What Exactly CAN You Inhale?

A week back I did a piece on Vermont's decision on a bill that would tax wholesale vaping products at 90% and would, eventually, put a bunch of small businesses out of business, even though they are helping Americans quit smoking cigarettes.  It is a stupid and short-sighted proposal; it was last week and it will be tomorrow.

Today, though, I thought of that piece again when I read that the once-great state of Colorado was actually considering a bill to let students in its school use "medical" marijuana.  I can't get over the hypocrisy that the American left has in its approach to, well, anything, but this one really makes your head spin.  Because we know that the left is behind both of these proposals, and it is truly impossible to reconcile the positions these bills present.

A few things first.  I do not doubt that there is an element in marijuana that is a pain reliever.  I do, however, challenge the assertion that it is the only thing that relieves pain in specific patients.  I do challenge the assertion that unregulated, varied-dose products, not peer-reviewed under FDA programs like any other drug, should be able to be prescribed by physicians.  And I do challenge the assertion that smoking a drug like that would be a legitimate way to deliver it no matter what level of approval FDA gave it -- especially when the Colorado student bill provides only for eating it.

Another "thing first."  Cigarette smoking is literally the worst external thing affecting public health and has been for 100 years.  Even now, over 400,000 people will die prematurely this year from the effect of having smoked cigarettes -- or been around people who were.  They are foul to those around them, and fatal to a third of those who use them.  And their manufacturers conspired for decades to lie to the public about all that goes with cigarette smoking.  If they were made illegal tomorrow, I would quietly celebrate.

That said -- please explain the left.  Leftist orthodoxy is this -- pot is good, vaping is bad, cigarettes are also bad.  But cigarettes have no productive use at all; vaping is a tool for smoking cessation by simulating the smoking act and providing nicotine step-downs without tobacco; and marijuana is an addictive psychoactive drug whose analgesic benefit is duplicated by many other pain-relieving medications, without the psychoactive or addictive properties.

I'm sorry; I cannot reconcile those positions in my own mind so as to figure out what the left's principles (oxymoron alert) are against which to explain all that.  If they hate cigarettes as much as I do and want them banned, then why don't they feel the same way about marijuana?  If they think marijuana is beneficial even without dose control, then why is vaping so bad as to try to tax it into oblivion, when it is used to break the cigarette habit they hate?

If the drug companies are greedy leeches who should be able to be sued for any side effect their products have (hint: as explained here, they shouldn't be), then how do they explain being willing to have pot shops all over Colorado selling the stuff with assumed impunity from legal liability, and how do you have doctors prescribing it all over California with no real ability to explain to their patients how to know how often it is OK to use it (since the FDA has not approved it)?

It is so, so hard to be a leftist these days.  Nothing they propose as a solution to problems ever works, from the disaster that was and is Obamacare, to handcuffing our military trying to battle the nation's biggest threats, to raising taxes as an attempted redistribution approach, to the whole Great Society that has left us with a higher poverty level than when we started.

Nothing ever works that the left proposes and tries to implement.  In trying to please everyone, it ends up pitting its own special-interests against each other -- the left wants black votes, but black unemployment is far too high, and the left still insists on open borders through which even more immigrants can come through, depressing black employment and forcing wages down.  Its solution?  Raise the minimum wage, which also depresses black employment and puts poor people back on government support again.

I'm not sure what, besides marijuana, the left feels it OK to inhale, because their positions on this, as in everything else, are irreconcilable.  Some day the press will make a list of these things, and actually oblige a leftist politician to address the inconsistency rationally.  They can't, of course, but a real press would gleefully dive in and seize the moment.

I'll keep waiting.  Please join me in that.  Carpe diem.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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