California campaign finance disclosures reportedly show that the campaign to defeat marijuana legalization is being funded in part by the alcohol industry which does not relish the idea of joints replacing shots as intoxicants of choice.
The California Beer and Beverage Distributors contributed $10,000 to the No on Prop. 19 campaign, also known as “Public Safety First.” The industry has also spent considerable funds to fight other pot-related legal change, including opposition to Proposition 5, the Nonviolent Offender Rehabilitation Act (NORA), which attempted to reduce marijuana possession from a misdemeanor to an infraction.
This is something truly out of the movie “Thank You For Smoking.”
Polly: Did you see the coverage the fetal alcohol people got themselves over the weekend? They made it seem like we were encouraging pregnant women to drink. I’m surprised I didn’t get kidnapped to my way to work this morning. NICK: I don’t think people from the alcoholic beverage industry need to worry about being kidnapped just yet.
Polly: Pardon me?
Nick: Look, I mean, nothing personal, but tobacco generates a little more heat than alcohol.
Polly: Oh, this is news.
Nick:My product puts away 475,000 a year.
Polly: Okay, now, 475 is a legitimate number.
Nick: OK 435,000. 1,200 a day. How many alcohol deaths a year? 100,000, tops? That’s what, 270 a day? Wow, 270 people, a tragedy. Excuse me if I don’t see terrorists getting excited about kidnapping anybody from the alcohol industry.
Nick: How many gun-related deaths a year in the U.S.?
Bobby Jay: 11,000.
Nick: Thirty a day. That’s less than passenger car mortalities. No terrorist would bother with either of you.
Source: Huffington Post
Although Elaine’s proposed Marinarajuana Sauce with Linguini sounds like a wonderful idea (linguini is such an underutilized pasta shape), I’m going to have to say that prime rib of bison sounds absolutely delicious, Slarti.
Mmmmm . . . Bison. (drool)(drool)
Slarti & Blouise,
All non-trolls are welcome to be members of our taste-testing panel.
First recipe to test: Marinarajuana Sauce with Linguini–and we won’t need no stinkin’ basil!
Blouise,
Sounds fair to me.
Buddha,
Curiously enough, my experience in cooking with hash oil involved chocolate chip cookies as well (really chocolate chunk cookies as I used Hershey’s ‘Nugget’ mini candy bars cut in half instead of chocolate chips). I made a batch of (extremely potent) cookies which I had with me at a friend’s wedding – the bride and her two bridesmaids thanked me profusely for satisfying all three of them at once and my friend’s comment when the groom got to the front of the church before the ceremony was, ‘Looks like he ate both cookies’. The reception dinner was cooked by the groom (a chef) with the assistance of me and several other of our friends – prime rib of bison – and it was absolutely fantastic…
As far as asking first goes, imagine the friend you’re smoking a bowl with saying, “By the way, it’s laced with opium…” Talk about your weird dreams…
Slarti,
I have a funny story about hash oil chocolate chip cookies.
I was visiting a friend to get something one time in college and I had a non-smoking friend with me. We got to my buddy’s house and we waited in the kitchen while he got something for me. On the counter was a huge plate of chocolate chip cookies. It must have been four or five dozen.
While my non-smoking friend didn’t care for herbal entertainment, the boy did love him some cookies. It was morning and neither of us had had breakfast, so I had about four or five cookies, but my boy had about a dozen. My friend comes out of the back room and says, “Holy Shit! How many of those cookies did you eat?”
I said four or five and my other friend said about a dozen.
The response was “I hope you get to class or wherever you’re going soon. Those were made with a lot of hash oil whipped into the butter.”
By the time we got to campus, I was zooming along quite nicely but my cookie fiend friend was coming unraveled. He said he didn’t think he’d be going to class, but opted to hang out in the student union playing pinball instead. I went off to my three classes that day, much happier than usual.
When I returned to union, my friend had a crowd around him. He’d been playing the same game for three plus hours (it was a William’s Pin-Bot machine).
He’d rolled over the score and was up into the millions again.
Seeing that his ride had arrived was the only thing that got him to abandon the game and several free games he’d won.
Although he said he rather enjoyed his day off, I think that was the last time he ate something without asking what was in it first.
Elaine, Buddha, Slarti,
I’ll wash all the dishes, scrub the counter tops, and take out the garbage if you’ll let me into the test-tasting group ….
Elaine,
What about me? I use whole grain flour in my gingersnaps…
Buddha,
As far as cooking goes, hash oil is the best – easy, tasty, and potent…
Slarti,
One lives to be of . . . what was that thing? Oh yeah, service, man. Service. One lives to be of service. 😉 The toxicity argument is not a new one for me. I’ve had it at least twice here before your time.
Elaine,
Not only would I love to co-author with you, I’d volunteer to test the recipes. 😀 Now if I could only find some hash . . .
Buddha,
Maybe we could kill two birds with stone and discuss the addition of marijuana to healthful foods…even talk about writing a cookbook on the subject titled “Hash for Dinner.” Interested in being a co-author???
😉
Dr. Mah,
I like food, too. I find that gingersnaps are my food of choice, the spiciness of the cookie blends nicely with the pot taste nicely – and no need to hurt your lungs by smoking…
Buddha,
Thanks for the info – I had always heard that reefer had no LD50 but had no source to back it up…
dr.mah,
“its very harmful for our health don’t play with people health about the topic of marijuana its illegal to do that . i prefer talking about healthy food more than marijuana .”
You provide no evidence or logic for this opinion which means it’s simply your opinion and not a fact (as well as very much astray from the scientific method if you are indeed a doctor with any science credentials), but you are entitled to your opinion as unsubstantiated as it is. As to your preference, perhaps you should wait for a thread about healthy food or food safety to get your wish.
The topic of this thread is marijuana.
Hell, I’d pick pot over booze any day.
Feel good without the hangover
– feels good less filling.
its very harmful for our health don’t play with people health about the topic of marijuana its illegal to do that . i prefer talking about healthy food more than marijuana .
Elaine M.
1, September 18, 2010 at 11:10 am
Blouise,
“…only in America!”
Maybe USA should stand for Unique States of America? We surely aren’t “united” any more.
======================================================
Sad … but true
Blouise,
“…only in America!”
Maybe USA should stand for Unique States of America? We surely aren’t “united” any more.
They did this before – after Prohibition was repealed, they saw that people had come to like weed. Their lobbying got congress to make marijuana illegal. Score one for them; hope they don’t succeed again.
And here is a website that has some good data and natty charts.
http://www.saferchoice.org/content/view/24/53/
AY,
When discussion toxicity it’s all about median lethal dosages, often abbreviated LDsub50 or LD-50. This number represents the dosage required to kill half of the subjects tested. Although the number is a good general indicator of acute toxicity, there can be variations due to genetics, environment, etc. It does not however measure chronic toxicity which indicates damage than can be less than lethal, for example kidney, liver or brain damage.
Alcohol has a median lethal dosage of 10. This means it only takes 10 times the effective dosage (what it takes to feel the effects). This is an overdose dosage that is actually fairly easy to reach. A paper published in 2006 by Lopez, Mathers, Ezzati, Jamison and Murray based on 2001 data shows alcohol as one of the greatest causes of preventable deaths. The CDC’s numbers show than in the United States between 2001 and 2005 there were 79,000 deaths per year attributable to alcohol.
Compare these numbers to marijuana.
Marijuana is considered on of the least toxic substance you can use with a median lethal dosage of 1000. Which means you’d need 1000 times the effective dose to run a 50% chance of overdosing. It’s also worthy of note that there has never been a death reported that was attributable to marijuana. I’ve said before that’d I’ve seen the number expressed as one would have to smoke 1500lbs. in 15 minutes to overdose on marijuana – a practical impossibility, but I recently stumbled upon my original source for that number.
Judge Young in a 1988 ruling from the DOJ made the following conclusions (p.55-56).
“VIII.
ACCEPTED SAFETY FOR USE UNDER MEDICAL SUPERVISION
With respect to whether or not there is “a lack of accepted safety for use of [marijuana] under medical supervision”, the record shows the following facts to be uncontroverted.
Findings of Fact
1. Richard J. Gralla, M.D., an oncologist and Professor of
Medicine who was an Agency witness, accepts that in treating cancer patients oncologists can use the cannabinoids with safety despite their side effects.
2. Andrew T. Weil, M.D., who now practices medicine in Tucson,
Arizona and is on the faculty of the College of Medicine, University of Arizona, was a member of the first team of researchers to perform a Federal Government authorized study into the effects of marijuana on human subjects. This team made its study in 1968. These researchers determined that marijuana could be safely used under medical supervision.
In the 20 years since then Dr. Weil has seen no information that would cause him to reconsider that conclusion. There is no question in his mind but that marijuana is safe for use under appropriate medical supervision.
3. The most obvious concern when dealing with drug safety is
the possibility of lethal effects. Can the drug cause death?
4. Nearly all medicines have toxic, potentially lethal
effects. But marijuana is not such a substance. There is no record in the extensive medical literature describing a proven, documented cannabis-induced fatality.
5. This is a remarkable statement. First, the record on
marijuana encompasses 5,000 years of human experience. Second, marijuana is now used daily by enormous numbers of people throughout the world. Estimates suggest that from twenty million to fifty million Americans routinely, albeit illegally, smoke marijuana without the benefit of direct medical supervision. Yet, despite this long history of use and the extraordinarily high numbers of social smokers, there are simply no credible medical reports to suggest that consuming marijuana has caused a single death.
6. By contrast aspirin, a commonly used, over-the-counter medicine, causes hundreds of deaths each year.
7. Drugs used in medicine are routinely given what is called an LD-50. The LD-50 rating indicates at what dosage fifty percent of test animals receiving a drug will die as a result of drug induced toxicity. A number of researchers have attempted to determine marijuana’s LD-50 rating in test animals, without success. Simply stated, researchers have been unable to give animals enough marijuana to induce death.
8. At present it is estimated that marijuana’s LD-50 is around 1:20,000 or 1:40,000. In layman terms this means that in order to induce death a marijuana smoker would have to consume 20,000 to 40,000 times as much marijuana as is contained in one marijuana cigarette. NIDA-supplied marijuana cigarettes weigh approximately .9 grams. A smoker would theoretically have to consume nearly 1,500 pounds of marijuana within about fifteen minutes to induce a lethal response.
9. In practical terms, marijuana cannot induce a lethal
response as a result of drug-related toxicity.”
So the short answer AY is that alcohol is considerably more lethal than marijuana, even more so if one wants to factor in automobile and industrial accidents attributable to alcohol.
The criminalization of marijuana has its roots in the efforts of Hearst (to keep hemp paper from rendering his wood assets essentially valueless) and the DuPont family (Slarti’s noted nylon example) but carries on to this day because of the prison-industrial complex and their desire to fill their beds with non-violent pot smokers whose only real crime is preferring the less toxic marijuana to the notably toxic alcohol.
In effect, they are punishing people for making the healthier choice in social intoxicants.
It’s also noteworthy that one of the nation’s largest private prison firms (Wackenthut) has Dick Cheney as a substantial shareholder. And we all have some idea what that evil venal bastard will do out of profit motive.
Damn….and which really over all is more harmful……
I find this unsurprising since part of the reason that pot was made illegal in the first place was because nylon couldn’t compete with hemp as a material for ropes.
“The California Beer and Beverage Distributors contributed $10,000 to the No on Prop. 19 campaign, also known as “Public Safety First.”
This is shaping up to be the strangest election season I’ve ever experienced. Teabaggers sending out garbage scented mailers and the alcohol-pot calling the pot-kettle black … only in America!