aWANTEDmag.com, Inc

The Yahoo! headlines are a compendium of doom. Bin Laden Claims Airline Bomb Attempt on Christmas. Haiti Government Says 150K Bodies Recovered. Obama’s State of Union to Focus on Jobs. Premier: Israel to Keep Parts of West Bank Forever.

It is not necessary to delve beyond these summaries to know that the world is in trouble, that America has failed in its promise to become a dream-life refuge. John Mayer’s new song, the first one whose words seem to ring terribly true, says it best: “Who Says I Can’t Get Stoned?”

The reason, it turns out, that he can’t, at least not legally since the Federal government banned marijuana in 1937, is a metaphor for all that’s gone wrong with America: the prejudices, the greed-driven politics and the failure of the press to alert us to the real truths. The fact that marijuana is fast on its way to becoming the “new” old wonder drug may be the best sign yet, the most audacious hopeful signal, that there might actually be some of that “change” our President promised us in his campaign.

On January 18, New Jersey became the 14th State to legalize medical marijuana. Like those brave states before it, California the first back in 1996, New Jersey is relying on what Mike Meno, spokesperson for the Marijuana Policy Project calls a “small mountain of peer-reviewed research that has been done on marijuana over the last 20 years.”

Based on that research, he said, many of the country’s most prominent health organizations have jumped on board stating strongly that the outlaw herb has legitimate medical value to help everything from glaucoma to depression and that patients should not be denied access. Among them are the American Public Health Association, the American Nurses Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians just to name a few. Even the Mother of all medical associations, the American Medical Association, just this year changed its stance urging that marijuana’s status as a federal Schedule 1 controlled substance, placing it on the most-dangerous list that includes heroin and LSD, should be “reviewed with the goal of facilitating the conduct of clinical research and development of cannabinoid-based medicines, and alternate delivery methods.”

Importantly, the AMA’s policy on medical marijuana concludes that “effective patient care requires the free and unfettered exchange of information on treatment alternatives and that discussion of these alternatives between physicians and patients should not subject either party to criminal sanctions.”

Amen, offers Dr. David Bearman, a Santa Barbara, California-based doctor specializing in pain management and cannabinoid medicine, otherwise known as medical marijuana.  “The conversation about marijuana’s benefits has been squelched for at least 70 years, it is only in the last few that we can actually talk about it,” he said.

Why?

Dr. Bearman, who has during his 40-year tenure served as an expert witness on more than 340 criminal cases involving alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, opiates, methamphetamines, tranquilizers and inhalants, offers a one-word explanation to describe the irrational inability to even imagine that marijuana could be beneficial: propaganda.

Back in 1937, when the Marijuana Tax Act was proposed, the AMA actually said it saw no danger in the drug and fought against the tax. But The Machine said otherwise. Harry Anslinger, the nephew-in-law of then-Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon, was named the first Director of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. He was an unequivocally raving racist and a supreme power-mongering bureaucrat, pointing fingers at minority cannabis users including “ginger-colored niggers” playing “voodoo music” and dating white women, and job-stealing Mexicans, about whom the slang term for medical cannabis, “marijuana,” was created to refer to Pancho Villa’s whore, “Mary Jane.” Anslinger famously warned, “one puff and you’re hooked for life.”
 
No surprise that the xenophobic round-up of groups known for their pot-smoking was also supported by the interests of large lobbying concerns. High among them was DuPont, which was at the time readying to patent processes for creating the new synthetic materials nylon and rayon and one to create paper from wood pulp.  These processes would not have been able to compete with the strength and cheapness of hemp, for which a new machine, the decoricator, had recently been invented. The new ban, then, suited DuPont nicely as it did Andrew Mellon, whose Mellon bank was DuPont’s main financial backer.

Enter the media. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst owned the bulk of the timber industry whose conventionally-processed pulp was used to make the paper for newsprint. As the story goes, Mr. Hearst used his reach and influence to strike the fear in readers as only a good “news” article can, furthering the term “marijuana” over other well-known terms like cannabis simply to play up how foreign and, hence, dangerous the substance was.

A headline at the time might have read, “Bring us your poor, your tired, your hungry…but not your high.”

So, what’s changed? The rich and influential are beginning to hearken back to before “modernity” rendered historically effective uses of herbal remedies moot.

According to Dr. Bearman, whose father owned a drugstore between 1900 and 1970, the modern attitude was that we wanted medicine to have a single chemical compound in order to define more easily what it did than a plant that can carry more than 400 chemicals. Marijuana, he said, has 483 chemicals, but chemicals that we already have in some form in our bodies, that we can metabolize easily unlike alcohol and artificially-created compounds.

“Compared to an ad on TV for any pharmaceutical drug, an ad on TV for marijuana would come out much, much safer,” he said. In addition to offering far-fewer side effects, importantly, “nobody has ever died from an overdose of marijuana.”

The truth is finally getting out, not that illegal partaking of marijuana has been at all uncommon. According to the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services’ own 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health 41% of Americans, roughly 102 million people, admitted to having used cannabis in their lifetime. One can assume that number is higher.

The political and legal machines are both gearing up on the side of legalizing marijuana and, of course, that is what it takes.

In addition to the now 14 states that have decriminalized marijuana for medical use, ranging from New Jersey’s new initially stricter laws to California’s more relaxed stance, other states have reduced penalties to the extent that possession of small amounts of marijuana is comparable to a traffic citation and some cities, like Denver and Seattle, have deemed it the lowest law enforcement priority, according to MPP’s Mr. Meno.

California rep. Tom Ammiano has proffered a bill to legalize and regulate cannabis as we do with alcohol, a plan that would produce $1.4 billion in state tax revenue every year for the desperate-for-cash state. And even the Federal government is beginning to come around, maybe because its leader admitted he inhaled. In October, the Justice Department delivered on Obama’s campaign promise to cease using federal law enforcement in states that have made marijuana legal for medical use. “This is the most meaningful reform in policy because it frees states up to pass more medical marijuana laws without fear of recrimination,” Mr. Meno said.

And, once these laws do pass, Harry Nelson, a partner of Los Angeles-based law firm Fenton Nelson, is standing by. Mr. Nelson has, with great foresight, co-founded a unit specifically targeted to helping doctors and the collectives and cooperatives that have cropped up to dispense recommended doses of marijuana that comply with confusing state law.

This Medical Marijuana Law Group, created six months ago, is initially focused on California, currently representing roughly 50 cooperatives and collectives cultivating and dispensing marijuana and 50 physicians who are recommending medical marijuana but, Mr. Nelson hopes, will “eventually push for more national compliance issues.”

One of Mr. Nelson’s clients is a marijuana edibles company, an area that he expects soon to be a “big part of the food business.”

Steve Horwitz, owner of Ganja Gourmet in Denver, America’s first medical marijuana restaurant and dispensary, is a trailblazer. The Long Island-native, a longtime salesman of promotional products and now licensed dispenser of medical marijuana, predicts that “You will see marijuana legalized in this country in the next 3-4 years.” In preparation, he is gearing up his line of Ganja Gourmet homemade edibles including brownies, cannolis and chocolates all made with marijuana-infused butter, for a wholesale business. “If they legalize it to ship, we will become the Omaha Steaks of marijuana,” Mr. Horwitz said.

In addition to baked goods, Ganja Gourmet also offers a menu of entrée items including pizza, laganja (aka lasagna) and a Hummus and Ganja Ghanoush platter, all made with marijuana-infused olive oil. Or, for a mere $30, guests can opt for the Dinner Buzz Special, which includes a fat ganja gourmet gourmet joint, a “ganjamade” appetizer of olive tapenade with ganja olive oil and any entrée and dessert.

So far, Mr. Horwitz said, no guests have had to take advantage of the restaurant’s offer to drive them home. “The Colorado Medical Marijuana community is very smart and eats generally less than we recommend,” he said. Plus, “people stay, eat, meet other people and chill for hours.”

As the word spreads of marijuana’s beneficence, of its help with pain, depression, sleep disorders, migraines and a variety of other ailments, Ganja Gourmet could become a national chain. And there could be lots of competition for these marijuana edibles. Who knows, even Wal-Mart could carry them in their “functional foods” section?