That nagging pain ...

For a few weeks (gasp!) I have been dealing with discomfort, which has compelled me to learn a tad about human anatomy.  Anytime I engage in such learning about the human body, I am reminded of my daughter, who, after her first exposure to learning about anatomy in medical school, remarked that it is a surprise that we don't drop dead like crazy. 

Our complicated anatomy itself is evidence that no intelligent god designed us--anybody with half my intelligence could have put together a better Lego model!  Then there is the remarkably complex biochemistry.  And then the mind, which is beyond our analytical understanding.  Seriously, how do people sincerely believe that a god designed and created all these?

Such a highly complicated system means problems of various kinds.  One of those is chronic pain.  All I have is discomfort.  Not even pain.  And then there is chronic pain, which is "estimated to affect a fifth of the global population, or 1.5bn people."

Even reading that sentence is enough for me to consider myself lucky.  A while ago, I stopped asking my mother about her pain because there is no point.  "It is always there," she said a couple of years ago.  More recently when my father asked my mother about her pain, my sister cut him off with "stop asking her everyday."  I did joke with my mother that if she lived in Oregon she will be able to use marijuana.

I suppose as long as we humans have been around, we have also been bothered by pain.  And we have searched for remedies.

Our instinct when in any kind of pain, acute or chronic, is to make it stop. We reach for drugs, typically one of two groups: anti-inflammatories such as aspirin and ibuprofen, or opioids. Both types of drug are blunt, ancient instruments that have been around in various forms for thousands of years, a fact that would be quaint if the pills weren’t also potentially lethal. Aspirin derives from willow bark, whose first-recorded use as a painkiller was in Egypt in 1500BC. The opium poppy is known to have been cultivated in Mesopotamia in 3400BC (the Sumerians apparently called it the “joy plant”) and opium was recommended before surgery from at least as early as the second century AD, when the Greek philosopher Celsus recorded its use as an anaesthetic.

The prolonged use of drugs is, obviously, one hell of a problem.

Developing the miracle painkiller drug is not easy:

Pain medication faces distinctive problems that don’t apply to other drugs. Unlike cancer, for example, pain doesn’t have clear biomarkers: you can’t measure the effect of a drug that treats it by counting white blood cells. Instead, researchers rely on patients giving their pain a score on numbered scales, from one to ten, say, or on a visual scale, where the individual marks the level of their pain at a point on a line between two extremes. But pain is infuriatingly subjective. The placebo effect is significant: give someone a sugar pill and they’ll report an improvement in their pain just because it has been noticed and apparently treated. There is no way of knowing if one person’s report of their pain means the same as another’s. “Your nine is different to my nine,” said L’Huillier, who looked somewhat despairing at the thought of such a crude measure being used to determine the efficacy of a drug in which his company had just invested hundreds of millions of dollars. “I have no idea what your nine is versus my nine. And that’s what we’re using in trials.”

Which is what my daughter told me after he early years in medical school--there is no way to compare pain.  Your pain is your pain.

May you have a pain-free life!

Chart of the day: the failing war on drugs

The chart (ht) clearly shows that:

that even with increased crop eradication and constant “record seizures” of the drug by land and at sea are not accomplishing the stated goals of the policies and therefore calls into serious question whether they are worth the expenditures in question.  Indeed, it is quite clear that the ability of coca famers to produce enough coca leaf to overtake whatever successes that are accomplished in crop eradication and cocaine seizures is quite clear.  Such overproduction is simply the cost of doing business.  This is a lesson, by the way, that we need to keep in mind in Afghanistan, where the policy direction it towards crop eradication of opium poppies.  I predict now that even if thousands upon thousands of hectares or opium poppies are eradicated, that the poppy farmers will be able to out produce the eradicators.

Of course, libertarians like the folks at Reason have all along pointing out to the wasteful and costly attempt to keep the drugs out--and, of course, the infringement on the rights of American citizens ...  The war on drugs which is no longer confined to Colombia, and is now just short of a civil war in Mexico is, according to Jorge Castaneda all screwed up: "The Mexican drug war is costly, unwinnable, and predicated on dangerous myths." Going after the supply, without acting on policies that might address the demand in the US merely escalates violence, and Secretary Clinton echoed this as well  when she said:

"Clearly what we've been doing has not worked," Clinton told reporters on her plane at the start of her two-day trip, saying that U.S. policies on curbing drug use, narcotics shipments and the flow of guns have been ineffective.
"Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," she added. "Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians."

So, when are we going to end this war, that even pre-dates the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?

All the talk about a "green economy" ....

Now it all makes sense :)

The strange meeting at the White House: Elvis and Nixon

You ought to read this LA Times story on how the famous meeting happened.  Reads like a movie story, than a real life one.  I suppose truth can be stranger than fiction.
The image on the left is the first of the five-page letter than Elvis hand wrote to Nixon while on the plane to DC.
ht

Oaksterdam University in Calif

Get it? Oakland + Amsterdam = Oaksterdam.
What is so special there?  Ahem, cannabis.  Yes, the old mary jane. weed.

Now, there are moves afoot in California to go further to fully legalise marijuana.

Evidence of the impact that the approval of medicinal marijuana has had on some areas of California is clear in Oakland.

Across the bay from San Francisco, it has come to be known as Oaksterdam, in a nod to the symbolic global capital of marijuana deregulation, Amsterdam.

It is surreal though to look at faculty listing at Oaksterdam University.  Why they don't have the .edu domain I wonder :-)  There are four campuses!!! I bet they are interested in some international locations too.

It appears that there is a de facto decriminalization of marijuana in California.  Of course, this is a state that is in deep,deep financial trouble.  And is releasing prisoners because there is not enough money to keep them in.

So, how do you get to Oaksterdam?  On the Pineapple Express, of course!


Update on Sep 28th:  Fortune has a cover story on pot legalization;

The acceptance of medical marijuana has implications that extend far beyond helping those suffering from life-threatening diseases. It is one of several factors -- including demographic changes, the financial crisis, and the widely perceived failure of the war on drugs -- reopening the country's 40-year-old on-again, off-again shouting match over whether marijuana should be legalized.