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As long as Americans have believed that marijuana has no medical value they've looked at it with a somewhat sideways eye, but that's beginning to change. It's all pretty straightforward: most of the stuff we've been told about marijuana is a farce, and the quicker we get comfortable with the new truth—that is based in fact—the quicker we can begin to see what's really going on inside this plant.
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Essentially, we have to go back in time. If we're going to really find the full medical potential of marijuana it's going to take a new wave of breeders who are able to work closely with researchers. Together they will be able to analyze phenotypes at a chemical level, and make breeding selections based on quantified amounts of cannabinoids as opposed to making breeding selections based on how something looks, or how high you get when you smoke it.People are going to smoke marijuana, and there's nothing that can be done about it as the failed War on Drugs has shown. However, what we've found is that if you banish marijuana because people want to get high, you also banish the medicinal properties. Why, in a culture where we support the recreational use of alcohol and tobacco—which both have negligible medicinal value compared to cannabis—do we balk at the thought of cannabis being accepted? It goes back to my previous piece on prohibition and the ages of the folks making the decisions. But, at this point the cat is out of the bag: cannabis is a powerful, natural, anti-cancer medicine, and it seems to have a whole wealth of other medicinal values that are yet to be discovered. So ask your senator, ask your governor, ask your representative: "What the fuck are we doing? How come I can buy beer to kill me and get prescribed synthetic medicines that cause side effects, but I can't get weed? "ZACHARY G. MOLDOFtwitter.com/imzachgClick here for last week's Weed Dealings

