Community | September 14, 2009 | 9 comments

Fortune Magazine Examines Legal Weed with Irv Rosenfeld

source: http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/11/magazines/fortune/medical_marijuana_legalizing.fortune/index...

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Herbal_Minded

http://money.cnn.com/2009/09/11/magazines/fortune/medical_marijuana_l...

I had the honor of speaking with Mr. Rosenfeld once. A great intelligent man that can also legally Smoke a joint inside a police station.-- Great informative article.

_HM_
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(Fortune Magazine) -- When Irvin Rosenfeld, 56, picks me up at the Fort Lauderdale airport, his SUV reeks of marijuana. The vice president for sales at a local brokerage firm, Rosenfeld has been smoking 10 to 12 marijuana cigarettes a day for 38 years, he says.

That's probably unusual in itself, but what makes Rosenfeld exceptional is that for the past 27 years, he has been copping his weed directly from the United States government.

Every 25 days Rosenfeld goes to a pharmacy and picks up a tin of 300 federally grown and rolled cigarettes that have been sent there for him by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), acting with approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Rosenfeld smokes the marijuana to relieve chronic pain and muscle spasms caused by a rare bone disease. When he was 10, doctors discovered that his skeleton was riddled with more than 200 tumors, due to a condition known as multiple congenital cartilaginous exostosis. Despite seven operations, he still lives with scores of tumors in his bones.

Rosenfeld is one of four people in the United States whom the federal government supplies with medical marijuana. Each is a living anomaly because, officially, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, NIDA, and the FDA all take the position that marijuana has "no currently accepted medical use."

That's the only way federal law can continue to classify marijuana, like heroin, as a "Schedule I controlled substance," forbidden from being prescribed by doctors. (Numerous dangerous, psychoactive, and addictive opium derivatives, by contrast, are more leniently classified as Schedule II drugs, allowing prescription use.)

Over the years the government's position has become progressively more embattled, if not untenable.


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    Community,   News and Politics,   Progressive America,   World News,   26 more
  2. tags:
    Marijuana,  Health Care,  Weed,  Legalization,  2 more
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