Cannabis prohibition is awful for many reasons. Dateline NBC had a full hour tonight about one of them — the federal government has deemed cannabis a Schedule 1 controlled substance (along with heroin, LSD, ecstasy and methaqualone) since 1970, which means that it has no possible medical uses.
Well, except that it does, particularly in controlling seizures, but also in non-opioid pain relief.
Harry Smith interviewed parents of seizure-afflicted children who have benifited from cannabis, a former NFL player who was so helped by cannabis he’s gone into the business, a medical researcher who attested to its effectiveness, and US Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Cory Gardner of Colorado.
The full episode is not online yet, short clips are on the show’s Twitter feed.
The show does not go into the racist origin of cannabis prohibition, or its current manifestation in our neo-Confederate Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. Nor does it mention that the Schedule 1 listing in 1970 was clearly way more political than scientific, part of Nixon’s campaign to anathematize and imprison young people, aka dirty hippies, who opposed his policies, and thereby appeal to his silent majority.
But it is powerful, because it shines a sympathetic light on people whose various sufferings have undoubtedly been ameliorated by cannabis.
My excellent Senator Kirsten Gillibrand gets the last word:
It breaks my heart. I mean if you’re a mom and you know your child could die at any given day, and they have a horrible disease that needs that medicine, and the federal government is saying you can’t have that medicine, it’s outrageous.
I mean I can’t believe we could treat these families with so much callousness. It is absolute disregard for the well-being of their family, the ability of their children to survive, the ability of a child to grow up, to learn how to walk and talk and ride a bike — that’s what this medicine does for these kids.
And it makes me so angry, because it is just morally wrong. It is wrong to say that giving the child the medicine that the child needs is illegal. It’s wrong.
Indeed it is, and long past time to right this wrong.
