Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent, says that marijuana medicine should be freely prescribed and people should be allowed to apply for a card at NuggMD if they wish to.
CNN’s chief medical correspondent called for full-scale federal legalization of medical marijuana in no uncertain terms.
“In terms of making this legal for medicinal purposes — yes, and there are both very pragmatic reasons and more subjective reasons for that.. ( legalization of medical cannabis should happen if only to address ) “ridiculousness of the refugee situation” in Colorado.
“This refugee situation that is developing,… I met with these families and it is real,” “Are you really going to arrest a person for taking their medicine back to their state?” Gupta said. “This is not the society that I think most people would think we are and yet it’s absolutely happening. It’s heartbreaking.”
Gupta, of course, makes his living as a TV personality, not a profession that evokes a lot of confidence. Many of those refufee families came to Colorado seeking “Charlotte’s Web,” a strain given ahigh profile by Gupta’s TV show and promoted by the nonprofit medical marijuana group Realm of Caring to treat 300 patients to date.
Gupta’s enthusiasm comes from the experience of now seven-year-old Charlotte Figi, for whom the strain was named, She used to suffer from hundreds of seizures a week and was the first child in Colorado to be legally treated with decriminalized cannabis “medical marijuana.” If you are interested in learning more about medical marijuana and how to obtain a medical marijuana card it might want to read – how to get a medical marijuana card in ohio or a state more local to you.
The problem with this story is that Charlotte’s recovery “has been miraculous,”at least according to her mother. Gupta’s opinion means a lot not because he is an expert but because he is one of cable news’ most recognizable personalities, and was also President Barack Obama’s first choice to be surgeon general. He says, “What I found with medical marijuana was that as I dug deeper, that it all really held up. Not only is it real, the mechanisms by which it works are pretty well described and elucidated by a lot of scientists around the world. The therapeutic benefits have squarely moved out of the realm of the anecdotal into science — peer-reviewed science.”
Perhaps this is so, however two things bother me. First, I have yet to see this science, I have looked on the web and not seen it but that may be because newscasters usually do not point out their sources. Sec9nd, and more important, is an obvious contradiction in Gupta’s statement. If “mechanisms by which it works are pretty well described and elucidated by a lot of scientists around the world” then why hasn’t some drug company manufactured a chemically defined treatment for Charlotte’s disease?
Forgive me for being afraid that Sanjay Gupta’s enthusiasm comes from his very reasonable opposition to the silliness of treating marijuana as a Schedule I drug, a danger and a poison comparable to opium. “It just doesn’t meet the criteria for Schedule I — and it never did,” Gupta said. MJ, weed, is none of that. It is likely not even as dangerous as coffee, much less as dangerous as booze. None of this, however means we need to legislate the idea that a plant should be marketed as a medicine rather than assuring that Charlotte gets a well characterized drug!
Gupta’s hypocrisy worries me. He says that there’s a real danger when ideology takes precedence over hard science — “This hypocrisy conjures up for me when I was in medical school, some of our first lessons revolved around when politics or religion trumped science and how dangerous that was … And I think that’s what’s happening here — you have politics trumping science. In past situations, it may have been the position of the Earth in the universe. But now it is real people, their lives, their illnesses in the middle of this. It’s incredibly sad.”
If he is sincere. the shouldn’t Gupta be pushing for the manufacture of a well characterized drug? Or is this part of his TV show?