The title was chosen to highlight one of the first things I learned
about cannabis and its users after agreeing to screen candidates for
'pot recommendations' at an Oakland Buyers' Club (not the OCBC) in late 2001. I had
seen several references to Kramer's book after it was published in 1993
and may have even read a review or two, but had no more than passing
interest in Prozac or any of the other SSRIs at the time because I was
then a chest surgeon, who had yet to discover drug policy issues and
hadn't ever been actively involved with treatment of
"depression." Besides, I'd gone semi retired in '94 and wasn't writing
many prescriptions.
Today, when I read a review
of Kramer's book by someone even more committed to regressive
psychoanalysis than he apparently was, I quickly caught a sense of both
his (and Kramer's) disapproval of Prozac's potential for obviating so
much of what Psychiatry is/was all about. Yet, Kramer had obviously
been so impressed with Prozac's therapeutic benefits that the reviewer
faithfully reported that fact before adding a note of disapproval so
mild that it would be easily missed by a casual reader.
That review made me eager to read the book, but I was completely
frustrated by the impenetrability of my old sources at Amazon.com; thus
I started Googling 'cannabis, Prozac' and soon found an item by Phillip
Dawdy which had appeared both in the Seattle
weekly and on the Alternet in
August 2004.
Dawdy's article was enlightening in a number of ways:
1) A lot of what I had been somewhat surprised to learn from and about
patients had already been suspected in 2004. Nevertheless, my work goes
a lot further than those suspicions because it's based on longitudinal
data supplied by real people who now are organized as a registry.
2) The drug policy reform 'movement' which claims to speak for medical
users has missed the most important way in which pot is being used as
'medicine.' That includes Lester Grinspoon whose quoted complaint about
IRBs is very weak tea; compared to the stir that would be caused by
endorsement/replication of my work by those (relatively few) California
physicians in a position to do so. So far, that hasn't happened; for
reasons neither they nor reform will discuss with me.
3) The links supplied by the Alternet Drug Reporter are contemporary;
in other words, the people who wrote articles on behalf of DPA, MPP,
and ASA are clearly way behind where Phil Dawdy was in 2004.
