Bill Barr Never Wastes A Puff
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2024-10-21 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Editorial , 247 references Ignore this thread
Bill Barr Never Wastes A Puff
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I have to give him this: He's consistent.

With only three months until the election, the Biden administration is attempting to score political points by launching a proceeding to loosen federal restrictions on marijuana. Unable to satisfy either the legal or scientific standards for making this change, the Biden-Harris administration is engaging in a cynical shell game, rewriting the rules and ignoring the science to achieve its partisan objective.  

Oh, false.

First, Marijuana never met the standard for Schedule I -- no medical use and high potential for dependence and abuse.

The former is false; marijuana has had a hundreds of year history of medical use in various forms.  The FDA and DEA continue to claim that there's no "accepted medical use" but the FDA also will not permit formal testing and no company will pay for the extreme levels of security and such required to do it because there's no way to make a patented profit off it.

Barr's argument is that despite over a hundred years of known, documented use in the United States "weed today is different because people make it stronger."

So let me see if I get this right: I should be able to buy beer provided it is no more than 5% ABV.  I should not be able to buy whiskey, because it is typically eight times as strong as beer -- never mind that this also means that a typical user might pour himself two fingers of same over stones (or rocks) and thus drink 1/8th the amount.  Oh, and the four high-grav IPAs in my fridge right now should be a felony offense?

Could I take a "modern" joint of 30-50% THC and smoke the whole thing instead of taking a single puff?  Certainly, but I could also take the entire bottle of whiskey and chug it, and if I did that it would probably end very badly for me due to vomiting, alcohol poisoning and possibly death!

This is plainly fallacious. In the U.S., the availability of drugs for medical use is not based on their political popularity but only on the FDA’s decision, based on rigorous scientific study, that the drug is safe, effective and uniformly made. The FDA has still not found an acceptable medical use for marijuana.

The FDA found that Covid shots were "safe and effective"; we can argue over safety but not effectiveness as their claim was formally, as Biden said, if you take this shot you won't get Covid.  Not only did the FDA say this so did the manufacturers in public statements.  Those statements were categorically false: Biden took the shots and went on to get Covid more than once, thereby falsifying his own claim.  So did myriad others in the Administration and advisory roles, including Fauci himself. 

On the other hand people like myself who refused that false claim (and thus also avoided the risk since it is now known there's also unsafe, exactly as I expected and warned about since there was 10+ years of data on that technology and it had never once passed safety review and thus never was formally trialed for effectiveness against anything else) only got covid once.

This comes at a time when cartels and transnational criminal organizations with connections to Mexico and China have expanded their operation of marijuana cultivation and distribution inside the United States.  

This has nothing do with legal marijuana cultivation, processing, sale and consumption.  I fully support finding and prosecuting every single illegal grow and everyone connected with it to the fullest extent of the law, including hammering said persons with selling knowingly-mislabeled or adulterated drugs which, under existing law, is a very-serious federal offense.

This, incidentally, is the entire point of legal distribution: Enforcement of labeling and purity requirements along with attempting to limit sales to and use by minors.  There is absolutely no way to do this with illegal drugs and that is a huge problem -- a significant percentage of those poisoned by fentanyl did not intend to buy or use an opiate yet they bought adulterated drugs on the street and thus were, from a legal point of view, poisoned.

Existing federal authority allows for 20 years in the slammer for adulterated drugs (21 USC Sec 333so for those products that have an active ingredient other than listed, or which have other substances in them which have a reasonable probability of causing serious adverse consequences or death to humans or animals there is already an existing remedy under Federal Law.

So which world would you rather live in?

One where we throw in jail all the counterfeit and illegal producers and generate tax revenue from the legal, tested and thus reasonably-assured "as labeled" producers and outlets or street dealers who sell whatever, from wherever, adulterated with whatever might be in there whether they know it or not?

Bill Barr's position is that "well if you use illegal drugs you deserve to die!"

I find that position not only reprehensible but criminally corrupt besides, particularly given the proved corruption within our FDA which has been on full public display over the last four years (and much longer, if you bother to look or care) and would like to see that rat bastard rot in prison -- or worse.