Government Attracts The Corrupt

Government attracts the corrupt.

College students who cheated on a simple task were more likely to want government jobs, researchers from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania found in a study of hundreds of students in Bangalore, India.

Their results, recently released as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, suggest that one of the contributing forces behind government corruption could be who gets into government work in the first place.

That reminded be of the beginnings of cannabis prohibition. Here is a bit on the inception of cannabis prohibition.

Back in 1937 Congress held hearings on Marijuana. Testifying was Harry Anslinger, who was the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 until 1962. He, like most bureaucrats, wanted to get a bigger budget and more power for his department. His main witness was a pharmacologist at Temple University who claimed that he had injected the active ingredient in marihuana into the brains of 300 dogs, and two of those dogs had died. He was asked by the Congressmen, “Doctor, did you choose dogs for the similarity of their reactions to that of humans?” The answer of the pharmacologist was, “I wouldn’t know, I am not a dog psychologist.”

Never mind that marijuana users don’t inject it into their brains and that the active ingredient in marijuana was not synthesized in a laboratory until after World War II so who knows what this pharmacologist injected into these dogs but it almost certainly was not the active ingredient in marijuana. Details such as those didn’t matter and his testimony was sufficient for congress to act. Marijuana use became a federal offense.

That was not the only testimony the pharmacologist gave.

Remember that pharmacologist who injected something or other into the dogs? He became Anslinger’s star drug expert later testifying that he had experimented with the drug himself. “After two puffs on a marijuana cigarette, I was turned into a bat.” He testified that he flew around the room for fifteen minutes and then found himself at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot high ink well…

Ah. So pot made him “batty”, a common term for the mentally ill back in those days. These days the prohibitionists say it triggers schizophrenia. Prohibitionist are so much more scientific with their lies these days.

New research from Harvard Medical School, in a comparison between families with a history of schizophrenia and those without, finds little support for marijuana use as a cause of schizophrenia.

“The results of the current study suggest that having an increased familial morbid risk for schizophrenia may be the underlying basis for schizophrenia in cannabis users and not cannabis use by itself,” note the researchers.

It also doesn’t cause lung cancer or kill brain cells.

A synthetic cannabinoid — similar to the compounds found in marijuana, but substantially stronger — causes the growth of new neurons and reduces anxiety and depression, investigators at the University of Saskatchewan here reported.

And researchers at the University of Calgary said they’ve found evidence that the brain contains so-called CB2 cannabinoid receptors, previously seen in immune tissue but thought not to exist in brain tissue. The discovery, they added, could lead to new drugs to treat nausea associated with cancer or AIDS.

Most so-called drugs of abuse — such as alcohol or cocaine — inhibit the growth of new neurons, according to Xia Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Saskatchewan.

“Only marijuana promotes neurogenesis,” Dr. Zhang said.

The finding — reported in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation — does not involve smoked or ingested marijuana, but rather a synthetic compound dubbed HU-210, which Dr. Zhang said is 100 times as powerful as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the compound responsible for the highs experienced by recreational users.

Dr. Zhang and colleagues showed that administration of HU-210 in high but not low doses, not acutely but over a period of several weeks, promotes new neurons in the hippocampus of rats by causing neuronal progenitor cells to proliferate.

[snip]

The finding “gives us important and unexpected insights,” said Raphael Mechoulam, Ph.D., of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was the first to isolate THC and later discovered the first endocannabinoid.

It “has changed the way we think about the flow of information within the brain, and how the brain communicates with other parts of the body,” Dr. Mechoulam said in a statement.

And the biggest cannabis lie promoted by government? The DEA says that cannabis has no currently accepted medical use. That is the biggest lie going. And the DEA has maintained that the lie is the truth for decades. It is difficult to get more obvious than that.

The truth is getting out. “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on.”

In the bigger picture what the report says is that smaller government means less corrupt government. Not because the government will be less corrupt. Just that there will be less government.