FURTHER INSIDE CANNABIS (Part 2)

For all but the last 12 years of my half-century of cannabis use, I have been an out-and-out opponent of making the plant legal. My change of mind was at least engineered, I would call it, by Ted Smith, in roughly an hour, 12 years ago.

My wife and I had been talking to Ted about making a film about his work advocating medical cannabis at the Victoria Cannabis Buyers Club, the oldest compassion club/dispensary in Canada. We’re supposed to be investigative documentary filmmakers, so we expressed strong skepticism about Ted’s wide-ranging claims about the medical efficacy of cannabis.

Ted cut directly to the chase and arranged for me to meet and interview the late Jennifer Gress, one of the VCBC’s longstanding members. Jennifer called herself a sit-down comedian, since she was mainly wheelchair-bound as a result of Multiple Sclerosis. Now that’s a sense of humour.

Photo Credit: https://vcbc.live/history/
TED SMITH, FOUNDER, VICTORIA CANNABIS
BUYERS CLUB

Jennifer arrived at the club in her wheelchair, shaky and with her speech sorely impaired. She smoked. Five minutes later, in a way that was clearly either genuine or a level of acting that would blow Meryl Streep off the big screen forever, Jennifer could speak intelligibly and get up from her wheelchair and walk, with difficulty but without assistance.

Practicing scientists would call this little story anecdotal evidence, by which they mean evidence they don’t need to bother about. Anyone older than ten and literate can see the circular reasoning involved in this little phrase. It’s a lot like the term ‘placebo’, which is as pure a value judgment as you’ll ever hear. When patients recover after taking a placebo, physicians dismiss what happens as just the ‘placebo effect’, which deflects attention from the fact that the patient recovered simply by believing they would.

It would not be convenient for science to try to explain how that can happen, so instead scientists trot out some obfuscating Latin: Placebo means “I shall please”. That is, the physician is going to please the patient by giving them something to go with the pat on the back while ushering them to the door.

Since I am not a practicing scientist, though, I was free to be deeply impressed by Jennifer’s transformation, which is in no way too big a word for what she underwent in the course of a few minutes. Indeed, I pass completely on telling Jennifer or anyone else what they mean when they tell me their experience of what happens to them when they use a particular medicine, or when I see them go through the experience of using it. Moreover, I would deny anyone’s right to tell Jennifer that she doesn’t know what’s good for her.

These seem to me to be far more fundamental principles of good medical practice than telling someone they are undergoing ‘ the placebo effect’, which is supremely bad medical practice, since it is a wildly biased, virtually meaningless value judgment.

And if health care professionals are too hidebound and bone idle to treat ‘anecdotal evidence’ as self-evidently the strongest possible indicator that the evidence is crying out to be explored in depth, probed, accumulated in bulk from every possible source, then those are health care professionals who ought to find a new discipline to pollute with their prejudices and scientific incompetence.

Photo Credit: Brian Robert Marshall lhttp://www.geograph.org.uk/more.php?id=1840979

There’s a way in which this entire column is trying to show that those who advocate the legalization of cannabis may be well advised to show particular care in deciding what to wish for from society as a whole. It’s certainly already too late to prevent cannabis from becoming a full-on industry operating on capitalist principles.

In every other industry where capitalists are in control, the profit motive crushes all others when the chips are down, or even when they’re not. Directors of corporations have one overriding duty under law; to maximize profits for the shareholders of the company.

Amongst other things, this means that every time you see or hear a commercial, and every time you read an advertisement, in which claims are made that the company concerned wants to do anything even one millionth as important to them as swell their profit numbers, they’re either lying or breaking the law, or being so incompetent at being capitalists that they won’t last until the next full moon.

For my money, when marketing twaddle like ‘bag appeal’ becomes part of the regular discourse of selling cannabis, and pseudo-scientific twaddle like ‘placebo effect’ is deployed by opponents of the new industry, it’s time to cross every ‘t’ and dot every ‘i’ with the greatest care and attention. Then check the spelling.