When you read the article, you find that these symptoms are associated with the smoking of ANY substance.
It's clear that the author wanted to damn marijuana and so wrote the headline accordingly.
If accuracy and usefulness had been in the author's mind, the headline would have read as follows:
"Edible marijuana is safest way to enjoy cannabis"
But the Drug War is all about demonizing mother nature's drugs.
Please vet your news stories for drug-bashing headlines like this. Such articles promote the prohibition mentality that has turned America into a police state and destroyed the rule of law in Latin America, all WITHOUT ending drug use, but rather increasing the use of DEADLY DRUGS by forcing users to employ product of which the quality and dose are uncertain.
Author's Follow-up: November 6, 2023
Look, there's nothing wrong about reporting downsides to any drug. But until drugs are depoliticized and legalized, the stories about downsides represent pure propaganda, even if they're true. Why is this? Because the establishment is determined to cite ONLY downsides -- and so all such reports are propaganda when considered collectively. They never consider the value of being relaxed, the value of having a break from full-on sobriety, the value of treating pain, etc. They simply toss mud at the picture of marijuana and hope that some of it sticks. The collective propaganda is exacerbated by the establishment's refusal to recognize the value of a drug that helps some people forswear alcohol, a far deadlier drug than any, if mere statistics tell us anything at all.
Author's Follow-up: November 10, 2023
In fact, all arguments of prohibitionists are based on the false idea that there is no rational reason for "drug use." It's as if the prohibitionists are channeling Dr. Spock. No, there would be no reason for psychoactive drug use if we were all Dr. Spock from Star Trek, oblivious to the yearnings of the heart for self-transcendence, but the inconvenient truth is that we are actually human beings and that consciousness counts, notwithstanding the dogmatic myopia of materialists on this point.
So we can say of prohibitionists what William Brereton said of the critics of opium: "They assume certain statements as existing and acknowledged facts which have never been proved to be such, and then proceed to draw deductions from those alleged facts."
Finally, the decision to use any drug is based on a cost/benefit analysis. And as long as prohibitionists ignore all the benefits, one cannot help but be suspicious of the long lists of costs that they are forever compiling. Nor can science help them in their campaign of substance demonization, because the decision to use any psychoactive drug is based on a cost/benefit analysis that only the user can make, for only the user knows his or her own goals in life, how much they value transcendence, how much they believe with William James, for instance, that we must study other worlds that are not visible to our senses in the sober state.
Open Letters
Check out the conversations that I have had so far with the movers and shakers in the drug-war game -- or rather that I have TRIED to have. Actually, most of these people have failed to respond to my calls to parlay, but that need not stop you from reading MY side of these would-be chats.
I used to be surprised at this reticence on the part of modern drug-war pundits, until I realized that most of them are materialists. That is, most of them believe in (or claim to believe in) the psychiatric pill mill. If they happen to praise psychedelic drugs as a godsend for the depressed, they will yet tell us that such substances are only for those whose finicky body chemistries fail to respond appropriately to SSRIs and SNRIs. The fact is, however, there are thousands of medicines out there that can help with psychological issues -- and this is based on simple psychological common sense. But materialist scientists ignore common sense. That's why Dr. Robert Glatter wrote an article in Forbes magazine wondering if laughing gas could help the depressed.
As a lifelong depressive, I am embarrassed for Robert, that he has to even ask such a question. Of course laughing gas could help. Not only is laughter "the best medicine," as Readers Digest has told us for years, but looking forward to laughing is beneficial too. But materialist scientists ignore anecdote and history and tell us that THEY will be the judge of psychoactive medicines, thank you very much. And they will NOT judge such medicines by asking folks like myself if they work but rather by looking under a microscope to see if they work in the biochemical way that materialists expect.
In "Psychedelic Refugee," Rosemary Leary writes:
"Fueled by small doses of LSD, almost everything was amusing or weird." -- Rosemary Leary
In a non-brainwashed world, such testimony would suggest obvious ways to help the depressed.
We should hold the DEA criminally responsible for withholding spirit-lifting drugs from the depressed. Responsible for what, you ask? For suicides and lobotomies, for starters.
I never said that getting off SSRIs should be done without supervision. If you're on Twitter for medical advice, you're in the wrong place.
The benefits of entheogens read like the ultimate wish-list for psychiatrists. It's a shame that so many of them are still mounting a rear guard action to defend their psychiatric pill mill -- which demoralizes clients by turning them into lifetime patients.
It's really an insurance concern, however, disguised as a concern for public health. Because of America's distrust of "drugs," a company will be put out of business if someone happens to die while using "drugs," even if the drug was not really responsible for the death.
We've got to take the fight TO the drug warriors by starting to hold them legally responsible for having spread "Big Lies" about "drugs." Anyone involved in producing the "brain frying" PSA of the 1980s should be put on trial for willfully spreading a toxic lie.
There are neither "drugs" nor "meds" as those terms are used today. All substances have potential good uses and bad uses. The terms as used today carry value judgements, as in meds good, drugs bad.
Opium is a godsend, as folks like Galen, Avicenna and Paracelsus knew. The drug war has facilitated a nightmare by outlawing peaceable use at home and making safe use almost impossible.
Before anyone receives shock therapy, they should have the option to start using opium daily instead and/or any other natural drug that makes them feel good and keeps them calm. Any natural drug is better than knowingly damaging the brain!!!
M. Pollan says "not so fast" when it comes to drug re-legalization. I say FAST? I've gone a whole lifetime w/o access to Mother Nature's plants. How can a botanist approve of that? Answer: By ignoring all legalization stakeholders except for the kids whom we refuse to educate.
Buy the Drug War Comic Book by the Drug War Philosopher Brian Quass, featuring 150 hilarious op-ed pics about America's disgraceful war on Americans
You have been reading an article entitled, Weed Bashing at WTOP.COM: an open letter to station manager Joel Oxley, published on November 6, 2023 on AbolishTheDEA.com. For more information about America's disgraceful drug war, which is anti-patient, anti-minority, anti-scientific, anti-mother nature, imperialistic, the establishment of the Christian Science religion, a violation of the natural law upon which America was founded, and a childish and counterproductive way of looking at the world, one which causes all of the problems that it purports to solve, and then some, visit the drug war philosopher, at abolishTheDEA.com. (philosopher's bio; go to top of this page)