Why I Changed My Mind On Weed

I'm glad that Gupta has made this public apology. It takes a lot of courage to make that statement especially for someone with great public influence.

I'm just curious as to why it took him this long. Medical marijuana has been prescribed in hospitals for some time with great benefit. I mean, just from a clinical standpoint, he should've seen the great upsides and limited downsides to using the drug. Patients, typically the elderly, with cachexia from cancer are often given marijuana to stimulate their appetite, and it works. Given its possible links with the development of Schizophrenia and the rest of its relatively mild side-effects, a quick and simple benefits/costs analysis should show that in many cases, its efficacy far outweighs the potential risks.

A huge percentage of physicians today, as indicated in the article, would be supportive of a move to legalize it. And it has been this way for several years. I just do not understand why it took Gupta so many years, having to go to the ends of the earth to dig up research from various countries to come to that conclusion.

My suspicion is that his initial viewpoint was more rooted in irrational bias and ignorance than in scientific evidence proving the drug's inefficacy. You can tell that by his mentioning of his children and how he wouldn't let them try marijuana, which is both irrelevant to the issue and an ignorant emotionally-charged argument commonly used when the topic of legalization (for medical use) is brought up. It's effectively "but remember the children!" The same could've been said for legalization of opioids and a myriad of other medications that have much more severe side-effects. And that really saddens me, because I've got great respect for the guy. I'm glad he's on what I believe to be the right side, but as someone with great influence in this country, with such an accomplished background, I feel he could've arrived to this conclusion much earlier, with much less data, and pushed for its medical legalization when the conversation was happening.

All in all welcome aboard, Dr. Gupta. Please be a little more forward-thinking from here on out.

Hardly! He doesn't have to slink off anywhere, nor do I think he should.

But frankly, the convenience and timeliness of his argument is well worth pointing out. Speaking personally, I hold a special disdain in my heart for smart people that perpetuate the war on drugs for various reasons and then profess to stand for individual freedom.

In particular, the argument of not enough research, keep it illegal is the most insidious kind of argument because it sounds reasonable enough but inherently contains the opinion that we should keep jailing people until this research materializes. So yeah, when I get a chance to rub it in with someone like that, I take it. I guess that's petty, but so is jailing people for getting high.

Fair, but a little knowledge really can be a dangerous thing. I'm not a practicing physician, but several members of my family are (whose characters I tend to trust).

The annoyance you may feel when a non-engineer pontificates on a technical topic they clearly only have a surface level understanding of is similar to the aggravation they (M.D's) feel when patients who have perused pubmed and webmd decide they're better informed than they actually are.

I'm of the opinion that "trust, but verify" is a reasonable way to approach subject matter experts in other fields.

It's encouraging to see public opinion and the medical community evolve on the issue of medical marijuana. However, there still remains an ambiguous interpretation to the way the substance is treated between State and Federal governments. For example, in my home state of Oregon the laws on medical marijuana possession are quite liberal, yet the consequences at the Federal level make progress on the issue nearly void. Furthermore the consequences at the state level in Oregon for illegal possession of marijuana remain quite harsh [1].

My biggest concern is that people who otherwise wouldn't be criminal are becoming lifelong criminals by getting locked up for a relatively harmless substance. From a financial standpoint, our government needs to tax the substance so we aren't treating a large portion of the economy differently than any other industry.

[1] http://www.robertcrowlaw.com/blog/drug-crimes/oregon-marijua...

And some MDs were educated at Georgetown, which is a Jesuit school, so you can't trust any Georgetown grads because they believe in sky faires.

Let's also remember that "MDs" work in a field founded by bloodletters who believed in the four humors.

The important thing is whether the field is progressing via scientific method, not what its founded believed long ago.