Because it helps me to feel slightly less weird – and doesn’t postmodern life do a good enough job of making us all feel just weird enough – I am going to assume that I am not the only one who’s been sitting around this winter coming up with more apt monikers for the initials of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The best I’ve come up with is Dumbest Ever Assholes. I realize this does not propel me directly into Oscar Wilde/Eminem territory on the wit scale, but if we are all being honest here, most of my other attempts get bogged down almost instantly and I’m left with a string of Douche ______ Agency and Dong Eating _____-type non sequiturs, which do little to lessen my absolute disgust for this “enforcement” body.
The DEA, like so many other government programs, is the proverbial pig gloriously luxuriating in its own mess. Scandal- ridden (google “DEA scandals” and prepare to laugh) and seemingly above any oversight, a well-supported case can be made that we, as a nation, would be better served by slashing its nearly $3 billion budget by about 90 percent and requiring the agency to justify, to citizen oversight committees, how its actions defend public interests. Additionally, it should be stripped of its ability through its asset-forfeiture program to confiscate cash and property seized in raids. Most significantly, as a result of the most recent breach of logic in the tactics for fighting the “War on Drugs,” the DEA should be immediately removed from the venue of cannabis-related interests, left to focus on things like methamphetamine (the kind made from Sudafed, not, of course, the kind pushed by Big Pharma for our schoolchildren) as suggested in Doug Benson’s
The most recent reason for my outrage with these goons is the agency’s decision last month to take steps to more formally establish its position against CBD oil, a chemical compound found in the hemp plant that has displayed astounding healing properties and is absolutely non-psychoactive. To make a comparison, the relationship between THC (the compound responsible for the cannabis high) and CBD is of the order of that between heroin and loperamide, an opium-derived medicine that does not cross the blood-brain barrier – rendering it ineffectual as an intoxicant – which is used to treat diarrhea.
CBD, or cannabidiol, is the medicine of inflammation and arthritis relief, of anxiety-lessening, of seizure-reduction, and cancer fighting and. As such, it is prized by the people whose decades of life leave them sore in the mornings and after increased activity, like my parents who love the salve I gave them for Christmas, by athletes – watch the NFL playoff games this weekend and ask yourself if those guys wouldn’t be served by a non-narcotic pain treatment, by those for whom more mainstream medicines supported by the FDA and DEA have failed to help, and, most significantly, by children who suffer from epilepsy and other seizure disorders. CBD came into the national spotlight following research by Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN, who looked into the case of a young girl named Charlotte Figi from Colorado whose parents discovered in CBD a life-changing medicine which reduced her grand mal seizures caused by Dravet’s Syndrome, a form of epilepsy, from approximately three hundred per week to almost none.
This, friends, is where the DEA is directing its efforts. I don’t understand it and I’m sure I never will.
Christopher Gallagher lives with his wife and their four dogs and two horses. Life is pretty darn good. Contact him at [email protected].
