Grammy knows best

This story has been making the rounds but since the Boston Globe is just getting to it today, I'll link to it because I love this quote.

Peering through owlish glasses, Hiatt fires up a cannabis cigarette with a wood-stem match. She inhales. The little apartment -- a cozy place of knickknacks and needlepoint -- takes on the odor of a rock concert. "It's like any other medicine for me," Hiatt says, blowing out a cumulus of unmistakable fragrance. "But I don't know that I'd be alive without it."

Whether it's because it really works or simply gives this 81 year old a reason to keep living is immaterial. It helps her cope with a myriad of chronic and painful medical conditions. John Walters of course has a reply.

"The standard of simply feeling different or feeling better" does not make pot safe and effective medicine, said Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. People who abuse illegal drugs such as crack cocaine feel a similar burst of euphoria, he noted, "but that doesn't make crack medicine."

By that reasoning then neither is the widely used medical morphine a legitimate medicine. That also brings a sense euphoria to it's users. More telling is Walters' new spin. For years he's been insisting there's absolutely no medicinal value whatsoever in cannabis. Now that his old lackey, Andrea Barthwell has been hired by Sativex however, he's modified his spiel.

Any beneficial compounds that do exist in the leafy plant, he said, should be synthesized, sent through the rigors of the regulatory process and packaged as a pharmaceutical, not smoked like black-market weed.

Now it's just smoked marijuana that's dangerous, not the plant itself. Pretty convenient no? By vilifying the delivery system instead of the substance, he gets to keep his job and his options as future spokesperson for Sativex open at the same time.