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March 08, 2014
Annals of Depraved American Stupidity
One would have hoped that, with timid efforts at "legalization" getting underway in Washington state and Colorado, a measure of sanity might be finding its way into America's destructive "marijuana" policy, but they'd be wrong: a fact convincingly demonstrated by a feature article in the current issue of Rolling Stone.I immediately remembered how disgusted I had been by stories about "baby faced" narcs posing as high school students when I was editing a weekly drug policy news letter between 1997 and 2001. It simply didn't occur to me that cops would still be employing the same sleazy tactics fifteen years later; particularly in the state that passed the nation's first "medical use" law in 1996. It's almost as if the invidious Daryl Gates were still alive and setting police policy.
To return to the Rolling Stone story; I hope readers will scan in enough detail to learn that the sting's adolescent victim suffers from a severe form of autism known as Asberger's syndrome.
Just as disheartening from my point of view is that (as far as I can tell) I am the first "pot doc" to report that cannabis has been particularly effective in treating applicants who have been self-medicating for several conditions on the Autism Spectrum.
That a "sting" targeting adolescents for "drug crimes" should require prior approval by both police supervisors and school officials, would seem obvious: particularly in our litigious society, yet this one was carried out without the knowledge or consent of the victim's parents–– a circumstance I find appalling because it dramatically points out the inroads Nixon's Controlled Substances Act has made in what were once considered civil rights and Constitutional guarantees.
As usual, I'll have more to say about the warts and pimples of the worst possible public policy since the Nuremberg Laws.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at March 8, 2014 05:52 AM