Israeli Nursing Home Prescribes Medical Marijuana

Photo: NTD Television

Moshe Rott tokes up at Hadarim Geriatric Home in Israel

​Even as the Obama Administration inexplicably denies the medical benefits of marijuana, at least one Israeli nursing home is prescribing the herb to its elderly patients, reportedly with great results.

Israel’s Ministry of Health in 2008 approved limited use of medical marijuana, and now that the nation’s elderly residents are eligible for cannabis prescriptions, they’re giving it high marks, reports Andrew Belonsky at death + taxes.

“What does it do? It makes me tranquil and less uptight,” said patient Moshe Rott, reports Eric W. Dolan at Raw Story. “I’m able to take it easy, and I feel restful. Before that my hands were in pain, like someone suffering from Parkinson’s disease. It stopped after three months. My hands don’t shake anymore, and it’s totally different.”

“We were just looking for some kind of medicine that would bring relief, and we found it,” remarked Inbal Koren, head nurse at Hadarim Geriatric Home.

Pain specialist Dr. Bareket Schiff-Karen recommends medical cannabis to some of her patients.

“If the question is relieving pain and leading a normal life as opposed to being dependent on a drug, then why not take that drug to improve one’s quality of living?” Schiff-Karen asked.

“The Ministry of Health claims that these patients possess scientific evidence that their illness can be relieved by using cannabis.”

An instructor from one of the providing companies said that the most crucial point about cannabis is that it’s not dangerous or hazardous to the patient.

Annual Causes of Death in the USA

This advertisement appeared in the National Review, the New Republic, the Weekly Standard, The Nation, Reason Magazine and The Progressive. 

		Annual Causes of Death in the United States Tobacco 430,7001 Source:(1996): “Smoking-Attributable Mortality and Years of Potential Life Lost,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control, 1997), May 23, 1997, Vol. 46, No. 20, p. 449. Alcohol 110,6402 Source: “Number of deaths and age-adjusted death rates per 100,000 population for categories of alcohol-related (A-R) mortality, United States and States, 1979-96,” National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, from the web at http://http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/databases/armort01.txt, last accessed Feb. 12, 2001, citing Alcohol Epidemiologic Data System, Daadatmand, F., Stinson, FS, Grant, BF, and Dufour, MC, “Surveillance Report #52: Liver Mortality in the United States, 1970-96″ (Rockville, MD: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Division of Biometry and Epidemiology, December 1999). Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs 32,0003 Source: Lazarou, J, Pomeranz, BH, Corey, PN, “Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analysis of prospective studies,” Journal of the American Medical Association (Chicago, IL: American Medical Association, 1998), 1998;279:1200-1205, also letters column, “Adverse Drug Reactions in Hospitalized Patients,” JAMA (Chicago, IL: AMA, 1998), Nov. 25, 1998, Vol. 280, No. 20, from the web at http://jama.ama-assn.org/issues/v280n20/ffull/jlt1125-1.html, last accessed Feb. 12, 2001. Suicide 30,5754 Source: Murphy, Sheila L., “Deaths: Final Data for 1998,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 48, No. 11 (Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, July 24, 2000), Table 10, p. 53, from the web at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvs48_11.pdf . Homicide 18,2725 Source: Murphy, Sheila L., “Deaths: Final Data for 1998,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 48, No. 11 (Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, July 24, 2000), Table 10, p. 53, from the web at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvs48_11.pdf . All Licit & Illicit Drug-Induced Deaths 16,9266 Source:  Murphy, Sheila L., Centers for Disease Control, “Deaths: Final Data for 1998,”, National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 48, No. 11 (Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, July 24, 2000), pp. 1, 10, from the web at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvs48_11.pdf . Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs Such As Aspirin 7,6007 Source: Robyn Tamblyn, PhD; Laeora Berkson, MD, MHPE, FRCPC; W. Dale Jauphinee, MD, FRCPC; David Gayton, MD, PhD, FRCPC; Roland Grad, MD, MSc; Allen Huang, MD, FRCPC; Lisa Isaac, PhD; Peter McLeod, MD, FRCPC; and Linda Snell, MD, MHPE, FRCPC, “Unnecessary Prescribing of NSAIDs and the Management of NSAID-Related Gastropathy in Medical Practice,” Annals of Internal Medicine (Washington, DC: American College of Physicians, 1997), September 15, 1997, 127:429-438, from the web at http://www.acponline.org/journals/annals/15sep97/nsaid.htm, last accessed Feb. 14, 2001, citing Fries, JF, “Assessing and understanding patient risk,” Scandinavian Journal of Rheumatology Supplement, 1992;92:21-4. Marijuana 08 Source: Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN), available on the web at http://www.samhsa.gov/; also see Janet E. Joy, Stanley J. Watson, Jr., and John A. Benson, Jr., “Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base,” Division of Neuroscience and Behavioral Research, Institute of Medicine (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), available on the web at http://www.nap.edu/html/marimed/; and US Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration, “In the Matter of Marijuana Rescheduling Petition” (Docket #86-22), September 6, 1988, p. 57.

Man gets 4 years in Calif.-to-Ohio pot scheme

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A man has been sentenced in a federal court in Ohio to four years in prison and must pay a $10,000 fine for his role in a scheme to fly thousands of pounds of marijuana from California to Ohio in suitcases.

Six people have either pleaded guilty or indicated they’ll plead guilty since authorities broke up the $3 million operation last year.

 Thirty-three-year-old Christopher Cash was sentenced Friday. Cash was from Los Angeles at the time of his arrest and later living in Louisville, Ky. He pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute more than 2,000 pounds of marijuana.Awaiting a July 29 sentencing is 44-year-old Frank Edwards of Hacienda, Calif. He previously pleaded guilty to drug charges

History of Cannabis in the United States Quote

“The history of cannabis in the United States was at first a happy one. Cannabis use was neither stigmatized nor popularized. This situation lasted until the early 1930s, when crusades of Harry J. Anslinger, U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics, created a public hysteria. Anslinger appears to have acted largely at the behest of American chemical and petrochemical companies interested in eliminating hemp as a competitor in the areas of lubricants, food, plastics, and fiber.
Anslinger and the press characterized cannabis as the “weed of death.” William Randolph Hearst popularized the term “marijuana” with a clear intent of linking it to a mistrusted dark-skinned underclass. Yet it has been extraordinarily difficult for science to state exactly what the objections to the cannabis habit are. Patterns of government funding for research make it virtually certain that “Caesar will hear only what is pleasing to Caesar.”
Despite all the pressures brought against it, cannabis use rose and until today cannabis may well be America’s single largest agricultural product. This is one of the most persistent aspects of the great paradigm shift that I am here calling the Archaic Revival. It indicates that the innate drive to restore the psychological balance of typifying the partnership society, once it finds a suitable vehicle, is not easily deterred. Cannabis use diminishes the power of ego, has a mitigating effect on competitiveness, causes one to question authority, and reinforces the notion of the merely relative importance of social values.
No other drug can compete with cannabis for its ability to satisfy the innate yearnings for boundary dissolution and yet leave intact the structures of ordinary society. If every alcoholic was a pothead, if every crack user were a pothead, if every smoker smoked only cannabis, the social consequences of the “drug problem” would be completely transformed. Yet, as a society we are not ready to discus the possibility of self-managed addictions and the possibility of intelligently choosing the plants we ally ourselves to. In time, and perhaps out of desperation, this will come.”

—	Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods – Cannabis in the Twentieth Century

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