Bertha Madras in the Sunshine State

From our Florida Correspondent February 3, 2016

On the heels of her profiling in O’Shaughnessy’s, Bertha Madras was hosted today at the Florida Senate building for a talk on Marijuana Risks and Consequences. Hosted by our hometown favorites Drug Free America and Save our Society from Drugs. 

I thought to make the drive up but am I glad I didn’t.  There were only 10 bodies in the room. Two of them were friends of mine. Six of the rest were part of Broom Hilda’s entourage, including naturally Calvina Fay. 

Madras was brought in because there are no less than 12 different cannabis/hemp bills working their ways through the legislative process this session, including a Right To Try bill that would give terminal patients all the THC they can get (and expand the no-THC licenses to grow the real cannabis necessary for that). 

But Madras’s doom and gloom “town hall meeting” was literally ignored. She was an unnoticed sideshow today, at least so goes my report from inside the room.

From the managing editor

Lester Grinspoon decided to tone down his description of Madras in the Harvard piece. He thought she was off her rocker.

Glad to hear about her not drawing a crowd. She couldn’t —on her own.  The new issue has a piece suggesting that the pro-cannabis activists should ignore Kevin Sabet. He’s just a parasite, all the interest and energy is coming from our side. Where Madras does real harm is back at Harvard, with her neuroimaging crew and think tank pushing SBIRT —”Screening, Brief Intervention, Referral to Treatment”— a program she devised to vacuum up illicit drug users and send them off of to the Therapists for straightening out. 

The print edition has gaffes, but they’ve been corrected online, where the issue has been laid out as Volume 12 of  The O’Shaughnessy’s Reader —”The 9% Solution.” The prohibition of marijuana now rests entirely on claims by Psychiatrists of a 9% addiction rate (how un-rigorous can you get?) and claims of longterrm brain damage by neuroimagers that are unproven.  

What else have they got?  

PS

Did you see the paper in Nature about the C4-A gene driving schizophrenia? Russo finds the material “quite compelling” and suspects that CBD might affect the gene regulation. Kevin McKernan comments: “Synaptic pruning. I wonder what does the opposite of that?”