The first source I decided to look at was an article published in a recent issue of Westword magazine. The article was entitled, “Garden of Weedin’ ” by William Breathes, who is a medical marijuana patient in Colorado as well as a journalist for Westword magazine. This article talked about how cannabis was introduced to America, how it was traditionally used, and how it caught a bad rep. So how did cannabis get here in America? According to Breathes, it arrived in the slave trade sometime in the 1500’s. Once it arrived, all different kinds of people used the flower for all sorts of reasons. Mexican soldiers would smoke it to ease the pain of wound earned in battle, Native Americans adopted it and used it for spiritual reasons in ceremonies for it resembled their ancient drug of peyote. Later in the northern parts of the U.S. Hemp was grown for its wonderful fibers and Breathes even quotes George Washington in saying, “Make the most of the Indian hemp seed, sow it everywhere.” On the medical side, in the 1800’s, cannabis oil was a common ingredient in medical tinctures. In the south however, cannabis was beginning to catch a bad rep from the newly settled whites. The minorities already living in the area who had been using cannabis for years were seen as inferior beings to the whites and the propaganda began associating smoking cannabis with an inferior lifestyle making it so the white population would avoid using the plant. Breathes says, “Officials and the media began calling the herb ‘marijuana’ rather than the traditional ‘cannabis’ because it sounded more like Spanish and was therefore scarier to whites.” Early anti-marijuana campaigns usually targeted the Mexicans and Mexican immigrants, saying that they are the cause and source of the marijuana epidemic. Then, shortly after California banned cannabis in 1913, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada did the same between 1915 and 1917. Breathes ends by discussing Amendment 64, which just passed in Colorado. He says that the amendment will allow the government to tax cannabis and that the first $400,000 of this cannabis tax will go directly to public school construction projects across the state. Overall he feels that this is a good amendment that is a good step forward and out of the wrongful prohibition.
My next source is a website, http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/, and it looks at the pros and cons to using marijuana medicinally in an article called, “Should Marijuana be a Medical Option.” One major con was that in 1972, congress made marijuana a schedule 1 drug and considered it to have, “no accepted medical use.” Another argument against using marijuana in the article is, ” Opponents of medical marijuana argue that it is too dangerous to use, lacks FDA-approval, and that various legal drugs make marijuana use unnecessary. They say marijuana is addictive, leads to harder drug use, interferes with fertility, impairs driving ability, and injures the lungs, immune system, and brain. They say that medical marijuana is a front for drug legalization and recreational use.” But on the pro side of using medical marijuana, the article states, “Proponents of medical marijuana argue that it can be a safe and effective treatment for the symptoms of cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, pain, glaucoma, epilepsy, and other conditions. They cite dozens of peer-reviewed studies, prominent medical organizations, major government reports, and the use of marijuana as medicine throughout world history.”
Finally, my third source is another website article from, http://gothamist.com/2012/07/15/pro-medical_marijuana_brooklyn_judg.php, called, “Pro-Medical Marijuana Brooklyn Judge Dies From Cancer.” The judge, Gustin Reichbach expressed his feelings on medical marijuana to the New York Times, “My survival has demanded an enormous price, including months of chemotherapy, radiation hell and brutal surgery… Inhaled marijuana is the only medicine that gives me some relief from nausea, stimulates my appetite, and makes it easier to fall asleep.” says Reichbach. The former judge also told the Times, “Being treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, I am receiving the absolute gold standard of medical care. But doctors cannot be expected to do what the law prohibits, even when they know it is in the best interests of their patients. When palliative care is understood as a fundamental human and medical right, marijuana for medical use should be beyond controversy…” Clearly marijuana offers relief that simply can’t be had with any legal drug out there. Last, he says, “Given my position as a sitting judge still hearing cases, well-meaning friends question the wisdom of my coming out on this issue. But I recognize that fellow cancer sufferers may be unable, for a host of reasons, to give voice to our plight. It is another heartbreaking aporia in the world of cancer that the one drug that gives relief without deleterious side effects remains classified as a narcotic with no medicinal value.” Here, he is noting that it’s terrible that cancer patients have to suffer because congress made cannabis illegal on the faulty reasoning that it has no accepted medical value.
After analyzing my research on medical marijuana, and being a MMJ patient myself for over one year now, I cannot see how anyone could refuse the true medicinal value of cannabis. I believe that anyone who looks down on cannabis use before knowing the facts and only having the ‘stoner stereotypes’ to fall back on is absolutely ignorant and hypocritical. Anybody who drinks alcohol is using a mind altering drug that has serious health risks tied to it in the brain, liver, and stomach. I am willing to bet that they aren’t using it medicinally. And furthermore, one certainly cannot overdose and potentially die from using cannabis too much, as they easily could, and do every day, with alcohol. So with this in mind, I argue: Why should cannabis remain prohibited while alcohol was permitted to break free from its former prohibition? We have judges like Gustin Reichbach, who cried out for someone to listen to the fact that cancer patients like him NEED this innocent herb, but sadly, his and the cries of many others have been ignored. However, things have recently took a change for the better in the cannabis culture here in Colorado. With the passing of Amendment 64 by Colorado voters, cannabis will soon be legalized to citizens twenty-one and up. As you probably would have guessed, I agree with Breathes one-hundred percent in that he proves exactly how and why cannabis was wrongfully prohibited and intentionally given a bad rep.
Matters of Concern In American Food
It is time to address the growing concern about the quality of the food here in America. I simply cannot stand to see anybody, especially obese people though, chug down extra large, “diet” sodas or shovel down sugar free cookies and other snacks! These things are poisonous! Aspartame, sodium benzoate, sorbitol, etc… all poison, legalized, FDA approved, government subsidized poison.
Way too many people are purchasing hormone injected, preservative filled cow bits, oops, I mean ground beef. yummy! Why is this the case? Is it because it is the most affordable option? Is it because our governments subsidies are creating an inelastic need for the shitty beef in families that can’t afford the organic beef given their socioeconomic position and the state of the current economy?
According to an article by Ethan A. Huff on Truththeory.com, USDA caves to food industry pressures, “After intense lobbying by Kraft Foods Global Inc. and Kemin Food Technologies, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), has agreed to reverse existing regulations that prohibit the use of three toxic meat preservatives.” That’s right, we are working backwards. instead of getting more and more harmful preservatives banned, we are just allowing more to be in our meat. Why are these unnatural substances in our food to begin with? Well, we all know that they are supposed to make the meat bigger and better looking as well as last longer. “FSIS has long been of the persuasion that major food corporations would attempt to use such additives to ‘conceal damage or inferiority in meat and poultry,’ but the agency’s view has apparently changed.” Says Huff. Recently, FSIS siad, “Kraft submitted data collected from its in-plant trials and from scientific studies that show that these substances do not conceal damage or inferiority, or make products appear better or of greater value than they are under the proposed conditions of use”
What is most sad to me, is that the vast majority of people are allowing this to happen by simply buying their products over and over again. Why are we buying this crap? Why are we spoon feeding it to our kids? Stop it! Realize your purchasing power. Stop paying for corruption.
The Bright Side of Violent Video Games
Violent video games, good or bad, the fact of the matter is that the majority of people are playing them. According to the article, “Brain Changing Games” by Lydia Denworth , more than ninety percent of youth is playing them. But it’s not all child’s-play, also according to Denworth, the average gamer age these days is 33. With so many people playing these games that promote otherwise deviant or even taboo sociological behaviors in our modern society, it is important to try to find out what real effects the games are having on our brains. Are they making us a more violent and desensitized population, or are the games sharpening our important everyday senses? (or both?)
The article, “Brain Changing Games” by Lydia Denworth mainly focuses on the ways that playing violent games helps improve our overall brain power. First, Denworth delves into how it was not that long ago when believing that playing violent games was a recipe for turning your brain into idiot stew was the popular way of thinking. After many years of research on this stereotype though, Denworth claims that this is not at all the case.
In fact, Denworth says that all of the research points to how playing violent games can help to improve skills that can be applied all of the time in our daily lives and not just in the video games.”… a decade of research has shown that if I spent a few more hours playing Call of Duty, I could improve more than my aim and the life expectancy of my avatar. Aspects of my vision, attention, spatial reasoning and decision making would all change for the better.” says Lydia Denworth in, “Brain Changing Games.”
Next, Denworth explains that research done by neuro-scientist, Daphne Bavelier, concludes that these games in particular are already achieving the whole point of our education system, which is teaching somebody how to learn. Even the great Einstein said, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.” The article also talks about how her research has shown that videogames can help people with visual disorders.
Then, The article goes into how it is the most violent games that have the strongest positive influence on our brains, but there is also a stronger negative influence when it comes to violent behavior. Luckily though, it is currently believed that the affect that the violence has on our behavior is only temporary and brief, whereas the positive neurological effects are long lasting. The next step then, or the step currently in progress, is to figure out how to not only make video games that can improve our brains in all the ways that the extremely violent games do right now without all of the weapons and violence, but to do this and still have a game that people are going to want to buy and play.
Finally, The article covers a few more aspects of where videogames are actively improving our brains such as improving the speed of processing visual information and making a decision. Then, it briefly describes the commonly looked over or ignored presence of game addiction but this is not overwhelmingly relevant.
I found this article to be pretty informational, although it was not a first-hand study. It was merely introducing other studies that were related to the topic. The studies provided though were reliable and were conducted by credible neuro-scientists with all the aspects of a well performed experiment. The outcomes of all the experiments in this article all line up with what I had already believed myself, and that’s that violent games don’t produce violent people, violent people produce and play violent video games. I was surprised however to see just how much playing violent games can help me in the real world.
When it comes to whether or not the game companies can produce a nonviolent game that still contains all of the brain training properties that will still sell, I don’t think it is going to happen. I believe that these games can absolutely be produced, but it probably won’t sell very well. Before all of these new studies, people weren’t paying for games like Call of Duty in order to improve their spatial awareness, they were paying for the violent nature of the game. they were paying to kill people in a virtual world and I would bet that this is still the case today. I believe that this article did not do a very good job of saying how game companies were planning on accomplishing this task.
People are, and have always been a violent breed. In macro terms, nothing has really changed. The introduction of videogames has not made our society any more violent then we were in the times of gladiators and coliseums. I strongly believe that someone who is not already a violent person will play Grand Theft Auto and suddenly become violent and try to imitate what they saw on the screen by running over unsuspecting pedestrians and motorcyclists. When confronted with the ignorant idea that games are stemming violence in society, I simply refer to the common phrases, “do guns kill people or do people kill people?” “do spoons make people fat? ”
All in all, this was a good and insightful article, but it could have done a lot more in introducing solutions as to how to make a successful game without incorporating the violence that everyone is currently dishing out the big bucks for. Also the article would have been more credible if it offered a first-hand experiment as opposed to just offering other experiments alongside matters of opinion.
link to Lydia Denworths article:
http://lydiadenworth.com/2013/01/brain-changing-games/
Good Vibes Music
Until next week, enjoy a good song with a positive and truthful message!
Schools Kill Creativity discussion on TED Talks
It is extremely evident that schools in America these days just do not provide the students with a rich learning environment. The schools instead just shape the minds of the youth to simply think in black and white terms, or right and wrong. The useful skill of thinking deeper than this which we are all born with, however, is quickly sucked out of most of us as children. Ken Robinson leads us to better comprehend just how the schools are doing this in the discussion he performed on TED Talks which is posted below. Check it out! http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Is Ignorance a Curable Disease? 