crapping rainbows in your brain

Recently, I believe I posted about the ruling of the Supreme Court as regards medical marijuana that occurred on 6/6/05.

I certainly think from a purely constitutional perspective that the ruling was completely wrong. I agree with the conservatives on this one (they were actually being traditional conservatives)... In fact, I appreciate O'Connor's emphasis on the concept of experimentation. I've thought this for some time. States should be allowed to have very different dynamics internally. But now we have an overarching federal scheme that essentially makes states very, very similar.

Now, my point in this post is to "reverse-engineer" the issue... The conservative case is that Congress has no authority to regulate intrastate medical marijuana, due to the fact that there is no interstate commerce involved. And especially in this case, where the patient(s?) was/were growing it their selves, without going through any distribution channel... There is fucking no commerce involved at all.

So, I thought about what it would mean if the court HAD voted the conservative way, and that Congress has no right to ban intrastate growing and consumption of marijuana. They don't say, of course, that the States don't have the right. The individual states could still ban it in whatever way they see fit (so long as they don't infringe upon constitutional rights)... Now, though, if this were the ruling, the federal court would in effect say that with regards to federal law, there is no legal way for them to prevent you from growing marijuana yourself and using it. Wrap that around your head... If the strict constitutionalists would have been the majority, you would have every right as a citizen of the United States, to grow your own weed. That doesn't mean you necessarily have that right at the state level, but there wouldn't be a damn thing the government could do to stop you if your State DID allow you to grow it and smoke it.

This is just one example of the reason I'm for a limited federalism. By this I mean a confederation of states, with limited national unity, to serve for common purposes, but not much else. I don't like the way it's called the "Federal Government", because to me, it's more of a "national government". In theory it's a federation of loosely regulated states, but in actuality, it's not the case.

bah. anyways.

this article shows an argument between pro- and anti-medical marijuana "advocates"(???)

The thing I noticed right away is the word "smoked" in the "anti" article.  I thought, that's odd.  So I search text for "smok"... and sure as shit... the only piece to talk about smoked pot is the anti article.

The pro article recognizes that there are many different methods to imbibe MJ.  Tinctures, and vaporization are just two examples that pop off the top of my head (these are not mentioned specifically).

There are many problems I find in the debunking.  Some very specious (sp?) arguments...

Wow.

Heart attacks. Cardiovascular disease. Atherosclerosis. We hear these words everyday, even if, unlike me, you don't work in the field. That's because this growing epidemic is responsible for so many deaths each year in industrialised nations. A combination of our diet, habits like smoking, not exercising enough, gum disease, industrial pollutants and genetics are combining to cause the greatest cause of death for men and women.

Scarcely a day goes by when another item is added to the list we mentally keeped taped to the fridge, entitled "More things that will kill me." Less frequently, items get added to the other list, "things that might keep me alive." Recently, it was announced that a compound in red wine, resveratrol, could be beneficial in warding off heart disease. Now we might be able to add its less socially-accepted colleague, cannabis (subscription required).

THC, one of the active ingredients in cannabis, acts on a family of receptors called CB receptors. There are two subclasses of CB receptor, CB1 and CB2. CB1 receptors are present in blood vessels, amongst other tissues, and they cause blood vessels to dilate. The role of CB2 receptors is less well understood, but they are expressed on circulating immune cells like macrophages.

These cells are critically important in many inflammatory auto-immune diseases, and in atherosclerosis the disease is driven by the recruitment of circulating macrophages into the wall of the blood vessel, where they take up deposits of cholesterol and lipids. Steffens et al. have shown that adding THC reduces the development of atherosclerosis in mice, and that activation of the CB2 receptor by THC affects their activation and recruitment to the plaque.

Now at this point I ought to point out that smoking cannabis isn't necessarily going to be beneficial for you — the sedentary life style, the hypotension, and the fact that smoking anything is bad for the lungs and circulation. It is possible that we will see drugs targeting CB2 receptors being developed however, as oral or transdermal administration are both better routes of administration.