There has been a great deal of debate during the last 3 years about the amount of government involvement in the health of the nation. Progressive Democrats for instance think that the government should offer Universal health care to all citizens. They are not against a private insurance industry. If private companies wish to offer a higher level of services they have no problems with this. But basic health care should be guaranteed. Conservative Republicans on the other hand promote the idea that government should have no involvement at all in medical care. Not only did they fight like their lives depended on it two years ago to remove any thing like a single payer system, they turned massive attacks on things like Medicare, Planned Parenthood, Social Security and medical/pension benefits for public employees (excluding Congress of course). Progressives complain that health is too important to be left to the vagaries of the market or the potential greed of profit oriented businesses. Conservatives believe that the Government is incapable of running a program this large, that citizens do not have an explicit “Constitutional Right” to health care and that private industry can get the job done more efficiently. Considering the facts we can easily determine which side is correct.

According to CNN Money health care costs will increase more than 5% again this year alone and the past two years have seen nearly 10% increases. Medicare spending on the other hand has increased less than 1% a year. In fact, according to the bi partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the the gap between medicare/medicaid spending, and all other health care in the US, will widen nearly exponentially during the next 50 years under current policies. This essentially means that, dollar for dollar, government financed health care is a great deal more cost efficient than private health care. The CBO projects that medicare/medicaid will grow from 3-4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and is expected to grow to 8-10% before 2035. Private health care expenditures on the other hand are expected to grow from 13% of GDP to more than 30% of the GDP. Determining which method is the most cost efficient is simply a matter of looking at the numbers and doing some simple arithmetic.

But not only does our primarily private health care industry incapable of bringing American health care costs down to the level of the rest of the Industrialized world, but they also seem unable to keep up with the production of vital drugs. This is a problem any pharmacy technician in American can tell you about. There have been a large number of reports during the last few years about shortages of life saving drugs in the United States and many stories about people needing to travel to Canada or Mexico, or order online, just to buy the medications they need to stay alive. In 20ll the number of prescription drugs that are in short supplies grew to 267, a number that is 4 times larger than it was in 1995. The reason for this is simple: Under the private system made on an as needed basis. The medical and pharmaceutical industry will not manufacture a single medication that they think that they might not be able to sell, leaving only limited amounts in warehouses. When needs spike however they are caught short. Government control of health care however would require manufacturers to stockpile medications, especially those with life saving implications and most drug shortages would immediately disappearance.

The main argument against Universal Health Care is that would require an increase in taxes. This is a specious argument however. Of course taxes will increase. But if you are already paying the currently huge medical costs now (a healthy family of three will pay several thousand dollars a year on health care alone), and having this system would remove those costs, then paying a few dollars more in taxes seems to make better sense. Especially since all of the numbers actually demonstrate that the government can operate a health care system much more effectively than private industry can hope too.

Political funnyman Bill Mahr said during one of his monologues that Americans are not suffering an obesity problem because they eat too much. The overweight problem is simply caused by what we eat, and not as much by how much. In a single 12 oz. can of Coca Cola contains the equivalent of 12 cubes of sugar and many people consume several cans of this drink a day. But surprisingly enough, this fact is not nearly as alarming as a recent report issued by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. According to this new report 9 out of 10 Americans, aged 2 years and older, are consuming far more than the recommended amount of sodium (salt) a day. While sugar has a number of serious health affects if over used, salt is nearly twice as dangerous, leading to high blood pressure, depression, heart disease and many other problems.

While some of the problem comes from too much table salt, or too many chips and popcorn, these are only the tip of the iceberg. Many Americans, and people in the West as well, consumes great gobs of salt that they are not even aware of. A slice of white bread for instance can have as much as 230 milligrams and while a single slice is not harmful, if you eat several slices a day it adds up quickly and since salt, being a mineral compound, is hard for the body to process efficiently. According to the report the recommended daily allowance of salt is 2,300 milligrams, for healthy individuals under 51 years old and as low as 1,500 milligrams for anyone older or with health problems. Americans however consume, on average, 3,500 milligrams per day.

A large part of the problem is the amount of processed food that Americans eat trying to keep up with a fast paced lifestyle. This problem kills nearly 1 million people each year and adds a quarter of a trillion dollars a year to national health care costs, according to Thomas Frieden, CDC Director. There are many different foods that are problem foods. Processed meats, soups, pizza, pasta, meats, potato chips and pretzels, cookies. More than half of this this food comes directly from products that we buy at the store and the rest comes from restaurants and fast food chains. School cafeterias are also guilty of loading up on sodium laced products, simply because they are less expensive. Some food giants, like Kraft Foods and Leprino Foods are saying that they are actively working to cut at least 10% of the current amount of sodium from all of their products. But when you consider that most Americans consume nearly 100% of the recommended amount it is far from enough. The CDC says the lowering salt intake by just 400 milligrams will save nearly 30,000 lives each year and $7 billion in health-care costs.

My family is Italian and I grew up in the Catholic Church, going to Catholic schools from Kindergarten through High School. Throughout my years in a very Catholic culture I remember the “jokes” about priests and alter-boys. Literally everyone had heard stories about priests being attracted to young boys who worked in the Church and when I asked my family about it I discovered that these practices were known to parishioners for literally centuries but were ignored. In the United States we have the same problem with “fast food” restaurants. In the 1970´s Jack-in-the-Box was caught serving both horse and dog meat to customers, as well as e coli tainted meat. In the 1990´s McDonald’s was found to have accepted meat that was known to be tainted with e coli. Taco Bell serves a medium “hot sauce” that children use to clean old pennies and in any of these restaurants you can actually buy a meal for less money than it takes to feed your dog. A hamburger at McDonald’s for instance can be purchased for under $1 but a can of dog food costs nearly twice as much.

But despite the dangers of eating disease tainted meat, the chances of an individual actually eating this meat is quite high, simply because of the large numbers of people who eat at these restaurants. Not all meat is tainted or even a significant part of it. But one thing that every customer at these restaurants consumes a tremendous amount of food additives. The animals are injected with hormones during their entire lives and these hormones are eaten by our children, which causes them to develop much faster than nature intended. When the meat is processed it is injected with sodium, to increase the plumpness of the cut, preservatives, to keep the meat fresh, and food coloring to give the chemically loaded meat a more natural look.

While “primitive” cultures, like Native Americans, are known for using every part of an animal they kill, even these cultures, with zero scientific knowledge, understood that it is dangerous to include every part of the animal as food. In the United States however, one of the most scientifically advanced societies in history, with the Food and Drug Administration in place to protect us, we allow these fast food restaurants to use parts of animals that have ruled as unfit for human consumption. They take these scraps, formally used only in pet food, and “wash” it with ammonium-hydroxide, a chemical more commonly found in products like household cleaners, fertilizers and even explosives. The meat is then further treated with food coloring and turned into the ground beef that until recently was served in every hamburger sold at McDonald’s restaurants. It does not take a registered nurse or any medical professional to understand that ingesting the same chemicals used in fertilizers and explosives is just not a good idea.

While the FDA seems unable to make appropriate decisions about issues like this, the general public is not. Led by celebrity Chef Jamie Oliver, a months long campaign against using “pink slime”, a name given the concoction by the industry itself, to human beings and charging them as if this were real meat. Public pressure from the campaign has forced at least this one chain from using this poison but the company maintains that it was not Oliver´s efforts that led to the decision. They use the FDA’s confusing position that using the same chemical used in fertilizers and explosives is “generally safe” practice, yet they give no explanation why, after decades of use, they suddenly decided to stop.

The simple facts are that unless industries are monitored tightly by the Government, they will do whatever it takes to make money. How many of the executives of these huge corporations actually eat the food their company regularly sells to the general public? How many of them, knowing how this food is processed, allow their children to eat it? Nearly 70% of all meat processed in the United States is loaded with these, or comparable, chemicals and these chemicals are used by companies for two purposes. They either want to use parts of animals that are proven to be dangerous, or they want to increase their profits by forcing animals to become larger, heavier, than is natural for them. In either case these companies are playing with the health of all Americans for the sake of a few dollars more profit.

There are more than 10,000 live births in the United States every day, a number which has been decreasing approximately 5% every year. But the number of births are not the only birth statistics that are decreasing. A new report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics has discovered that more and more women are rejecting the “traditional” hospital deliveries in favor of home deliveries. While between the years 1990 and 2004 these numbers actually declined, after 2004 they have increased more than 30% and in that year it was 36%. One of he possible reason for this is that the United States now has he second highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world. There are approximately 4 million live births annually in the US but there are also more than 2 million infants who die within the first 24 hours, which is 30% of all deliveries. According to one study, reported on CNN in 2006, the American infants are 3 times more likely to die during the delivery, or shortly thereafter, than Japanese infants and 2.5 times more likely than infants in Finland, Iceland or Norway.

While the high infant mortality rate is one of the reasons for the sudden jump in home birthing, it is far from the only one. American hospitals, striving for efficiency in order to increase profits, have become baby mills, concerned only with quantity and not with quality. Everything is impersonal, from the hospitals to the strangers who are conducting vaginal exams and privacy is non-existent. Hospitals are even putting deadlines on mothers in labor. If the mother does not dilate a minimum of 1 cm per hour a Cesarean section is ordered, which scars her, in some cases both physically and emotionally.

These unfortunate facts are causing more and more families to elect to use a nurse-midwife for the delivery and the home for the delivery room. The phenomenon is no longer limited to migrants, the poor or minorities. The same study indicated that more and more upper income Caucasian women are electing to deliver at home. American football superstar Tom Brady is an excellent example of this fact. He and his wife, supermodel Giselle Bundchen, planned a home delivery from the time she discovered that she was pregnant.

Americans pay more for health care than any modern nation in the world and for this extra money they should be able to expect at least care that is equal to nations that pay less money. This is no longer true however, if it ever has been. The US spends nearly twice, per capita, on health care than does Norway yet has an infant mortality rate 250% higher than the Scandinavian nation. Infant mortality rates are one of the base measures used in determining the quality of health care in a country because the need is so basic. If they US medical industry cannot keep this number at least competitive with the rest of the industrialized world it might be time to reassess how we provide medical care to our people.

The “War on Drugs” has been raging for nearly 50 years in the United States and a great deal has been said by both sides of the argument about whether marijuana is safe to use. In 1937 a short movie, “Reefer Madness” was produced and shown in classrooms nationwide for nearly two decades. The movie depicted people smoking pot and hallucinating, going into convulsions and committing violent acts and no thought was ever given by the “educators” showing this movie to young minds, many of whom are now our nation´s leaders, this movie that was so obviously untrue. The makers of this film no doubt had the best intentions in mind when they produced it but using scare tactics and misinformation seldom works.

One of the best arguments opponents to legalization of marijuana use is that smoking pot damages the lungs. The facts however are quite the opposite. According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) recently conducted a study that found that marijuana smokers who smoke one marijuana cigarette a day for seven years or one a week for twenty years, will suffer no harmful effects to their lungs, and this is true even considering that marijuana smokers draw much deeper and keep the smoke in their lungs much longer than cigarette smokers and while marijuana does have tar, there is no nicotine,which is the substance that causes addiction and considerable lung damage in cigarette smokers.

The study measured lung function on a variety of individuals, a total of 5,100, all having differing smoking habits, over a period of 20 years. The same individuals were used throughout the entire study. The study´s co-author, Dr. Stefan Kertesz was very clear when he said that any decision about whether or not to use marijuana, whether for medical or recreational purposes, should not be made based on myths about the substance causing lung damage. Dr. Kertesz said “It’s not a decision about lung health, it’s all the other issues: the risk of addiction, an increase in the chance of having accidents and social functioning.” But with no real evidence of addiction and the fact that many recreational substances, such as alcohol which is legal, can impair social functioning. The study also included cigarette smokers, for comparison purposes, and found that, unlike marijuana smokers, the scores on lung function dropped drastically on cigarette smokers. They also discovered that pot smokers who smoked a joint a day for seven years actually experienced greater lung capacity.

America has the largest percentage of its people either in prison or on some form of parole or probation and the numbers are climbing rapidly, expecting to pass 5 million by the end of the decade. More than 25% of those people, or 1.7 million are non violent drug offenses. Depending on the custody level and State, it costs about $30,000 to imprison someone per year, most of which goes to security. Nearly half of that number are people in prison for marijuana. Arrested users tend to be young, college age people and the arrest can completely destroy their future. Jobs become hard to get, scholarships and Grants for school are simply impossible. Simply because a person elects to smoke their recreation instead of buying it from the Adolph Coors company. In 2009 the Louisiana State University Police arrested 38 people on campus for possession of marijuana in one single semester and at Oswego State University in Ohio the University police report that they made 228 marijuana arrests in 2010 and this had increased from only 59 in 2009, representing a 400% increase in these arrests in only the last few years. How long can tax payers continue to be the muscle for Coors, Budweiser and Pfizer?

The attacks on medicare have been coming fast and furious this year as Conservatives try over and over again to eliminate the program. While both parties recognize that the largest problems with Medicare is abuse and waste, they are divided as to which sector is causing it. Republicans put the blame completely on users of the program, many of whom opponents say are not eligible. Democrats on the other hand say the problems come from inefficient payout systems and too little accountability from providers. The facts are however that all of these factors contribute to the high costs of maintaining the program.

When fraud happens it is usually conducted by large scale confidence groups who set up fake clinics and submit paperwork. The FBI has arrested and prosecuted literally hundreds of these cases, costing tax payers hundreds of millions of dollars, and if provided with more agents or inspectors, could be extremely successful in preventing this type of fraud. Individual collecting medicare when they are not eligible is actually very rare. Other problems, like real doctors and hospitals charging for services never given or grossly overcharging Medicare cases, when compared to private insurance cases, and many other factors. Finally there are a great number of errors that are made by medical coding and billing specialists that are simply not caught by Medicare, leading to a waste of resources.

But the largest part of the problem is the inefficiency of the program and this comes from the fact that the agency is Legislatively hampered. One excellent example can be found in the post-discharge treatment of Medicare patients. When a patient is released from the hospital, especially older patients, see a much faster recovery rate and experience fewer readmission if, for the first 30 days after leaving the hospital, they see a physician at least one time or engage in some form of therapy. A doctors visit to access progress can catch any problems before they require readmission and the exam will cost about $100 while a readmission to the hospital, counting transportation and emergency care, and first days room, can cost over $1,000. One Washington based research group, the Center for Studying Health System Change, found that more than 35% never see a physician during the first 30 days after release and this is leading to more than a 40% rise in readmission’s.

Some hospitals are taking the initiative and setting up post discharge clinics for patients. One clinic for instance, the Tallahassee Memorial Health-care Transition Center, offers two months of out patient clinic care, which can be extended with a doctor´s orders, for patients with a high risk readmission. The clinic has served more than 600 patients since opening its doors and the readmission rate for high risk patients has dropped 61%, giving the hospital, and hence insurance companies, including Medicare, savings of millions of dollars. These types of changes will also open the job market for more jobs like medical assistant and nurse, as well as many technician jobs. The entire question must revolve around efficiency if it is to work at all.

Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan has all but declared war on both Medicare and Social Security and does not seem to care at all that 85% of the American public does not want those programs touched in any way. But understanding Paul Ryan is not difficult at all. Ryan vigorously opposed Obama´s health care Bill and has many times pledged to end even the watered down version. The original bill proposed health care for all on an equal basis and would not have required a tax increase to pay for. It would have, however, put severe price controls on both the medical and private insurance industries and put them into competition with the US Government. Ryan had no interest in the benefit that such a program would have given to millions of people however. His sole interest was in protecting the status quo that has Americans paying more for health care than any other developed nation in the world.

Ryan tried to eliminate Medicare last year by turning it into a voucher program. This means that the government will issue vouchers for a small percentage of medical expenses and seniors would have to use these to negotiate with private insurance companies. The plan was met with overwhelming resistance from voters in both parties and faded quietly in the background for several months. Ryan was not skulking away however, he was merely rewriting and recruiting a Blue Dog Democrat, known for siding with the Republican agenda, to support him on the Bill. But experts are saying that this new Bill is not different in essense from the old bill and even works out better for the insurance companies because it allows them to cherry-pick the healthiest, wealthiest seniors.

But not surprisingly when we look closely at Ryan´s new plan, attached to the new budget, it really appears to be remarkably like Obama´s Affordable Care Act. Not surprisingly because every aspect of what Republicans call “Obama-care” is are actually ideas promoted by Republicans for decades. Mitt Romney actually passed an identical plan when Governor of Massachusetts and was fully supported by National Republicans. The big difference between the plans is that under Ryan´s plan only seniors would be covered and insurance companies would be subject to little or not oversight or regulation. More and more health care workers, like nurses, lab techs and pharmacy techs, would be out of a job as the medical industry would downsize in response to higher insurance rates and less federal subsidization.

The Republicans were not concerned with Universal Health Care, or even health care reform. Their entire objections were based on protecting the health insurance industry. Under the Affordable Care Act, even the watered down version, insurers were not allowed to refuse coverage and children could remain on their parents policy much longer. Basically the new law stops the insurance company from “cherry-picking” only the healthiest while leaving the rest uninsured. Ryan´s new attempt is simply starting to redefine the argument with Medicare and if this Bill passes it can be used as precedent in future attempts to get true Universal Heath Care.

Ryan and other Republican leaders in Congress are in a panic. Beginning in November of 2010 they have risked the entire identity of the Party in an attempt to make the President look like a failure. On at least three different occasions they have moved to actually add to the deficit and trash the economy simply to keep things bad and then blame the President. The recent resistance of the Party to pass even a two month tax cut for wage earners after fighting for an unpaid for tax cut for millionaires exposed the Republican Party for exactly what it was. Recent news from the Department of Labor that unemployment rates are now below 8.5 and still falling does not bode well for Republican chances in November. This is a party that has spent the last 3 years attacking the President, who despite these attacks he has accomplished a great deal, for completely political reasons.

The thought processes of someone who believes that restricting an organizations right to freely discriminate somehow restricts the organizations religious freedoms have to be twisted indeed. The contradictions between Christian talk and Christian deed are simply too numerous to mention in the space of this article but a recent move by a Catholic agency in Illinois includes several of the most common in one fell swoop.

The Christian Church has been heavily involved in running orphanages for over 1000 years and the government seldom became involved in adoptions until about 75 years ago. When a child lost their family or were abandoned by them civil authorities. When people talk about the horrors committed by religious zealots through history Christians always come back with “well look at all the charity the Church does”. There is more than one kind of Charity however. A charitable act is supposed to be given with no expectations of recompense. In other words charity is helping people because the act of helping is a good thing to do. But anyone who has been homeless and who has tried to stay at a Christian run shelter, knows that you will sleep on the side walk if you refuse to attend the mandatory church service.

The Illinois government has been funding Catholic Charities in the State for nearly 50 years and the organization handles a large percentage of adoptions for the State. This funding comes from tax payer dollars and not all tax payers are Catholic. Not all of the children and prospective parents are Catholic either. If the Charity is accepting funding from tax payers dollars and performs a function for the State that affects non-Catholics, then it only seems fair that they should not discriminate based on religious grounds. But the Illinois Bishops do not see it that way. They are quite willing to accept State money and claim that their “God” created all men, they claim that restricting their discriminatory practices actually restricts their religious freedoms.

Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki actually claimed that if we do not allow the church´s intolerance society was being intolerant. Maybe the Bishop would like us to return to the Inquisition or which burnings, other great examples of Christian intolerance. The uproar started when an, inexplicably Catholic, gay couple in Marion, Illinois, were turned away from Catholic Charities because of their sexual orientation. The Illinois State Legislature voted in 2010 legalize same-sex civil unions however and this means that if any organization takes government money form contracts then it must recognize these unions.

The opponents of this Catholic practice are saying that the issue is a civil rights issue. They say that the Church is using exclusively religious reasons for illegally discriminating while they are under contract, which is a violation of State law. But they are also taking the battle to several other levels as well. The Obama Administration now requires religiously affiliated hospitals and charity groups to adopt health plans for employees that cover contraception if they take grants or have contracts with the government. The lawyers for the Church claim that by excluding them from contracts for actions taken with religious conviction, they are being excluded for religious reasons.

Catholic charities receives about 62% of its gross earnings from government contracts and in 2010 alone it received over $2.9 billion. This is all being done when things like environmental protection, easy scholarships and grants, even police and teachers, are being cut to the bone. But instead of using those contracts to help all people the Church needs to use its power to discriminate against anyone that does not follow their particular belief system. In a Catholic hospital a woman is more likely to die if she needs an abortion and a child is more likely to spend life as ward of the State than in a loving, same-sex home.

There has been a great deal of talk in Washington about the enormous amount of money we spend on Medicare. The common theme in this talk is that the program spends too much money for no real benefit. According to Republicans there is a great deal of fraud in the system. The problem is however is that while they are completely correct that there is a great deal of fraud, it turns out that the fraud is actually coming from the business and medical communities, not from the masses of people who desperately need these programs. A single arrest this week by the United States Justice perfectly illustrates the extent of this problem. One businessman (and yes, until he was caught he was seen as a “businessman”, (just like Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff were), was found to have bilked Medicare out of tens of millions of dollars by setting up fake clinics and medical supply companies.

Companies like this buy stolen databases and set up clinics and medical supply companies that actually offer no services. When someone visits their businesses however they turn out to be empty. The companies actually provide no medical services or products. They use the stolen databases to bill the government for services never rendered. While the FBI says it is impossible to determine exactly how much operations like this cost the tax payer, the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association (NHCAA) gives a conservative estimate of more than $60 billion a year and could be as high as $250 billion a year.

Interestingly enough, while the Justice Department has been aware of this problem for nearly 30 years, it was not until 2007 that an FBI “Task Force” was actually formed. The problem is however that the problem, because of neglect, has grown to such epic proportions and the tiny group of investigators is simply not large enough to investigate even a small percentage of the cases. When George Bush formed the Department of Homeland Security it took less than 12 months before this huge government police agency was fully operational and investigating and arresting American citizens at world class rates. The only lesson that can be learned from this is that when Republicans want to “solve” a problem using either the military or police that they can do it very quickly.

But it is not in the Republicans political interest to solve a problem it never seems to happen. The above statistics on fraud is available to every Republican in Congress. Yet when they are speaking there is not one single word about exactly who is committing the fraud. Investigations have revealed that not only are corrupt business persons engaging heavily in this, but that they would not be able to without the active participation of doctors and hospitals. The question is then, if the business community and medical community are mostly responsible for the fraud, then how does cutting benefits for everyone going to solve the problem.

One of the largest problems is the False Claims Act, 18 U.S.C. § 287. Under this Act the penalties are a mere $500,000 fine and 5 years in prison-maximum. One fake clinic bilked more than $20 million in one month and with resources like this it is unlikely that they will be sentenced to anything near the maximum sentence. A person who is caught with a tiny amount of crack cocaine however can face a sentence at least twice as long. Then when they are released and try to get their lives back together they are banned from getting things like scholarships and grants, or any other help from the government and in many cases they will be banned from even renting an apartment. When do we ask ourselves who does more damage to our nation, crack users or medicare cheats?

There was an interesting story on the CNN website today that should be discussed. We have spoken during the last few articles about the history and effects of the “War on Drugs” and have shown that much of the information that we have been given by the government and our “unbiased” media is simply not true about both the history and health effects of marijuana use. The CNN article stated that 1 in 9 High School students are currently using a new synthetic version of marijuana colloquially called “Spice” and according to the story marijuana use is at epidemic proportions. Another story on MSNBC claims that more High School and College students are smoking marijuana than are smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol. The disturbing thing about both of these stories however is not what they say, but what they fail to say.

In the CNN story for instance the writer states that the National Institute of Health “has long documented the harms of marijuana use”. Not only does the story fail to state exactly what these harms are but neither does the NIH on its website. The NIH website says that because young people´s minds are “still developing” , “its use by teens may have a negative effect on their development.” The report cites no studies on teens, no statistics, nothing. When reading the PDF of the actual report we see that in reality the effects of marijuana are actually far less devastating than either alcohol or tobacco, neither of which are even classified as drugs, let alone Schedule 1 dangerous drugs.

The last 40 years have seen the American tax payer fork out over $3 trillion fighting against anyone using drugs that are not government approved. This is one quarter of the nation´s current national debt. No one will argue that the United States has a problem with drug addiction that exceeds most other nations. The use of substances like heroin, cocaine, crack and crystal methamphetamine has sky rocketed since 1970 and we know that not only do this substances have severe health effects but the severe addictive properties make it difficult for users to function in either school or the work place. These are all dangerous drugs with no redeeming medical value and should be vigorously controlled. But the fact is that alcohol has nearly the exact same consequences as the above three drugs and is perfectly legal. Like these other substances, alcohol frequently causes violent reactions, loss of work and school time and severe health issues. Marijuana however has the exact opposite effect on users. Instead of becoming violent, marijuana smokers become calm and tranquil. The herb has not only never been shown conclusively to have any major health affects but has been found to have many health benefits, especially for patients with seriously debilitating conditions.

But there is now a new direction being taken by both our politicians and pharmaceutical industry. The active ingredient in marijuana is THC and several companies are developing a THC based pill for medical marijuana patients. The argument is that while THC is unarguably beneficial for some patients that smoking it is dangerous, even though marijuana is a vassal-dilator, which actually allows blood to flow more freely. Cigarettes on the other hand are vassal-constrictors, which restrict blood flow and are much more dangerous because of this. But the object of this new direction is simply business by Legislation. The best way to beat a competitor in business is to make their products illegal. This will essentially mean that anyone who wants to receive the benefits of THC, instead of being able to grow it at home, will be forced to pay the large Pharmaceutical companies inflated prices. While this may help create a few pharmacy technician jobs, the fact is that, once again, the medical community and drug companies will have successfully taken their place at the top of the heap.