If it was suicide

Personally I think his suicide had more to do with public exposure with charges, than pot or PSTD.

RD is correct.

People take their lives when they can't visualize a future they want to be in. Women generally suicide when they believe they've lost all love, and men generally suicide when the believe they've lost all honor.

The media are mostly to blame for badgering him while trying to make him their anti-pot poster boy. His doctors are also to blame for not getting him on indefinite sick leave and getting him out of the community to somewhere he couldn't be found and harassed.

nah, the real conclusion that can be made from this
he obviously found out 0bama was gay... and was actually married to a hybrid male wookie sasquatch named michelle 0bama ....she needed a full body shave twice a month to maintain the illusion that she is female/human.

and it complicated things further to find out bill clinton is actually pregnant with B. 0bama's mutated deformed demon children. also that 0bama had gay orgy's with chris matthews, socialists, union thugs, dogs, arabs, and communists

and the dude's fragile mind just couldn't handle such shocking truth and he took his own life.

You take a marijuana in the morning, and you take your chances.

But seriously, It was obviously racisim and homophobic attitudes towards his drug use that killed him in the end.

I think it's worth mentioning here,(particularly to the gun haters who think only the police should own guns), that the policing profession holds the honor of the highest suicide rate of any vocation - could be stress - or torment over conflicted ethics.

The whole concept of "medical marijuana" is dubious at best. Having discussed it repeatedly with colleagues of mine who work with chronic pain patients, and from my own observations, we've yet to encounter any patient claiming a benefit from it who was not previously a heavy recreational user.

"The 'medical' marijuana didn't work," is obviously a true statement. It was prescribed to calm him and relieve his stress. Instead he committed suicide. Nobody said the pot caused his death, but it's not exactly a wonder drug, is it?

Marijuana isn't a cure for anything except perhaps for boredom, and that temporarily.

Yikes, is SDA morphing into a liberal rag -- using someone's untimely death to score ideological points?

The easy refutation: every cancer death does not signal that failure of some cancer med or another. Medicine is not rainbow magic: it extends lives, eases pain, and sometimes cures people. We don't know SFA about the counterfactual in this particular situation to draw conclusions about whether the marijuana failed, Lance's idee fixe notwithstanding.

We'll Dr D, you'll need to expand your circle of colleagues.
My experience with medical marijuana had nothing to do with chronic pain.
Medical marijuana shines for other reasons. In my case, waiting 3 years for a suitable liver almost killed me. Most of those dying on the waiting list succumbed because they wasted away and died. The reason being that nausea was a constant companion and made taking life saving sustenance (food) almost impossible. The medical marijuana eliminated the nausea, thus allowing me to eat and keep up my strength. During this stage I went from 220 lbs. to 135.
My medical team knew this and were not shocked or surprised at the life saving effects of the medical marijuana. It's only rigid small minded anti pot zealots that continue the facade made famous by the old "Reefer Madness" press.
When I hear people spout about medical marijuana not having life saving qualities, I know for a fact they are speaking from ignorance and not fact.
I now lead a normal taxpaying life and run a successful manufacturing company.

Can somebody fill me in cause I didn't see it in the article or missed it. What was he supposedly suffering PTSD from?

Shall I say it. One of the observed side effects of marijuana use is paranoia. Take someone with low self esteem and in a world of crap with petty charges and prescribe a dose of paranoia.

Just a note, back in the day when PTSD was called cowardice and soldiers were shot for it, it was uncommon. Today when everyone is a sucker for a sad story there is a plague of PTSD. That suggests to me that it is controllable to some degree.

I suspect what is called PTSD is simply mental illness of two kinds. One is actually physiological and the other sociopathic as in "give me a good pension or I'll kill myself"

Last Spring 8 Canadian Forces members killed themselves in a relatively short period of time. While the Forces have been hiring every psychologist they can find, none or close to none of the 8 sought help. Also, has anyone checked how many accountants or teachers killed themselves. I suspect suicide is a general problem in society as opposed to occupational

RickC makes a very cogent point. What was the source of his PTSD...ie what was the trauma?
Sounds more like clinical depression.

RickC - from his interview with CBC, he said it was due to his 20+ years on the force.
Posted by: RGB replied to comment from ChrisMcK on October 7, 2014 12:11 PM

RGB, I was about to pose the same question as did RickC. Twenty-plus years on the force = traumatic stress? I thought traumatic stress was supposed to arise as a reaction to a particularly horrifying incident, or a sustained exposure to a high level of life-threatening incidents, say, like being in a battle and seeing your buddies all get killed. Twenty years of going to work every day does not equal "trauma". If he really couldn't hack the the job, he had ample opportunity to resign, before he got himself in trouble.

As far as medical MJ goes, I would agree that suppressing nausea in chemotherapy patients seems to be one of the few valid uses for the stuff.

I love how potheads always like to bring alcohol into the discussion as a way to try and get off topic. The discussion is not about booze, it is about pot. Could we at least stick to the topic at hand?

A week does not go by when I don't come to a red light and see a pothead smoking a joint in his/her car while driving. So who is going to pay the bill to police these fools in the future? Who is going to pay the bill for the new equipment in police cars to detect if someone is under the influence of pot? I wonder. The tooth fairy? Allah? Maybe the Green Men from Mars will pay the bill.

Several years ago we took my family to see the Vancouver fireworks. We sat down, our youngest child only 5, and next to us a bunch of potheads starting smoking pot. So we moved, sat down. More potheads, blowing their smoke everywhere and acting like fools, giggling, and generally being stupid. Very classy and considerate lot these potheads, smoking pot a few feet from a 5-year old in public park.

Without a doubt the preferred way to consume pot is to smoke it. Who will pay for that health care bill I wonder? Perhaps the Hells Angels, let's ask them.

I've concluded potheads cannot read anything other than tabloid newspapers, because if they could they would read plenty of recent research that shows that pot damages the brain, even in small amounts. I think that's why they cannot even stick to an argument and have to keep talking about alcohol, which is an entirely different substance altogether, whose chemistry is entirely different, and that is a naturally occurring substance in our bodies, albeit in very small quantities.

And look no further than Justin Trudeau if you want to see what recreational pot use does to someone. Ha ha! The blank dazed look on his face most of the time. The inability to be quick on his feet. The tortured logic he comes up with. All the signs of a pothead who has fried his brain.

A Crushing Hangover..?? WTF are you on bro..? NO Such thing whatsoever. NEVER. Alcohol no question, but smoking a copl joints..Youobviously ahve never done that to come out with a stpid comment like that. Sugggest you go back your movie: Reefer Madness.

RGB - good points. I too am not surprised to see the big Drug compnaies shy away from Pot..its not like its made in a test tube with their proprietary mixture/solution - anyone can grow it...it's a weed for Christs sake"!! ....AND as such There is NO money in it for them..!! for that matter there is no money in any "CURE" for them...why would they kill their golden goose.??

For me there is enough anecdotal evidence for relief of nausea, pain and from anxiety for me to buy into into the medicinal properties...at this point in time at 62 yrs I do not require it for "medicinal" properties nor do I require it per se...but from time to time, I do enjoy a hoot...as much as I enjoy a wee dram of 18 yr old single malt Scotch.

As for being Brain Dead..Sorry but that is pure horse shit. If that were so, I and nmumerous of my peers would surely all be in a convalescent home slobbering at the mouth...Yet I have a management postion in the Oil Sands, own my own home, am quite happily married for the past 25 years, have two well adjusted slightly right leaning daughters both with post secondary education..etc etc. My peers are to a person doing extremely well also. I for opne am 110% for Complete and Unregulated legalization.

Brain dead indeed..LMAO at someone who knows F ALL about it.
Your argument holds zero pot BC.

The whole "medical marijuana" issue is partly a means of legalizing a drug which should never have been made illegal in the first place. The only time I get enraged if I see a driver toking up while driving is if they're in front of me; the primary effect of THC on driving is to make stoned people believe they're speeding while going 20 mph.

WRP PTSD, this is greatly overdiagnosed. Recently, I saw a retired cop for other medical issues and he told me about his "PTSD" diagnosis. When I did a standardized query for symptoms of PTSD, he had almost none of them and he was relieved that he was free of his PTSD diagnosis. What I noticed early on is that chronic pain and PTSD went together as I found out from a fellow psychiatrist that she was treating a number of my chronic pain patients for PTSD and asked what I had done to suddenly make them so much better? What I'd been using for their chronic pain was nabilone, a semi-synthetic THC derivative, which has the advantage of a 12 hour half life and thus allows people to sleep through the night. This treatment was very effective in reducing recurrent nightmares and I suspect that PTSD-prone individuals are bad at forgetting. The link between PTSD/chronic pain could involve the same neurobiologic mechanisms as people with chronic pain appear to be unable to "forget" pain memories which likely involve permanent rewiring of pain pathways in the spinal cord and brain areas which handle pain stimuli. Another patient, a former US soldier who saw combat in Iraq in 2003, found that smoking weed made it far easier for him to deal with some of the memories and noted that quite a few of his fellow soldiers had taken up smoking weed after combat. From a medical perspective, I'm much rather have such people smoking weed than drinking themselves into a stupor every night.

I rarely prescribe medical marijuana although do so when I want people to be on cannabidiol (CBD) which is looking like it will the the antipsychotic of choice in the elderly. My patients who use cannabis for relief of pain find they function best with a 1:1 THC:CBD strain but such strains are hard to find as others have noted. The vast majority of botanical innovation in the cannabis genetic engineering industry has been in increasing the THC fraction to make BC hydroponic cannabis superior to some of the best hashish of the 1970's. One of the common problems we used to see in ER rotations when I was training was that of people from outside BC coming to Vancouver, purchasing some skunk weed, and then coming into ER psychotic and thinking their weed was poisoned. Under recommendations to patient I would write "roll much smaller joints".

The endocannabinoid system is at the analagous point now of when prostaglandins were first discovered. Endocannabinoids are involved in local messaging between cells and, essentially affect all human physiology. For those who want to do their own research, ignore anything coming out of the US, especially if it's funded by one of the agencies whose sole function is the maintenance of a bloated totalitarian bureaucracy which criminalizes certain plants and works towards creating a totalitarian state in the USSA. The best early endocannabinoid research was carried out in Israel and there's a huge amount of research now taking place in Europe. Reading those papers will demonstrate the amount of junk science being carried out in the US.

Pharmaceutical companies have little interest in cannabis as one can legally buy seeds over the internet for ones desired strain and grow ones own source of exocannabinoids. My gut feeling is that treatment of emphysema will involve inhaled cannabinoids (likely via vaporizer) as this targets the mast cells involved in lung inflammation in emphysema and mast cells don't respond well to corticosteroids which are the mainstay of emphysema treatment now. Currently, in Canada, I'm prohibited from extracting CBD from cannabis even though I can now legally have patients marijuana shipped to my office (thus far the legal growers haven't been supplying doctors with samples of their product). Only smoking the plant is legal and fortunately this idiotic law is not being challenged on constitutional grounds.

As steakman has pointed out, large numbers of people enjoy the occasional toke without any sign of adverse effects. The degenerated potheads that are trotted out by those individuals who believe that the only acceptable drugs for legal mood alterations are ethanol and nicotine should be aware that their analogy means that one can bring up the degenerated E. Hastings Chinese cooking wine drinking alcoholic (who most certainly has far more brain damage than the average Vancouver pot addict) as what happens to people if they drink any amount of ethanol. Once the same alcoholic has either multiple subdural hematomas from being unable to handle gravity while drunk or Korsakoff's syndrome, they are permanently institutionalized and a far greater drain on the medical system than potheads. The cost of prohibitionist policies both to taxpayers and individual freedoms is far far greater than any medical consequences of cannabis use.

Prescient captcha: jnptsd

It absolutely stuns me to read statements like this, especially from someone who appears to be a doctor:

"The only time I get enraged if I see a driver toking up while driving is if they're in front of me; the primary effect of THC on driving is to make stoned people believe they're speeding while going 20 mph."

See here:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/smoking-pot-doubles-car-accident-risk-1.1216818

and here:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/06/09/marijuana-accidents/10219119/

and here:

http://www.universityherald.com/articles/9455/20140516/marijuana-use-involved-in-more-fatal-car-accidents-since-its-commercialization.htm

and so on and so on.

Where to start?
JT, being his mother's son, has no brain to fry.
I brought alcohol into the discussion because I, and others, believed there are more than "one conclusion" that can be made. It was mentioned in the article and alcohol use is one of the main causes of suicide. Therefore my mentioning of it was totally legitimate and had absolutely nothing to do with getting off the topic.
The police cannot check the pot use of drivers because it stays, with no resulting impairment,in the system for a month and they haven't come up with a reliable test to measure impairment. Lung cancer victims probably cost relatively little as they have a tendency to die rather quickly. Joggers, many of whom will require knee or hip replacements that last only 7 - 15 years, will then become somewhat disabled, will probably cost the system more.
I've seen reports stating that any given time a high percentage of drivers, up to 40%, are DUI.
I've been to sporting events and seen the classy and considerate alcoholics guzzling down beer in front of 5 year olds. Some have even left the contents of their stomachs in the aisles or all over the washroom floors. Some also give us the extra entertainment from a fight that their belligerent selves start. Drunks also give us such stimulating conversation. Boy I wish I had such class.
It's not a different substance, it's a DRUG, like opiates, pain killers, anti-depressants,sleeping pills, et al.
Society, north of the Rio Grande at least, is in denial when it comes to admitting that alcohol is a drug. That's why we have "alcohol & drug" centres. People are referred to as getting into alcohol and drugs. There are even cutesy names like "wobbly pops" for beer. Alcohol is a drug, admit it, because until society does, it will always be the most costly drug to society.
As too the rest of your denial, please read "Steakman", whose experiences with pot smokers are similar to mine. Speaking of experiences, I've seen far more people's lives destroyed by alcohol than pot. FAR MORE.
Thank you Loki, one of my favourites, for your comments.

If the Liberal left allowed concealed carry, stand your ground and castle laws, I'd vote to let them poison themselves all day every day.

The problem with allowing the Liberal left to legalize drugs, is that they won't allow us to protect ourselves from the fallout.

Also increase the sentencing for committing felonies while under the influence, and we'll have a deal.

Dr Daniel Amen, and other psychologists and psychiatrists, who actually MEASURE human brains withs a number of different technologies, say it is DEFINITE, CLEAR, and UNMISTAKABLE, that marijuana has MEASURABLE effects on the user's brain. These become PERMANENT if the the marijuana use continues for several years. They all say DO NOT SMOKE MARIJUANA for the deleterious effects to the user's brain - let alone the deleterious to the lungs.

See here:

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/10/07/Cannabis-As-Addictive-As-Heroin-New-Study-Finds

Here is a better link discussing the same study:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2783111/The-terrible-truth-cannabis-Expert-s-devastating-20-year-study-finally-demolishes-claims-smoking-pot-harmless.html

None of these pot arguments have any merit.

When I drink a class of Cab Sauvignon to go with my Alberta steak, it's not to get drunk, it is because the two go very well together. When I drink a pint of beer with a plate of chicken wings, it's not to get drunk, it's because the two go very well together. After either one, I can still hold an intelligent conversation, I can still get in my car and drive, and I can still walk a straight line.

If I have two glasses of wine or two pints of beer, at most I might feel a little relaxed on a Friday night while chatting with my wife. But that's it. Nothing more.

Yes, some people drink alcohol expressly to get drunk, to varying degrees, but that's not what most sensible people do, and it is certainly not the only or even the primary reason to enjoy a glass of the good stuff. (And yes, I'm guilt as charged here too - we all get a chance in our lives to be a fool)

Those who smoke pot on the other hand are doing so for one single reason only, and that is to significantly alter their brain chemistry.

Big big difference.

I'll keep this short as I said I'd mow the lawn on my day off.

BC, there's no correlation whatever between drug levels in a person's bloodstream and their risk of getting into an MVA. A 16 year old (and why are infants allowed to drive anyway?) having 1 beer is far more likely to be involved in an MVA than I would be after consuming 6-8 beer. That's got to do with my greater years of experience in both driving and knowing when I shouldn't drive. For example, after I've been working for 24-36 hours straight I won't even think of driving as my chances of getting into an accident are unacceptably high whereas my medical competency is intact.

When I did a study in medical school about the relationship between blood alcohol levels and reaction time. I found that people fell into two classes; those, like myself, in whom simple reaction time decreased with EtOH levels (had to drink an additional 26 oz of Scotch to get mine to go up finally and, because of the severity of the hangover, haven't repeated the experiment) and those who were very sensitive to EtOH and whose reaction time increased as a function of blood EtOH levels. I fudged the data on choice reaction times because I was told that the course instructor was already unhappy with my simple reaction time findings and I was the only person who got faster on a choice reaction time task with EtOH albeit over a narrow range of EtOH levels. My first introduction to "scientific" medicine.

With regular heavy drinkers, their brain adapts to high EtOH levels and they are far far more dangerous on the road if they suddenly stop drinking. On a performance based driving impairment test they'd pass but on a worthless blood alcohol level test they'd fail. Probably the reason we don't see performance based testing is that a lot of the elderly would fail - depending on what performance criteria are utilized for pass/fail. Patients with Parkinson's disease have reaction times so slow that they wouldn't be able to get a drivers license if they took the test designed to determine whether people with brain injuries should regain their drivers licenses. People on high doses of opiates for chronic pain are allowed to work in safety critical positions as long as they have been on a stable dose of opiates for a sufficient period of time. Their blood opiate levels would be astronomical yet they are perfectly competent whereas an opiate naive person taking 1/10 of their daily dose would be more likely to die of respiratory depression before they had time to attempt to drive. The concept of tolerance must be far too complicated for politicians to comprehend and that is why I reject simplistic laws relying on faulty metrics.

The concept of individual responsibility seems to be lacking here as every individual who gets into a vehicle should do so only after assessing their capability to safely operate the vehicle. (This is basic situational awareness such as knowing ones local environment when walking in a dangerous area at night, making a decision about how to get ones rifle across a fence while hunting and always knowing where the barrel of ones firearm is pointing). If people are unable to do this or "forget", they shouldn't be driving or doing anything which might be the least dangerous. Once they've made that decision, then if they are at fault for an accident, it's their responsibility (that r-word so detested by leftists again). One would have a far greater impact on any drug-related accidents if insurance companies refused to pay out for claims where the individual had demonstrated impairment on performance based tests as well as high levels of drugs in their bloodstream that have been associated with adverse effects on driving performance.

Doolweb, there seems to be some unique properties of cannabinoids in liver disease which I still can't explain but, in talking to one of the HepC specialists, he's in favor of all HepC patients being on cannabis as they do considerably better. Whether it's treating the nausea or some other, still unknown factor, is unclear but that's the state of evidence based medical opinion at this time. This thread is proof that there are significant differences between Libertarians and Conservatives, even though they agree of 90% of things.

RGB, actually THC is as addictive as heroin, but that involves the consumption of 4-12 grams/day of very high quality weed. There is a cross-reactivity of THC with opiate receptors and I've used nabilone to help people through opiate withdrawal; obviously the converse holds and one presumably gets opiate receptor desensitization with very high dose THC intake. I've seen patients like this and the withdrawal was quite unpleasant for them and, again, I used nabilone in tapering doses. For the dose you were using, you're not even close to the "addictive" range. Actually, the word "addiction" will likely be replaced with something more specific to statist-despised drugs as the most common cases of drug withdrawal I see are from SSRI's/SNRI's. The two worst offenders in this category are DL-venlafaxine and Duloxetine. Curiously, D-Venlafaxine is, thus far, seemingly free of this "addiction" phenomenon. Patients who have had experience with both have told me that heroin withdrawal was nothing in comparison to stopping DL-Venlafaxine.

Lucky Lori - thanks for the link on glycol inhalation and propensity to lung infections; I plan on ridiculing IHA's illogical "smoke free environment" policies when hospitals remain open during the forest fire season when they should be closed according to their policies. There's evidence suggestive of increased psychotic episodes in young people which parallels increases in THC levels in weed over the last 4 decades. These likely represent the unmasking of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder as a result of high levels of THC ingestion. I've had arguments with physicians who work for drug abuse agencies when they claim that exposure to THC below the age of 18 is associated with increased schizophrenia in users. They have never done a controlled experiment where individuals with no signs of schizophrenia are exposed to THC which would be the only way to determine if there is a cause and effect relationship. Simple psychosis is only a problem if it's treated incorrectly. I've talked down people having bad acid trips during my ER shifts during training and it helped when one had an ER physician who knew exactly what a bad trip felt like; put them in a dimly lit quiet room, a touch of lorazepam and wait a maximum of 8 hours for the experience to terminate. Now I'd use Olanzapine instead but that hadn't been invented when I was an intern. The way to make the psychotic episode last longer is to put them in a regular ER bed in a high stimulation environment and use physical restraints. Thus, I'd like to know how individuals presenting with THC induced psychosis were handled in the ER.

Given the well demonstrated antipsychotic effect of CBD and the high risks of thromboembolic side effects of atypical antipsychotics in the demented elderly, one has to wonder if the state would prefer to have elderly useless eaters just die to save the system money. No drug company is going to do such a study as there's no money in it for them, but no-one is going to privately do such a study given the immense regulatory burden that is involved in dealing with such a dangerous "drug of abuse" such as CBD.

And now that lawn.

I love the topics which illuminate the idiots among us and allow the quick skipping over of their comments in future.

Thanks to BC for joining the club.

"BC, there's no correlation whatever between drug levels in a person's bloodstream and their risk of getting into an MVA. A 16 year old (and why are infants allowed to drive anyway?) having 1 beer is far more likely to be involved in an MVA than I would be after consuming 6-8 beer. That's got to do with my greater years of experience in both driving and knowing when I shouldn't drive. For example, after I've been working for 24-36 hours straight I won't even think of driving as my chances of getting into an accident are unacceptably high whereas my medical competency is intact."

I've shown this paragraph to my oldest daughter as a classic example of how to attempt to win an argument without actually saying anything meaningful at all. It a case of "If I say enough, and if I make it look like I am an expert, and if my arguments are circular enough, then people might simply believe me".

So you work 36 hours straight as a doc do you Locki? And you think there's no correlation at all, i.e. correlation pretty much mathematically zero, between drug levels and an MVA?

Poser.