This is an available criminological statistic from Statistics Canada. That made us all liable to fine and imprisonment in the cheeky old days, when youth took over during our "Post War Revolution".

We may all still retain the sense of clandestine camaraderie, or especially the independence that Democracy allows to the individual in the sense that we "bucked the system", lobbying through sensible Doctors like Dr. Small of Agriculture Canada, whose quiet and illuminating studies brought a sense of perspective which shone beyond the prohibition days "Killer Weed" hysteria and ignorance.

Now that there is good medical money in Marijuana Research, it must be the herb. You don't hear anti tobacco types waging such war over their new money-maker, do you, now?

Yes, I was one of the stoned hippies attracted to the use of natural herbs. Was it peer pressure - why, yes, indeed. I wanted to know what being stoned was, like most curious young people. My Dad had tried it during WW2 in Egypt, and both parents were open minded.

Being from the Medical side of life, they taught us that mind was the important aspect of matter, that our focus and intellectual involvement with substance was what made the dream possible.

I look back with a sense of fun and very much joy as I recall my pot days and the sense of bonded future we young revolutionaries enjoyed. Smoking up had become a statement of rebellion and definitely of adventure. The staid fifties had so sickened everyone that most of we educated beings could not wait to bust through the massive hypocricy still tied, as it was, to Victorian surface etiquette and the false  economic hope of warfare.

Marijuana does not seem to pose the same threat it was supposed to formerly, in these days of cocaine addiction and a renewed threat to health from a type of Speed (meth-amphetamine), so recently in the news. Instead, since the sixties, we have learned that the herb is useful for patients with glaucoma ( a condition which blinds the eyes, causing foveal vision.

 The fovea is  a small, round area in the eye, which holds the colour vision cones for vision. When vision from the  rod cells in the eye is impaired   (rod  cells  perceive black and white) it leaves  the victim with  a circle diminishing eventually to a dot of sight. This is vision from only the fovea.).

We knew that marijuana helped alleviate the convulsions and other types of seizure for epilepsy patients, and that experimental labs were checking the smoke for the relief of nausea during chemotherapy, a type of treatment used for cancer patients.This was sixties to seventies news.

I used Marijuana until I was twenty five years old. I had suffered from grand - mal epilepsy from age ten, and was hopeful that my regimen of careful vegetarian diet, yoga, meditation and weekend "tokes" using "grass" or hashish, would eventually help me with my physical delicacy.

I was also advised by a homeopath to drop sugar and a percentage of the carbohydrates I consumed. This diet was also experimental, since Doctors en masse had pooh-poohed the existence of hypoglycemia as a metabolic imbalance , albeit, until this was eventually, a proven medical fact. 

The proveability of both the herb Marijuana and also problems like hypoglycemia are now just water under the bridge. My epilepsy is gone, along with the condition of hypoglycemia itself. I NEVER habituated marijuana, and it certainly proved Dr. Smalls' original study that the use of the herb is actually non - addictive. I don't smoke up anymore.

I think that the quality of the smoke which leaves one with enhancements to vision or consciousness, a factor which was proven by Dr. Small, is actually the reason it is non- addictive, in that it may be a cleaner for both external visual processes and for the occipital brain functions for vision.

Dr. Smalls' initial study stated, merely, that Marijuana left permanent occipital changes.He did not say whether the changes were for the better or vice versa. It stands to reason though, that if the herb is non-addictive and leaves one with enhanced visual powers that one has used a medicine in order to clear the body, and that, simply, it works for the good of health.

"An Italian research team reported in 1998 that the endocannabinoid anandamide, which binds to the same brain receptors as cannabis, "potently and selectively inhibits the proliferation of human breast cancer cells in vitro" by interfering with their DNA production cycle. (12,13) Non-mammary tumor cells were not affected by anandamide. Clearly, further research is necessary and appropriate."

reading:Prostate PC-3 cells

I would like to stand up and be counted for the actual bliss my body went into very naturally from yoga and eastern meditation. I was followed around by the unaware drug enforcers for years by people whose only belief system for a blissful woman was their idea that I must have been on coke.

Once one transcends ordinary social inhibitions, drugs are just for medicine, when one truly needs them. And fie on drug enforcement when it seeks to undo what The Great Unpretender has so justly allowed as nature in a persons soul.

(From an article called: "Herb Remedy")

Scientific American:www.sciam.com (Explore/ Herb Remedy)

"Ultimately, advocates of marijuana as natural medicine may find their work superseded by developments stemming from discoveries of cannabinoid receptors in the human body--and of molecules that bind to them. Some research groups are seeking analogues to the binding molecules naturally present in the body that might provide therapeutic benefits superior to those of plant-based cannabinoids."

In a site page called "snitch", readings offer some balance to the feeding frenzy of US drug enforcers and their starchy warning pages, in the same site , about substance abuse and the law. In this article, Professor Blumensen warns that peoples rights have been violated by a law which permits the seizure of all assets during a drug bust, not just of the dealers' or growers' funds, but of their relatives or found ins, should there be various types of contacts.

Typically, big business has superceded the common sense inherent in drug crime prevention through the greed of some US  police outfits, whom, the Professor of Law reports, are busting some people for their housing by first estimating realty value and, papers in hand ( at times) planting evidence so that their relatives can get a cheap deal on housing ownership. DIS-grace!!There is a report about some old Mom who had nothing to do with her sons dealings in drugs. She has lost her only family home due to this law.

The work is well worth reading in its entirety. Now that pharmaceuticals are often upward of two hundred dollars, not too many people can always afford the medicines they need. That's why I grow my own herbs.Excluding some of the agrarians experimenting with marijuana may dismiss and bury some very fine scientific talent.

A case in point - a naturalists' discoveries of uses for the common peanut, brought to us by George Washington Carver.  Dr. Carver was an uneducated black guy with an affinity for plants, back in the thirties. He ran a plant hospital for years, until his work with the peanut was discovered. Even though racial issues were still stringently opposed to negro peoples' development back in the old days, Dr. Carver was offered an education as a chemist, and became a reknowned researcher.