Conservative Christian Mothers Are Fed Up with Jeff Sessions and the GOP on MMJ Issues
Not all political conservatives and Christians are buying into the reactionary drivel emanating from the White House. This is especially true for mothers of special needs children who tend to fight like hell for what they know is best for their babies. And they don’t tolerate ignorance.
A group of moms in Texas are on the warpath to combat the blatant lies of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recently had the gall to
compare weed to heroin.
Mothers Advocating Medical Marijuana for Autism (MAMMA) is fighting for the “legalization of therapeutic cannabis” and they’ve got science behind them
MAMMA, a grassroots parent advocacy group, is seeking the legalization of medical marijuana with autism as a qualifying condition.
Their #cannabis4autism campaign aims to change state laws so that “our children with autism can have access to this healing plant under a doctor’s guidance.”
In a
Vice feature about the group, one of MAMMA’s co-founders and current executive director,
AmyLou Fawell, estimated that hundreds of parents in Texas are using MMJ after having little to no success with prescription drugs for their autistic children.
Fawell said MAMMA’s decision to advocate for medical marijuana “goes a long way” in a traditionally conservative state like Texas, where current
MMJ laws are too restrictive to help those in need, by capping oils at low THC counts and allowing it to be used only for severe epilepsy.
Meanwhile, according to the
Marijuana Policy Project, 75 percent of Texans support marijuana law reform.
As far as Fawell is concerned, pushing for the loosening of Texas’ MMJ restrictions actually makes total sense as a creationist.
“If God made it and our bodies need it, then that is the Christian argument,” she told Vice, regardless what Jeff Sessions and other Republicans are saying.
Go Moms....most powerful force in the universe is Moms.
University Drops Out of Pot for PTSD Study; Vets Demand Answers
Though cannabis is legal in the District of Columbia, there isn’t much medical marijuana access in the greater Washington, D.C. metro area. Virginia is still a no-go zone, and four years after lawmakers in Maryland approved medical marijuana, would-be patients in that state are still waiting for the first delivery.
Keep in mind that
the area around the nation’s capital is full of military veterans. Post-traumatic stress disorder
affects between 10 and 30 percent of vets, and PTSD is one of the conditions for which medical cannabis in Maryland is available—but until that state’s cannabis program becomes active later this summer, at the earliest, one of the only options for area combat vets to (legally) try cannabis for PTSD was through a study.
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was one of two research institutions in the U.S. to receive funding to see if smoked marijuana helped combat-related stress, as a growing body of anecdotal evidence suggests.
Hundreds of veterans inquired about participating—and they started to find
out sometime last week, via a pre-recorded voicemail greeting, that the study had been canceled. Now, mystified and angered vets are demanding answers.
As Reason reported, both Hopkins and Arizona-based researcher Sue Sisley received funding from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) to formally study marijuana’s efficacy in treating PTSD. Veterans—many of whom claim that marijuana allows them to be weaned off of harder, habit-forming drugs like prescription painkillers—
would receive some cannabis to smoke, and the progression of their symptoms would be cataloged.
Up to 76 veterans were to participate in the initial stage of the study, to be held simultaneously with Sisley overseeing vets at the Scottsdale Research Institute in Arizona (where medical marijuana is legal) and with Hopkins researcher Ryan Vandrey to run the study in Maryland (where it is legal only in theory).
Without warning and without formal announcement, the Hopkins study was canceled.
“If you are calling about the PTSD study, please know we are no longer participating in that study,” veterans who called a hotline number seeking participants were told as of Monday, Reason reported. A university spokesman later confirmed to Reason that the school had dropped out of the MAPS-funded study because “our goals for this study weren’t in alignment.”
Military veteran Sean Kiernan, president of the Weed for Warriors Foundation, is predictable apoplectic.
“Think of all the hopeful veterans now being told their hopes are dashed over voice mail,” he wrote in a letter addressed to Ronald Daniels, Hopkins’s president. “This hardly seems to be the actions of a prestigious university concerned with veterans who are easily triggered by the continual systematic stonewalling of their needs.”
As Kiernan pointed out, 65,000 military vets have committed suicide or fatally overdosed on prescription medication since 2011—and Hopkins received $2 billion in federal funding for medical research in 2015, the most of any research institution in America for the 37th consecutive year, none of which appears to be helping vets.
So what happened?
Reason speculates it might boil down to shitty government weed. As has been documented extensively, the only marijuana available for study in the United States must come through the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which licenses the University of Mississippi to grow the research supply.
According to researchers and anyone else who has seen the government cannabis, it is terrible—horrifyingly so. Sisley, the western partner in the PTSD study, raised hackles recently when she went public with her concerns about how bad the weed was.
“It didn’t resemble cannabis,”
she told PBS News Hour. “It didn’t smell like cannabis.”
(cont)
Bizarre Ban on Political Contributions from Pot Companies Struck Down
Illinois has a bit of an image problem. Namely, the state that sent both Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama to the White House is seen as wholly crooked, a hotbed of graft and corruption, notable most for its remarkable reliability.
This is the reputation you earn when
four out of the seven governors to serve since the 1960s ended up in federal prison.
Lawmakers in Illinois at least have taken the first step—they admitted they have a serious problem. Or, at least, kind of. Moving to dispel “the perceived risk of corruption” “among the public and the media” was the idea when, on the same day Illinois
enacted medical marijuana in 2013, the state banned political contributions from medical marijuana providers.
Never mind that medical cannabis in Illinois had barely time to meet with politicians, let alone bribe them in ways above and beyond common campaign cash, or that marijuana had absolutely nothing to do with the likes of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich trying to auction off Obama’s Senate seat (and getting caught, and subsequently eroding the public’s already thin trust in the veracity of our democracy).
The ban on politicians accepting legitimate cash from cannabis operators—and only cannabis operators;
casino magnates, horse-racing track owners and waste-disposal companies are all ok—was so patently ridiculous, even a lawmaker involved with its passage admitted it existed merely to “appease ‘conservative’ and ‘hesitant’ colleagues,”
as Reason reported last year.
And as the website reported on Friday, a federal judge agreed
and declared the ban unconstitutional. Money is speech, after all, and a selective muzzling of political speech is absolutely a violation of the First Amendment.
(cont)
