The advertised “Pro and cons of dagga” emblazoned across last Friday’s front-page was a real disappointment. Just another odd bunch of lists – some calming and some alarming – about cannabis: the things we think we know and the things we know we know plus the things we think we don’t know and the things we know we don’t know.
I’d have taken it back for a refund but I needed something to light the fire. Why wasn’t equal prominence given to Gavin Hillyard’s far more interesting letter (“Smoke and mirrors”) on the same subject last Wednesday?
Hillyard raises some fascinating questions about the nature of the doctor-patient relationship and the industrialisation of medicine. I expected howls of protest from the medical industry (they prefer “profession” or even “fraternity”), but both Dr WJ de Wet and Michael Vente of Functional Health Diagnostics, who’d written the previous week, have since kept schtum (“Dagga not funny” May 15 and “Practitioners should encourage medicinal use of dagga” May 19).
Neither has anyone else commented on the three anti-prohibition letters published May 17 on this page; not just my own ramblings but also well-reasoned opinion from intelligent contributors like Keith Gottschalk (“Decriminalise dagga”) and Robin Ducret (“Drug laws don’t work”). Judging by the deafening silence from the doctors’ side I gather they’ve all read the same books as me, such as Medical Power & Social Knowledge, Bad Pharma, Cured to Death, The Political Economy of Health and Pharmaggedon.
But we do need to hear the medics’ views on cannabis because the courts are currently taking a serious look at repealing the existing legislation and the final outcome will depend heavily on medical opinion, albeit dressed up as “evidence”. Personally I don’t remember ever signing up to a scheme whereby the police can kick my door down to search for cannabis just because doctors don’t think it’s good for me. But that’s the effect of the current law. And it will probably change only if the medical industry decides to give its “stamp of approval” to “recreational” as well as to prescribed cannabis use.
Of course, over the years doctors have often given their “stamp of approval”, not to natural organic herbs such as cannabis though, but instead to a wide range of manufactured synthetic drugs. Drugs like morphine as a better alternative to opium (its natural form) and drugs like heroin as a better alternative to morphine (at first heroin was even touted as being less addictive!).
Back in 1884 the father of modern psychiatry, Dr Sigmund Freud, prescribed to his depressed patients regular injections of cocaine refined from the coca leaf which, in its natural form, had been used in South America for thousands of years. Freud even tried it himself and, while under the influence, wrote “I am as strong as a lion, gay and cheerful”.
When it came to ending the treatment it was, as you can imagine, a very different story. At other times the medical profession has given its stamp of approval to – and promoted the widespread use of – amphetamines, barbiturates, benzodiazepines and numerous other easily-abused, highly-addictive or damaging artificial drugs.
The Thalidomide tragedy in the 1960s brought more regulation in its wake but there is still a long way to go.
Only last April this newspaper reported certain drugs linked to Alzheimer’s about brain-imaging research that points to a causal link between the use of anti-cholinergenics and the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Anti-cholinergenics are a broad range of pharmaceuticals available not only on prescription but also over-the-counter. They include widely used hay fever and incontinence treatments and some sleeping tablets and anti-depressants.
Those taking the drugs exhibited poorer performance in short-term memory, verbal reasoning, planning and problem-solving. It’s scary stuff. In fact the day the medics give the thumbs up to Mary Jane will probably be the day I quit.
(By the way, Hillyard ended his letter saying that he would be hard-pressed to refute the argument if someone were to call the controlled legalisation of cannabis a no-brainer (I hope he doesn’t even try because, funnily enough, I wrote just that on March 6 in my letter er… “It’s a no-brainer”).