Doctors confused about medical marijuana

I've had occasion to interview several MDs as my wife and I search for doctors here in Portland, where marijuana consumption has been legal since last year. The situation is this: my wife has chronic pain in her legs, chronic insomnia, and bouts of depression. She has discovered that there is one and only one drug that can help her with these problems.

She has tried the drugs prescribed by doctors, but started having suicidal thoughts and stopped immediately. So when she goes looking for a doctor, the first thing she asks is, Do you prescribe marijuana for your patients? The answer is invariably, no.

Doctors seem perplexed. The young ones recently left medical school, where they learned absolutely nothing about the possible benefits of medical marijuana, while the older ones grew up in the days when we were all told that marijuana was incredibly addictive and useless for the treatment of any disease.

Now that marijuana is legal for medicinal purposes in many states, and likely soon will be legal in many more, doctors need to know more than just what the law says. They need to treat marijuana like any other drug that may possibly be helpful to their patients.

The problem here is akin to the problem with taking action on global warming. Millions of dollars are being spent to convince people that global is not real and that nothing can be done about it, or, worse, that it is a conspiracy to part them from their money. These millions of dollars have convinced a large segment of the population that scientists are dishonest charlatans who make millions from their lies.

These aren't the only cases of attacking scientists, who are frequently the messengers of truths that people don't want to hear. Tobacco companies spent millions fighting against claims that nicotine was addictive and caused cancer. The residual effects of this campaign are that some people still refuse to believe that smoking is bad for them. They also refuse to believe that second-hand smoke is also bad for them, despite numerous studies that show second-hand smoke is almost as bad as smoking itself.

This disbelief in science is a byproduct of capitalism. Corporations will spread propaganda (only they call it public relations) to keep their product from being outlawed and keep the money flowing into their bank accounts. They do not care how many people die as a result of their actions. They only care about the bottom line--the profits they make from the suffering of others.

Those who attack the Supreme Court for its Citizen's United ruling--that lets corporations and wealthy individuals spend as much money as they like to elect politicians to do their bidding--are missing the point. It's capitalism itself that permits the winning capitalists to impose their wills on the losers. Capitalism itself is causing the collapse of human societies all over the world.

We must find an alternative before it is too late. Or is it already too late?

New York Times Does Hatchet Job On Amazon

Over the weekend the New York Times published a hatchet job about the company culture at Amazon.com. You can tell it's a hatchet job--meaning an article intended to unfairly and one-sidedly attack some one or thing--because the article goes on at length about the terrible employee morale at Amazon. For example, the article says:

The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses.

Now there's a revelation. The company encourages employees to fink on their fellows to get in tight with management. The problem here is that every company in the world has employees who rat on their fellows. Nothing new or different here.

A more serious charge is the following:

Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.

But this is the sort of thing that happens in many large corporations, including Apple and Microsoft. The fault lies not with the company, but the law. The law says employment is "at will", which means the company can fire you at any time for any reason.

The Times could have written an exposé of personnel practices in American corporations and shown how only unionization could protect the workers from these practices, since just having the CEO say he'll take care of it will not cut it. But this is not about personnel practices. This article is about how bad Amazon is, no matter how little the company differs from every other capitalist company.

The underlying reason for this hatchet job is the print media's anger, frustration, and hatred of digital media. Amazon happens to be the focal point. The anger felt by members of the print media against Amazon is real and unreasonable. I recently self-published my own book with a print-on-demand publisher who is affiliated with Amazon. I went to an independent bookstore in Washington, DC, and asked them if I could have a book-signing event at their store. They told me it was their policy not to hold book-signings for books published by Amazon.

"Wait a minute," I complained. "Your policy is not going to hurt Amazon, but it will hurt me and other authors like me who need a chance to bring their work before the public."

The management than assured me that if anyone ordered my book, they would be glad to fill that order. In other words, they were throwing a roadblock in my path to success, but if I ever, somehow managed to succeed, they would be glad to share my profit with me.

Thanks, guys. Your generosity is overwhelming.

But anger against Amazon is justifiable because people in the newspaper and bookselling industry are losing their livelihood with no possibility of recovery. The anger is not going to help, though. These jobs are going away and will never come back. These white-collar, salaried positions are not being moved to Singapore or China. They are vanishing. Automation is destroying them.

There is a hatchet job that could be done about that, but it's not one that the New York Times wants to write. It's a story about how capitalism is failing to provide jobs for the people that automation is making obsolete. This automation is making big profits for corporations like Amazon and its ilk, but it isn't doing much for newspapers like the Times, which has laid off hundreds of employees in recent years. (Question: How many of those layoffs harm the employees who were fired through no fault of their own?)

We need a serious examination of what this country is going to do right now to help people made redundant by automation. Tomorrow will be too late. Today is too late, already, frankly, as we have the spectacle of billionaires running the country for their own benefit without a single sincere concern for the people who must pay for their abundance.

Socialism or Democracy?

Capitalism has failed everywhere it has been tried. The US is the last bastion of corporate capitalism, and everywhere we look we see failures to comprehend and resolve the issues of the day. Yet in one important way, capitalists have succeeded. The top capitalists, the one percent, control more than one third of all the wealth in the country. The rich have succeeded by a series of political maneuvers that have each left a residue of wealth on them, like the ring in a bathtub.

1. The ultra-rich have defeated trade unionism.

The unions once challenged the ultra-rich at the ballot box and won concessions that led to a higher standard of living for all. The ultra-rich countered by passing laws like the Taft-Hartley Act, that nullified New Deal legislation favoring unions and made it possible for companies to kill unions outright. The ultra-rich blamed big unions for the loss of jobs in heavy industry, like steel production, automobiles, and the garment industries. Common people believed the propaganda against unions and stopped supporting them.

2. The ultra-rich have harnessed the government like a mule.

While they decry big government, the ultra-rich are the ones who profit most from it. The war-mongers in congress pay $500 billion or more annually to the ultra-rich to provide guns and bullets and other materials of war--when there is no war going on! The super-rich also get subsidies for various industries like farming and oil extraction. 

Passing democratic social programs will mean unemployment benefits that don't get cut off, living wages determined by unions, medical care for all, day care for working parents, controls on Wall Street and hi-tech entrepreneurs, rent support, and other improvements in the lives of ordinary citizens.

No doubt conservatives will oppose these reforms the same way they oppose gay marriage, by saying that these democratic measures will harm business in some utterly vague way, without giving any details about how that harm will happen or how it will happen. Trouble is, conservatives will have a tough time selling these fears because their policies over the last 20 years have resulted in stagnant wages, permanent unemployment, urban disintegration, and jobs being created everywhere in the world but here.

3. The ultra-rich have set up a system of propaganda that includes a TV Station (Fox News(, a once-proud newspaper (Wall Street Journal), a bunch of loudmouth radio hosts, a sizable number of front groups masquerading as think tanks, and the finest Congress money can buy.

4. The ultra-rich have used defects in the US Constitution to control the government without actually winning elections. They have an unelected Supreme Court doing their bidding, dozens of gerrymandered house districts, and a bunch of Senators representing the trees in small states.

When liberals try to change the way things are today, the ultra-rich raise cries of socialism, which sounds ominous but which has lost all meaning. Socialism is actually the result of democracy, where the majority gets to govern.