Transcript

Century of Lies / March 3, 2013

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DEAN BECKER: The failure of Drug War is glaringly obvious to judges, cops, wardens, prosecutors and millions more. Now calling for decriminalization, legalization, the end of prohibition. Let us investigate the Century of Lies.

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DEAN BECKER: Welcome to this edition of Century of Lies. This week, once again, we are reporting from Washington, D.C. at the National Cannabis Unity conference. First up Dr. Bob Melamede.

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ROBERT MELAMEDE: I am an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. I was formerly the Chairperson there. I’m also President and CEO of a publically traded company, Cannabis Science, symbol CBIS.

DEAN BECKER: Tell us a bit about your experience. What led you to creating CBIS?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: The obvious need to have medicinal cannabis available to everyone. We created CBIS to go through the FDA so that anybody in America, in any state could go to a pharmacy and get cannabis-based medicines that would be, in fact, paid for by the health system.

DEAN BECKER: It seems that more and more of the media, even politicians – the word is out there, the idea of this need for change. Let’s talk about your observation of that awakening.

ROBERT MELAMEDE: First of all you have to understand that all humans from the time of conception until the time of death everything in their body is homeostatically regulated by the endocannabinoid system – meaning that every one of us makes marijuana-like compounds and they regulate your immune system, your digestive system, your cardiovascular system, your endocrine system, your skeletal system, your muscles, your skin, every reproductive system – everything in your body is regulated by the pot that your body makes.

If you go to any doctor and say, “Should I take omega-3s? Are they good for you?” They all say yes but then you ask them why they are good for you and 99% of them will not really understand why.

The reason is that they make your endocannabinoids so they are the source of how your body makes its pot. How profound that is is if we look at mother’s milk it has psychoactive cannabinoids in it which, of course, leads me to have a nice joke…Should we start arresting nursing mothers for giving their infants psychoactive cannabinoids? Maybe we should just arrest all women for walking around with paraphernalia.

In all seriousness, everything in your body is regulated by the pot your body makes. One of the things it regulates is open-mindedness. If somebody forgets everything they’re non-functional and if somebody remembers everything they are non-functional. Functional, healthy life is somewhere in between there. It is intrinsically true that half the population of the U.S. is going to be more cannabinoid-endowed for any particular property such as open-mindedness and the other half are going to be less endowed.

The question to ask is are there consequences to that and I would like to suggest that yes, there are profound consequences because open-mindedness means that you can forget incorrect information when you have better information to supplant it with. If you’re not capable of doing that then you get stuck in stupid thoughts.

For example, “Marijuana is a dangerous and addictive drug.”

That’s not true. We’ve been indoctrinated with that and we’ve been indoctrinated with that because so many people make so much money as a result of that philosophy – pharmaceutical companies, law enforcement, prison union, guards, etc. – but we, the people, are the ones who are suffering because we are denied the incredible medical benefits of cannabis as a result of that situation.

So half the people in the world are cannabinoid-endowed with respect to open-mindedness and they brace the unknowns of the future because they are confident, they are optimistic that they are going to be able to deal with that change.

Charles Darwin said natural selection is not selecting for the strongest, it’s not selecting for the smartest – it is selecting for the most adaptable.

The reality is the people who are cannabinoid deficient tend to be what I call the un-high people. They are more uptight, they are more angry, more frustratable, less cooperative because essentially they’ve become more selfish because of their fears.

On the other side you have people who are cannabinoid endowed. They are more peaceful, more cooperative, more loving. In fact cooperation is the foundation of how life has evolved. It’s a fundamental property of a developing human race as well as, in fact, the developing biosphere.

We embrace change and we cooperate with one another to have implementation of new ideas as we move out of the past. So I divide the world into forward-looking people who are cannabinoid endowed and backward-looking people (BLIPS and FLIPS) …

It’s my belief that the bulk of the people who run the world today and historically are BLIPS – backward-looking people, un-high, aggressive people. If you look historically…we’ve got Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, on and on and on. How many people do we have that really exhibited consciousness as world leaders? We had Mahatma Gandi, Nelson Mandela, Gorbachev, and I would probably throw Jimmy Carter into that category. Descent people trying to help others.

It’s my belief that for mankind to survive - because keep in mind that most species that have ever existed on this planet have gone extinct – for mankind to survive we have to replace the un-high BLIPS that rule the world with more optimistic, open-minded people who can embrace change, who will base their decisions and their movement into the future on evidence, on science rather than sticking their head up their butts and being ignorant and unable to embrace change.

So it’s not their fault. That’s the way they are and in reality the way things work in life is it’s always a balance of opposing forces so you need the conservatives as much as you need the liberals. You need open-minded people and close minded people because it’s the back and forth that sets the average. The point is that the average that we’ve had in the past is no longer good enough.

We’re in a new world and man’s impact on our environment and the rapidity with which things are progressing and changes are occurring has created dangerous situations for the species in terms of pollution, in terms of the need for energy acquisition to keep the organization of our society powered. If we’re going to do that at the expense of our environment we’re going to self-destruct as we basically poison ourselves.

This is a common characteristic of growing populations. They start out at a particular level and then as they reproduce they increase and enter what’s called the log phase or the growth phase and then they start poisoning themselves with the waste and run out of food. Then they level off and then they crash. Most species that have ever existed on the planet are now extinct.

I firmly believe that if we do not replace the BLIPS with the FLIPS and make policies that are based on an attempt to understand reality to the best of our ability we’re going to continue being stupid.

As the republican governor said, “We’ve been the party of the stupid.” Well, we’ve been the society of the stupid in so many respects.

Who in their right mind would outlaw an anti-aging drug that kills cancer and is found in mother’s milk?! Right there it tells you how ridiculous our situation is.

DEAN BECKER: Folks you are listening to Century of Lies on the Drug Truth Network and Pacifica Radio. We’re speaking with Dr. Robert Melamede, the president of Cannabis Science, Inc.

Let’s talk about the forward-looking, backward-looking and how it plays out. We have thousands of our soldiers coming back from war, minds are messed up – Post Traumatic Stress, unable to cope – and yet … you know where I’m going here.

ROBERT MELAMEDE: The reality is that we have sent our soldiers off to war and while they functioned admirably we have not because they come back and they’re damaged. They’re damaged because of the stress at the very least - if they, in fact, have physical injuries - that’s all the more reason to increase the stress that they’ve had.

We have, sadly, our military personnel taking their own lives at a pathetic rate. One of the things that has been observed in Colorado and a lot of Colorado is military. I’m in Colorado Springs. We’ve got the Fort Carson for the Army. We’ve got the Air Force base, the Air Force Academy so we have a very strong military presence.

As a professor at the university I encounter a lot of these people. It’s really, I think, the utmost lack of respect for these people as well as the principles of our country that we send them off to war to fight for freedom and when they come back and they hear and understand from others that cannabis can benefit them and we deny them that. That is criminal insanity as far as I’m concerned.

Cannabis has profound effects for pain. In many cases what we see in Colorado at the dispensaries is that people who have been on high doses of narcotics completely stop using them or dramatically reduce the dose. That’s all supported by peer-reviewed science. So why are they not allowed to do that? It’s just not right.

Thankfully the VA has opened up a little bit in that in states where cannabis is legal at least now they are not penalizing soldiers who have dirty urine. It’s just insane. How can you deny these people their freedom?!

When a person has head injury, for example - which there is all too much of that having occurred in the wars that we’ve ridiculously gotten into recently – but head injuries half comes from the primary insult and half comes from the inflammatory response generated by your body in your immune system. Cannabinoids inhibit that inflammatory activity which is totally unnecessary and inappropriate in the case of head injury. It’s not like you have necessarily an opening so let’s look at that extreme.

You have no opening, there is no infection and yet your body is responding with all of this inflammation. We use inflammation to fight infection, typically. We wind up damaging ourselves. That inflammation literally kills your nerve cells. Interestingly your endocannabinoid system regulates what’s called neurogenesis which the production of new nerve cells. It also guides neurons to where they have to go. It also increases the complexity of the wiring. It’s called neuroplasticity. It’s how we develop new neuron terminals and we track unused ones so that we can always be adapting to the future.

Cannabinoids just have profound benefits for people with head injuries. What we’ve seen in Colorado …also has profound benefits in terms of depression, being able to sleep at night, not having intrusive memories and bad dreams because you’re suffering from PTSD.

We did a small survey with Cannabis Science – Mitch Earlywine conducted an online survey and we surveyed hundreds of veterans who were PTSD-qualified and they were using cannabis. They universally agreed that cannabis reduced the intrusive memories, reduced the anger and the hostility that they were feeling and it was beneficial and allowed them to sleep.

Everything in living beings is oscillations. One of the largest oscillations is sleep/wake/sleep/wake. If you can’t do that all of your body rhythms get out of wack basically. If you’re not sleeping properly it very hard if not impossible to actually be healthy.

Cannabis is the way to go to sleep. You use the right strains and they’ll put you to sleep. You’ll sleep like a baby. You’ll wake up refreshed in the morning. Certainly our soldiers deserve the right to have that opportunity if they so choose.

Give them the freedom they’ve earned. Let’s stop hurting them.

Now I’m rather liberal in most of my thinking but not so with respect to science. I’m an extremely conservative scientist in that I don’t embrace anything until I’ve spent a lot of time reading tremendous amounts of literature in order to satisfy that conservatism of myself.

There’s been literature existing since the 1970s that shows cannabinoids have anti-cancer properties. My friend Rick Simpson back in the late or mid-2000s recognized from his own personal experience that cannabis had killing properties. He made concentrated cannabis extracts that he treated himself and countless other people with cancer and a variety of other illnesses. He was very successful and yet I couldn’t quite believe that for a long time.

Even though the science was telling me that that’s probably true and my views of what life is and what health is which are not the norm but are grounded in science (thermodynamic equilibrium developed by a Nobel Laurette – Ilya Prigogine) what we really see here is that there are some unique opportunities to maintain health through these cannabinoid systems.

What we’re doing with cannabinoid science is we’ve focused on originally skin cancers because what we wanted to do is go through the FDA as I mentioned. We figured the easiest way to break open that opportunity would be to use something that was topically applied and something that I then found out how effective it was for both squamous cell and basal cell carcinoma through observing a number of individuals who chose to take that alternative for themselves as opposed to surgery and the other forms of butchery and poison that are given to people with cancer.

I finally woke up and embraced what Rick Simpson was saying because it was completely consistent with the now 800 peer-reviewed scientific articles that I have that discuss the anti-cancer properties of cannabinoids – both anti-cancer and anti-metastacisms and, in general health promotive, regenerative properties.

What I believe is not going to become the game changer globally is that right now we are at the beginning of the second AIDS epidemic. In countries like America where we at least treat a significant number of people. Globally the significant number of people are not treated. What’s happening is long term anti-retroviral users – people who have been using these anti-retroviral for 20 years, 30 years are now becoming resistant to all the various classes of antiretrovirals that are being used. As a consequence they are coming down with infections that are associated with people who have HIV/AIDS – in particular Kaposi sarcoma.

If you think back to the early days of the first presentation of AIDS on the planet you’ll remember that a lot of people had these red/purple blotches all over them. That’s extremely painful. What it is a blood vessel cancer – endophilia cell cancer – that emerges and appears on the surface. You might think of it as a skin cancer but it’s really not.

There is no effective cures. They can take a lesion off with radiation or cutting or freezing or chemicals but they keep coming back. Eventually they kill you. It’s a painful horrendous death and right now there are millions of people in Africa who are dying that way and they are not treated at all because there is no effective treatment and certainly nothing cost-effective that you can just distribute throughout Africa.

Low and behold cannabis will work very effectively on people with Kaposi’s. What we’ve shown is you can topically apply it and those Kaposi’s will fall off. Pretty amazing. We can use cannabinoids to, in fact, prevent the occurrences to begin with.

We’ve now focused on that because of how critical it is at a global level in terms of saving lives and relieving suffering of millions of people. It’s too big now. It cannot be stopped. There are too many people who know what’s going on and I feel what we’re doing with Cannabis Science is providing an opportunity for the government to work with us and ease into a position of sanity instead of maintaining the utterly ridiculous position that cannabis has no medical value.

80% of Americans know that that is not true that it has value and that’s why they vote for it all the time and that’s why more and more people are demanding it. Why should we not have the opportunity to use a God given plant to treat ourselves?

There’s some significant indication that from a biblical point of view cannabis was used in the holy anointing oil. How you translate the word cannabosm and there is really only one sensible way to treat it when you look at what they are talking about and that is, in fact, cannabis.

We’re in a very interesting era right now where there is somewhere between 30 and 50 million people in the world that are HIV infected and that are if they’re lucky enough to get the drugs they are going to be failing those regimes at some point and that means they are going to come down with Kaposi’s with various forms of lymphoma, cognitive dysfunction, etc. – cannabis works for all of that.

It’s time for America and the world to wake up. It’s your own life. It’s the health of not only the individuals that suffer from these illnesses but it’s the whole society. Do you have any clue as to how many millions and billions of dollars are going to spent in health care as the existing drug regimes fail and as things like Kaposi’s become more and more prevalent? That’s the leading indicator and we’re getting the most preliminary epidemiological evidence right now that’s got to turn into full-fledged studies.

We have to demand that the CDC start following what’s going on with Kaposi’s because they haven’t because they thought that was put to rest with the antivirals. Now we know that that’s not true. There is increasing number of people suffering from Kaposi’s all the time and cannabis can save them.

As a result as well quite interestingly cannabis also has a very positive impact on the HIV infection itself typically resulting in decreased viral load and increased T-cell numbers. There are a number of people today who are only alive because of using high dose cannabis. They are not on anti-retro virals and as long as they are using the cannabis they are not coming down with the Kaposi’s.

So wake up America. It is now that we need to act. Contact your congressman. Contact your senators. Demand change. The life you save may be your own.

So, once again, this is Dr. Bob Melamede, president and CEO of Cannabis Science. You can follow us on http://cannabisscience.com and our symbol, again, is CBIS. Follow our news releases. See what’s going on.

We’ve got the former Assistant Surgeon General. He’s now part of our team. We’ve got former drug development experts from all around the world who are now a part of our team. See what’s going on.

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A hundred years, a hundred years, a hundred years, a hundred years.

You can hear the drug war blow a hundred years.

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HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: My name is Howard Wooldridge. I am a retired police detective from Fort Worth, Texas. I’m currently the drug policy specialist for COPS (http://citizensopposingprohibtion.org)

What I do is work with the United States congress to convince the members that we should treat marijuana with a 10th amendment approach – state’s rights – that way all 50 states could choose their own path on the issue of marijuana free of federal interference.

DEAN BECKER: We’re here at a cannabis conference. A lot of experts, a lot of knowledge being shared. I think that represents what’s going on across the nation in so far as major broadcasters, a lot of politicians, a lot of people are beginning to speak of this that never have before. Your thoughts?

HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: That’s correct. With the win in Colorado and Washington State this issue has finally broken out of its thundering silence mode that it’s been in for the last 50/60 years and now has gone mainstream where people are actually discussing the merits and/or demerits of legalize/regulate/tax.

It is so important that those two states did legalize because it has sparked a national and international discussion. South of the border current presidents of Mexico, Guatemala, and Colombia are saying we need to review our marijuana policy in light of the two states that legalized it in the USA.

DEAN BECKER: Let’s talk about your shirt. I want to pan back here – Cops say legalize pot. Ask me why.

HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: I invented this shirt back in 1998 in Fort Worth because I wanted to talk about the issue every day and the T-shirt allows me to have conversations – 2,3 or 4 every day – when people ask me why. Then I can pass out a business card and, of course, my response is simply we can arrest more pedophiles that rape our children if we don’t waste the time on a green plant.

This simple, clean response strikes a responsive chord with every parent, grandparent out there and it has been a wonderful marketing tool in helping to move the issue everywhere I go. As you know the thin blue line has been shrinking these past four or five years of hard economic times and people understand the police force has less sworn personnel, less people carrying a badge and a gun to enforce the same number of laws. They understand hard choices have to be made and they want the children protected. If a marijuana user has a problem then that’s a problem for the marijuana user. They want their children protected and they understand better today than ever that the police need to focus more on protecting children and Willie Nelson not so much.

DEAN BECKER: Let’s talk again about the work you do. You’re patrolling the halls of congress/senate trying to open this dialogue. How’s that going?

HOWARD WOOLDRIDGE: Exactly right – I do patrol in a sense. I’ve worn out three sets of boots other than my Tony Lama’s in these last 7 years. What I do is go to every office – 535 offices – once a year and put on a 15 to 25 minute presentation about why this is a disastrous policy, it’s dysfunctional, it’s immoral as bad as or worse than Jim Crow and slavery and that it is past time for the congress to give back to the people, bring the power closer to the states to control or any policy they want with these illegal drugs.

The resistance to the COP message of returning this to the states now approaches a mathematical zero at the aide level. Now the members are a different story but we’re quickly a story from about 3 weeks ago when I met a republican congressman from southeast United States and he asked what I did. I said I represent law enforcement who believe that chasing Willie Nelson is a waste of time. His response was, “Yeah and it’s a hell of a waste of money, too.”

So money is playing an ever important role in that they know that we are spending across America some 13, 14 billion dollars on a policy which everyone admits that marijuana is more available to our kids than alcohol. It’s everywhere. It has been since the congressman was in college.

This is a failed policy. It is dysfunctional and expensive and there is more recognition of that by members of congress and their staff.

My website, http://citizensopposingprohibition.org, has some information. The most important thing it has is a todo list and I’m asking anyone listening to this to please write the email to your congressman and say please support a 10 th amendment approach to marijuana policy.

Don’t ask him to legalize just ask him to repeal federal prohibition. By framing this as a 10 th amendment issue you can be much more effective because in the sandbox that I play in every day, the United States congress, the issue here is to repeal the federal prohibition not legalize. There’s a huge difference in support for the 10th amendment versus legalize/regulate/tax.

Please write those emails. No matter how much you believe your congressman is anti-COP message they respond better to a message of let the states decide this issue. That polls much higher and rings much better in the ears of conservative congressman.

Thank you in advance for what you do.

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Opening a can of worms and going fishing for truth. This is the Drug Truth Network. http://drugtruth.net

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DEAN BECKER: I want to thank you for joining us on this edition of Century of Lies. I want to thank Dr. Robert Melamede and Howard Wooldridge.

As always I remind you there is no reason for this drug war to continue. Please do your part to end this madness. Prohibido istac evilesco!

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For the Drug Truth Network, this is Dean Becker asking you to examine our policy of Drug Prohibition.

The Century of Lies.

This show produced at the Pacifica studios of KPFT, Houston.

Transcript provided by: Jo-D Harrison of www.DrugSense.org