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Posted October 29,
2007
Analysis by Richard Cowan
On October 18th,
Robin Prosser, a Montanan with lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease, who used
medical marijuana, committed suicide.
She
was driven to suicide
after the DEA in March, “seized a small shipment of medical marijuana in
transit from Prosser’s state-approved caregiver. Though she was never
criminally charged, Prosser was crushed. She said caregivers became
afraid to supply her with the medicine she needed so badly.
In July, she penned an op-ed
piece in the Billings Gazette, pleading with
Montana’s politicians and her fellow citizens to
speak out against the DEA’s actions and improve the lives of people like her.
‘Give
me liberty or give me death,’ she wrote. ‘Maybe the next campaign
ought to be for assisted-suicide laws in our state. If they will not
allow me to live in peace, and a little less pain, would they help me to die,
humanely?’”
See Prosser’s statement on
YouTube
Four days after Prosser’s death, the
one person most responsible for her death, DEA Administrator Karen Tandy,
announced
that she was resigning, to become “Senior Vice President of Motorola’s Global
Government Relations and Public Policy Division.”
The timing was just one more of
those “coincidences” that tell us more than we can understand about the world
we live in. Sadly, Prosser wasn’t the first DEA victim
to commit suicide, and I know that she won’t be the
last.
See
No doubt, Karen Tandy will deny
any responsibility for Ms Prosser’s death, but let us judge her by her own
standards and her own words.
Tandy wrote and article for the
March 2005 issue of Police Chief Magazine, an official publication of the
International Association of Chiefs of Police. Oddly, it is not online in
their archives, but there is no shortage of prohibitionist propaganda, such as
Drug
Legalization: Why It Wouldn’t Work in the United
States
However, it was reproduced on
the DEA web site
Marijuana:
The Myths Are Killing Us.
Her article is primarily an
attack on medical marijuana, and she says “Legalization advocates
themselves have alluded to the fact that so-called medical marijuana is a way
of achieving wholesale drug legalization.”
See
She
is very clear that she holds us responsible for the consequences of our words
and actions: “It is as if legalization
advocates stood outside their schools handing out their leaflets of
lies.”
“Leaflets
of lies?” Very well. Either we are lying or she is lying, and all of
us should be prepared to take responsibility for their words and
actions.
In this article, Ms Tandy begins with
the story of a 14 year-old girl who died after taking ecstasy, but Tandy
blames marijuana because her young friends panicked and tried to save her by
stuffing
“‘marijuana leaves into her mouth because, according to news sources, ‘they
knew that drug is sometimes used to treat cancer
patients.’”
That is not really what
the
article she cited
reported, but it makes
her point:
Reporting
that cancer patients have used cannabis to deal with nausea sends the message
to children that stuffing marijuana leaves in the mouth of someone who is
vomiting is “medicine.”
See
“Bill
chose not to inhale, I’d like the same choice.” — A Teenage Cancer Patient.
and
New
York Times Runs Pro-Medical Marijuana Op-ed
By
National Review Senior Editor Richard
Brookhiser
Again, these are the terms of
the dispute. Someone is lying and these lies are
killing innocent people. Therefore, when I accuse Tandy of lying
and say that her lies are responsible for the death of Robin Prosser, no one
should object to my rhetoric or to the harshness of my judgment. These are her
terms.
Now, who is lying?
Actually, there are so many
lies in the Police Chief Magazine article that I can only use a few examples,
but almost nothing she says is entirely true.
1.
“Myth: Marijuana is
medicine.
Reality: Smoked marijuana is not medicine.
The scientific and medical communities have determined that smoked marijuana
is a health danger, not a cure. There is no medical evidence that smoking
marijuana helps patients.”
Reality check:
First notice the bait and switch from “Marijuana is medicine” to
“Smoked marijuana
is not medicine.”
Obviously, marijuana does not have to be “smoked.”
See
and from two years prior to Tandy’s
article, see
Second, even on her own terms by her
on citations, she is wrong, lying. Her
footnote
number 15 says,
“Institute of
Medicine, “Marijuana and Medicine”: chapter 4 and summary. A
single narrow exception was the recommendation that short-term use of smoked
marijuana of less than six months should be considered under closely monitored
and documented conditions for potential use by terminal cancer and AIDS
patients, for whom it said the benefits might outweigh the harms of smoking
marijuana. See page 179.”
That is hardly a minor
exception, but on the same page the report goes on to say, “Until a
nonsmoked rapid-onset cannabinoid drug delivery system becomes available,
we acknowledge that there is no clear alternative for
people suffering from chronic conditions that might be relieved by smoking
marijuana, such as pain or AIDS wasting. One possible approach is to treat
patients as n-of-1 clinical trials, in which patients are fully informed of
their status as experimental subjects using a harmful drug delivery
system and in which their condition is closely monitored and
documented under medical supervision, thereby increasing the knowledge base of
the risks and benefits of marijuana use under such conditions. We recommend
these n-of-1 clinical trials using the same oversight mechanism as that
proposed in the above recommendations.”
“(T)he FDA has approved
Marinol (dronabinol)-a safe capsule form of synthetic
THC that meets the standard of accepted medicine
and has the same properties as cultivated marijuana
without the high- for the treatment of nausea and vomiting associated
with cancer chemotherapy and for the treatment of wasting syndrome in AIDS
patients.”
Reality check: Does the head of
the DEA not really know that
THC is
the principle psychoactive ingredient in cannabis? Many patients
dislike Marinol precisely because it makes them
TOO HIGH! Of
course, it is also very expensive.
See
Marinol
Was The First Schedule 2 Drug To Be
“Down-Scheduled,”
Boasts Roxanne On Its New
Marinol.com Web Site.
Doesn’t That Mean That It Should
Never Have Been Schedule 2 Anyway?
She then says, “Since 2000,
for example, the California-based Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research
(CMCR) has gained approval for 14 trials using smoked marijuana in human
beings and three trials in laboratory and animal
models.
This CMCR research is the first
effort to study the medical efficacy of marijuana. But researchers have not
endorsed smoking marijuana and instead are attempting to isolate marijuana’s
active ingredients to develop alternative delivery systems to
smoking.18
Not one of these researchers has found scientific
proof that smoke marijuana is
medicine.”
Reality check: She
must have been betting that no one would check
the
press releases on the CMCR web
site. In fact, the
researchers have worked with whole cannabis. Notice the list of the
studies
now completed, almost
all of which she should have known involved “smoked
marijuana.”
See
Myth: Legalization of
marijuana in other countries has been a success.
Reality: Liberalization of drug laws in other countries has often resulted
in higher use of dangerous drugs. Over the past decade, drug policy in some
foreign countries, particularly those in
Europe,
has gone through some
dramatic changes toward greater liberalization with failed results. Consider
the experience of the
Netherlands,
where the government reconsidered its
legalization measures in light of that country’s experience. After marijuana
use became legal, consumption nearly tripled among 18- to 20-year-olds. As
awareness of the harm of marijuana grew, the number of cannabis coffeehouses
in the
Netherlands
decreased 36 percent in six years. Almost all Dutch towns
have a cannabis policy, and 73 percent of them have a no-tolerance policy
toward the
coffeehouses.20
Reality
check:
Well, let’s begin with the fact
that her footnote cites the Drug Czar’s “White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy, “What Americans Need to Know about Marijuana,” 10; Dutch
Health, Welfare, and Sports Ministry, report, April 23, 2004; University of
Tilburg (Netherlands), “Coffeeshops in the Netherlands 2003,” September
2004.
See these two postings which
date from about the time Tandy was writing her
article:
and
Yes,
73% of Dutch “towns”, the smallest of which are socially conservative, often
extremely religious, bar coffee shops, but virtually all Dutch cities permit
them.
Also,
note that after 30 years of tolerance the Dutch rate of cannabis is about
one half of the
US
rate.
Both of these links have user
data:
and
“Myth: Smoking marijuana
harms only the smokers.
Reality: Marijuana use harms
nonusers.
Secondhand
smoke from marijuana kills other innocents as well. Last year,
two
Philadelphia
firefighters were killed when they responded to a
residential fire stemming from an indoor marijuana grow.
48
In New York City,
an eight-year-old boy, Deasean Hill,
was
killed by a stray bullet just steps
from his
Brooklyn
home after a drug dealer sold a dime bag of marijuana on
another dealer’s turf.
49”
Reality check: Good grief!
First, it should be obvious that both of these tragedies were the result of
prohibition, not cannabis.
Second, I really don’t think
that “second hand smoke” had anything to do with the deaths of the firemen.
However, her bizarre statements demonstrate the lengths to which she will
go to blame drug war opponents for the deaths of drug war victims.
Time does not permit a complete
analysis of her lies, but anyone who cares to use the search function on
MarijuanaNews.com can find out the rest. One should also see
Rx:
Pot A Prescription for
Disaster an anti-medical
marijuana section of the DEA’s web site
JustThinkTwice.com,
which lies to teens about cannabis, thus undermining the credibility of their
warnings about meth and other drugs.
She
has claimed responsibility for this prohibitionist
propaganda.
In any case,
Karen Tandy is condemned by her own words and her own
standards.
But what about
Motorola?
Motorola
says, “Ms. Tandy will
be directly responsible for development and execution of Motorola’s global
policy initiatives. She will foster the growth of
advocacy programs for Motorola positions with national, state and local
governments on public policy issues that support the growth of the Company’s
business. Ms. Tandy’s responsibilities will include
creating business enabling strategies in priority countries, ensuring that
country-specific governance requirements are met and operations are in
compliance with local laws; overseeing lobbying efforts in support of
Motorola’s government customers; and influencing regulators worldwide on a
range of issues.”
The problem is that Motorola claims
in its
“corporate
responsibility” page,
“Ethics and transparency: We operate with transparency and according to high
standards of ethics and law in directing and managing the company for all
stakeholders.”
Oh,
really?
Motorola
can even boast that
“Motorola Ranked Fourth Among
America’s
“100 Best Corporate Citizens” CRO Magazine
Recognizes Motorola for Outstanding Governance, Environment, Community and
Employment Practices
Schaumburg, Ill. – 14
February 2007 – CRO magazine has named Motorola,
Inc. (NYSE: MOT) to its list of the “100 Best
Corporate Citizens.” The 2007 ranking, released today, marks the second year
in a row that Motorola has earned the fourth spot on the list and the fourth
time that Motorola has appeared in the top 10…
“Corporate responsibility is
inherent in everything we do – from our commitment to strong environmental,
health and safety practices to our community support and efforts to foster a
diverse and engaged workforce,” said Maryann Clifford, corporate vice
president, who leads Motorola’s corporate responsibility efforts…”
Media
Contact: Jennifer Erickson Motorola, Inc
jennifer.erickson@motorola.com
Oh,
really?
Is it responsible for the lies
and cruelty of its new employee?
Or is she just there to use her
connections to the police state kleptocracies that will buy more equipment for
their police to continue to suppress medical cannabis.
See
Robin
Prosser’s last essay
quoted Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty, or give me death.” She had her choice
forced on her, but let us remember Henry’s words just preceding those: “Men
cry ‘Peace, peace, but there is no peace.”
And that is what is in all this
for Tandy and Motorola. The Drug War has its profiteers, just like the
Iraq war. We continue to sacrifice even the lives of those who
managed to survive their wounds, so it should not surprise anyone
that they will kill a poor sick woman in Montana. We
have become a nation of accomplices.
See
and
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