Pubdate: Sat, 25 Jan 2014
Source: Sarasota Herald-Tribune (FL)
Copyright: 2014 Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Contact: http://www.heraldtribune.com/sendletter
Website: http://www.heraldtribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/398
Author: Richard Maus

MEDICAL MARIJUANA

In response to naive naysayers who subscribe to the 50-year-old
paranoid propaganda of marijuana use, real-time statistics are
available at your fingertips using Google. Dr. Sanjay Gupta says we
have been "systematically misled" on marijuana.

While investigating, I realized something else quite important.
Medical marijuana is not new, and the medical community has been
writing about it for a long time. There were in fact hundreds of
journal articles, mostly documenting the benefits. Most of those
papers, however, were written between the years 1840 and 1930. The
papers described the use of medical marijuana to treat "neuralgia,
convulsive disorders, emaciation," among other things.

A search of the National Library of Medicine last year pulled up
nearly 20,000 more recent papers. But the majority were research into
the harm of marijuana. That paints a highly distorted picture.

More than half of Americans reported that one or more close relatives
has a drinking problem; over 10,000 people die annually due to
alcohol-related crashes; alcohol abuse destroys all human organs.

Richard Maus

Sarasota
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