‘Cannabinomics’ – The Marijuana Policy Tipping Point
The gutting of our economic democracy has been occurring for years and can be found in reams of books and volumes of eyewitness testimony, but nowhere has the case for the theft of American health by their supposed corporate protectors been laid out as brilliantly as when Dr. Christopher Glenn Fichtner clears all the smoke and mirrors with his new book, Cannabinomics: The Marijuana Policy Tipping Point (Well Mind Books, 2010).
A firestorm of controversy has erupted over Dr. Fichtner’s new book Cannabinomics that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what happens behind the iron medical curtain when Americans are shown how to take ownership of this homegrown commodity and facilitate system-learning that could help solve larger global drug war problems.
Marijuana use is illegal throughout many countries of the world for reasons that are not clear. This book is important because it provides a scientific critique of the medical benefits of marijuana in light of the social, political, and legal hysteria that have been attached to it.
Cannabinomics, as Phillip Smith of the Drug War Chronicle puts it, is “Chris Fichtner’s eye-grabbing term for managing our relationship with cannabis,” in order to move from pot prohibition to regulation. Jettison the “M” word, acknowledge that cannabis is a highly valued homegrown American commodity, and get on with the task of managing its commercial integration into the economy! Why not generate new tax revenue, and create opportunities for American entrepreneurs to enter the global medicinal cannabis market?
Cannabinomics is not a medical handbook, a drug war treatise, or an economic model, so much as a work of patient and public policy advocacy. It looks at real-world medical cases, recent trends in successful policy reform, drug war costs, and the potential economic benefits of cannabis change. Brilliantly, Dr. Fichtner examines—then debunks—many of the common misconceptions about marijuana. From medical renaissance to revolution, from drug war prohibition to public health, from economic reefer madness to recovery—trajectories in public policy are converging toward regulation and economic integration of the herbal cannabis trade.
Dr. Christopher Glenn Fichtner
The incongruity of our political policies that legally prohibit individuals from gaining access to natural plant material they find indispensable for relieving debilitating systems borders on the absurd. This conversation is going on in state legislatures, like New York’s, where the draconian Rockefeller drug laws are up for review; in other states, from California to Massachusetts, various forms of marijuana decriminalization are being enacted.
The state-level medical cannabis movement is growing rapidly, but California was the only state to allow for mental health applications—until New Mexico specifically included post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on its list of acceptable indications for medicinal use of herbal cannabis. Among the many interesting ideas in Cannabinomics, Fichtner—who began his career treating combat veterans with PTSD in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)—suggests that PTSD may be a disorder for which herbal cannabis can provide broad-spectrum symptom relief. And he makes this suggestion after a very thorough discussion of how, even with FDA-approved medications like Zoloft and Paxil, it is rare to see the full spectrum of PTSD symptoms respond to treatment with just one medication. Fichtner’s extended discussion of evidence-based practice in this context is just one example of the kind of rigorous analysis—cutting across medicine, science, ethics and philosophy—that establishes this work as a unique book for our time.
There are also more puckish signs of a zeitgeist shift. All polls conducted on behalf of Cannabis usage show a public obsessed with the legalization of marijuana and its medical use. Moreover, there is an enormous potential windfall in the taxation of marijuana. It is estimated that pot is America’s largest cash crop, and potential annual revenue estimates range from $14 to $40 billion. A 10% pot tax would yield $1.5 billion in California alone. And that’s probably a fraction of the revenues that would become available — and of the economic impact, with an estimated 36,000 to 58,000 new jobs in California in agriculture, packaging, marketing, and advertising.
But there are still bigger issues of economy and simple justice, especially on the sentencing side. It’s increasingly clear that the criminalization of marijuana creates more problems than it solves. Cannabis prohibition deprives needy individuals of medicinal benefits, unnecessarily creates crimes and criminals, fuels the black market, and deprives the mainstream economy of important taxable revenue, the book points out. The U.S. is, by far, the most “criminal” country in the world, with 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. “We spend $68 billion per year on corrections, and one-third of those being corrected are serving time for nonviolent drug crimes. We spend about $150 billion on policing and courts, and 47.5% of all drug arrests are marijuana-related. That is an awful lot of money, most of it nonfederal, that could be spent on better schools or infrastructure — or simply returned to the public,” it was noted.
Inhaled, eaten, taken sublingually, vaporized, or patched onto the skin, individuals experiencing nausea, pain or muscle spasms often find immediate relief. In particular, herbal cannabis has been reported to be beneficial in cases of migraine, multiple sclerosis, chronic cancer pain, epilepsy, arthritis, AIDS, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Unlike tobacco, which exacerbates cancer, use of marijuana is associated with significantly decreased risk of some types of head and neck cancers.
Criminalization related to cannabis has proved to be unsustainable. The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences. Law enforcement agencies today spend many billions of taxpayer dollars annually trying to enforce this unenforceable prohibition.
Dr. Fichtner weeds out all the negatives regarding drug criminalization and concludes: “Cannabis change is the low-hanging fruit of drug policy reform, and medical marijuana is so ripe it’s falling off the trees in front of us.”
Last year – the city of Philadelphia changed its law enforcement approach to marijuana – and stopped jailing people for having less than 30 grams of marijuana. Now – the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office admits this new approach has saved the city over $2 million. A lot of savings can be found when a city doesn’t need to pay for defense attorney’s prosecutors, and lab tests just to bust someone for having some pot on them. Police also admit that more relaxed marijuana laws have had no effect on the city’s quality of life. “We need to take a lesson from Philadelphia – and end Richard Nixon’s Drug War,” notes Fichtner.
The author’s background: University of California, Riverside (B.S., psychobiology, 1977); University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine (M.D., 1987); psychiatry residency at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago; Certificate in Medical Management awarded jointly by the University of Southern California and the American College of Physician Executives; and board-certification in psychiatry. Between college and medical school, he attended Columbia University in the City of New York (M.A., psychology, 1979) and Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div., 1982), and completed a year of doctoral level work in religion and psychological studies at the University of Chicago. Dr. Fichtner has served on the faculty of several medical schools, including the University of Chicago, and currently holds an appointment as Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. Since 2008, he has worked as a staff psychiatrist for the Riverside County Department of Mental Health in southern California.
