Thursday, March 19, 2009

Grassley Fights Grass

This is exactly what is wrong with the Republican Party.

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley criticized the Obama administration Thursday for moving to loosen restrictions on medical marijuana.

At a gathering to discuss health care reform, the Iowa lawmaker criticized the Justice Department's new policy of targeting California's medical marijuana distributors only if they violate both federal and state law.
When even former Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey comes out for legalization of marijuana for adults you can tell the Republican Party is out of step with the nation. Depending on the survey between 55% and 85% of Americans favor medical marijuana. When medical marijuana is on the ballot it almost invariably does well. In fact it is so popular that some state legislatures are passing laws. On top of that Grassley is passing out discredited bromides like "mother's milk leads to harder drugs". Actually mother's milk contains marijuana analogs. It has a soothing effect on babies and makes them want to eat (well drink) more. In tests with mice - babies that didn't get their full quota of marijuana analogs didn't do well. Uh. Where was I? Distracted by breastfeeding mothers I fear.

So why is the Republican Senator denying the will of the people? I was under the impression that politics was all about winning elections, but it is entirely possible that I have a mistaken view of the process.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

1 comment:

Unknown said...

If you think mother milk is anything other than an extremely specialized substance that is needed to stabilize what a newborn is : a little heap of powerlessness, in need of huge amounts of energy and immonucompromised.

Breast milk is, in effect, a very strong and specialized medicine that is intended to keep a human body going in a very difficult moment. It's formula is longer than the DNA that was used to create the baby in the first place, since it is partially based on the DNA of viruses, bacteria and on the molecular structure of dangerous environmental factors the mother's immune system encountered. It is also meant to infect the infant's digestive tract with a few bacteria that, while critical to our survival, are not all that nice either.

But since your argument depends on breast milk being a cleary benign substance according to you, I suggest you do what your stomach did when you were young : inject you with breast milk.

You will die within minutes. For anyone BUT an immunocompromised baby with a thymus gland operating in a specific mode breast milk is dangerous poison that kills in a few dozen seconds.

Immediately after contact with blood with a working immune system breast milk's active components will commence an assault on your immune system, which will respond in kind. This will cause massive clotting, but not before the milk has spread over your entire circulatory system. Your blood will solidify all over your body. You will barely have time or energy to do anything, except perhaps one final scream. You certainly won't survive long enough to get a doctor to you, and he won't be able to do anything anyway.

This will happen even with the milk from your own mother.

Even for babies breast milk contains a few booby traps that the baby is supposed to fight before they kill him/her. After a while they will become active, if the immune system of the baby has failed to eradicate them before that time ...

Economics like to state that this is done so that babies with a "slightly" compromised immune system would die before their parents invest too much time and energy protecting and attempting to cure them. After all, if their immune system remains compromised such an effort would be a waste of time.

But it does contains tiny amounts of endorfine (not marijuana). I'm afraid the chances that it's enough to mask the pain of an immune conflict causing massive clotting in your bloodstream are minute.

To be honest, if I were injecting someone with a substance that would make darwin himself proudly state "now THIS is natural selection", I'd mix in drugs too. Especially if I wanted to later on give him/her more of it.

Breast milk is a very complex, specific medical drug, meant to cure a very specific condition.