Marijuana: Medical Panacea or Gateway Drug?

HS - Jason Hartman Income Property Investing (1)It is commonly known that cannabis (marijuana) helps with glaucoma and the side effects of chemotherapy. What isn’t widely known is that our bodies possess an endocannabinoid system, which regulates almost every system of our health. The phytocannabinoids produced in marijuana are very similar in molecular structure to the cannabinoids that our bodies produce. Author Clint Werner joins Jason Hartman to discuss studies that have proven the health benefits of marijuana, including for the treatment of Alzheimers, protecting the health of diabetics and fight the spread of breast cancer cells. Clint talks about the demonizing of marijuana that started in the ‘30s by Federal agents and a journalist spreading “reefer madness” throughout the country. He also discusses needed reforms. Other facts about marijuana include protecting the brain by reducing inflammation and by stimulating the production of healthy new brain cells and reducing the risk of chronic, long-term smokers for developing lung cancer. Additionally, Clint talks about the differences between strains of marijuana grown in various climates and conditions, including indoors in artificial light versus outdoors in sunlight; the health benefits of THC; smoking versus vaporization; and the numerous forms in which it is available, such as tinctures and salves.

Clint Werner has degrees in journalism and library science and has worked in the field of preventive health care for over 25 years. He studied macrobiotic cooking and practice in Boston in 1985, relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area where he co-authored the San Francisco Police Department’s health and fitness plan in 1987 and worked teaching AIDS, cancer and heart disease patients how to improve their health with diet and lifestyle changes. His writing has appeared in the book Cannabis Therapeutics in HIV/AIDS, the Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics, Macrobiotics Today, Canine Chronicle, the San Francisco Sentinel and other publications. Clint has been named “Activist of the Month” for June by NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Narrator: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary for you to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival Show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you’ll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show. This is your host Jason Hartman, where we talk about protecting the people places and profits you care about in these uncertain times. We have a great interview for you today. And we will be back with that in less than 60 seconds on the Holistic Survival Show. And by the way, be sure to visit our website at HolisticSurvival.com. You can subscribe to our blog, which is totally free, has loads of great information, and there’s just a lot of good content for you on the site, so make sure you take advantage of that at HolisticSurvival.com. We’ll be right back.

Start of Interview with Clint Werner

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Clint Werner to the show. He is the author of Marijuana Gateway to Health. And I think this subject in our culture is largely under discussed, so I wanted to do a show on it. And my grandmother was affected with Alzheimer’s very severe and eventually died from it, and I thought we’d hear about some of the benefits. I can’t imagine she would ever touch the stuff, but Clint tell us about your book and what some of the health benefits are.

Clint Werner: Well the amazing thing is many of us have heard or known about the palliative effects of marijuana for vomiting from chemotherapy and nausea and also for treatment of glaucoma. But the science is really very new in terms of cannabis and cannabinoids. And no one really knew until the late 90s or early part of this new century that we even have what’s called an endocannabinoid system and that we produce chemicals that are cannabinoids in our bodies which regulate our health. Almost every system of our health is affected by these cannabinoids.

Jason Hartman: So a cannabinoid, is that something found in marijuana?

Clint Werner: It is. Well the plant also, which is the really miraculous thing about this plant, is it produces phytocannabinoids, plant cannabinoids, that are very similar in molecular structure to the cannabinoids that our bodies produce. And that is the reason why marijuana has such a broad range of therapeutic effects and preventive effects even, on so many illnesses. Because these molecules from the plant, they supplement the activity, the pro health activity of our own naturally produced endocannabinoids from our bodies.

Jason Hartman: Well, where do I go here? There’s so much to talk about. Let’s maybe back off from the health benefits for a moment here, and let’s talk about why does marijuana have such a bad name? For example, why can’t you get the word out about this kind of stuff better? What is the suppression going on and why is it so interesting? I’ve often heard people say, Clint, they compare it to alcohol. And some people say, well the alcohol industry just has a better lobby. And that’s why we don’t have legalization. Let’s talk about some of that and you’re an activist for Normal I guess. And that’s the national organization for the reform of marijuana laws; I’m reading your bio here. Let’s talk a little bit about that side of it if we could.

Clint Werner: Well what’s fascinating you know Jason, you mentioned your grandmother. And depending on how old she was, it’s possible that in her youth she used cannabis medicines, marijuana medicines because there were tinctures and pills and extracts that were available until the late 30s, early 40s as standard remedies. They were called Indian Hemp Preparations or Cannabis Preparations.

And then there was this whole reefer madness campaign, which took the name marijuana and used that, which was a term of affection from Mexican culture because it was a plant that was really appreciated as a folk medicine and also as a euphoric agent, and they demonized it and they just put the full power of the federal government behind demonizing this plant and the use of it. And then through the 40s and 50s they linked it up with heroin and cocaine in the broad terms of dope, the category of dope. And it really wasn’t until the 60s when a large population began to experiment with marijuana again. It moved into sort of the main stream middle class youth, the white youth. And it effected a broad enough population that it intersected with some people who were seriously ill and they found that it worked for them, and that’s how we’ve sort of had this renaissance of medical marijuana because people found out that the reefer madness campaign was really a pack of lies, and not based in science but in superstition and bigotry.

Jason Hartman: So why was it demonized? If there were products using various extracts and so forth up until I think you said the 40s, and my grandmother was born in 1912, she was 96 when she passed away. So where did the demonization come from?

Clint Werner: It started in the 30s with Harry Anslinger. It’s really interesting. What really looks to have happened is that as prohibition was repealed, there was a huge population, a huge group of federal agent that didn’t have jobs. The revenuers. And so they targeted cannabis and Randolph Hearst who had the chain of newspapers throughout our country, he conducted the reefer madness hysteria campaign about youth who were using marijuana were ax murdering their parents and it was making white women go out and have sexual relations with black men, and it was just this whole horrible campaign that just drummed it into people that this was only something that degenerates and lowlifes would use and that it’s really harmful and will just wreck you physically and morally. And on and on, they kept on and hammered it and hammered it and the American medical association was bullied into compliance.

And they ceased their resistance to it, which they initially had. They protested the criminalization of these remedies. But the narcotics bureau bullied them into compliance and we ended up with this really sad state of affairs where this incredible therapeutic plant has just been blockaded from use by humanity.

Jason Hartman: Well that’s quite an interesting history. I never knew this stuff, what you’ve shared here. So basically the genesis of it is the government trying to expand their power and bureaucracy and keep themselves employed, basically. That sounds like the start, right?

Clint Werner: Right. It was a make work effort in a sense.

Jason Hartman: As it is with so many things in government. And thus one of my many reasons for disdain for government. But what’s kind of interesting about it is if you look at government and laws and so forth, really the government outlaws anything that changes one state, except alcohol. Well I guess you could say nicotine and caffeine change your state and other things do too to a lesser degree. But alcohol is the main one that can really induce massive state changes. But everything that changes your state is illegal, except alcohol and nicotine right?

Clint Werner: Right. And I think caffeine is a good point because I really find that cannabis, marijuana’s effects are much more similar to caffeine than to alcohol. Because alcohol is so thoroughly impairing and you just don’t find that with marijuana. I’ve gone to a lot of cannabis festivals and there are people there who are ingesting very large amounts of marijuana and hashish and you don’t see people staggering around, no one’s falling into anyone’s set up, no one’s picking a fight, no one’s throwing up in the corner. To me, it is more of a mood altering effect, more like caffeine. Instead caffeine’s a stimulant and cannabis is a little bit more of a relaxant and a thought provoking agent. Although there are some strains of cannabis that have some type of stimulant effect, sort of motivating, which most people don’t know that there are some that can get you up and moving.

Jason Hartman: Well don’t we have to Clint, to talk about this honestly, don’t we have to make the distinction between marijuana of the olden days, where it got so popular in the 60s and so forth and the 70s, and then marijuana today that is far more powerful and maybe that additional power is more dangerous?

Clint Werner: Not physiologically or organically because the compounds, if you have more cannabinoids, you’re just getting more of the beneficial compounds. And there was a study with rats and mice that found that the more they ingested orally, the less cancer they got and the longer they lived. And they really dosed those rats and mice up.

So the issue with potency is that in the 60s and 70s, most of the cannabis was imported from Columbia or Mexico and it was grown outside in mass and it was seeded. There was some really exceptionally strong marijuana available if you knew the right people from Hawaii or Thailand and what people did – you know it’s funny they say that marijuana makes people a-motivated, not really motivated to engage in life and accomplish things, but the marijuana growers and aficionados took the plant and they really managed to, through selective breading to take those best plants available, optimize the conditions in which they’re grown in, take them from sort of plantations to more boutique cultivation and just really optimize what they have.

So the government wants to make it sound like there’s some sort of frankenweed out there that’s really dangerous. It’s just that people have taken the strongest cannabis available and made it far more available to broader range of people.

Jason Hartman: So what did they do? How did it get more powerful? Did they just learn how to grow it? Was it genetically modified? How come it got so much more powerful from the 60s and 70s to the more modern version of it?

Clint Werner: It was produced in mass in the 60s and 70s in these plantations down south, central America and it was seeded. So when it seeded you have less volume of potency because you’ve got the seeds, which you can’t really use other than to cultivate or to eat. But that’s another story. So what the hippies did essentially, you couldn’t really grow that type; there’s two strains or forms of marijuana. There’s sativa and indica. Sativa needs a tropical environment and it matures very slowly and it doesn’t produce a whole lot of volume. The indica from more mountains cooler regions matures much more quickly, the harvest is a shorter time, and so they started hybridizing these plants so that they could grow in north America because the tropical plants could not grow before the season went bad. But they hybridized, got plants that were really potent that then they could harvest here in North America.

Then when Ronald Reagan launched his campaign against marijuana production and started a paramilitary assault on outdoor cultivation in Hawaii and northern California, people went inside. And I think that might be one of the issues that people are experiencing when they have…some people that smoked in the 60s and 70s and 80s try some of the pot today and they have uncomfortable experiences. And I think some of that is because indoor grown cannabis is really strong, but because it’s not been exposed to the sun, I find it a little imbalanced. It’s not as smooth, it’s not as euphoric, it’s a little more insistent in the effects.

Jason Hartman: You’re really a connoisseur. It sounds like if you just change the words around you’re describing a fine wine there.

Clint Werner: I rode through the wine country recently and I just looked at all these hills covered with vineyards and grape vines and I thought gosh, that should be cannabis.

Jason Hartman: Oh my god.

Clint Werner: And that was shortly after I had a rather bad burn on my hand, and I have an ointment, Mary Jane’s Salve, cannabis infused. And it was hurting up to my elbow. I grabbed a pot that was too close to a burner on the counter, burned a couple of fingers and my thumb and it was just hurting all the way up to my elbow, went in, slapped on some of this salve because I’d heard it was good for burns. The pain stopped 100% within 15 seconds. No blistering, no redness. It was amazing. And I just said they should have this burn remedy in every burn center and every first responder vehicle in the nation, if not the world.

Jason Hartman: Well there’s all these powers that be that control all of this stuff. Now, you have to admit though Clint, are you recommending that people smoke it? Is that where they get the health benefits from? Or do they get it in a pill? I know some cancer patients can get prescriptions and so forth or pain meds; I think they can get THC pills I believe?

Clint Werner: Yeah that stuff just does not work the way cannabis does. it’s a synthetic version of THC isolated from all the other plant, well it’s not even isolated. It’s taken out of the context, removed completely from the nature of the plant and it’s supportive components in the plant besides THC that work with THC to support its effects. And the synthetic THC just does not have the effects.

Now smoking has problems. The interesting thing is that chronic long term marijuana smokers have been shown to have up to a 37% reduction in the likelihood of developing lung cancer when compared to non-smokers.

Jason Hartman: Well that’s what I was going to ask you about. It must be bad for your lungs.

Clint Werner: Well the smoke is very similar in some of its harmful gas and particulate matter profiles to that of Tabaco. But the interesting thing is that you don’t have nicotine which is an irritating and constricting chemical, but you have THC which is an anti-inflammatory compound, which actually expands the airwaves instead of contracting them. And THC has powerful anti-tumor activity. It attacks tumors and prevents them from producing blood vessels to feed themselves. It also triggers what’s called apoptosis which is targeted cell death in tumors. So that’s why you see chronic long term marijuana smokers actually having a lower lung cancer risk than people who don’t smoke anything.

But vaporization is the way to go for patients if you’re going to do an inhalation method. Because it liberates the healing compounds and creates none of the harmful smoke. So you just get the good without having to get over the hurtle of the bad.

But there are also tinctures, there are pills, there’s sprays that people can administer under the tongue. And that’s what the state legalization here in California and Colorado and other states has done. It’s permitted this to be taken out of the context of the black market, where you’re not going to be able to get a topical salve or a remedy that is low potency and calculated to relieve suffering but not get you high, or a strain of marijuana that has a low THC and a high CBD which is another cannabinoid that has no psychoactive effect, ratio. So you can get CBD which has anti breast cancer effects, anti-epilepsy effects, and seems to work against diabetes but it won’t get you high. But you’re not going to be able to get that from a street dealer.

Jason Hartman: Very interesting. If it were legal, people would really have access to all these other options right?

Clint Werner: Right. Because I always make the point that closing the dispensaries is just so idiotic and short sighted, because the stoners are going to get their weed. It’s the cancer patients and the Alzheimer’s patients, and the people who have chronic pain who have never been part of cannabis culture, high times life. They don’t know where and you can’t get these things unless you go to a dispensary because the dispensaries contract with people who produce these. And it’s only when you have a plethora, a large amount of cannabis grown, that you can experiment in producing these remedies. We’re reviving a whole branch of medicine that was lost back in the 30s.

Jason Hartman: And what about the people who say well, they used to put cocaine in Coca Cola. That wasn’t good. Just because it was done in the past up until the 30s, 40s.

Clint Werner: You can use cocaine as a medicine in the United States though, and you cannot use cannabis as a medicine in the United States.

Jason Hartman: What is cocaine good for? That’s a medicine?

Clint Werner: It’s an anesthetic. And it works for numbing, especially in dental and ocular surgery. And I believe that it is actually a pretty effective migraine remedy. I personally have no interest in cocaine for anything unless It works when I’m at the dentist or god forbid I had to get eye surgery. But there are medical uses for it and it’s a schedule 2 drug whereas cannabis is a schedule 1 drug that says it has no medical uses and a high risk of abuse.

Jason Hartman: Tell us about those schedules if you would. People have probably heard of them, but what’s on the schedule and how does it work?

Clint Werner: Well they were developed by John Mitchell who was Nixon’s Attorney General henchman because Timothy Leary had the old marijuana tax act thrown out. He was arrested for a joint by federal agents in a customs area when trying to cross into Mexico and I think he was sentenced to 37 years. And he appealed the sentence because the old tax act that had criminalized marijuana, in other words it was a federal tax act. If you didn’t pay and get a tax stamp for your marijuana, which wasn’t available anyway, sort of a catch 22, then you could be charged with a crime. Well they found that if he had declared the marijuana and tried to pay the tax, he would be declaring himself guilty of state law in Texas.

Jason Hartman: So that would be like a 5th amendment violation right?

Clint Werner: Yeah, double jeopardy or whatever.

Jason Hartman: Well he’s incriminating himself.

Clint Werner: Yeah to comply with federal law would mean incriminating himself at the state level.

Jason Hartman: This is why a lot of times really what they get the drug dealers for is tax evasion.

Clint Werner: Right. Frequently. So that’s how they’re trying to shut down the dispensaries actually. So anyway, the old marijuana tax law act was thrown out right in 1969, the summer of Woodstock. So there were no federal laws against marijuana during the period of Woodstock. So they crafted this new approach which was scheduling, the controlled substance scheduling procedure. And it was not conceived or implemented by a physician or a medical expert; it was a right wing lawyer with a bias against any kind of cannabis or psychedelic use, a heavy bias. So what they did was they put marijuana in schedule 1, which means it has no medical use and a high threat for abuse, along with heroin, LSD, and some other compounds.

Jason Hartman: That is shocking. I never know that. So the government really thinks of marijuana like it does LSD and heroin?

Clint Werner: Oh absolutely.

Jason Hartman: That’s crazy.

Clint Werner: It is crazy. And even one of the men who had researched cannabis with the veteran’s administration, he’s named Dr. Hollister, he said that he found it just insane and absurd and no medical professional he’d spoken to could see any reason for implementing this schedule. Because it would make a mockery of respect for the government’s authority and advising people what substances are harmful. In other words, you have methamphetamine was a schedule 2. But cannabis was schedule 1. So they were saying that cannabis is more harmful than methamphetamine and cocaine.

Jason Hartman: That’s absolute insanity. Meth has got to be the most dangerous drug in the world. I have heard stories, I have seen documentaries. That is one scary substance.

Clint Werner: It’s the fastest road to hell in the drug world by far.

Jason Hartman: So they did this and there was a move to challenge this and to say, well no this can’t be right. So there was a presidential commission empaneled, Nixon stacked it with far right ideologues, but they looked at the evidence. And after they looked at the evidence and traveled and really studied marijuana and cannabis. They went to Afghanistan and looked at the hash fields and anyway they came back and said our suggestion is that criminalization is far more harmful than use. We recommend legalizing personal use and exchanges of small amounts for no financial gain and continue criminalization of massive cultivation and importation until we can see how this plays out and maybe try to wrestle with that in the future. And Nixon buried it. He rejected it.

So that’s how marijuana is still schedule 1. And let me even give you something that’s even more horrifying and shocking. So in the United States there is a congressional mandate that prevents any research into marijuana’s benefits. You cannot conduct research in the United States and you cannot do a study, conduct a study, that is designed to show benefits to asses if marijuana has a benefit.

Jason Hartman: Are you kidding me? So you cannot study the product?

Clint Werner: For benefit. For harm only. The national institute on drug abuse is the gatekeeper for research grade marijuana and for funding and approval for studies on controlled substances. And their congressional mandate is to only study harm or chemistry.

Jason Hartman: Well wait a sec, wait a sec. I think there’s a distinction here though. That’s if you want to get funding. The government won’t fund your study…

Clint Werner: It’s more to get material. The only source for marijuana to study is the national institute on drug abuse. You have to go through them to get research marijuana.

Jason Hartman: Okay but you could buy it from a drug dealer and study it in your own lab.

Clint Werner: No you can’t, because that’s not going to be approved by your human research comity, your supervising institution or any of the state boards, or the FDA. You have to go through NIDA, and NIDA is the only approved source for research marijuana in the United States.

Jason Hartman: This is insane. In a country where we have a first amendment, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, that is unbelievable.

Clint Werner: In fact, Dr. Abrams, Donald Abrams who is one of the few people who has done research in human beings with cannabis. He tried twice to do a study to see if it benefited people with aids for weight gain apatite. It was rejected twice. And when he pitched it as a harm assessment study to see if marijuana interfered with aids drug absorption and then added secondary values to find benefit, it was sort of a Trojan horse effort, that’s how you have to try and do it. And no one does it. Because it’s so discouraged and it’s so hard to do and there’s no funding support. And then some of the major journals have hostility to publishing any research that shows beneficial outcome.

Jason Hartman: Yeah I had a little bit of concern about doing a show on this actually. So kind of same thing. I want to ask you two questions right now. First of all, what do you say to the gateway drug argument? People say. Well gosh if someone starts smoking pot they’re going to end up doing LSD and heroin and cocaine and meth before you know it. What about that?

Clint Werner: Well there’s no scientific support. That’s just a myth that has been perpetrated by the government. Studies have shown that marijuana use does not prime rats or mice to use cocaine or heroin. And there’s also a quote from my book, I just turned to it, “statistics show that over 40% of Americans have ever used marijuana while only 1.3% have used heroin. That’s a pretty poor conversion rate for a gateway drug. “

People don’t go leap from cannabis marijuana to heroin. If there is any association of transferring from marijuana use to other drug use, it is from the illegality where someone goes to buy from a dealer and there’s a poly drug assortment at the dealers and he’s trying to encourage them. You know, you like this weed, maybe you want to try this. Maybe you want to try this, look what I’ve got over here. That’s the real gateway drug, is criminalization.

Jason Hartman: Well that’s an interesting point. It’s the drug dealer trying to expand their product line and upgrade their customer. That’s where the conversion occurs, huh? So Clint, if the US government is just making it virtually impossible to research health benefits, to do anything, it’s schedule 1; that’s mind boggling to me. I never knew that. What goes on in other countries? Portugal recently I guess, decriminalized all drugs I believe. I can’t remember, but I remember reading or hearing that somewhere. Talk about what goes on around the world with this. Are other countries researching health benefits? Many of them have organizations similar to our FDA. What happens elsewhere?

Clint Werner: Well a lot of the research, our government reaches beyond its borders and funds a lot of international research so it also controls a lot of international research. But fortunately there are some independent researchers. Scientists out there who have decided to really look at this. Because the indications are so fascinating about what these molecules, these phytocannabinoids do in terms of human biology. How they just fit right into our chemistry and seem to amplify the good and suppress the harm. A lot of the actual molecules, the cannabinoids were actually discovered in Israel. And they are doing a lot of research in terms of actually finding applications for human use. Their posttraumatic stress disorder soldiers, soldiers who are having issues with that are being prescribed marijuana now. So they’ve actually embraced it.

You can get medical marijuana in the Netherlands. Which is interesting because they have the coffee shops but they also have pharmaceutical grade marijuana available. And a lot of this research that shows benefits is done in Spain, Israel, Italy, that’s where a lot of this is done because it’s discouraged here in the United States and we can’t get it done. It’s a shame. We’re losing. We should be the leaders in this.

Jason Hartman: Let me take a brief pause. We’ll be back in just a minute.

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Jason Hartman: I’ve got to say though, I’ve been to Amsterdam a couple of times. And my first time there, I’m pretty much a libertarian. I don’t like government getting in my way or anybody else’s. We need government but I think it should be incredibly limited. Because every time government expands, our freedom diminishes. I saw a good quote recently that said, “the larger the government, the smaller the citizen.” And I think that sums it up pretty well.

But I remember going to Amsterdam the first time thinking we should legalize at least pot in the US. Maybe not other drugs; those seem pretty dangerous. But at least pot should be legalized. And after I was there for, I think I was there for two days, I thought it was kind of scummy. I sort of didn’t have the same view when I came back. Do you have any comments on that? I don’t know if you do; maybe it’s just sort of an anecdotal observation.

Clint Werner: I don’t know, I guess that’s sort of not my experience. I went there but I’m an old hippie.

Jason Hartman: You do live in San Francisco.

Clint Werner: I don’t mind patchouli and sweat so much. But people tend to focus on that. That’s what you tend to see I guess, and people associate it; because of the brainwashing that’s what you’d expect. But I would say for every sort of freaky looking slacker there is, I think there are probably 5 achievers.

Jason Hartman: No I agree. I know a lot of very successful people who smoke pot. I’m not saying the hippie looking people. I just thought, you know I saw like condom wrappers in the gutter in the street and syringes lying around. That’s what I was referring to when I was talking about Amsterdam.

Clint Werner: Oh I never saw any of that when I was there.

Jason Hartman: I don’t know, maybe they cleaned it up. They don’t like picking up after their dogs over there either. They love dogs, but…

Clint Werner: Oh I hate that. We have dogs and you’ve got to pick up.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, definitely. What’s interesting about this is that it sort of seems like the government wants to regulate our state of mind. And what I was saying earlier, except alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, some other things I guess, it sort of begs the question, what business is it of the government to regulate one’s state of mind? If someone wants to engage in escapism, why does the government have a say in that? I’m not even saying necessarily that it’s a healthy behavior, but the fact is that people do it. Why does the government have a say in that? It just sort of seems wrong to me.

Clint Werner: Well it is wrong in my opinion. I don’t think that the government should be able to tell me how I think, what I think and what I express from what I think. But what you mentioned was, what business is it of the government? And tragically, this is exactly what we’re seeing. It is a business of the government’s to continue this prohibition of cannabis because it feeds people, fairly compliant, passive people into the prison industrial complex; which is now turning into sort of a make-work or an employee agency for private corporations, slave labor for private corporations. And that’s a lot of the reason I see the government being resistant to legalization. The whole prison industrial complex, the billions of dollars that goes into law enforcement and maintaining prisons. And then you have the resistance from the pharmaceutical industry which has a lot of power because if these remedies become widely available, they’re far less harmful than many over the counter or prescription drugs. And yet they’re far more effective.

Jason Hartman: And we didn’t even really talk about the entrenched interest in the pharmaceutical industry and how they don’t want to see alternatives like this that are cheap or almost basically free from nature. They want to sell these synthetic drugs that have terrible side effects. I’ve done shows on it. Especially these “mental health” drugs.

Clint Werner: They’re unbelievable.

Jason Hartman: Oh my god. I’ve seen the destruction from them first hand.

Clint Werner: And then you take those drugs and they don’t work because your body starts to compensate, and it’s terrible.

Jason Hartman: Yeah. Whether it be Adderall, Xanax, Prozac, and those types of drugs, I think those things are extremely dangerous.

Clint Werner: I just plug a book from my friend, Dr. Andrew Weil, Spontaneous Happiness, in which he talks about the whole chemistry of happiness and all. It’s a great book.

Jason Hartman: Good to know. Well hey, give out your website and tell people where they can get your book.

Clint Werner: My website is www.MarijuanaGatewayToHealth.com, one string of characters: MarijuanaGatewayToHealth.com. And I’m on Facebook. The book’s available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble Online, Nook and Kindle. You can go to your bookstores. Please go to an independent bookstore and buy a book. Help them out. Or order it – that would be great.

Jason Hartman: And then finally, I just want to ask you Clint, are there any action steps people can take if they believe what you’re saying? Should they donate money to Normal, how do they get involved? Maybe you talk about this in the book. You probably do.

Clint Werner: Get mad. Because everyone is being robbed of their legacy of natural health care by keeping this incredible plant ally of humanity criminalized. It makes no sense. It is the most promising biologically active plant known to mankind. And we can’t utilize it. So you should get mad. You should write very angry letters to your legislators, call them, ask them why they don’t care about cancer, Alzheimer’s and pain patients.

We have senators here, Boxer and Feinstein, they’re worthless on this. For ‘96 we passed this and they’ve done nothing to defend the patients in California that use it. They are completely absent. And we need to start humiliating these people the way that the activists did during the aids crisis. Take off the gloves and just get in their faces and really humiliate them. Make it hard. Put pressure on these people because they are engaging in criminal activity that is rooted in bigotry and primitivism from last century. And they’re hurting people.

Jason Hartman: And what’s funny about Boxer and Feinstein is they’re liberals.

Clint Werner: They say they are.

Jason Hartman: You know, it’s like the republicans, the rhino in name only. Maybe there’s a lieno, a liberal in name only.

Clint Werner: Well, you know Jason, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a liberal but I don’t know if I’m a democrat anymore. Because like you were saying, the government encroachment on freedom, it’s unending.

Jason Hartman: Well that’s the problem and that’s where the two political parties, they kind of have to meet. Because on one end, the liberals like big government and that means there’s more influence from the big corporations because they’re basically running the government. So Boxer and Feinstein have probably sold out to the pharmaceutical cartel and they’re certainly against any of this stuff that you talk about. So that’s the problem.

Clint Werner: One does wonder how Diane Feinstein amassed a fortune of 40 to 90 million dollars while working in the senate.

Jason Hartman: Yup. That’s a very good question my friend. Maybe a topic for another show. But that’s a very good question. Well hey Clint, thank you so much. This was a very interesting talk. And keep up your work out there and keep getting the word out there. If nothing else, it’s an issue of freedom. If nothing else; not an issue of health or anything else, but just pure freedom.

Clint Werner: It is a big issue of health and freedom and people really need to educate themselves. Read my book, Marijuana Gateway to Health. It has footnotes, justified scientific studies, and then argue. Make the argument.

Jason Hartman: Good stuff. Well thanks so much. Talk to you soon.

Clint Werner: Thank you Jason. I really appreciate it.

Narrator: Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival Show. Protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating Wealth Show, which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today’s economy. Learn more at www.JasonHartman.com or search “Jason Hartman” on iTunes.

This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own, and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional. Information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed. (Image: Flickr | Torben Bjorn Hansen)

Transcribed by Ralph

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