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Questions and Answers About Medical Marijuana
08-15-09 | Salem-News.Com | Dr. Phil Leveque & Bonnie King

Dr. Phil Leveque has been around medical marijuana for over fifty years. He was first introduced to it by a professor at the Oregon Medical School who needed a closet cleaned out. Among the old stuff to be hauled off was a big bottle of cannabis cough syrup.

One day shortly after that he was sick, and while looking for something to take, he remembered that he had brought home the old bottle of medicine made of marijuana that was in fact really old, dating from pre-prohibition years when cannabis was a mainstay in American medicine.

Many people are surprised the first time they read that. They have no idea that this stuff used to be everywhere - legally. It was a movie and a press campaign that demonized marijuana.

In fact some of the very same pharmaceutical companies that today fear and oppose the legalization of medical pot, used to sell it like mad in the days before Reefer Madness and back then they swore by the stuff.

Case at hand: the Eli Lilly Company in Indianapolis. History shows us this was one of the major manufactures of cannabis medicine, up to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.

While trying to push company's new A.D.D. drug, a spokesman said, "Marijuana’s utility as medicine was unproven," yet Eli Lilly was among the leading manufacturer and seller of marijuana-based medicine in the U.S. for at least 50 years.

The company spoke out because medical marijuana's effectiveness at treating A.D.D. was a threat to the new Lilly drug.

In this video Dr. Leveque and Bonnie King discuss many aspects of medical marijuana treatment and the slowly evolving laws that allow its use.

There are a large number of other videos available from Salem-News.com on this subject, you can find them by using the key words highlighted below the article.

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Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses.
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