publishing empire. Hearst begins a 30-year propaganda campaign denouncing Spaniards, Mexican-Americans and Latinos, portraying Mexicans as lazy pot-smoking layabouts.

1910: The white minority in South Africa outlaws cannabis ingestion in an attempt to force blacks to stop practicing ancient Dagga religions.

1914: Congress passes the Harrison Narcotics Act, its first attempt to control recreational use of drugs.

1916: The United States Department of Agriculture issues "Bulletin No. 404: Hemp Hurds as Paper-Making Material," printed on hemp paper, outlining a revolutionary new hemp pulp technology invented by USDA scientists Dewey Lyster and Jason Merrill. The bulletin lists increased production capacity and superior quality among the advantages of using hemp hurds for pulp. Lyster writes in Bulletin No. 404, "Every tract of 10,000 acres which is devoted to hemp raising year by year is equivalent to a sustained pulp producing capacity of 40,500 acres of average wood-pulp lands." Hence, an acre of hemp produces four times as much pulp as an acre of trees.

February 1917: Henry Timken, the wealthy industrialist who invented the roller bearing, meets with inventor George Schlichten to discuss his brilliant yet simple new machine, the "decorticator." Motivated by his desire to halt the destruction of forests for wood pulp, Schlichten spent 18 years and $400,000 developing the decorticator. The decorticator was capable of stripping the fiber from any plant, leaving behind pulp -- making it the perfect tool to revolutionize the hemp fiber/paper industry in much the same way that Eli Lilly's cotton gin revolutionized the cotton industry during the 1820's. After meeting with Schlichten, Timken views the decorticator as a revolutionary discovery that would improve conditions for mankind (with healthy profits for investors), and he promptly offers Schlichten 100 acres of fertile farmland to grow hemp for the purposes of testing the new machine. At anemic 1917 hemp production levels, Schlichten estimated that the decorticator could produce 50,000 tons of paper for $25 per ton -- 50% less than the cost of newsprint.

1919-1933 Alcohol Prohibition
1920 - 1940: Economic power in the United States begins to consolidate in the hands of a small number of steel, oil and munitions companies, laying the foundation of the national security state. DuPont becomes the U.S. government's primary manufacturer of munitions. DuPont later creates Rayon, the world's first synthetic fiber, from stabilized guncotton.

1925: Concerned by the high number of "goof butts" being smoked by off-duty servicemen in Panama, the U.S. government sponsors the "Panama Canal Zone Report." The report concludes that marijuana does not pose a problem, and recommends that no criminal penalties be applied to its use or sale.

1931: Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon (head of the Mellon Bank of Pittsburgh, one of the two banks with which DuPont did business) appoints future nephew-in-law Harry J. Anslinger to head the newly-formed Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

1934: U.S. Senator Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania attacks Harry Anslinger for making references to "ginger-colored ******s" on Federal Bureau of Narcotics stationary in letters circulated to department heads.

June 1934: Congress passes the National Firearms Act, the first prohibitive tax in U.S. history. The National Firearms Act was a futile attempt to reduce machine gun-related violence by gangsters -- a direct result of the prohibition of alcohol, and an eerie echo of the current state of affairs in the United States. Through the power of statute, Congress now "permits" anyone (even Branch Davidians) to own a machine gun, as long as the individual has paid a $200 "transfer tax."

1936 - 1938: William Randolph Hearst's newspaper empire fuels a tabloid journalism propaganda campaign against marijuana. Articles with headlines such as "Marihuana Makes Fiends of Boys in 30 Days; Hasheesh Goads Users to Blood-Lust" create terror of the "killer weed from Mexico." Through his relentless disinformation campaign, Hearst is credited with bringing the word "marijuana" into the English language. In addition to fueling racist attitudes toward Hispanics, Hearst papers run articles about "marijuana-crazed negroes" raping white women and playing "voodoo-satanic" jazz music. Driven insane by marijuana, these blacks -- according to accounts in Hearst-owned newspapers -- dared to step on white men's shadows, look white people directly in the eye for more than three seconds, and even laugh out loud at white people. For shame!

1936: DuPont obtains a patent license to manufacture synthetic "plastic fibers" from German industrial giant I.G. Farben Corporation. The patent license is obtained as part Germany's reparation payments to the United States after World War I. A few years later, I.G. Farben manufactures deadly Zyklon-B gas, used in Nazi death camps to murder millions of Jews (along with many homosexuals and drug users). DuPont owned and financed approximately 30% of Hitler's I.G. Corps, the military-industrial backbone of the fascist Third Reich.



1937:
The year the federal government outlawed cannabis.

-- DuPont patents petrochemical manufacturing processes for making plastics, as well as pollution-heavy sulfate/sulfite processes for producing wood pulp. For the next 50 years, these processes are responsible for 80% of DuPont's industrial output.

--In its 1937 Annual Report, DuPont informs stockholders that the company anticipates "radical changes" from "the revenue raising power of government... converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization."

1937 The movie Reefer Madness was released as a smear campaign against marijuana. Disinformation at it's best.
March 29, 1937: The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upholds the National Firearms Act.

April 14, 1937: The Treasury Department secretly introduces its "marihuana tax bill" through the House Ways and Means Committee, bypassing more appropriate venues. Committee chairman Robert L. Doughton, a key Congressional ally of DuPont, rubber-stamps the bill.

Spring 1937: Congress holds hearings on the Marijuana Tax Act. Dr. James Woodward, representing the American Medical Association, testifies that the law could deny the world a potential medicine. Cannabis was already prescribed for dozens of common ailments, and medical researchers were just beginning to explore the therapeutic benefits of the numerous active ingredients in marijuana. Woodward said that AMA doctors were wholly unaware that the "killer weed from Mexico" was actually cannabis. "We cannot understand yet, Mr. Chairman, why this bill should have been prepared in secret for two years without any intimation, even to the profession, that it was being prepared," Woodward testifies. FBN commissioner Harry Anslinger and the Ways and Means Committee quickly denounce Woodward and the AMA, which already had an adversarial relationship with the Roosevelt administration.

December 1937: The Marijuana Tax Act is signed into law, initiating 60 years of cannabis prohibition and annihilating a multi-billion dollar industry. DuPont and other synthetic materials manufacturers reap vast profits by filling the void conveniently left by the criminalization of industrial hemp.

Read more here: The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937

1937 - 1939: Under Harry Anslinger, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics prosecutes 3,000 doctors for "illegally" prescribing cannabis-derived medications. In 1939, the American Medical Association reached an agreement with Anslinger, and over the following decade, only three doctors are prosecuted.

February 1938: Popular Mechanics describes hemp as the "new billion dollar crop." The article was actually written in the spring of 1937, before cannabis was criminalized. Also in February 1938, Mechanical Engineering calls hemp "the most profitable and desirable crop that can be grown."


1941: Popular Mechanics introduces Henry Ford's plastic car, manufactured from and fueled by cannabis. Hoping to free his company from the grasp of the petroleum industry, Ford illegally grew cannabis for years after the federal ban.

1942: The Japanese invasion of the Philippines cuts off the U.S. supply of Manila hemp. The U.S. government immediately distributes 400,000 pounds of cannabis seeds to farmers from Wisconsin to Kentucky. Just four short years after cannabis was outlawed as the "assassin of youth," the government requires farmers to attend showings of the USDA pro-cannabis classic, Hemp for Victory.

Also in 1942: Harry Anslinger is appointed to a top-secret committee charged with finding a "truth serum" for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency (which, in later years, investigated the applications of psychedelic drugs for mind control purposes). The group picks a cannabis-derived form of hashish oil as their truth serum of choice. In 1943, the committee abandoned the idea because test subjects tended to laugh hysterically and get the munchies rather than spill the beans.

So it's because of a few racist, evil big businessmen that it was outlawed. Now the whole world suffers because of these bastards.

Jeff Gordon sucks..

How about legalize it, subsidize it, and ship it to Russia just like other US crops and make the world happier and safer?

Outlaw alcohol if anything.

Thursday November 29 5:38 PM ET
US Drinking and Driving Fatalities Increase
By Emma Hitt, PhD

ATLANTA (Reuters Health) - After dropping for years, the number of alcohol-related traffic deaths increased from 1999 to 2000, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on Thursday.

The number of traffic deaths increased by 4% for those over the legal alcohol limit and 7% among those who had been drinking but were not over the legal limit for alcohol consumption.

A blood alcohol concentration of 0.10 grams per deciliter or more is considered the legal limit in most states, and a crash is considered alcohol-related if a driver or a pedestrian involved in a crash has a detectable blood alcohol level, according to the report in the November 30th issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

``There have been no obvious changes that would lead one to expect an increase in (alcohol-related) crashes,'' the CDC's Randy Elder said. ``Many factors can affect the number of crashes, and it is difficult to specifically identify what is responsible for changes from one year to the next,'' he said.

According to Elder, this increase was the first since 1995. ''The long-term trend is down,'' he said. ``We progressed from alcohol-related crashes being responsible for 57% of traffic fatalities in 1982 to 40% last year.''

But, he noted, progress has slowed over the last few years. ''We'll need a broad range of public health strategies to stem further increases and reduce the number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities,'' he said.

``Ultimately, everybody in our society needs to understand that choosing to drink and drive is irresponsible and unacceptable,'' he said. ``Drinking and driving is a national tragedy, that so many people are killed and injured as a result of a completely preventable act.''

Different article.....

A newly released National Highway Transportation Safety Administration study indicates that alcohol is by far the leading cause of drug-related traffic accidents, while marijuana poses negligible danger except when combined with alcohol.

The report concluded that alcohol was by far the "dominant problem" in drug-related accidents. A responsibility analysis showed that alcohol-using drivers were conspicuously culpable in fatal accidents, especially at high blood concentrations or in combination with other drugs, including marijuana. However, those who used marijuana alone were found to be if anything less culpable than non-drug-users. The report concluded, "there was no indication that marijuana by itself was a cause of fatal accidents."

Yes nature has provided us with all the answers yet since it's more profitable to use synthetic products we continue down the wrong path.

The thing with alcohol is it does tend to make people more violent and it's obvious driving impairment effects. I've seen countless fights between drunks at bars and clubs. I've never seen stoned people getting into fights, the're usually too busy finding something to eat..:D

If anything alcohol prohibition proved that outlawing mind altering substances causes more harm than good. When was the last time Beer dealers got into a gunfight? Or the last time someone smuggled Whiskey across the border?:cool: