Legalize

In the past, my brilliant posters and I have veered into the terrain of drug legalization. So today, I thought I'd just go ahead and devote an entire entry to it.This week the FDA asserted their exclusive authority in matters pertaining to doobage by officially pissing on the notion that states have the right to legalize marijuana for medical use.Personally, I don't find the debate about states' rights versus federal law all that interesting, so I'm not going to go there. Those of you lawyers out there with opinions on the subject, feel free to enlighten at will.Let me, however, just state the following:Marijuana works.I have had three types of pain in my life that no other medication alleviated:1) lower back spasms2) debilitating stomach aches3) earth-crushing menstrual cramps (we're talking head-spinning around, speaking in tongues, full-on Linda Blair from the Exorcist stuff).For all three occasional maladies, I tried an assortment of medications. Nothing ever worked. Not even a little bit. Not even enough to take the edge off so that I could go about my normal routine. Because, however, I was a recreational pot smoker (which I no longer am, by the way, Mom) I decided to use myself as a guinea pig to see if pot had any medicinal effects.Lord god almighty, it did. This was about five years ago, which means that I suffered needlessly for decades because of soft-headed drug policy which keeps perhaps the world's best painkiller out of the hands of people in pain. My question is this:FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHY???????Pain hurts. If there's something out there that neutralizes that unpleasant fact, why on earth aren't we exploiting it? Yes, smoking pot makes you high. Codeine makes you foggy and valium sends you to sleep. What's the big deal? Sure, you can use pot for kicks instead of pain-killing. You can do this with almost any prescription pain killer. Just ask Rush Limbaugh. But to single out a substance that helps AIDS patients, cancer victims, people with eating disorders and endometriosis because one of the side effects is excessive happiness is just plain mean.By now, anyone reading this blog knows my feelings on the subject of drug legalization and civil liberties. I like small government and big freedom for individuals. If people want to jack themselves up on pot, cocaine, prozac or HBO, that's their business. The law is a clumsy way of trying to improve people. But for the purposes of this post, I don't even want to get into that larger question. I just want to know why we should outlaw an effective pain killer for people who are in pain.