*The shifting medical view on…

The shifting medical view on marijuana

Yesterday’s Boston Globe published an article called The Shifting Medical View on Marijuana by Lester Grinspoon (co-author of Marijuana, The Forbidden Medicine. In it, Grinspoon makes note of the recent Medscape poll that showed “76 percent of physicians and 89 percent of nurses said they thought marijuana should be available as a medicine.” Grinspoon has long been an advocate of medical marijuana, and he takes the argument even a step further:

The only workable way of realizing the full potential of this remarkable substance, including its full medical potential, is to free it from a dual set of regulations — the laws that control prescription drugs, and the often cruel and self-defeating criminal laws that control psychoactive substances used to for nonmedical purposes. These mutually reinforcing laws strangle marijuana’s uniquely multifaceted potential. The only way to liberate the potential is to give marijuana the same legal status as alcohol, a far more dangerous substance.

Kudos to the Boston Globe for running the Grinspoon piece. Articles like this one and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer piece I mentioned on Friday may be a sign that the mainstream media is beginning to allow objective anti-prohibition coverage.