From Looking Glass

It didn’t seem to make sense. Why would the Obama administration, which had promised to leave medical marijuana dispensaries alone, suddenly go after them?

There was no likely electoral reason for it. The policy of relatively benign neglect wasn’t costing the Change We Can Believe In any votes. The Republicans weren’t making an issue of it and, anyhow, every poll on the subject has confirmed that the public is in favor of allowing these dispensaries to operate.

But there was a coordinated assault, led by the U.S. Attorneys, and it went after not only dispensaries and their suppliers, licensed or not, but landlords, too, threatening to seize people’s property under forfeiture laws which don’t even give the victim a court hearing.

In the immortal words of R. N. Black, what they hey?

The federal government has filed a patent on cannabis. I have read the application. It is extremely long and wordy, and a big part of it is technical jargon and a recitation of complex chemical structures, but the main point is clear. They’re getting ready to sell fake pot to us by way of America’s pharmaceutical companies, and they don’t want anybody getting in the way of that.

In support of the patent, the applicant cites twenty-eight research studies and scholarly papers which support the medical benefits of cannabis. Amazing how much science can be gathered on the subject when the feds want to find it. To the public, the government continues to classify pot as a Schedule 1 drug, with no medical benefits whatsoever. That’s the only way these liars can keep it illegal.

The application declares to the patent office that cannabinoids are valuable in treating “a wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia.”

I don’t want to deter you from enjoying the full flavor of this application. You can find it, as I did, online. Go ahead, enjoy yourself. Marijuana, according to the U.S. government, has health benefits and medical applications so vast it is quite simply a wonder drug. A few of the claims made for this new ‘invention’:

“In more particular embodiments, the cannabinoid is used to prevent or treat an ischemic or neurodegenerative disease in the central nervous system of a subject, by administering to the subject a therapeutically effective amount of a cannabinoid to protect against oxidative injury to the central nervous system.

“The ischemic or neurodegenerative disease may be, for example, an ischemic infarct, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Down’s syndrome, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) dementia, myocardial infarction, or treatment and prevention of intraoperative or perioperative hypoxic insults that can leave persistent neurological deficits following open heart surgery requiring heart/lung bypass machines, such as coronary artery bypass grafts… “

But pot’s illegal because it gets you high.

When you apply for a patent, it helps if you can identify why the particular item you have in mind is different from other similar items already in use elsewhere or manufactured by others. It also helps if you’re the government.

In the case of patent number 6630507, the particular item being patented is a special variety of marijuana: it has had its psychoactive characteristics removed. Same stuff, but no high.

Only the government would do something this creepy. Or maybe Monsanto.

Of course, as anyone with any brains knows, the medicinal value of this herb is not something which can be chemically extracted while the rest is discarded. That’s not how nature works, folks. The rather extraordinary value in marijuana lies in its entire composition.

But in America, health is secondary to cold cash, as the health care sellout certainly proved. The government and its pharma friends want to make money. They are probably in panic mode right now because pot is becoming not only popular but widely accepted.

Medical marijuana has indeed done what its detractors feared: it’s opened the door to legalization. For the first time, a majority of Americans would simply remove all criminal penalties.

What happens if pot is legal?

For one thing, all of that profit goes down the tubes. The mafia loses a lot of money; the government can no longer count on the Mexican drug wars to fuel the industrial machine along the border. People getting healthy and high at the same time, that’s a crisis.

Big pharma is not going to lose this opportunity. They are expecting to develop a vast array of chemical cocktails using cannabis as a base, mixing it with hard drugs and selling it at wildly inflated prices. Throughout the patent application, the government differentiates its ‘invention’ almost entirely by claiming that “In disclosed embodiments the cannabinoid is not psychoactive…”

Except of course that one cannot sever the medical benefits from the entire plant. The new drugs will not have the same beneficial effects. There will be numerous studies, a lot of chemists tweaking the formulae, all of those free samples dropped off at your doctor’s office. Because they are going to have to reformulate it, there will be problems, the usual sort of problems you get when chemical companies mix their own garbage with something natural.

This is how the government plans to sever the medical benefits of marijuana from the popular use of the plant itself. They can keep it illegal, pleasing the gangsters, they can get rid of the dispensaries, and they can enrich Roche and Lilly and GlaxoSmithKline.

Technically, the patent listed three ‘inventors’, one each in Bethesda and Rockville, Maryland and one in Irvine, California. Then there is the ‘assignee’, The United States of America as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services.

For their patriotic contributions to the pharmaceutical industry, if not to organized crime, the inventors will no doubt receive benefits in the form of lifetime government research grants.

I am not sure, of course, that the actions of the Obama government in sending the U.S. Attorneys after the dispensaries –– and forcing sick people, many of them elderly, to try to get drugs on the street –– coincide with patent 6630507, but it’s curious that the very first application was filed in 1999, the same time that the medical marijuana partisans began looking for a way to get the issue on the ballot. And while the actual application was finalized in 2003, it is only now that the U.S. patent office is moving forward with it.

There’s too much money to be made on sick people. That’s why America, alone among the economically privileged societies, has no universal health coverage. It would be much too easy to legalize a drug which grows naturally, which anyone, with the possible exception of me –– I’ve tried growing it a couple of times and produced pitiful little things unworthy of their noble use –– can raise in their garden, flower box, or as an indoor plant.