Another Possibly Preventable Cancer Death

Donna Summer , the Queen of Disco, died Thursday May 17, 2012 after a losing battle with lung cancer. In 1974 she was doing Dutch television shows promoting her song, "The Hostage'. The song was a hit in Belgium and the Netherlands. That year LaDonna Adrian Gaines married Austrian actor Helmut Sommer. She anglicized the name to Summer and the rest is history.
While Donna Summer's career was taking off in 1974, President Nixon was busy declaring a war on Cancer, directing the Government to expend money in the search for a cure for cancer. Also in 1974, the Medical Collage of Virginia, at the request of the Federal Government, conducted experiments to determine the effectiveness of tetrahydracannabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana. The results of these experiments showed marijuana was indeed effective in treating cancer. As reported by Peter Cushing on the Alternet website, the research was expected to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system but found instead that THC slowed the growth of lung cancer, breast cancer and a viral form of leukemia. The research was shut down by the Drug Enforcement Administration along with all further cannabis cancer research. In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies and in 1983, the Reagan/Bush administration tried to persuade American Universities to destroy all 1966 to 1976 cannabis research work including that in their libraries.
More recently in 2000, Compultense University in Madrid, Spain announced they had destroyed incurable cancer tumors in rats by injecting them with THC. The Madrid research and the Medical College of Virginia research are the only research to date on marijuana and it's effectiveness on cancer. Studies have been done but the Government must provide the marijuana for research and to date has never filled a research request.
Millions of people, Donna Summer included have died from cancer that might be alive today had not the Government, in the name of prohibition and the financial gain of the Pharmaceutical Industry, interfered in cannabis research. During the 38 years since Nixon's declaration of a War On Cancer and despite the Governments active suppression of the facts about marijuana as medicine, we now know quite a bit about marijuana's efficacy and effectiveness. The Drug Enforcement's own Administrative Law Judge, in 1988 declared marijuana to be, "the safest therapeutic substance known to man".
Why, in the name of heaven, are we ignoring and even suppressing this information? Those who continue this amoral policy deserve the condemnation and contempt of the entire nation!
To you Legislators, both Federal and State, it's a good bet that you or someone you know will get cancer at some time in the future. As you lay dying, or you watch in anguish as your loved one dies, remember, your vote to continue the suppression of marijuana as medicine has deprived your doctor of what appears to be the most effective medicine against cancer we have found to date. At the federal level Legislators should support and pass HR 2306 the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2011. Here in Kentucky Legislators should support and pass SB 129 the Gatewood Galbraith Memorial Medical Marijuana Act. It is time for a policy on marijuana that is based on science and facts and not how it will impact some Pharmaceutical Company's bottom line.