It's 2018. Why Are We Still Arguing About Weed?
It was Monday, so it was time to check once again to find out which of the president*’s hirelings was embarrassing us recently. Come on down, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who stopped in Ohio to do his finest Joe Friday impersonation. From the Dayton Daily News:
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in Kettering today, “There really is no such thing as medical marijuana.”... He went on to say, “There is no FDA approved use of marijuana, a botanical plant. I just want to be very clear about that.” Azar was responding to a question from the Yellow Springs News about what role he sees medical marijuana playing as an alternative to opioids for pain relief. Cresco Labs Ohio LLC has secured a state license to build a medical marijuana cultivation facility in Yellow Springs. The federal government is focused on the development of pharmaceutical alternatives to opioids, Azar said, and does not recognize marijuana as approved pain treatment. “We are devoting hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of research at our National Institutes of Health as part of the historic $13 billion opioid and serious mental illness program that the President and Congress are funding,” he said. “Over $750 million just in 2019 alone is going to be dedicated towards the National Institutes of Health working in public-private partnership to try and develop the next generation of pain therapies that are not opioids.”
Azar, we should all recall, is a creature of Big Pharma. He used to be the president of Eli Lilly, which is as big as big pharma gets. It’s no surprise that he might not be wild about a pain remedy that doesn’t come in a pill and that you can grow pretty much in a window-box in your third-floor walk-up.
But to say there really is no such thing as medical marijuana is more retrograde than it is cruel, and sillier than it is pedantic. There are millions of Americans (and counting) who use it as medicine to great effect and to tell them to wait for a new pill from the folks who have helped bring you the opioid crisis is really insulting.
But, hold on, coming up fast on the outside is EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, always a crowd favorite. Seems he gave a few interviews back in Oklahoma, and that the tapes of those interviews have surfaced. Somebody shuffled the tapes to Politico and, boy howdy, we are out on the edge now with old Scott Pruitt.
“There aren’t sufficient scientific facts to establish the theory of evolution, and it deals with the origins of man, which is more from a philosophical standpoint than a scientific standpoint,” he said in one part of the series, in which Pruitt and the program's hosts discussed issues related to the Constitution.
And,
“We're saying to a certain category of religion, 'No, you can't be a part of the public square, because you are the majority religion, historically. We're going to make sure that the minority religions are built up and encouraged, but the majority religion is going to be shifted aside.' Now that violates, again, individual liberty.” History has proven that people will not do what's right without religious principles to guide them, Pruitt said. “When you take out this aspect of who we are as a republic, and you try to eradicate it from who we are, it leads to what? 'Each man did what was right in his own eyes,' and you have chaos,” Pruitt said. He added that without changes to protect constitutional rights, "it leads to anarchy, it leads to rebellion,” which he predicted could happen within the next few decades or sooner.”
Of course, there are exceptions, religion-wise.
In one episode, a host suggested that Islam “is not so much a religion as it is a terrorist organization, in many instances.” The host, Gwen Freeman, added: “You can believe whatever you want to, but if you’re going to be hiding behind a mosque and teaching people in your mosques to harm other people, that’s where you have to draw the line.” “Absolutely,” Pruitt responded, going on to talk about the relationship between God and believers and saying that people should be able to practice any religion unless it is manifested in violence. “Our First Amendment should preserve the right of Hindus and Muslims to practice their faith. I believe that with all my heart. But what I don’t agree with is that because of that relationship, if it is manifested in violence as Gwen is saying, that we don’t have the right to deal with that.”
And, apropos to current events, Pruitt seems to think God’s last name is either Smith or Wesson.
“If you can tell me what gun, type of gun, I can possess, then I didn’t really get that right to keep and bear arms from God,” he said. “It was not bequeathed to me, it was not unalienable, right?”
“All the best people” is never not going to be a fabulous punchline.
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