(Excerpt from the DEA’s marinol page )

Marinol SUCKS

I got an email from somebody who saw our website and wanted to know if we tried Marinol. I answered that we had, but it didn’t work for Alex due primarily to his inability to swallow a pill. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much I hate Marinol. Guess it’s time to vent again.

The government would have us all believe that medical marijuana is dangerous for a wide variety of reasons, and as proof that there’s no need for cannabis, they provide Marinol. It’s a wonderful little pill that contains synthetic THC! You don’t need a plant or anything complicated like that, you just get THC straight out of a bottle. What a marvel to behold!

What they state sounds very compelling, and a lot of people buy it, but I have a few words to say about the DEA and their continued campaign of lies.

Marinol is safer than cannabis because it isn’t smoked.

The DEA won’t shut up about this, and I for one am sick to death of hearing it. Smoking pot isn’t the only way to get the effects, and in fact my son is proof – he eats the raw hash. How is ingesting a synthetic pill safer than ingesting hash? Really, I want to know. But the DEA never tells us why Marinol is any better than cannabis butter, vaporizers, or hash oil. Why not? Because they know they’re on damn shaky ground as it is, given that smoked marijuana isn’t even proving to be terribly dangerous.

Then there is the simple fact that many medications are better when taken in a non-pill form. Asthma inhalers target the lungs and so are able to act more quickly. Alex has used a nebulizer for albuterol more than once in his life due to various lung problems. Inhaling a medication has indeed proven useful even when it’s hard to measure out a dose. The doctors, when we said Alex won’t directly inhale the albuterol, said to simply run the nebulizer and aim the “smoke” at his face for something like five minutes. He would likely get enough to help with his cough. It’s interesting that more than one doctor has given such instructions for medicating a child, but the DEA claims smoking is too hard to measure a “safe” and regulated dose.

And if we insist on talking about safety, let’s keep in mind that the therapeutic index of marijuana is 1000:1 in conservative estimates, and I’ve seen it stated to be as high as 20,000:1. This means that the dose that’s effective for Alex, around 100 milligrams of hash, would have to be multiplied by at least 1000 to kill him. That is 100 grams of hash, eaten with a sufficient quantity of fatty food to absorb the THC effectively. For those who hate the metric system, 100 grams is just under a quarter pound. A quarter pound of hash is (a) far more than we have ever possessed, and (b) a whole lot to try and eat all at once. If the ratio is indeed as high as 20,000:1, Alex would have to eat about four and a half pounds (2 kilos) of raw hash. Yeah, that is dangerous for sure.

Marinol comes from a pharmacy

…so therefore it’s in measured doses that are safe and well-tested and other such horseshit. You know what’s interesting about a pharmacy, DEA? They can extract stuff, too. In fact, as you guys state, “scientists have extracted active ingredients from opium, which are sold as pharmaceutical products like morphine, codeine, hydrocodone or oxycodone.” I bet they could extract the plant matter in full rather than just having to manufacture fake THC! And let’s not even get started on the ridiculous price of Marinol – according to every source I’ve found, Marinol is more expensive than the street price of marijuana. So let’s just try to figure that one out – instead of harvesting a drug that has proven to be safe and effective, and sell it for cheap, we’ll manufacturer a synthetic and sell it for so much money, people who can’t afford the real thing still won’t be able to get Marinol. Gosh, I wonder if that’s a clever insurance scam so the pharmaceutical companies can make gobs of money….

For everybody paranoid about how corporations will destroy cannabis if it becomes legal, you’re too late – they already have. They are raping EVERYBODY right now. People who can’t get a hold of real cannabis get Marinol. The health insurance pays most of those costs, and pass those insane rates on to everybody in the country.

Marinol is legal

I have actually heard this as a reason to use Marinol over cannabis, and it’s ridiculous. Legal because of unethical practices isn’t the same as “good”. Marinol is a product built to try and stop the ever-increasing awareness of how wonderful cannabis is. It was created to destroy the plant, and while I’ll give it to Alex as a last resort (or rather, I would if it weren’t so “dangerous”), I’ll never agree that it’s a good product.

The funny thing is that a large number of medical marijuana users would probably shut the hell up about legalization if cannabis were schedule III instead of I. If I could get Alex a regulated dose of hash, do you think I’d bother with this website?