{"id":38532,"date":"2019-09-28T05:00:11","date_gmt":"2019-09-28T13:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2019\/09\/28\/harvard-professor-writes-questionable-defense-of-trumps-reefer-madness\/"},"modified":"2019-09-29T00:46:23","modified_gmt":"2019-09-29T08:46:23","slug":"harvard-professor-writes-questionable-defense-of-trumps-reefer-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2019\/09\/28\/harvard-professor-writes-questionable-defense-of-trumps-reefer-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"Harvard Professor Writes Questionable Defense of Trump\u2019s Reefer Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

In\u00a0an essay published on NBCNews.com on Sept. 20<\/a>, Kevin P. Hill, an addiction psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing moral panic over vaping \u2014 which to date is believed to have killed 12 Americans, or fewer than half the number of humans on bicycles killed by cars in New York City this year \u2014 by\u00a0offering instead a defense of modern-day \u201creefer madness<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In late August, just as the first few reports of a mysterious lung ailment possibly related to vaporizer use were surfacing, Jerome Adams, Donald Trump\u2019s current surgeon general,\u00a0released the first Surgeon General\u2019s advisory on cannabis in 37 years<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Cannabis,\u00a0according to Adams and Alex Azar, the current Secretary of Health and Human Services,<\/a>\u00a0is a \u201cdangerous drug\u201d that poses a particular threat to youth and to pregnant women \u2014 many of whom are under the mistaken impression that using weed, which is many magnitudes more powerful than it used to be, is relatively risk free.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis ain\u2019t your mother\u2019s marijuana,\u201d warned Adams, who declared without equivocation, that cannabis use is linked to lowering IQs, plummeting school performance and even suicide.<\/p>\n

The next day, the official Surgeon General Twitter account posted the claim, refuted numerous times by numerous studies, that legalization has led to more youth cannabis use.<\/p>\n

\n

Surgeon General Jerome Adams: \u201cThis ain\u2019t your mother\u2019s marijuana.\u201d https:\/\/t.co\/GCRTiO5ls8<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/j77GP0YP12<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 The Hill (@thehill) August 29, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rather than point out the Surgeon General\u2019s many misstatements and outright fabrications, Hill instead chooses to amplify them while chasing a few apparent beliefs of his own. The public, Hill asserts, have been bamboozled by an \u201chistorical narrative\u201d into believing that \u201cweed is safe and good for you.\u201d He laments the paucity of science on cannabis\u2019s benefits (something that even legalization advocates could agree on) while also suggesting that legalization, despite the often draconian restrictions under which it has been cautiously advanced, itself suggests that cannabis can be used \u201cwhenever, however, and with whomever we want.\u201d<\/p>\n

And Hill also draws a connection between high-potency cannabis and \u201cpotentially disastrous results\u201d like the vision of a teenage wasteland of increased psychosis, physical dependence, and declining function invoked by Surgeon General Adams \u2014 whose claims Hill does not see fit to examine critically. This is probably because the assumptions on which Hill\u2019s offering to the discourse are based rely on the same thin evidence as Adams\u2019s. That is, they\u2019re thinner and weaker than a roll of off-brand paper towels in the rain and include at least a few strawmen of Hill\u2019s own making for good measure.<\/p>\n

Hill writes that \u201cincreasing legal access to weed does not and should not imply that weed is risk-free.\u201d To this, Hill should be asked, \u201cWho, exactly, made such an implication?\u201d It certainly was not any pro-legalization campaign. In every recent political effort where legalization was at stake, accepted as gospel were the notions that cannabis and kids are a bad mix; that cannabis should not be consumed in public or most anyplace, ever; and that individual counties, cities, and towns should be allowed to ban legalized cannabis for any reason whatsoever (or no reason at all). And all this \u2014restrictions that are not applied to alcohol or tobacco outside of \u201cdry counties\u201d in the Bible Belt, a vestige of a bygone era \u2014 came from the pro-legalization side! Whether a political decision or not, every legalization effort accepts that cannabis use carries risk and is thus an activity that should not be done by anyone aside from an adult 21 or over, and even then only in certain environments.<\/p>\n

To buttress his assumption that the general public \u2014 the same public of whom 40% can be relied upon to oppose legalization wherever it appears on the ballot \u2014 has been fooled into thinking weed is safe, he\u00a0offers the results of an online survey conducted by a University of California, San Francisco researcher<\/a>. The researcher, a physician, admits that there\u2019s limited evidence that cannabis is harmful (this despite decades of prohibition and many studies that set out to show some harm, such as the UCLA lung-health study that instead showed long-term cannabis use wasn\u2019t associated with lung issues) but that there could be harm out there somewhere we just haven\u2019t found yet, despite\u00a0almost two centuries of well-documented use dating back to the British Raj<\/a>. More problematic for Hill is that the study\u00a0does<\/em>\u00a0find that a vast majority of Americans admit cannabis use carries harms, just maybe not the harms Hill wants us to worry about.<\/p>\n

Perhaps worst of all is Hill\u2019s suggestion of a nexus between the increased availability of high-potency cannabis and incidences of serious mental health problems like psychosis. There are two serious problems here. One is that \u201cthe weed is stronger than ever before!\u201d\u00a0is a claim that has been made for almost four decades<\/a> \u2014 with increasingly shameless disregard for facts.<\/p>\n

In 1975, authorities told us that cannabis was 20 times stronger than it was in the 1960s. In 1986, according to NIDA, cannabis was seven times stronger than it was in the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, according to Joe Biden, using cannabis was analogous to using a \u201claser-guided missile\u201d as opposed to a shotgun. Exaggerations like this hide the limited truth on which they are based.<\/p>\n

Cannabis potency has absolutely increased. A decade ago,\u00a0the Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported<\/a>\u00a0that the average strength of cannabis confiscated was 11.1% THC, up from 4.8% in 1988, an increase of about 125%. But any link between potent cannabis and accompanying health problems is\u00a0questionable at best<\/a>. And while adults\u00a0do seem to prefer stronger cannabis,<\/a>\u00a0Hill\u2019s axiomatic suggestion that this is in any way problematic is undercut by his own admission that science is sorely lacking.<\/p>\n

And what\u2019s the missing and unspoken second leg of the suggested logical argument? \u201cToday\u2019s cannabis is more potent; therefore, today\u2019s cannabis users are all using more potent cannabis.\u201d Is this true? To assume yes would dismiss the CBD craze and those users seeking out THC-CBD blends. About the worst case scenario Hill can conjure is the \u201cunpleasant and scary\u201d outcome when an edibles consumer, either deliberately or by misadventure, eats too much weed. While definitely very bad and avoidable, edibles scare-tactics have largely evaporated thanks in part to strict new state regulations that limit edibles to no more than 100 milligrams of THC per package. This does extremely sick patients who need much more than that to manage pain or other serious symptoms a grand disservice \u2014 and apparently hasn\u2019t done much to satisfy the pearl-clutchers\u2019 cynical fear-mongering.<\/p>\n

Hill does make a few good points. He calls for \u201csensible, evidence-based education on weed for all stakeholders\u2026 to bridge the gap between the science of cannabis and public perception.\u201d He also recognizes that the science, such as it is, is sorely lacking and lagging far behind society. Though he oddly has praise for the National Institutes of Health, which has been notoriously tight-fisted with research money and has also earned a reputation for only funding cannabis-related studies having to do with abuse rather than health or wellness, while also failing to mention the very salient fact that the only government-approved cannabis available for research is the very same weak stuff he earlier declared irrelevant.<\/p>\n

The good thing about Adams\u2019s own screed, the latest incidence of health officials using the power of their office for political purposes, is that it went away quickly and was replaced by the panic over vaping. Hill is surely a clever fellow, well-educated and well-read. Why he\u2019s choosing to spend his time and a national platform on a crusade in search of a problem is his business, but amplifying Adams\u2019s blinkered logic was not the contribution to the discourse anyone needed \u2014 anyone except Adams and the anti-legalization brigade.<\/p>\n

TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0what is the craziest \u201creefer madness\u201d story you\u2019ve heard?<\/p>\n

The post Harvard Professor Writes Questionable Defense of Trump\u2019s Reefer Madness<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n


\n
\nRead More: Harvard Professor Writes Questionable Defense of Trump\u2019s Reefer Madness<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0an essay published on NBCNews.com on Sept. 20, Kevin P. Hill, an addiction psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School, provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing moral panic over vaping \u2014 which to date is believed to have killed 12 Americans, or fewer than half the number of humansContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,12589,119,12590,2898,3949,2075,420],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38532"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38532"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38533,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38532\/revisions\/38533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}