The government sucks at its side of the War on Drugs. Their "war" spends billions of dollars, imprisons millions of people, and fails miserably on reducing use or improving health.
Recently published data proves it sucks at the "drug" side of the war, too. For more than 40 years, the government has grown marijuana for research purposes, mostly at the University of Mississippi. It’s low in THC, and doesn’t contain much CBD either — the chemical with proven medicinal value.
Dave Chappelle's stoner classic Half Baked has it all wrong: government weed isn't fire.
That's according to a paper just published in bioRxiv by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and a private lab called Steep Hill, which compares government-grown marijuana to store-bought stuff from Colorado, California and Washington.
Government weed has about 5 percent THC, which is worse than the soggiest culero weed smuggled up a coyote's asshole. Store-bought weed, meanwhile, is on average three times as potent, with an average of about 15 percent THC.
Government weed also tests around 6 percent CBD, while store-bought weed has 10 or 12.
So the government fails as badly at growing pot as they do at stopping other people from doing it.
Why does this matter? It matters, says Daniela Vergara, the paper's lead author. She says the government is hampering science and medicine.
When scientists want to research whether, say, cannabis kills breast cancer, they can't just go out and buy pot, even if they work in Boulder, Colorado, like Vergara does (the weed store is right across the street). Researchers like her have to order weed from the government and wait for it to be shipped from Mississippi. And, after all the delays and paperwork filings are over, the government-grown "research caliber weed" is still dirt, as potent as the stuff you bought in eighth grade from your brother's friend's Camaro's glove box.
So when scientists run their experiments, the results are inevitably wrong. Whatever American pot is doing to the human body, it's different from what the American government's pot does.
To this day, the government still officially says that marijuana has no medicinal value. But its actions have always said something different entirely. The government started growing its own weed in 1968, to provide it to researchers who were clamoring for it. Then, in 1976, a patient with glaucoma proved weed helped him. Complying with a judge's order, the government sent marijuana to him and six other sick people. Four sick people still smoke government weed, which arrives in their mailbox every month.
The weed sprung from seeds taken from illicit Mexican marijuana in the 1960s. The government never did the meticulous cross-breeding, testing and culling that real growers do to pimp their strains.
Even before this hard data came out, researchers knew that the Mississippi weed was weak. One researcher, Rick Doblin from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, who wanted to research PTSD, told Mother Jones that "we don't want their weed." He personally asked the government to grow fire, and the government refused. He says they're, "scared of the research. If we prove that it's not true that pot pushes people into schizophrenia or causes lung cancer, if it's not doing the things the government says are the reasons it's bad, then we undercut their credibility."
Vergara suggests that bunk weed grown under federal supervision might be hampering the government from achieving their own nefarious goals, too. Anti-drug researchers seemingly want to prove that any 12-year-old who whiffs second-hand smoke from a passing car will have their brain shrivel up like a raisin on a grill. If the government wants their data to show anything like that, it ought to let the henchmen / researchers use store-bought, 66-percent THC shatter so strong it immediately ends your day's productivity. But there's no governmental source for either concentrates or edibles for research — just this stuff straight out of a 1972 Bad Company concert.
This is the level of lobotomized, paint-sniffing idiocy of the Drug War. Everybody loses — even the bad guys.
An email to the NIDA, which grows the bud, was not immediately returned for comment.
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