The Official Story Debunking "Gutter Science"

http://jackherer.com/chapter15.html


After 15 days of taking testimony and more than a year's legal deliberation, DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis L. Young formally urged the DEA to allow doctors to prescribe marijuana. In a September 1988 judgement, he ruled: "The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision . . . It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for the DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record. In strict medical terms, marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man."

Yet former DEA Administrator John Lawn, his successor, Robert Bonner, and current DEA Administrator John Constantine - non-doctors all! - have refused to comply and have continued to deprive persons of medical cannabis, according to their own personal discretion.

Wasting Time, Wasting Lives

More than 100 years have passed since the 1894 British Raj commission study of hashish smokers in India reported cannabis use was harmless and even helpful. Numerous studies since have all agreed: The most prominent being Siler, LaGuardia, Nixon's Shafer Commission, Canada's LeDain Commission, and the California Research Advisory Commission.

Concurrently, American presidents have praised hemp, the USDA amassed volumes of data showing its value as a natural resource, and in 1942 the Roosevelt administration even made Hemp for Victory, a film glorifying our patriotic hemp farmers. That same year, Germany produced The Humorous Hemp Primer, a comic book, written in rhyme, extolling hemp's virtues. (See appendix I of the paper version of this book.)

Yet even the humane use of hemp for medicine is now denied. Asked in late 1989 about the DEA's failure to implement his decision quoted above, Judge Young responded that administrator John Lawn was being given time to comply.

More than a year after that ruling, Lawn officially refused to reschedule cannabis, again classing it as a Schedule I "dangerous" drug that is not even allowed to be used as medicine.

Decrying this needless suffering of helpless Americans, the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML) and the Family Council on Drug Awareness quickly demanded Lawn's resignation. His successors, Bonner, and now Constantine, retain the same policy.

What hypocrisy allows public officials to scoff at the facts and deny the truth? How do they rationalize their atrocities? How? They invent their own experts.

Government Doublespeak

Since 1976, our federal government (e.g., NIDA, NIH, DEA*, and Action), police sponsored groups (like DARE*), and special interest groups (like PDFA*) have proclaimed to public, press, and parent groups alike that they have "absolute evidence" of the shocking negative effects of marijuana smoking.

* National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, Drug Enforcement Agency, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, Partnership for a Drug Free America. All subsequent researchers found Heath's marijuana findings to be of no value, because carbon monoxide poisoning and other factors were totally left out.

When U.S. government sponsored research prior to 1976 indicated that cannabis was harmless or beneficial, the methodology of how each study was done was always presented in detail in the reports; e.g., read The Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana (1976) and you will see exactly what the methodology of each medical study was.

However, when our government bureaucrats deliberately sponsored negative marijuana research, time and time again Playboy magazine, NORML, High Times, etc. had to sue under the new Freedom of Information Act to find out the actual laboratory methodology these "experiments" employed.

What they found was shocking.

Dr. Heath/Tulane Study, 1974

The Hype:

Brain Damage and Dead Monkeys

In 1974, California Governor Ronald Reagan was asked about decriminalizing marijuana.

After producing the Heath/Tulane University study, the so-called "Great Communicator" proclaimed, "The most reliable scientific sources say permanent brain damage is one of the inevitable results of the use of marijuana."

(L.A. Times)

The report from Dr. Heath had concluded that Rhesus monkeys, smoking the equivalent of only 30 joints a day, began to atrophy and die after 90 days.

And ever since, dead brain cells found in monkeys who were forced to smoke marijuana has been given maximum scare play in federal booklets and government sponsored propaganda literature against pot.

Senator Eastland of Mississippi used it throughout the mid-1970s to horrify and stop national legislators from supporting NORML's decriminalization bills in Congress, mostly sponsored by the late Senator Jacob Javitts of New York.

Reports of the study have also been distributed by the hierarchy of drug rehabilitation professionals as part of their rationalization for wanting to get kids off pot, based on supposed scientific studies. It is used to terrorize parent groups, church organizations, etc., who redistribute it still further.

Heath killed the half-dead monkeys, opened their brains, counted the dead brain cells, and then took control monkeys, who hadn't smoked marijuana, killed them too, and counted their brain cells. The pot smoking monkeys had enormous amounts of dead brain cells as compared to the "straight" monkeys.

Ronald Reagan's pronouncement was probably based on the fact that marijuana smoking was the only difference in the two sets of monkeys. Perhaps Reagan trusted the federal research to be real and correct. Perhaps he had other motives.

Whatever their reasons, this is what the government ballyhooed to press and PTA, who trusted the government completely.

In 1980, Playboy and NORML finally received for the first time after six years of requests and suing the government an accurate accounting of the research procedures used in the infamous report:

When NORML/Playboy hired researchers to examine the reported results against the actual methodology, they laughed.

The Facts:

Suffocation of Research Animals

As reported in Playboy, the Heath "Voodoo" Research methodology involved strapping Rhesus monkeys into a chair and pumping them with equivalent of 63 Colombian strength joints in "five minutes, through gas masks," losing no smoke. Playboy discovered that Heath had administered 63 joints in five minutes over just three months instead of administering 30 joints per day over a one-year period as he had first reported. Heath did this, it turned out, in order to avoid having to pay an assistant's wages every day for a full year.

The monkeys were suffocating! Three to five minutes of oxygen deprivation causes brain damage "dead brain cells." (Red Cross Lifesaving and Water Safety Manual) With the concentration of smoke used, the monkeys were a bit like a person running the engine of a car in a locked garage for 5, 10, 15 minutes at a time every day!

The Heath Monkey study was actually a study in animal asphyxiation and carbon monoxide poisoning.

Among other things, Heath had completely (intentionally? incompetently?) omitted discussion of the carbon monoxide the monkeys inhaled.

Carbon monoxide, a deadly gas that kills brain cells, is given off by any burning object. At that smoke concentration, the monkeys were, in effect, like a person locked in a garage with the car engine left running for five, 10, 15 minutes at a time every day!

All subsequent researchers agree the findings in Heath's experiment regarding marijuana were of no value, because carbon monoxide poisoning and other factors were totally left out and had not been considered in the report. This study and others, like Dr. Gabriel Nahas' 1970s studies, tried to somehow connect the THC metabolites routinely found in the fatty tissue of human brains, reproductive organs, and other fatty areas of the body to the dead brain cells in the suffocated monkeys.

Now, in 1999, 17 years have passed and not a single word of Dr. Heath's or Dr. Nahas' research has been verified! But their studies are still hauled out by the Partnership for a Drug Free America, the Drug Enforcement Administration, city and state narcotics bureaus, plus politicians and, in virtually all public instances, held up as scientific proof of the dangers of marijuana.

This is U.S. government propaganda and disinformation at its worst! The public paid for these studies and has the right to the correct information and history being taught in our taxpayer sponsored schools.

In 1996, Gabriel Nahas, in France, sued Mishka, the translator of the French edition of this book, "L'Emperor est Nu!", for damages. Mishka wrote that Nahas' studies were viewed by the world as garbage. The French court, upon hearing all the testimony by Nahas, and after Nahas had spent an quivalent of tens of thousands of American dollars on legal fees, awarded him its highest insult: one franc, the equivalent of approximately 15 cents American for damages, and no legal fees!