48 Comments - And I Approved This Message - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 9:56 am: What’s he smokin? - Ghost - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 9:58 am: the Governemnt did a detailed study which established the benefits… That said oxycodone and other drugs have well documented stuff thats not good for you; You feel good when you firsttake them, but the side effects are pretty bad. But he is ok with that? I am pretty sure Rich made this story up, afterall a police lobbyist named Limey? - VanillaMan - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:01 am: There are actually meth heads who claim that they decided to use meth in order to lose weight. This has been a common statement by users, especially women. They are often claiming that they are using meth for medicinal reasons - weight loss. So, his statement isn’t out of bounds. There is no medical reasons to support pot smoking. There are dozens of alternatives available. There are millions of Californians smoking and growing marijuana without any real medicinal needs to do so. Pot is not harmless. - Champaign - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:06 am: Limey’s also been opposing concealed carry for IACOP for the better part of 10 years. He likes to play the fear mongering card - ‘blood in the streets’ and ‘endangering police’. Was his bar any good? - wordslinger - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:06 am: –There is no medical reasons to support pot smoking.– But the question remains: is our children learning? And a bottle of Bud is the same as 12 oz. of Jack Daniels. They’re both booze, right? - Obamarama - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:07 am: ===Pot is not harmless.=== Neither is eating too much celery. It should be a balancing act. Would allowing medical marijuana use be a net positive or net negative for Illinois as a whole? - jonbtuba - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:08 am: Smoking pot isn’t exactly healthy, but to compare it to meth is absurd. - Vote Quimby! - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:09 am: ==So, his statement isn’t out of bounds== Yes, it is. I’ve met and talked with over 30 meth users, and NOT ONE mentioned weight loss as the reason they take it. That’s like saying they took meth for dental care because they didn’t want to brush their teeth since meth melts them away… - Ghost - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:11 am: Look at most of themedicines people take for high cholestrol, depression, pain, not to mention the medical use of steroids and what those do to the body. Much of the meidcine we take is horrible for us, but apparently if it comes from a lab we are good with it. - TaxMeMore - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:15 am: Does Limey have a degree in medical science or is Limey flat out bearing false witness and lying? Hey Limey, show us your science that specifically names all the stuff in cannabis that is not good for you. Reefer madness false propaganda doesn’t work in the 21st Century Limey, sorry. I’m still waiting for any opponent of medical cannabis to show us one single solitary scientific study that says that locking up a cancer patient in a cage is better for that person than allowing them to vaporize some cannabis. I have yet to hear why the current policy of locking sick people in cages is preferable. And if using cannabis is like using meth, drinking coffee is even MORE like using meth. We should ban the police from using any coffee or caffeine. - TaxMeMore - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:22 am: VannilaMan - I’ll give you the pot is not harmless truth if you acknowledge prohibition is a failed policy that does more harm to society than good and that our current practice of locking sick cancer patients in cages is barbaric. “There is no medical reasons to support pot smoking. There are dozens of alternatives available.” Sure, you can eat cannabis, you can make it into a pill, you can make it into a skin cream, you can make it into a depository, and most importantly you can vaporize cannabis. There is no medical reason that supports locking sick people in cages for using cannabis. The only reason to do that is ignorance and barbaric habits. - Small Town Liberal - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:22 am: - But the question remains: is our children learning? - Yeah, and what is Limey’s qualifications? - Captain Flume - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:25 am: I remember a parody quote from the 1960s: Give me librium or give me meth. But really, one big argument for keeping marijuana illegal is that it leads to other “harder” drugs. Slippery slope fallacies like this keep the discussion always revolving around tangential issues instead of the central one. Meanwhile people in pain and extreme discomfort are allowed to keep suffering because the big drug companies don’t want anyone to grow their own treatments. It would seem that if a new revenue stream is needed for the budget, de-criminalizing marijuana and taxing it would bring some new revenue–not a budget-balancer, but something. - MrJM - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:28 am: “Pot is not harmless.” Neither is the internet. And we should let adults make their own decisions about both. - VanillaMan - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:36 am: our current practice of locking sick cancer patients in cages is barbaric Our current practice? What are you, one of the new Obamacare death panel members? Budweiser and Jack Daniels has a long list of production and quality processes required by law, this would be lacking in marijuana. In California, there are thousands of growers producing pot without a single oversight regarding content or quality. To call this product a medicinal product is ridiculous. The justification to use marijuana for medicinal purposes doesn’t exist. We have plenty of real medicines available without reaching back to the Middle Ages for a joint. Ridiculous! - TaxMeMore - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:37 am: “But really, one big argument for keeping marijuana illegal is that it leads to other “harder” drugs.” Actually that argument has been easily refuted now for decades. About half of the US population has used cannabis. So roughly 150 million people. And how many of those 150 million US citizens went on to “harder” drugs? We must have at least 1/3 of our population hooked on crack and meth and heroin right now if the gateway theory is anywhere near the truth, right? Using the gateway drug argument is bearing false witness against our neighbors in order to lock them in cages. I wish people would stop doing that. Some California revenue board just estimated that legal medical cannabis will bring in about $1.3 BILLION this year. - Rich Miller - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:39 am: ===Budweiser and Jack Daniels has a long list of production and quality processes required by law, this would be lacking in marijuana.=== Brewing and distilling are a whole lot more complicated than growing a plant, drying it and selling it. - Amalia - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:41 am: Limey, don’t worry, medical marijuana is not your son’s pot, it’s regulated, in how it is grown and dispensed. So all the lobbyists and the taxers can get in on the action and those who need the herb as medicine can get it. As for the fact that there are alternatives, yes, there are. Just as there are alternatives for the Valerian and the St.John’s Wort that sit on your store shelves. It’s plant based, not synthetic, created by some big Pharma lab. And people who are in pain and want it deserve to have it. kudos to the IDSP for neutrality! - TaxMeMore - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:50 am: VanillaMan, I can make beer in my own home without you standing over me. You are being completely ridiculous now trying to compare natural God created plants and man-made substances and drugs. Cannabis is LESS harmful than those alternatives you are pushing VanillaMan. LESS harmful than morphine or oxycontin or valium or percocet or you name it, and cannabis is less harmful. You are saying we shouldn’t drink water any longer because these days we’re more modern and drink soda. Or we shouldn’t be able to grow our own tomatoes and eat them because we know how to make sauce with it now. That is a completely unscientific and ridiculous argument. The justification to lock sick people in cages for cannabis doesn’t exist, except if your small narrow mind is stuck in the Middle Ages where they got a kick out of locking sick people in cages like barbarians. - NeveroddoreveN - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:56 am: There are a lot of bad quotes in this article. The stance that legislation like this might put the drug into the wrong hands is just as bad as Limey’s comparison. The herb is currently in the hands of at least one person in the article, and with or without the legislation, it will continue to remain there. The way I see it is you might as well take it out of the drug dealers hands, and put it into a taxable form or homegrown form. Both of those options do more for our economy than the current laws against it. - 47th Ward - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 11:03 am: ===The justification to use marijuana for medicinal purposes doesn’t exist.=== Because people like you refuse to allow federally funded research on medical use of marijuana. This subject is regulated by the DEA, not the FDA. Until that changes VM, you’ll be able to hide behind your last rhetorical line of defense: “there’s no research.” That’s a nice catch-22 you’ve got there my close-minded friend. - Yellow Dog Democrat - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 11:20 am: === We have plenty of real medicines available without reaching back to the Middle Ages for a joint. === That’s funny, since aspirin was first extracted naturally from willow bark, as the Greek physician Hippocrates first described in the 5th century B.C. BTW, aspirin can cause ulcers and stomach bleeding, a side effect you won’t find in medical marijuana. Finally, we’re “reaching back into the middle ages” every time we proscribe most any drug, since most find their origins in nature. The difference of course is that the naturally occurring forms are either rare or costly to obtain, so pharmaceutical companies hold patents for their synthetic manufacture. If Bayer held a patent for an effective substitute for medical marijuana, we wouldn’t even be having this debate. - Fed up - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 11:29 am: 47th ward their is actually alot of research on cannabis. Alot of universtys and labs get waivers to do research. Taxme more where are cancer paitents being locked in cages? I have no problem with legalizing and taxing and regulating cannabis. It’s nce to see liberals telling even goofier lies than conservatives. It’s like Richs statement that police in Az will be going up to people and asking for thier papers with no reason. Lies from either side are still lies that don’t advance the debate - Small Town Liberal - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 11:30 am: - We have plenty of real medicines available without reaching back to the Middle Ages for a joint. - I don’t believe the joint was a popular marijuana smoking device until Native Americans began trading high grade Kush to the US Government. I mean, those treaties had to be used for something, right? - Ghost - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 11:47 am: YDD aspirin can also cause Reye’s syndrome, acondition far worse then any side effect from marijuana… - VanillaMan - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 11:47 am: This is what the Federal Government says. Now, if you want to dispute this information, do so, but please try to be scientific about it. That is the problem with this - we have a bunch of emotional people refusing to recognize scientific facts because they have become comfortable with pot. - Siriusly - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 11:50 am: VM - most prescribers of medical pot in California advise their patients actually eat the pot - not smoke it - it’s a safer / healthier way to ingest it. Your claim about lack of quality control is ironic because the medical legalization in California has actually created very strict regulation of the growers and something even more important to quality control - legal free market competition. - Rich Miller - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 11:51 am: VanillaMan, that’s what the DEA says. If it was the FDA, I would take it more seriously. - Rich Miller - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 11:51 am: And the DEA’s first dot-point is this… ===Marijuana is an addictive drug== Nonsense. - Vote Quimby! - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 12:03 pm: ==please try to be scientific about it== How about one of the longest clinical trials in medical history? - 47th Ward - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 12:05 pm: This is also what the federal government says: http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Testimony/ucm114741.htm VM, take a few minutes to read this information. It details the difficulties with getting credible research on the subject. The federal government refuses to fully support medical research and hides behind the “just say no” mentality you so obviously hold as paramount in the debate, patient suffering be damned. You know, it could be discovered that this idea is horrible for medical treatment and prove your point VM. Unfortunately, we’ll never know because federal policy makers are too afraid to undertake this subject and people like you give them political cover for dumb policy decisions. - Rich Miller - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 12:06 pm: VMan and Limey should both read this article right away and watch the accompanying video and then come back and tell us we’re on the right track in the drug war… http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/this-is-your-war-on-drugs/56380/ VMan, don’t comment here again on this post until you read that story and watch that video. I mean it. - Team Sleep - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 12:06 pm: I was thinking about this quite a bit this morning after Jim Leach discussed the comments on his morning show. And for those of you who are not familiar with Mr. Leach, he is a morning talk show host on WMAY. This issue is as representative of any issue that crops up in Illinois as any other controversial matter. You would think that, in a state as progressive (plurality-wise) as Illinois, medicinal marijuana would already be legal and available for sale. But it’s not. And why? I can’t really grasp it, but it’s as similar a question as to why gay marriage or even civil unions are not legal. One would assume our blue-leanings would result in such legislation being passed with little-or-no difficulty. Is this due to the strong lobbying presence at the Statehouse? Are state reps and senators worried that our Wild West campaign finance laws will result in interest entities sending nasty fliers or making nasty robocalls in the politician’s district? I truly don’t understand. - Team Sleep - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 12:13 pm: And as an aside - and as very fiscally conservative person both in the political and personal sense - our war on drugs is about as offensive of an earmark of federal funds as any program ever run by the federal government. What a sham. The money that is wasted at the federal, state, county and municipal level to combat drug usage and dealing is enermous and uninspired. - 47th Ward - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 12:19 pm: Rich, thanks for posting the story, but that video ought to come with a warning. I saw it last week in the Economist blog, and it is very disturbing. I’ve said it before, but note the irony of “free market” advocates in lock step against the free market in the War on Drugs, the biggest public policy failure in U.S. history. By far. - TaxMeMore - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 12:22 pm: More than 800,000 human beings are arrested for cannabis possession every year and the odds of one being a cancer/AIDS/MS/etc. patient are much greater than there being none, especially in a state like Illinois. Typically, one patient gets themselves arrested on purpose most years to make a point. The policy and law is there and that can’t be denied. Our current law says we must lock up sick people with cannabis. VannilaMan - And you believe everything the government tells you? And you think everyone else should also? “There is no medical reasons to support pot smoking.” Here’s one of the few REAL studies allowed in the United States in recent years. http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/68/7/515 “…Donald Abrams,MD describes methodology of double-blind, placebo-controlled trial to determine if smoked marijuana is an effective analgesic for HIV patients with neuropathic pain. * In early 2007, the journal Neurology published the results of this study: Medical Cannabis is safe and effective for peripheral neuropathy, whereas standard narcotic medications have little effect.” http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8848547564860037103# Neurologists are pretty smart. Our federal government still sends medical cannabis to four patients, in joint form which are meant to be smoked. Maybe Durbin will look into to providing those 4 people vaporizers. One patient getting cannabis from the federal government has MS. And then we have the American Medical Association recently calling for the federal government to re-schedule cannabis out of the category (Schedule 1) that says cannabis has no medical use. The AMA disagrees with you now VanillaMan. The AMA wants to see the science and study it and learn more, not ban the science and pretend like they already know everything. Harry Anslinger is regarded as the father of cannabis prohibition, and he worked for the federal government also. Here is the “science” Anslinger used to determine that cannabis had no medical use. “Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.” “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” “Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing” “You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother.” “Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.” - helenhelpus - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 12:44 pm: Everything all of you say here can be refuted by someone or some article or some research somewhere. Those who claim pot is “healthy and not addictive” there is plenty of proof it’s not. Those who say there is no medical benefit, there’s now proof there may be. Those who claim the “war on drugs” hasn’t worked or hurt more people than it helped - consider that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who don’t use drugs and have not become addicts because of the drug laws. Aren’t those people’s lives worth anything to you? Seems you would prefer to boo-hoo over those who seek to break the law rather than be grateful for those who are healthy and safe because of the law. Prison’s aren’t filled with dying cancer patients who’ve been arrested for having a little pot. Those very few people get lots of attention from the legalization PR machine. So let’s get real and stop all the angry back and forth about this fact or that fact that can be crushed by someone else’s fact. Let’s get back to the fact that our legislators are playing doctor. If Eli Lilly or Pfiser was lobbying to get a drug of theirs approved without FDA approval and adequate testing, every one of you would be screaming at the atrosity. You can be name callers all you want. That doesn’t make you right. - Rich Miller - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 12:50 pm: helenhelpus, contrary to your post, there are hundreds of thousands of people whose lives have been ruined just because they got caught doing what every president elected since 1992 has done. Ridiculous. Your poo-pooing the pro argument is all too transparent. Pot is not addictive, but nobody denies there are problems associated with it. Yet, name us one drug that has no problems? Just one. I’m waiting. Also, people do get busted for medical marijuana use and that needs to stop. Why don’t you get out of their business and mind your own? Seems the conservative thing to do. The dirty, pot-smoking hippies are long gone. You can come out of your cave now. And your drug company analogy was silly. There are, in fact, fast track exceptions to the FDA approval process. Marijuana, meanwhile, has been illegal for decades and can’t even get on the slow track. Spare us the concern trolling, please. - TJ - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 1:24 pm: Uh…. not for nothing, but someone should really give a lesson to Nargelenas about Meth. Yeah, it gives you a “nice feeling” after you first take it, but afterwards it pretty much is just a non-stop addiction with no real temporary upside or boost. If anything, meth is the absolute worst of drugs due to the complete lack of a high it gives users after the first or second time they used it, how thoroughly addictive it is, and how completely it messes methheads up both physically and psychologically. Comparing meth with pot or alcohol or really any other drug (except maybe crack) is just completely baseless. - Vole - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 1:38 pm: My guess is that 99+% of pot smokers began their mind altering experiences with alcohol (and tobacco). Yet is alcohol ever cited as a gateway drug? Can I just make the point that even for the healthy, that widening the doors of perception can be therapeutic for many people? - Fan of the Game - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 2:56 pm: For those clamoring for Limey’s credentials, he’s a licensed IHSA football and basketball official. Wait, that doesn’t cover the topic, does it? The case for medical marijuana is that it works for some people with few side effects. The case against medical marijuana is California where everyone and his dog has a prescription because they’re just so easy to get. - Vote Quimby! - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 4:45 pm: ==meth is the absolute worst of drugs== Agreed. And it’s ingredients read like a terrorist checklist. Most meth cooks are in it for the money, not weight loss… - really? - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 6:30 pm: @tax me more= you can make it into a depository= Did i read this correctly or did you mean suppository? or were you on the grassy noll (LOL) And didn’t Limey retire from the Illinois State Police? - Amalia - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 6:33 pm: once upon a time, in, oh, the 70s, my home bulletin board sported a cartoon….a cow with capped udders. caption… “bossy busted, 100% of marijuana users found to have started on milk.” - PeaceLover - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 7:29 pm: Yep-Limey retired from the ISP and was quite the big shot. I wonder if his knowledge of pot smoking is as first hand as his knowledge of alcohol use. - Moving to Ojklahoma - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 7:47 pm: I love how we justify medicinal marijuana by saying that 14 states have some sort of legalized version of medicinal pot. However 48 states have right to carry and somehow Illinois is the state that is illuminated above the rest of the fray on that issue. Legal pot is ridiculous on its face. Liberals amaze me. - wordslinger - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 8:19 pm: Okie, I don’t really see MM or even decriminalizationi as a liberal issue. Former Sec. of State George Schultz has often declared the war on drugs a failure and called for decriminalization. - 47th Ward - Monday, May 10, 10 @ 10:43 pm: Moving to OK, It’s ironic that you bring up concealed carry. Both concealed carry and decriminialization of marijuana are legally consistent ideas grounded in classic Libertarian philosophy. In other words, to be consistent in your thinking, if you favor one of these political decisions, you should favor both. Sorry, comments for this post are now closed.