Continuing on her crusade against marijuana as medicine (except when it’s sold by a company she works for), Andrea Barthwell has resurfaced in Ohio.
Dr. Andrea Barthwell says she’s seen marijuana shops pop up like liquor stores. “These people move in with a vengeance,” she says.
The former adviser to President George W. Bush is warning against legalizing the drug for medical purposes.
“It’s full of contaminates, bird droppings, animal carcases and it exposes the sick and dying to a number of potential problems,” Barthwell adds. […]
They point to data from Colorado, which legalized medical marijuana in 2000. From 2006 to 2011, traffic fatalities from drivers testing positive for marijuana increased 46 percent. In 2011, drug usage among kids 12-17 was higher than the national average.
Barthwell’s goal is to stop all that from happening here in Ohio.
For those new to this blog, Andrea and I go way back.
In 2005, I broke the story about Andrea’s traveling con job, including the fact that she falsified sponsor information to suppport her Illinois Marijuana Lecture series.
I then covered her move as a Snake Oil Salesman, shilling for a company that sells medical marijuana while still going around opposing medical marijuana.
Later, Barthwell created an organization called “Coalition to End Needless Death on our Roadways,” publishing a “Fatal 15” list each year which they promoted in the media (big scare stories) based on NHTSA data. The only problem is, they didn’t use the data properly and their results were completely false and misleading. I created this page to alert the media to the scam, and before long, her organization evaporated.
Andrea is a con artist who loves to see her name in print and can’t seem to do anything without lying or distorting the truth in some way.
Keep alert, Ohio.
Update: Here’s another article:
“There is no instance where marijuana is superior to anything that is currently on the market,” said Dr. Andrea Barthwell, a former deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. “There is no need for it. There is no room for it. There is no place for it in the physicians’ toolbox.”
She claims there is not enough good medical research to show that marijuana has any positive effect except “an anecdotal finding that marijuana gives people the munchies.”
Barthwell worries that, if it is legalized in Ohio, we will see the drug become more easily available, especially to teens and children. She also argues that medical marijuana would set modern medicine back by over a century because it would open the door to letting ballot issues and lawmakers, not science and medical experts, determine what medicine should be on the market.
“Set modern medicine back by over a century.” Wow.
Now this particular article also has an anecdote from someone else (not Andrea) that really set me on edge…
At a Statehouse news conference, Coleman told the story of a client who explained the difference between drunk driving and drugged driving.
“With beer, you don’t see the red light. With marijuana, you see the red light, and you don’t care,” he said.
Noooooooooo!!!!
What a horrible (and inaccurate) distortion of my joke:
The drunk driver speeds through the stop sign without seeing it.
The stoned driver stops and patiently waits for it to turn green.
Wait, this is a gem for the ages;
Medical cannabis is full of –> “animal carcases” <–?!?!
Oh Andrea. I know there's a competition among prohibitionists to come up with the dumbest, most bombastic, ridiculous statements regarding the lowly cannabis plant. But you have got to be the front runner (for now).
Somebody with illustration talent has to come up with a rendition of animal carcase laden cannabis plants. It's just too good to pass up.
I see they know better than to allow open comments. Too bad. But with hyperbole like that, she doesn’t need rebuttal.
Andrea ‘Bird Droppings’ Barthwell added yet another dying light bulb moment. You know, when a bulb brightens, sparks and smokes just before it’s out forever. Steve ‘Cantalope Calves’ King added his recently. With sweating brows and trembling upper lips, the prohibitionists are becoming increasingly apoplectic. The rest of the usual suspects will surely be weighing in with statements even more ludicrous. The dying bulb is getting a little brighter every day. Wildly entertaining to watch, not to be missed.
It appears that comments are now open on the first article, but not the update.
Did she actually say “bird poop?” I’ve seen some far reaches to demonize cannabis in my time, but that one really takes the cake. Can’t say how many times I’ve washed that bs off of my garden produce…guess I should scrap gardening and go back to buying grocery store wares….
I’ve found clumps of dried mud in mine . . . but the weed had an accent to it and it was hard as a brick . . . it was a brick.
And already! A pair of ears in the Oval Office is twitching, then a voice flirtaciously says “I’m listening…”
Of course Sativex is medicine,,in fact they just started putting it through testing as a treatment for cancers in Italy if I read the press release right.
Do you realize how much money the pharmaceutical companies are shilling out in congress and around DC right now keeping any congressional discussion of marijuana,pro or con,from happening on the floor?
There will be many happy congressman going home for a spending spree.
It would be great to know more details about pharma payoffs in Congress to avoid canna-debate.
Aye,,it would,,but is there any doubt that congress is ignoring the issue,,especially the medical issue,,after all,,there is medical marijuana being sold legally a healthy walk from congress,,state supreme courts are forcing police to return medicine back to patients or pay for damaged crops,,how “accepted” does it have to become or how many headlines does it take before we consider that ignoring it is exactly what they are doing.
Thanks to toadies like Andrea Barphwell, Uruguay is well on its way to complete marijuana legalization:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/08/01
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Dr. Barthwell’s association with GW Pharmaceuticals has been terminated since at least 2011. For all the conspiracy theories spawned by that relationship all she did was to pocket GWP’s money. The last they heard from her she was laughing her way to the bank.
Yes, I do still have a significant (for me) position in GW Pharmaceutical’s common stock.
Hmmm…they spun off the U.S. Sativex license to another pharmaceutical company recently, I have heard. I wonder why the decided to abandon the U.S. process….
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They’ve licensed distribution almost world wide. Bayer has Canada and Great Britain, Almirall has Mexico & Europe, Novartis has the Middle East (except Israel) Australia, Asia (except China) & Africa, Neopharm has Israel and Otsuka has the United States. Russia and China are still up for grabs. It’s pretty much the common way a new pharmaceutical company markets their new drug(s). It takes a lot of capital to distribute a medicine world wide. It’s almost a certainty that GW Pharma won’t exist in the next decade. If Sativex succeeds they’ll be bought out and absorbed by one of the major pharmas. If Sativex fails they’ll fold up the tents and go home.
Otsuka owning the rights to the U.S. is nothing new. I found my first mention of them owning the U.S. rights back in December 2010. It does bother me very much that Bayer passed on buying the U.S. rights. Perhaps Otsuka just outbid them, but it still tells me that Bayer has serious doubts that Sativex will get FDA approval. But GW’s partners list is very impressive and Sativex doesn’t need the U.S. to succeed, just to make me steenkin’ feeel-thy rich.
Hmmm. ‘Conspiracy theories’. Let me see. Oh, yes, straight from the horse’s mouth:
The Vancouver Island Compassion Society also produces a cannabis spray, albeit a much simpler version. Unlike Sativex, which is a patented medicine, the Society’s spray is a tincture of cannabis administered via a vapourizer called Cannamist. Last May (2004), Lucas received a foretaste of possible legal battles to come with GW, Bayer AG, and its subsidiary Bayer Canada, when he described Cannamist at a medical marijuana conference held by a group called Patients Out of Time, at the University of Virginia. Geoffrey Guy happened to be in the audience, and afterward approached Lucas and asked him if he’d had a chance to look at the any of the many patent applications GW has for Sativex. “He said it with a twinkle in his eye,” recalls Lucas, “but with firmness in his voice.”
There is no question that GW plans to enforce its patents on Sativex, which is a precisely dosed medicine. Warns Guy: “To protect our extensive investment, we have sought to identify and patent certain inventions throughout the growing, extraction and manufacturing process. My comments to Mr. Lucas were made as a friendly and, hopefully, helpful gesture as I did not wish him to invest a great amount of effort into obtaining approval for a product as a prescription medicine only to find that he did not have the freedom to operate in the first place.”
Guy’s warning was reiterated shortly after I arrived in England to interview him, when Mark Rogerson, GW’s grey-templed, elegantly dressed, public-relations man, met me at the Oxford train station. “Once it’s approved and Sativex becomes a medicine under the law, there needs to be a minor change in legislation so it can be prescribed,” he said, as he steered his Hyundai (his Audi was in the shop) into near-gridlock. “The Home Office has already said they will do that, and then patients will be taking a legal medicine. But if you are an MS sufferer, it would still be illegal for you to grow cannabis at the bottom of the garden to treat your symptoms. Our medicine will be legal, but anything else will not be.” (Emphasis mine – k.)
Pretty straightforward, isn’t it? Home cultivation to remain illegal, overpriced liquid version of same plant in a spray bottle receives a Gub’mint blessing (no doubt thanks to campaign contributions) and abracadabra! magically becomes hunkey-dorey. Nothin’ to see here, folks, move along, move along…
And to think that Barthwell was hired on by GWP to be anything other than a conduit to her contacts in government in order to peddle what (apparently, miniscule) ‘influence’ she had in prohib circles is naive at best. She just wasn’t good enough at pimping herself, so she’s back on the bush-league snake-oil circuit…and she’s not even good at that. I’d bet the professional prohibs facepalm every time she swings around; the embarrassing ne’er-do-well who can’t even keep a simple job as a professional BSer.
“It’s full of contaminates, bird droppings, animal carcases and it exposes the sick and dying to a number of potential problems,†Barthwell adds.
Something very similar could be said about bagged salad, canned tuna fish, hot dogs, fresh fruit, and just about any other product made from animals or plants.
I think I read somewhere that cornflakes can have a certain percentage of rat droppings and go right in your bowl,,mmmm good!
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The USDA has an allowable level of pus in cow’s milk. I quit drinking milk for almost 10 years after I learned that fact. But coffee just doesn’t taste as good without half & half so I convinced myself that coffee neutralizes pus.
Eeeewww… I’d already mostly switched to soy milk before reading THAT… What level of “animal carcasses” is permitted?
Really? I can point to any number of local intersections where alcohol DUI fatalities have occurred. Can’t pinpoint the same for pot.
And Pete, it just goes to show how much better your original is. Anyone w/ 1/2 a brain cell had to hear/read that and go “huh?”
If animal droppings were a real problem there wouldn’t be any groceries in the stores. Keeping the thistle down off my plants is a bigger concern than critters.
And I say let the nutbags screech. They look loonier by the day.
The fatalities she mentions was: one got hit by a speeding semi on the turnpike . . . you had THC in your blood, therefore marijuana was to blame. Same thing with deer.
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I recall one day (I must have been drunk) when I was poking around on the ONDCP website. In the lower left corner there was a link to a story about a Pennsylvania man who was convicted of DUI-m who was in a collision where the other driver died. “Think driving high isn’t dangerous? Think again!”
They left out a few sniggling details.
* Pennsylvania is a “zero tolerance” State where the presence of inert metabolites gets you convicted of DUI-m.
* The man convicted of DUI-m was sitting at a red light when his vehicle was rear ended by the about to be deceased man.
* The about to be deceased man had a BAC more than twice the per se limit and was 0.19 IIRC.
But since there was cannabis in the general vicinity that’s all that mattered to the scumbags at the ONDCP.
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Dr. Andrea Barthwell is no Aristotle:
Author D. C. A. Hillman writes that drugs were at the intellectual core of the classical world:
Huh? What the heck are you talking about Bruce? I thought they were all drunken sots!
From the same article mentioned in the update for this post;
“Dr. Peter Rogers, medical director of the Southern Ohio Opiate Treatment Program, says he has a harder time getting patients off addiction to marijuana than harder drugs like heroin.”
Peter Rogers (I’m skipping the doctor part) just “says” it’s harder to break addiction to marijuana than heroin. Sure Peter, we’ll just take your word (lie) for it.
There needs to be a study to determine why certain rats just don’t know when to flee a sinking ship. Hold your breath Peter Rogers, it’s a long way down.
A former heroin addict once told me that for him quitting cigarettes was harder than quitting heroin. But I’ve never, ever, had anyone complain to me about feeling any addiction to pot.
I recall the 1980’s none too fondly; that was the first decade that a great many mental institutions, dependent upon public funding via tax revenues, were closed due to ‘cost-cutting’ measures (while the skyrocketing Pentagon budget included Ronnie Ray-Gun’s ‘Star Wars’ projects and other budgetary black holes), and dumped hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mentally disturbed people out into the streets, an environment into which they were not able to adapt and survive thanks to their many and varied conditions.
No one knows how many died in this silent holocaust, for there were few champions of those who could not defend themselves…and nobody kept track of those who were so abandoned; after all, they were just ‘loonies’.
The pattern continues and, if anything, has intensified, as witnessed by how many obvious, pathetic examples of mental illness, who should inhabit those institutions, instead inhabit our streets and public places, lost in their dementia, and raving at either passersby or shadows in their own minds.
Juxtapose that against the public utterances of those who profess to be experts in the field of drug rehabilitation, such as “Doctor” Rogers, Du Pont, Bensinger, Turner, Barthwell, et al, and you realize that not all of the mentally disturbed were cut from the tax rolls and ejected to die in the streets; some are doing quite nicely, courtesy of those same taxpayer’s dollars, while still raving their own particular (and particularly profitable) lunacies…
One of the ways this society is ridding itself of the mentally ill: they are being killed by cops in ever greater numbers (as are people suffering from other medical conditions, such as diabetes, stroke, etc.), usually by beating, sometimes by tasing or other less pleasant methods including torture, and even by bullets, when we SHOULD (as a society) be caring for them in a more humane, medical, manner. All too often those deaths are simply brushed off by both media and police. Sure, sweep it under the rug and the people will forget by the next big Hollywood or DC scandal.
she is such despicable scum.
We missed you CJ . . . how are doing?
I think she goes by her middle name, Grubb’s…
can’t make this shit up… They all grubb in the dirt like little piggies to cash in on the Ganjawar. Why does she get tax paid commercials bashing competitors in Dispensaries for her product Sativex? The sublingual spray from whole plant extracts sorta meaning it didn’t make a dilly damn if klintoon inhaled or not…
Her latest warning,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhkLCHxTwV8
NeoConflicts of Interest
MJ Research Cut as Support Grows
Wizz Quiz Your Way to Riches
Bush Barthwell & Drugs
Snowden’s NSA Domestic Surveillance Revelations Are Old News
Edward Snowden and Washington’s revolving-door culture ecp thread
Bushladen and the Terrorists Carlyles Groups
MKULTRA: CIA Mind Control
THE BUSH-CHENEY DRUG EMPIRE
Bush/Quayle/Lilly Pharmaceutical Sellout!
Booshammy
The vast majority of prohibitionists
still profit on the drug war,..
… and that is still their only motive.
Money Grubbing Dung Worriers
Bush Family Acreage in SA google
Bush Family Paraguay Hideaway Update – Biblioteca Pleyades
Bush Buys 100000 Acres on border of Paraguay & Brazil
TPM: About that Bush Family Ranch in Paraguay… – Democratic …
BEAUTIFUL PARAGUAY – THE BUSH’S LIKE IT – WONDER WHY …
Bush Family Buys Up Vast Vast Land Tracks in Argentina and …
Does anyone know why the Bush’s bought all that land in Uruguay …
Bush family land purchase in Paraguay – PrisonPlanet Forum
Photos: President Bush’s Trip to Uruguay – 2007
Pres. Bush buys 100,000acre ranch in Paraguay : Indybay
President’s Trip to Latin America – the White House
Get elected, get rich, buy up countries. No questions,
the land they bought is sitting on the largest fresh water aquifer in the world. …old family friend, the Most Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s gang bought a MILLION and a HALF acres around it! The law there protects them–they can’t be extradited to the US for war crimes.
How special…
She forgot to mention the nuclear waste and canned global warming that’s in medical marijuana. She must be off her game.
whoa… you must be psychic nick… not only did I find a dead cow in my plants this morning but I found a 55 gal drum w/ radioactive warning labels in there as well!
A man just can’t garden in peace these days with all those carci falling from the sky… it must be a lazy group of bud trimmers that leaves them in tho’…
I did say that the more desperate the prohibs became, the more bat-guano crazy they’d become in their public statements.
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” HL Mencken
Living in a ‘bubble’-cum-echo chamber apart from reality – as the prohibs demonstrably do – tends to cause those residing in it to believe their own propaganda…and usually leads to tragedy when such ivory-tower dwelling residents convince themselves that their peculiar beliefs justify imposing them upon others, usually by force. Most pages of the world’s history are written in the blood of the victims of such self-appointed (lower case ‘I’) ‘illuminati’. And it usually takes equal or greater violence to stop their crusade/jihad.
Hopefully, our fellow citizens, who at present don’t fully understand the role that such self-appointed morals proctors have played in national (and international!) policy WRT to presently illegal drugs will realize in time the threat to their own liberties that the prohibs represent to avoid such a necessity, and that the peaceful process of change via reform-fueled plebiscites will in time subdue those whose (falsely Olympian) desire to ‘save’ their fellow citizens from themselves stem from that desire to rule every aspect of their lives.
Mencken had them pegged perfectly:
“In brief, Prohibition has not only failed to work the benefits that its proponents promised in 1917; (Recall that Newt Gingrich promised the American people a ‘drug free America’ by 1995– k.) it has brought in so many new evils that even the mob has turned against it. But do the Prohibitionists admit the fact frankly, and repudiate their original nonsense? They do not. On the contrary, they keep on demanding more and worse enforcement statutes — that is to say, more and worse devices for harassing and persecuting their opponents. The more obvious the failure becomes, the more shamelessly they exhibit their genuine motives. In plain words, what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism. They lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible, disgrace upon the persons they hate — which is to say, upon everyone who is free from their barbarous theological superstitions, and is having a better time in the world than they are. They cannot stop the use of alcohol, nor even appreciably diminish it, but they can badger and annoy everyone who seeks to use it decently, and they can fill the jails with men taken for purely artificial offenses, and they can get satisfaction thereby for the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure, to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign of being happy. And all this they can do with a safe line of policemen and judges in front of them; always they can do it without personal risk. (Emphasis mine – k.)
True in 1926 when that was written; more so than ever today.
Please sign my petition to End the War on Drugs!!
End the War on Drugs, end this war on Americans.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/end-drug-war/6wkFcV8c