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THE INSIDE HISTORY OF THE
ISRAEL LOBBY
Former top
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by the Zionist lobby; how Israel bent LBJ, Reagan and Clinton
to its purpose; how Bush's White House has been the West Wing
of the Israeli government; how Washington's revolving doors send
full-time Israel lobbyists from think-tanks to the National Security
Council and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans. For all who want a
true measure of the Lobby's power, the Christisons' 8-page dossier,
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"In Corvallis, a very
progressive community, there is virtually no doctor who will
recommend cannabis for cancer pain or for severe nausea or AIDS."
-Nurse Ed Glick
Ed Glick was fired April 18 from his
job as an acute-care nurse at Samaritan Regional Mental Health
Center in Corvallis. He had been employed there for 12 years.
The pretext was his refusal to take a drug test. The real reason,
Glick thinks, was the pressure he'd been putting on the Oregon
Medical Marijuana Program to accept patients with psychiatric
diagnoses.
The Oregon Medical Marijuana
Act was created by voter initiative in 1998. Unlike California's
law, passed in '96, which authorizes doctors to recommend marijuana
for "any... condition for which marijuana provides relief,"
the OMMA created a finite list of qualifying conditions: Cachexia
(wasting), Cancer, Glaucoma, HIV+/AIDS, Nausea, Severe Pain,
Seizures, including but not limited to epilepsy, and Persistent
muscle spasms, including but not limited to those caused by multiple
sclerosis.
After OMMA passed, Glick began
seeing patients at Samaritan who said they were self-medicating
with cannabis to ease various psychiatric symptoms. He would
encounter the same people at the Compassion Center in Eugene,
where he worked as a volunteer helping patients enroll in the
state program. "We assist these people by trying to find
a physical correlation to their psychiatric symptom," Glick
explains. "For example, if they're having PTSD symptoms
they might be sick and have physical symptoms."
Glick attempted to determine
how many people were treating psychiatric symptoms by reviewing
172 randomly selected charts. He presented his results at the
Patients Out of Time Conference April 8:
"The average patient age
was 43. All the patients were registered in OMMA; 95% were registered
for pain. (A very large percentage of Oregon registrants are
pain patients. Some 40% had multiple qualifying conditions (not
including psychiatric) -physical pain and nausea, for example.
Pain with spasticity -they often go together.
"The results: 64% of the
patients in the survey showed some kind of significant psychiatric
benefit; 39% reported insomnia relief; 5% reported PTSD symptom
relief, many of them veterans who go to the VA hospital in Roseburg
and are denied. The VA doctors tell them 'No, I can't. I'll lose
my DEA license.' They just don't want to stand up to it -although
they're beginning to refer patients to us, which is kind of interesting.
"Anxiety, 11%; depressive
symptoms, 11%; 15% of the cohort reported that they were using
cannabis to decrease the side effects of medications; 56% reported
reduced use of medications.
"What these patients report
to me is that they're sick and tired of Vioxx and they're sick
and tired of Flexeril, Vicodin -people are literally sick of
these drugs. They can't sleep, they can't function, they're drugged
up, they don't have any enjoyment of life. When they start using
cannabis they leave off the Vioxx and they leave off the Vicodin.
Vicodin has a place, but for long-term pain management it is
really poor. Appetite stimulation -tremendously important for
people who are in pain all the time- was 20%.
"I put the survey together
as a request to the Oregon Department of Human Services to reconvene
the Debilitating Conditions Advisory Panel, which I was a member
of in 2000. At that time nine patients had submitted requests
to include psychiatric conditions to the list. The state health
officer did a fairly good job of bringing together the panel,
but the whole thing was skewed from the outset by political manipulation
by the governor's office and by the head of the Department of
Health Services. The information that they would allow us to
consider had to be filtered through rules stating that if it's
not a double-blind, peer-reviewed clinical trial, it doesn't
get a lot of evidentiary weight.
"We were not allowed to
give much weight to patients' reports. And of course there was
no relevant double-blind, peer-reviewed clinical trial. So the
panel was set up to fail. A few patients came in and gave very
compelling testimonials. And then out of nowhere came a whole
bunch of medical experts -psychiatrists from Oregon Health Sciences
University and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill- and
they just had fits. "This is quackery," they said.
"The only person who even
differentiated between affective depressive-type disorders and
schizophrenic thought disorders was one of the patients. None
of the doctors even made any differentiation between these two
completely different sets of medical problems. After a long,
protacted time we all wrote our comments out, and there was a
vote, and we voted to add affective disorders -severe agitation
and depressive symptoms. Didn't happen. They finally did add
Alzheimer's agitation. [Fewer than 50 patients have qualified
to date for Alzheimer's agitation.]
"So, five years later
I brought in the study I'd done with OMMP registrants and asked
them to reconvene the Debilitating Conditions Panel based on
this new evidence showing that indeed there is some psychiatric
effect that people are getting from their cannabis use. And they
rejected the request with a 'summary denial.'
"Then Lee Berger, an attorney
in Portland, asked if I'd be willing to sue the Department of
Human Services' OMMP and I said yes. We filed our petition for
judicial review in February -a formal request 'to Add Clinical
Depression, Depressive Symptoms, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD), Severe Anxiety, Agitation and Insomnia, to Those Diseases
and Conditions Which Qualify as "Debilitating Medical Conditions"
under the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act.' And it worked! I can't
believe it!
"We got word in late March
that, because the OMMP doesn't really want to go to court, they've
decided to kind of sue for peace. All we're asking is that they
reconvene a panel to evaluate these conditions. So, we're in
the process of negotiating with them to get this thing back on
track.
"We want to close some
of the loopholes that allow them to skew the evidence base. It's
pretty clear that there are a lot of patients who are using cannabis
for insomnia, for mood stabilizing, and for peace. Just for a
a very simple, elemental peace, especially with chronic diseases
like severe chronic pain. Cannabis is actually a miracle drug
for pain, in my opinion.
"There's no question the
last thing the pharmacy industry wants is millions and millions
of Americans growing and using their own medicine that covers
such a wide array of diseases."
Glick was fired 10 days after
giving this account to Patients Out of Time. Perhaps someone
at the Oregon Health Sciences University, the dominant institution
in Corvallis, did not like the effrontery of a Samaritan nurse
criticizing their prestigious "experts."
Washburn
Can't Get His Job Back
The Oregon Supreme Court has
ruled against Robert Washburn, a Klamath Falls millworker fired
by Columbia Forest Products in 2001 after he tested positive
for marijuana. Washburn had a card from the OMMP and used marijuana
at home (not "in" the workplace) for insomnia stemming
from muscle pain. Before getting his card in 1999 Washburn had
been using prescription painkillers. He says that marijuana is
more effective and exerts no adverse effects. He requested that
the company give him a test to determine if he was actually impaired
on the job (rather than one that detects metabolites in the urine).
This, his lawyer argued, would be a reasonable accommodation
under Oregon's statute protecting the disabled from discrimination
in the workplace. When the company refused, Washburn sued for
reinstatement and back pay.
A Multnomah County Circuit
Court judge ruled against Washburn, citing a clause in OMMA saying
the act shall not be construed to require "an employer to
accommodate use of medical marijuana in the workplace."
The Court of Appeals then ruled for Washburn and Columbia Forest
Products took the case to the state supreme court, which heard
arguments in November. Now the Supremes have ruled unanimously
that Washburn does not qualify as disabled because the prescription
drugs enabled him to sleep (albeit less well and with more side
effects than marijuana).
According to Chief Justice
Paul De Muniz, Washburn's pain-related sleep problems did not
constitute a "substantial limitation" justifying the
use of marijuana. In a concurring opinion, Justice Rives Kistler
cited the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Raich case that the
federal Controlled Substances Act prohibits marijuana possession
and use, even for medical purposes.
The state supreme court ruling
against Washburn is "narrow" in the sense that workers
with more severe disabilities might yet assert the rights he
was denied. But attorney Phil Lebenbaum, expressed concern that
the ruling limits the definition of a disability, and may affect
workers in cases having nothing to with marijuana.
Willamette
Weak
Reform advocate Don DuPay,
running for Sheriff of Multnomah county, got 31% of the vote
(on a budget of $485), despite being dissed by the Portland media.
DuPay is a former Portland cop who has worked extensively with
recovering addicts and alcoholics. "Willamette Week was
the first paper to talk to me," he recounts. "I spent
an hour talking to four of their reporters, explaining my ideas
about community policing, getting rid of tasers, getting rid
of the SWAT-team-style uniforms, creating a Wapato Treatment
center, giving back $30,000 of my salary to social services.
'Thank you Mister DuPay for coming in,' they said, 'And by the
way, what kind of a car do you drive?'
"What they printed was
that I was a 69-year-old marijuana-smoking grandfather with a
cult-following from the Cannabis Common Sense TV Show. Is that
all those reporters heard? They went on to endorse a write-in
candidate unqualified to take office." Alternative media,
indeed.
Can't
You Say Something Positive?
Bees and butterflies were sighted
in the Willamette Valley on our O'Shaughnessy's distribution
run. This may mean that the organic movement is reducing the
tonnage of pesticides and herbicides drenching that luscious
topsoil D.O., the osteopaths' journal, has a cover story on cannabis
in which Philip Leveque (whose license was revoked by the Oregon
Board of Medical Examiners) is one of two advocates for the herb
in a debate against 12 nay-sayers. Leveque says he's heard that
some 200 Oregon osteopaths have issued letters of approval for
their patients to medicate with cannabis.
Fred Gardner is the editor of O'Shaughnessy's
Journal of the California Cannabis Research Medical Group. He
can be reached at: fred@plebesite.com
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
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