top
California
California
Indybay
Indybay
Indybay
Regions
Indybay Regions North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area California United States International Americas Haiti Iraq Palestine Afghanistan
Topics
Newswire
Features
From the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature

Jesus, George Washington and San Diego's Medicine Struggle

by Rocky Neptun
It is indeed ironic that Bonnie Dumanis, San Diego’s District Attorney and a member of the Log Cabin Republican Club, in her vicious pursuit of medical marijuana users, is at odds with Abraham Lincoln who refused to approve a proposed prohibition on cannabis use. Every American president until the 1930’s used medical marijuana and according to Morey Amsterdam and Eddie Gordon, close friends of John F. Kennedy, who used cannabis for his back pain, he was going to legalize it during his second term.

Jesus, George Washington and San Diego’s Medicine Struggle

By Rocky Neptun

Under the shadow of a venomous San Diego District Attorney and a cliff-hanger Attorney General election between a fanatical D.A. from Los Angeles and a sympathetic D.A. from the Bay Area, medical marijuana patients, providers and activists met near Mission Bay under the banner of “putting patients first.”

The November 14th, all-day gathering, at the Marina Village Conference Center reflected both the radiance of altruism in the medical marijuana movement, its ancient heritage, and the potential to humanize the medical-care-giving industry, as well as the dangers members and patients face from reactionary forces still fighting the obsolete cultural wars of the 1960’s.

About 50 persons turned out to participate in San Diego’s first symposium on “Training for Medical Marijuana Professionals,” sponsored by Americans for Safe Access. The core curriculum, almost half the day, centered on introductory preparation for those working with medical marijuana patients - including the bio-psycho-social model of health. The emphasis was on treating the whole patient with a greater understanding of how illness is not just an isolated condition but how physical, psychological and emotional factors interact to affect patients’ functioning. Dr. Amanda Reiman, Chairwoman of the Medical Cannabis Commission for the city of Berkeley and a lecturer at UC Berkeley, led the training session.

Don Duncan, co-founder of Americans for Safe Access (along with San Diego’s own Steph Shearer) gave an hour-long history of the movement in California and reported on present efforts in Sacramento to guarantee and expand patients’ rights.

Going way beyond the scheduled departure time, a panel of attorneys gave an over-view of current law and recent court decisions, sharing concrete knowledge about what is legal and what is not for both patients and care givers, including cooperatives and collectives. Led by Lauren Payne, Americans for Safe Access’ Legal Services Coordinator, the lawyers conducted “know your rights” training sessions on encounters with law enforcement officials.

As I sat there, looking out the window at the bobbing sailboats moored near the conference center, I thought back to my days as a VISTA Volunteer in the Appalachian Mountains. The Voting Rights Act had been passed, yet the black folks in Skunk Hollow, near Corbin, Kentucky, we were working with, lacked safe access to the polls. Roaming gangs of armed “redneck” mountain men threatened any who exercised their “right” to vote. How so like San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, whose ideological zeal and personal ambition, threatens another group of people who are struggling for access to their rights. In this case, their entitlement to medical marijuana as guaranteed by the citizens of California.

Jeremy Joseph, an attorney from Los Angeles, urged the participants to continue to struggle for their rights. He noted that 11 states and the District of Columbia have medical marijuana provisions and another 9 states are in the process of working through those rights.
Sexism and Medical Marijuana Prohibition in the Middle-Ages

Medical Marijuana prevention is not a new phenomenon. Whenever those in power, religious or secular, have sought to increase or maintain that dominance, one of their first acts is to prohibit knowledge (just ask the Chinese government and Google). For thousands of years, the elderly women, usually widows, without a bread-winning male, made their way as the village healer. There were no doctors for the common people. They passed the knowledge of natural healing, the herbs and grasses of the forests, down from daughter to daughter, aunt to niece.

When I lived in a small Toltec village in the state of Morelos, Mexico as part of a cross-cultural educational experience in the early 1970’s, there was no doctor around. When I developed an eye malady, the family I was staying with presented me to a wrinkled, ancient woman – the village’s healer – who fanned the smoke of marijuana into my eye and also used a tincture from the plant to cure the infection.

It wasn’t until the 12th and 13th Centuries in Europe, when a series of devastating plagues broke out that the Church lashed out against naturalist healers in general and women in particular. From the Pope down to the lowliest Friar, the official spin on the plagues was theological rather than medical; it was God’s vengeance for sin and only more devotion, more donations to the Church, would save you.

Fearful mothers and fathers were bringing their ill children to the old women of the community, not the wine sodden priest. Some were saved; word and hope spread. The absolutism of the Catholic Church was threatened. The inquisition was formed to root out these “witches” and prohibit reliance on “medicine” in favor of prayer and confession. One of the charges brought against St. Joan of Arc was that she used marijuana.

Not only was the giving of medicinal preparations, including cannabis, by herbalists and chemists to ease suffering declared illegal but just possessing the expertise, called “witch’s knowledge” was punishable by burning at the stake.

By 1484, marijuana had become so well know among the common people for treating the pain and suffering of the plague that a fearful Pope Innocent VIII specifically labeled it “an unholy sacrament of the second and third types of the Satanic mass.” Stupid statements like this, flying in the face of reality, pushed more ordinary folk and their common sense further away from the church and laid the seeds of the Reformation.

Did Jesus Use Marijuana? Would it Have Saved George Washington’s Life?

I suspect that prostitution is not the world’s oldest profession [I must have given a hundred thousand dollars worth of it away before I knew it was worth anything] but rather healing. From the time we climbed out of the trees anyone could mate but those with the insight and knowledge to restore health and salvage lives; they were the indispensable ones.

Over 5,000 years ago physician farmers were growing and dispensing marijuana, called cannabis Tai-Ma, in China. Down to 1,000 B.C. the migration of the Aryan tribes, spread cannabis medicine from India to Europe. It had hundreds of medical applications, including a wound healer, muscle relaxant, tonic for pain, fever easer and helped with childbirths. It was considered a “sacred herb” and used by the priests of many early religions as their badge to the “divine.”

From the priests of Shintoism in Japan who used marijuana to unite couples in marriage and drive away evil spirits to the earliest Jews where “as part of their holy Friday night services in the Temple of Solomon, 60-80,000 men ritually passed around and inhaled 20,000 incense burners filled with kanabosom (cannabis), before returning home for the largest meal of the week,” as recorded by Jack Herer in his book, The Sociology Of Cannabis And World History. The Jewish Essene communities, south of Jerusalem, where Jesus is thought to have studied in his youth, are known to have used marijuana as a medicine.

But from independent, self-governing, communal associations, the Christian faith, seized by popes and emperors, became a process of tyranny and oppression. Not only medical marijuana, but an entire cornucopia of healing herbs and substances, tragically, criminally, were systematically denied whole generations of ill people. Right down to the 18th Century, bleeding patients of whole pints of blood was the primary treatment used by doctors. George Washington, who woke up one morning with the flu, was literally bled to death by his doctors. One wonders if he had just smoked some hearty Dutch Passion Feminized Cannabis and gone back to bed, would he have lived well into the 19th Century?

It is indeed ironic that Bonnie Dumanis, San Diego’s District Attorney and a member of the Log Cabin Republican Club, in her vicious pursuit of medical marijuana users, is at odds with Abraham Lincoln who refused to approve a proposed prohibition on the use of cannabis. Every American president until the 1930’s used medical marijuana and according to Morey Amsterdam and Eddie Gordon, close friends of John F. Kennedy, who used cannabis for his back pain, he was going to legalize it during his second term.

Even though California voters approved the Compassionate Use Act in 1996, patients and providers have been under attack by reactionary forces and their contempt for voters and police state mentality right up to our present day. As San Diego attorney Lance Rogers pointed out to participants, from the July 2008 joint local and federal narcotics task force raid on the Amsterdam Collective (in opposition to President Obama’s promises to leave patients alone) through the clearly illegal entrapment and forgeries of the SDPD in its Operation Green RX busts in 2009 to October of this year when a North Park medical marijuana collective was harassed; patients continue to have their rights assaulted.

As I sat in the conference room, I realized these people, always looking over their shoulder, aware of their vulnerability and still putting the patients first, are living proof that heroism is alive and well. They are the ethical descendents of that poor woman from the dark ages who was tortured and burned alive for saving a child’s life with her herbal medicine bag, they are in the tradition of the old woman in the thatched hut which saved my eye so many years ago and they keep the possibility open that I may need to self-medicate in the future, if that good Cuban rum I smuggle into this country can no longer ease the pain of my osteoarthritis.

There are those among us, I call sufferers from “Pleasure Disapproval Syndrome.” A vast populace, unhappy with their lives, trapped in dead-end jobs, bored with corporate entertainment, happy-hour devotees and pharmaceutical addicts; who are fearful not of criminals or terrorists…..but that somewhere, someone is having a good time, enjoying life. They voted against Prop. 19, are afraid that Lesbians and Gays might find enjoyment in marriage and, God forbid, are terrified that a person might actually get pleasure from taking their medicine.

The culture war continues; however, the participants at the San Diego patient rights conference seemed to agree to keep their powder (ah, buds) dry and continue to work toward unhindered access to this ancient, safe, and effective medicine for all who need it.
Add Your Comments
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!

Donate

$110.00 donated
in the past month

Get Involved

If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.

Publish

Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.

IMC Network