Medical Marijuana: Might let the states decide on it - keep your fingers crossed.

Every time I see Patrick Swayze with his face sunken and gaunt, it hurts me to know that he is probably going to die soon. I didn't grow up having a 'crush' on Patrick Swayze as an actor, or anything like that. But I watched the movie 'Ghost' about a million times, because it was one of the few good movies we had on tape at my parents' house. Watching the movie over and over again made me become familiar with Patrick Swayze, where you feel like an actor is just somebody you know.

I imagine he is probably using medical marijuana, privately, to make it easier for him to eat while suffering from pancreatic cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. He might be, he might not be, I don't know.

I haven't used marijuana deliberately, but I can recall two or three incidents over the years where I inhaled a small amount secondhand from other people who were smoking it. To me, it seems similar to tobacco and to many other herbal drugs (like St. John's Wort) that are legal. And as far as I know it doesn't trigger homicides and suicides (although I don't know enough firsthand to be sure) the way prescription antidepressants do. If you smoke a lot of it, and maybe use other drugs at the same time, it can raise your blood pressure enough to cause a stroke, just like tobacco does. There are dangers to using it, but it shouldn't be illegal.

(It turns out that the woman who owned the rampaging chimp had given it Xanax just before it went out and attacked a bunch of people. That's a really good 'placebo controlled' test. The chimp couldn't have had a 'placebo effect' of 'expecting himself' to go crazy after taking Xanax. But don't get me started: I believe there is no such thing as the placebo effect, and the entire concept of it is wrong.)

Today's good news says that there is serious talk about letting the states decide individually (instead of the federal government universally forbidding everyone) whether or not to allow medical marijuana. And they say they will stop raiding the shops that sell it. I feel skeptical and distrusting: "I'll believe it when I see it." It seems like it might really be true. This is an exciting thing to read in the news.

If the federal government gives a more tolerant attitude, the states themselves might also develop a more tolerant attitude. It could be a 'de facto' legalization, when they all relax about it and stop enforcing it so severely. The states will tend to copycat the federal government's attitudes in a 'voluntary' way.