15 May »
Ever wonder about the pens in your physician’s office, the ones with all the drug logos? Physicians taking freebies from pharmaceutical companies has long been a problem in this country: you never really know whether your doctor is prescribing the best medicine, or the best paying medicine.
So it’s good news that Pro Publica has begun assembling a database of payouts, which you can use to check out your providers. They only have data for 15 companies, but those companies are almost half of the U.S. market. More will be added.
Using the search tool, I was able to find most of my doctors, but not a lot of money. My primary got a total of $37 from two different companies, which I’ll be asking him about the next time I see him. My gastro didn’t appear on the list at all, nor did my colorectal surgeon.
Then I decided to start searching notable doc bloggers. Consider the pen problem, now amplified on the Internet: a lot of patients read doc blogs, but is what we’re getting original and independent perspective, or is it colored by payouts from industry?
Searching the database, I got zero hits on Kevin Pho, of Kevin, MD, which was reassuring. Likewise Jan Gurley, of Doc Gurley, who reports her ‘conflicts of interest’ as “none. Nada. Not a penny.” doesn’t appear in the database at all. I couldn’t find Val Jones of Get Better Health or Edwin Leap, either.
Robert Lamberts of Musings of a Distractible Mind got $442 from several companies, mostly in ‘meals’ – including one $12 meal from AstraZeneca in 2011. I can only hope a $12 meal doesn’t even get you a kiss at the door from Dr. Lamberts.
Westby Fisher of Dr. Wes got $200 in ‘meals’ from several companies, including that same $12 meal from AstraZeneca in 2011.
Matthew Mintz of Dr. Mintz’ Blog got a staggering $162,721 from 2009 to 2012, from both AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline. One payment alone in 2009 was for almost $50,000.
A couple of caveats to all this: first, eating a $12 meal doesn’t make you a whore: it’s what you do for the meal. In my primary’s case, I am pretty sure he’s acting in my best interest, despite his $37 jackpot. You should judge doc-blogger firstly on what they write, with this information as just another criterion by which to make that judgment.
Second, not all pharmaceutical companies are represented in the database — so the apparently clean doctors could be cashing in monthly $100k checks, and we wouldn’t know about it. The Affordable Care Act requires more transparency on such gifts starting in 2014, so all that should come to light.
Third, there are some doc bloggers who go by pseudonyms — Shadowfax, Whitecoat — and digging up people’s real identities is not something that stands to profit me any. They want to be anonymous, and I can respect that — but it also means we can’t check up on their conflicts of interest. So an anonymous doc blogger should be treated with a little more skepticism than one who is willing to put their name out there. Again, judge the writing firstly — but do wonder about the transparency.
If you use the database, keep all that in mind. But you should use it anyway — it’s a good way to check up on your physicians, and get a sense of where their interests lie. We should be glad Pro Publica has made this available, and look forward to it being more comprehensive in years to come.
13 May »
I stumbled into my office clutching the torn envelope. This was a bombshell, maybe as big as the one they dropped in the war. It was my case, but the coppers had to come in pronto. Sgt. Henderson was the guy — but where was his number? I searched my desk in vain, tried the drawers, the card file — nada. I stabbed the buzzer with my trigger puller, hoping to win the attention of the skirt in the lobby. “Flora, doll, where’s Henderson’s digits?” Flora buzzed right back: “Why’ncha call directory assistance, dummy?” “Yeah, sure — and what’s their number?” “Fer Pete’s sake — it’s 411″, she hissed, “same as always.” That girl was mean as a junkyard dog. I dialed the directory, and they put me through to Henderson’s switchboard. I made sure to get his number and write it down somewhere I wouldn’t lose it again. Mystery solved.
Henderson didn’t buy my evidence — left old Bunco to go it alone. This would require some fancy leg work, and by ‘fancy’ I mean my good suit, which was dangling from the back of my office door. I tore the plastic off and inspected the goods, which included my best white shirt, now featuring a yellow stain, probably by the perfidious Chinaman who ran my dry cleaners. “Flora,” I howled, “did those Orientals do this to my duds?” I showed her the incriminating mark. “You did that, dimwit,” she said, “last week, when you were eating nachos.” That dame could be mean as an angry tiger shark. “Also, ‘Oriental’ is a racist thing to say. They’re Korean-Americans.” So it wasn’t the Chinaman. Mystery solved.
I found a less-good-but-unstained shirt to wear with the monkey suit, then tramped down the stairs to my jalopy. I had left the radio on, so it blared hair tonic ads as I cruised towards the Van Howyk mansion. A few blocks from the scene of the crime, the disc jockey started spinning a tune I had heard before, but couldn’t remember the name of. I rolled to a stop in front of the mansion and listened, looking at the radio dial in case it started squawking. I didn’t see the hole punch until it was up against my neck. “You Bunco?” the hole punch owner asked. He was Van Howyk muscle. “Maybe,” I said. He waved me out of the car with his hardware. “Wait a sec, jack,” I said. “I’m trying to figure the marquee on this jingle.” “It’s ‘Kung-Fu Fighting’,” said the guy, “by Carl Douglas. He even says it in the song — ‘those cats were Kung-Fu Fighting’.” The Chinaman again! “Yeah,” I said, handing him the keys. “I guess that adds up.” Mystery solved.
(More dazzling Dirk Bunco adventures here.)
Tags: affect
10 May »
Slate ran an article yesterday by Maria Kefalas in which she discusses raising a terminally ill child, lessons learned, that sort of thing.
Writers don’t writer their own headlines usually, so I am assuming the subtitle “What I learned from parenting a terminally ill child” wasn’t Kefalas’s doing. I’m 100% sure she didn’t write the page title: “Fatally ill child teaches us how to mother”, which is a plainly immoral summary of the article, and ought to piss her off.
The problem with that headline is that it attributes agency to the child, and thereby implies a purpose to her suffering. If the child were able to articulate her own understanding of the situation, it might be very different than her mother’s and nothing to do with parenting. Consider how likely it is that in her dying minute the kid will think, “Totally worth it, if some people are better parents.” But that’s a question for the headline writer, not Kefalas.
So headlines aside, I want to give this article a gold star. Kefalas is pretty careful to say that she learned these things, not that Calliope taught them, and she is clear on the value of the kid’s life apart from those lessons. If you were the kind of person who was okay assuming sick kids exist to teach us lessons, you could read that into her piece, but I don’t think that’s what she intended.
Kefalas gets double kudos for this passage:
Yes, it’s great to give money to research and find a cure, but so many families lack the resources to get the costly equipment to care for their seriously ill child and so local families will, without question, need your financial help to get a wheelchair or a specially modified vehicle. If you are comfortable, ask parents in situations like mine if they need financial help taking care of their child. Many insurers don’t cover more than the most basic wheelchairs and there are precious few funds available to remodel homes.
Read the whole thing. It’s not perfect, but way better than most sick-kid stories.
10 May »
(Note: this is the first installment of a series, “What the F— Happened To…?”, in which I complain that people don’t make things I didn’t buy enough of.)
What the f— happened to Altoid Sours?
Last year I was getting ready for a surgery, and I knew I would be taking a lot of metronidazole by IV. For those of you who don’t know, metronidazole (aka Flagyl) has a horrible side effect of making everything in your mouth taste like bitter, metallic poop. I call it met mouth, and it really really sucks.
Fortunately, it has an easy cure: sour candy. The sourer the better. And even when you’re on clear liquids, you can suck on hard candies.
Enter Altoid Sours: extremely sour, extremely tasty little candies in reusable metal tins. The sourness of these little crystals really cuts through the bitter residue of metronidazole, and helps else everything taste better. I liked the Apple and Mango flavors, which had complex flavors much closer to real fruit than most candies. I was especially fond of the Tangerine flavors — by far the best citrus-flavored candy ever made. I used to have a tangerine tree in my back yard, so I know from tangerines.
The flavor issue is important, so let me explain: I like Lemonheads okay — won’t go out of my way for them, but they’re not bad a few at a time. But Lemonheads have a strongly chemical flavor that gets worse the more you eat them, so sucking on Lemonheads to combat met mouth just trades one awful residual flavor for another.
In the period 2003 to 2006, I was taking metronidazole regularly — usually for a few weeks after an ER visit — and a tin of Altoid Sours always helped relieved the resultant met mouth. I probably have a half-dozen empty tins floating around, which I use to store paper clips, guitar picks, ear plugs, and other small items — the tin labeled “E” holds picks for my electric guitar).
Come back to last year, when I was getting ready for my surgery and dreading a stint of met mouth: imagine my dismay at learning Altoid Sours were discontinued. It was the first in a string of setbacks surrounding that operation.
I tried other hard candies, but none of them were sour enough to combat metronidazole, while also having reasonably good flavor. In fact, I spent an embarrassing amount of money in the candy aisles of various stores, trying to find a substitute. I never quite got there.
You know how doctors compare drugs to sugar pills? Well, Altoid Sours are basically a sugar pill, but if you have to take metronidazole for any length of time, they work magic on your taste buds.
If you have to take metronidazole, by all means try to find some sour candy. It will definitely help. And maybe someday you’ll get to try Altoid Sours again. For now, I am left wondering: WTF happened to them?
9 May »
I have memory issues — maybe it’s the disease, the prednisone, or some genetic factor, but it’s hard for me to remember stuff that needs to get done. Since I know I’m not the only one, I thought I would share one of my strategies for coping: dry erase.
What you see above is a corner of my bathroom mirror, where I write myself notes in dry erase marker for stuff that I can’t forget. “Do Cat Litter”. “Buy Toilet Paper”. “Make Dr.’s Appt.” You get the idea. The dry erase marker sits in my toothbrush holder, where I can grab it each evening before I go to bed. That’s usually when I am thinking of all the things I need to do the next day. And if I don’t write it down, that’s usually the last time I remember they needed doing, until it’s too late.
Dry erase markers also give me a way to communicate with the owner of that other toothbrush (not the end-tuft, which is one of mine). If one or the other of us is out, we can write each other notes where we know we’ll definitely see it. The refrigerator door is not really a guarantee with us.
I used to use wax pencils, but they were a bit messier to clean up. I am old enough to remember when dry erase markers were such a stinky mess that only the calculus TA in my dorm bothered to buy a set (also, dinosaurs ruled the earth), but dry erase marker technology has gotten cheaper, cleaner, and much less smelly over the years. In fact, I am old enough to remember when the stoner kids would stick the dry erase markers up their noses, but I never tried it myself.
Dry erase boards, however, still suck as a general rule. I don’t own a single dry erase board. That’s okay, because dry erase markers work great on any glass surface — and glass cleans up with just a scrap of tissue.
If you have spare picture frame, you can make a custom dry erase board. The photo below is of my weekly calendar, which I made using an 8 x 10 frame. I used a word processor to make a landscape calendar for a generic Mon.-Fri. week, which I then put into the frame.
If know I am going to have a busy week, I usually sit down Sunday evening or Monday morning and schedule everything out on this whiteboard. That way I don’t have to turn on my computer to check what I am supposed to be doing.
Obviously, I use different colors to indicate different activities. I find four sufficient for my needs, but I’ve seen markers in sets of a dozen or more different colors. You could really go nuts color-coding your weekly schedule, if you wanted to.
I use post-it notes and a paper pocket calendar, too — not zealously enough, I’m afraid — but dry erase definitely helps me with the short to medium term tasks that I’m in danger of forgetting. If you have similar problems, try a dry erase marker. Just not up your nose, you know.
6 May »
After a few years of blogging I have some ideas about hyperlinks, and thought I would commit them to a post that literally nobody is begging me to write.
If you’re blogging, you don’t need to take what I’m writing as gospel — just a suggestion, but maybe a reason to think about your links. I just thought it might be helpful, is all.
If you’re just reading blogs, please don’t take this as some kind of dictate. The last thing I want to do is create more prescriptivism on the Internet, give trolls more filler for endless, pointless comments threads. This primarily for people who write blogs to help them write more effective blogs.
So, then, IMHO, YMMV, & etc., the real trick to links is choosing what to link. So, for example, I find myself writing sentences like, “Leslie at Getting Closer to Myself has a good post”, which obviously needs a link. (I’m using Leslie as an example because I know she won’t mind a ton of spurious pingbacks.)
As far as I can tell, there are three schools of thought on this.
1. Link to the author/blog
“Leslie at Getting Closer to Myself has a good post interviewing Laurie Edwards.”
2. Link to the object
“Leslie at Getting Closer to Myself has a good post interviewing Laurie Edwards.”
3. Link to the action
“Leslie at Getting Closer to Myself has a good post interviewing Laurie Edwards.”
I favor shorter links, so I think the first one is not effective. It also draws me to part of the sentence that isn’t really doing anything — it’s just information.
I used to favor the second, because I tend to think of links as referring to specific items or things on the Internet. After all, what’s behind the link is, in fact, a good post.
But lately, I have come to think that linking to the action is more engaging. In this case the sentence has a weak verb — ‘has’ — and a much stronger verb phrase — “interviewing Laurie Edwards”, so I go with that.
Another thing I have decided is important is giving the name of the blog some emphasis:
“Leslie at Getting Closer to Myself has a good post interviewing Laurie Edwards.”
Italics are usually reserved for books, but in this case I think it helps separate out the blog from the person from the rest of the sentence. I know I’m not helping by being Duncan Cross at Duncan Cross, so in those cases I would just use the name without italics.
This ends up being a little more work, but I think it makes for more engaging, readable blogging. And of course, if there’s a good reason to put the link somewhere else, then go for it.
Just to compare my approach to others, here’s some snips from well-established bloggers (and I am linking names because I am not forming sentences, but it’s not like these are fixed rules anyway):
Matt Yglesias at Slate:
Brenda Cronin reports on a fascinating study from Andriana Bellou of the University of Montreal that appears to show strong evidence of a causal link between broadband penetration and marriage rates.
Yglesias hits the verbs, too, but doesn’t mention that Brenda Cronin writes for the Wall Street Journal – I felt like I was supposed to know that, so I had to follow the link. That said, better to give Cronin credit than the Journal, if space demands a choice.
Ezra Klein at Wonkblog:
This week, the administration released the finished product – at five pages.
I would have included ‘released’ in the link, but I get why ‘the finished product’ is the right choice: the link isn’t to a discussion of the administration’s activity, but the actual finished product.
Later in the same post, Ezra writes:
According to the scientists, the treadmills cost about $1,000 out of a half-million-dollar grant.
For my money (i.e. none), ‘According to the scientists’ is not the crux of that sentence. I would have done it differently:
According to the scientists, the treadmills cost about $1,000 out of a half-million-dollar grant.
From Boing Boing:
Last summer, a nun, a drifter, and a house painter broke into the secure compound surrounding the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — the laboratory that made uranium for the Manhattan Project and continues to be a major part of America’s nuclear infrastructure.
That’s a bit too much link ink for my eyes — ‘broke into the secure compound’ would suffice. Judging by other links, Boing Boing is mostly 1 & 2, and favors longer links as a rule — but it’s not enough of a problem to keep me from reading.
Having decided I have ‘rules’ for linking, I now find myself paying a lot more attention to where other bloggers put their links. If memory serves, they used to be just about anywhere in a given sentence, but lately I have noticed most reputable bloggers going for the verb. So if I don’t have enough credibility, it’s what the pros do.
Or at least think about what you’re going to link: it will help your blog look more polished, and make your blogging more engaging.
3 May »
That quote from Serenity describes crying, but it’s also a pretty apt summary of my sleeping habits. I don’t sleep well, or rarely, although things have gotten better.
Insomnia has been a thing basically my whole adult life. To some extent it’s hereditary on my mom’s side. Chronic illness, especially the kind that involves prednisone and frequent bathroom trips, has not helped. Insofar as I think of myself as disabled, and I do, I break down my dysfunction into 65% insomnia and 35% everything else. I’d be a better person — if I could just sleep.
I discovered earplugs when I was in college, which was a blessing. Is there any other invention that has prevented more acts of violence? I also started on melatnonin — can’t get to sleep these days without my 5mg meltaway. Sometimes I need a little diphenhydramine, too. I tried Ambien and even Xanax, but the side effects were pretty miserable.
I try to be good about sleep hygiene – not reading in bed, going to bed at the same time, et cetera. This part has gotten harder since I started sharing sleeping quarters. We have somewhat different schedules and habits, and also cats.
Until recently, we also had very different tastes in mattresses. I am side sleeper, and not a warm sleeper — I like a mattress that’s fairly soft. Some nights I would sleep on the couch in the spare room, which was a good bit softer than our bed. After making do with a mediocre mattress for a few years, we finally decided our lives and livelihood depend on better sleep.
We had heard great things about Tempurpedic, did some research, and decided that was the way to go. We went to the showroom and tested every Tempurpedic before settling on one that was soft enough for me, but not too soft.
The thing about Tempurpedic that you don’t quite get in the showroom is that it’s temperature-pedic — the foam responds to your body temperature. You’re wearing clothes in the showroom, and you don’t get into the covers, and all that fabric between you and the bed keeps your body heat from really affecting the mattress. So we bought, not quite knowing what we were getting. The day the delivery guys showed up was cold out, so when I flopped down on the fresh mattress it felt like a cement slab. I almost injured myself.
Once the mattress thawed, we were pretty excited. We hoped — believed, in fact — that this mattress was going to change our lives. The retailer gave us a 90-day trial period, but we had to keep it for thirty days to get used to it. So we knew there would be an adjustment period. We settled in, and got ready for some serious sleep.
Instead, we had problems. The first problem was that the thing just plain stank. It smelled like mildew. I think it was just off-gassing from the plastic used to produce it, but it was bad enough that it made it hard to fall asleep. During the day we took the sheets off to air it out, but the smell persisted almost to the end.
Then we discovered it was warm. I am a cool sleeper, so I had no issue there, but the other party here burned up in the thing. We switched out our down comforter for a summer-weight polyfill, and still it was beastly hot. Because it got so hot, the foam got super soft, to the point that it provided zero support — which, again, was fine with me, but it’s not all about me.
Let me step back: I actually did have a problem with the warmth issue: I developed a raging case of jock-itch. That might be due to the excess heat, therefore moisture, but I also think I might be sensitive to whatever was creating that mildew smell. Mentally, I bracket this out as a third problem, apart from the smell and the heat.
At about 60 days, we had finally had enough; we ditched the Tempurpedic. Instead, we bought a Sleep Number, which lets each of us choose different firmness. We also upgraded to a queen, so more room to stretch out.
For us, the Sleep Number is what we’d hope for, and we are sleeping much better. Also, my jock no longer itches. It really has made a difference in our lives, even if the voyage to that point was a little longer than we planned. I still wear the earplugs and take the melatonin, and the cats are still obnoxious cuddlers, but it’s way better than it was. I have more energy, I’m less achy, less grumpy — healthier, I think.
The point of this piece isn’t an endorsement of Sleep Number over Tempurpedic; nobody’s paying me to write any of this. We were surprised, astounded even, at how much we hated the Tempurpedic, but we have friends who swear they are the best. Likewise we have friends who deeply regret their Sleep Number beds. Your mileage will inevitably vary.
The point is that sleep is an underrated part of health, and something you should consider taking more seriously, if it gives you difficulty. That might mean learning to sleep with earplugs, or adding a little melatonin in, or maybe just adopting better sleep hygiene.
A good mattress — the right mattress — can make a huge difference, too. Doing all the stuff I do to maintain good sleep, I was skeptical that changing mattresses would make any difference. It did — in fact, given all the work I was doing trying to get good sleep, it was pretty stupid of me not to think about the mattress sooner. So if you can afford it, maybe try a better mattress.
But definitely pay attention to your sleep. You’re on your own with the cats.
2 May »
So I took a vacation last week, and it was sort of good — not great. Kinda frustrating in some ways, actually, and I came back home not feeling the sense of restoration I had hoped for. The weekend didn’t really do anything for me, either.
Then on Monday I came down with a cold, which normally is a horrible thing but this one seemed to be very mild. After my life so far, a cold is not at all a big deal — yes, unpleasant, but not worse than bowel prep or a full-blown flare. Runny nose? I can cope with that, 100%. It’s not ‘real’ sick — just a damn fine excuse not to do what you’re supposed to for a couple days. I actually enjoy the downtime you get with a good cold: I can finally watch that movie that’s been in my queue forever, maybe take some naps here and there.
I was mostly over it by Tuesday when I called my employer to say I might be sick the next day (I only work part-time). He said, ‘go ahead, take Wednesday off’ — which I did. And I wasn’t too sick yesterday, so that ended up being a nice break, too. Now I feel recharged and ready for what promises to be a busy weekend.
So: vacation = exhausted, virus = recharged. And then I wondered if I am the only one, which was a good thought to have because I needed a prompt for this month’s PFAM.
To put it more broadly, what do you do to recharge? What gets you back on your feet, up and doing again?
We’ll do the deadline of May 15th for this one, with the edition going live the 17th or 20th.
To participate, send an email to dx@duncancross.net with :
1. Your name
2. Your blog name
3. Your post’s title
4. Your post URL
Thanks! I look forward to some thought-provoking responses.
Also, if you are interested in hosting PFAM, I believe Leslie is still looking for hosts for the next few months’ editions. It’s easy and fun, and a great way to meet blog people — get in touch with her at Getting Closer to Myself.
2 May »
Last week I flew back to the ancestral homeland — Florida — for a brief vacation. Because someone wanted to work that week, I had to take the trip alone. Thanks to the TSA, I haven’t flown solo for almost two years.
It may seem silly to boast about something 11 year-olds used to do routinely, but getting through an airport by myself is actually a major accomplishment. Since last year’s assault and insult I’ve been too nervous to go solo; I always fly withsomeone.
The problem is that TSA rules basically require me to get a pat-down. Either I set off the millimeter-wave (‘nekkid pictures’) machine and get a pat-down, or I ask for the metal detector and still get a pat-down. And the pat-downs are so invasive that the TSA people actually prefer to do them in a private room, which scares the crap out of me. Try imagining a situation in which two strange men take you into a claustrophobically small room and fondle you; how is that situation better because of the color shirt they wear?
Fortunately, TSA regs allow you take a person into the private room with you, so at least I usually have someone there with me. But that wasn’t possible this time, and so I almost canceled the trip due to my apprehension about the TSA.
Instead, I had a relatively painless trip. The outbound leg was easy — I took my Ativan, showed my doctor’s letter explaining my special needs, and they whooshed me through a line without a millimeter-wave scanner.
Here’s a puzzle for you: if the line at a TSA checkpoint doesn’t have an mm-wave scanner, you can go through the metal detector without a pat-down, but if it does have an mm-wave scanner, you have to get a pat-down if you go through the metal detector instead. So why is the metal detector enough security sometimes, but not enough other times? How is the pat-down not punitive?
I expected the return leg to be easier: that airport has a line for disabled people which does not usually have an mm-wave scanner. This time, surprise, the disabled line did have the scanner.
When I got to the head of the line, I asked for a supervisor. She was very nice as I explained my situation in a hushed voice. “Well, if you go through the metal detector you have to get a pat-down,” she informed me.
“Well, I really don’t like to be touched, if it’s at all possible,” I explained, pointing to where it actually says that on my special needs traveler letter. And then I noticed she was looking at my shaking hands — the Ativan had not quite set in yet.
I let them shake a little more, and hammed it up a bit — the disabled equivalent of minstrelsy: ‘Oh, Lawdy, please, I so he’pless, jess pud me t’rh de mebble bedector’. I didn’t say that, but that was the general spirit of my performance.
“Why don’t you just go through the metal detector?” she said. I did — no pat-down.
Am I ashamed that I pretended to be more of a cripple than I am? Not really. If TSA wanted me to fly with my dignity intact, they wouldn’t use the nekkid-picture boxes.
I would also point out that, for once, a TSA employee’s ignorance — granted, probably humane and willful ignorance — of its own rules worked in my favor. That’s a win, in my book. My world just got a little bigger.
18 April »
How to declare victory in the War on Drugs
A letter sent to President Obama may contain ricin, a deadly poison notoriously used to assassinate a Bulgarian dissident during the Cold War.
You may wonder what kind of criminal mastermind it takes to produce ricin — perhaps a Dr. No laboring away in a secret island lair? A Ted Kaczynski laboring in a mountain cave somewhere? A rogue government scientist stealing the poison from a military bioweapons lab?
As a matter of fact, you can grow the ricin in your backyard. Ricin is derived from the castor bean, a common ornamental plant that is perfectly legal to grow in the United States. You can plant your whole yard with castor beans, if you want. You can buy the seeds online.
Castor oil plants aren’t the only toxin you can grow: digitalis, also known as foxglove, will stop your heart. Oleander, jimson weed, jasmine, and many other dangerous species are also legal to cultivate. With what’s in my garden right now, I could kill my entire neighborhood — but I won’t go to jail for just growing those plants.
But I could be looking at serious trouble if I plant even a single seed of marijuana — which has never killed anyone, at least not from toxicity alone. Does that make sense?
And now lots of states are legalizing marijuana for medical uses, or in some cases any use. That same logic could apply to lots of drugs that have potential medical uses — ecstasy, opium, amphetamines, etc. Obviously our current restrictions on drugs like marijuana are not going to last, but where do we draw the line?
Let me propose a maxim by which to resolve this dilemma: anything green is good. Anything that you can grow in the garden should be legal.
It is not coincidence that several of the most popular drugs have botanical sources. You can grow opium poppies — or not, depending on what local and state laws, and what you do with the plants, and whether you have intent to consume them. Khat — or qat, for the Scrabble buffs — is an evergreen shrub that produces an amphetamine-like drug; it is chewed for that reason in parts of Africa and the Middle East. Cocaine comes from the coca leaf, another shrub, whose leaves are also chewed — coca is legal in some Latin American countries. These plants have been part of human history, even evolution, for millennia.
In their botanical form, these drugs are not — well, not harmless, necessarily, but not nearly as dangerous as their refined forms. There’s a lot of chemistry between a coca leaf and a crack rock. Same with opium to morphine to heroin. If you want draw a line between good and bad drugs, the distinction between botany and chemistry seems like a good place to start. Botany good, chemistry bad — especially because the chemicals involved are often toxic or dangerous themselves, so there is a legitimate public safety interest in limiting their use.
Anyway, it’s likely that most people would have no interest in refining the plants to their purified forms. You can refine marijuana into something called ‘budder‘, but hardly anybody does. Nicotine is both highly addictive and highly toxic, but you don’t see anybody processing tobacco leaves down into a concentrated street drug. If the botanical forms of cocaine or heroin were readily available, much of the demand for the purified, illegal extracts would go away. It would be a massive shift in the war on drugs, a change for which we are long overdue.
That said, liberating these plants for our gardens and greenhouses is not a total solution to the drug problem in this country. ‘Anything green is good’ does address the growing tensions in this country over what should be legal and illegal. As the medical marijuana movement changes the way we think about ‘dangerous’ drugs, we should also recognize that we have always been able to grow lethal poisons in our yards and gardens. If the government does not wish to regulate the truly dangerous plants, then maybe it should ease up on those plants that just happen to have fun or useful compounds in them.
Anything green is good: a drug policy for the 21st century.
