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February 15, 2009
Michael Phelps’ Bong Hit
I must admit to having become so busy maintaining my database of pot applicants that I hardly noticed the Beijing Olympics; about the only thing I could have told anyone about them in November was that Michael Phelps had amazed the world by winning eight gold medals and that he seemed to be setting a new record for product endorsements on TV. When I saw that picture of him taking a huge bong hit I knew immediately he was no beginner and wondered if he had ADD. This morning I received an e-mail referencing his mother’s earlier statement about his childhood diagnosis and learned that even before the Olympics he had been a source of inspiration to many diagnosed with ADHD.Of course there was no mention of cannabis.
For the record, virtually all recommendations I write now include “mood disorder,’ which I consider a generic term for the range of anxiety disorders that so many people have learned to self-medicate with pot since the Sixties.
Once I learned how to accurately question pot applicants about their prior drug initiations and current use, I couldn’t wait to tell my “reform” colleagues about those early findings at a national meeting in May 2004. Their responses ranged from stony silence to outright hostility, which I have since had to understand and am now ready to write about because subsequent interviews, now totaling nearly five thousand (over a thousand of whom have been seen as often as four times), have provided me with enough data to formulate a hypothesis with considerable confidence.
Because that hypothesis was arrived at as a result of unique data, it required me to understand why so may people have been so reluctant to accept conclusions which, to me, are very logical.
All I can say is that most advances in science have involved the questioning of false assumptions; often of long duration. Once one realizes that both sides in the drug war have been sharing many of the same false assumptions and that 215 provided a first-ever opportunity to test them against clinical data from actual pot smokers, one is on their way to understanding why I’m now considered a heretic and maverick by many ex-colleagues.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at February 15, 2009 12:32 AM