VLVL news: marijuana & Reagan & The Netherlands

[pynchonoid]

<http://www.rnw.nl/hotspots/html/can030901.html>

[...] The Dutch government has started distributing
cannabis as a prescription painkiller to pharmacies to
treat chronically ill patients. The Hague had already
been turning a blind eye to medicinal cannabis use,
but now it's become the world's first government to
supply the drug itself, in accordance with United
Nations rules on narcotics.

[...] Production is left to two official suppliers,
who grow their cannabis not for coffee shops but
exclusively for the government. One of the licences
went to James Burton, an American expatriate, who
grows his plants in laboratory-style conditions in his
well-guarded greenhouse, surrounded by water and
guarded by 39 cameras and security staff.

Every month, Mr Burton will sell approximately 10
kilos of medical cannabis to the Health Ministry,
which in turn packages and labels the drug in small
tubs to supply to pharmacies.

"Each plant is individually numbered," he says, "it
has a starting date, an identification number and a
pharmacy crop number, so that all the cannabis is
recallable and traceable." 

Mr Burton hails the plant's medical benefits, calling
it "a miracle drug, because it works for many, many
diseases." He has a special passion for the plant
because it saved his eyesight. "All my family members
have glaucoma on the male side, caused by a genetic
defect, and they're either blind or legally blind. Had
I not smoked cannabis at an early age in the military
service, I also would have been blind." 

As cannabis proved to work where conventional therapy
had failed, Mr Burton became a research subject in
America, where academic centres and hospitals studied
the effects of government-provided cannabis on his
eyes. 

But the tide turned in the early eighties when Ronald
Reagan came in as US president on his
"just-say-no-to-drugs" policy. All research into
medical cannabis was stopped, and James Burton
resorted to growing cannabis for his own use. After he
was arrested and his house and car impounded, he moved
to the Netherlands -  "the only place in the world at
the time, where you could grow cannabis, and with one
of the best eye-hospitals in the world located in
Rotterdam."

Now after 20 years, Mr Burton has become an official
cannabis supplier to the Dutch government. He finds it
ironic that in this capacity he'll soon be exporting
marijuana into the US for new research purposes.[...] 




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