52 tokewell magazine
This is science now; this is not anecdote, this is science and what we are seeing, early on, admittedly, is that it looks promising. What would you say to the naysayers who still feel that marijuana is solely an illegal drug and should be treated as such? In my reporting, in all these documentaries, I tried to stay away from the idea of moral equivalency. I stayed away from saying, “It’s not as bad as X, Y, and Z; It’s not as bad as alcohol.” I tried to stay away from that because I think it should be given the same merits as any other medicine. We don’t look at medicine and say, “It’s not as bad as X, Y, Z”; we take medicine because we think it’s going to help us in some way and it should have a certain amount of respect. The options that some people who have epilepsy, or PTSD have are often not very good, and I think the PTSD thing is so concrete because we are having more veterans killing themselves at home than have died on the battlefield. What we have been doing to treat them is not working. This idea that something else, a plant, could work and have a very low side effect profile and still return people to a functional life – if you say you don’t even want to explore that – it borders on being immoral. It’s not right. But I’ll get off my soapbox now.
TOP: JONATHAN TORGOVNIK; LEFT: JEFF HUTCHENS
she couldn’t even leave her house, couldn’t even get into a car, and she flew down to meet with us?! She is part of a study where they are looking at her brain to see what is happening in the brain, for good and for bad. What they find is that increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and really no evidence of damage to the brain. The idea that it could be helping and not hurting, and in fact, could be protecting and defending the brain–as opposed to assaulting the brain–is a very important concept. Especially because we tend to think of marijuana in the decades of stigma surrounding the “this is your brain on drugs” commercials and now we really get to see what your brain on marijuana looks like.