Sessions Wages War on Natural Weed, As He Grants Maker of Fentanyl a Monopoly on Synthetic THC

Jeff Sessions hypocritically granted a monopoly on the sale of THC to a company whose drug fentanyl kills tens of thousands a year, while promising to arrest people for a plant.

Govt’s Own Study Shows Legal Weed Reducing Teen Pot Use, Convictions, & Addiction

It has been just over three years since the State of Washington approved marijuana sales for recreational use. And despite the naysayers’ cries the sky would fall after Washington decriminalized weed, according to a new report, not only has cannabis use among teenagers and kids fallen, but so have admissions to treatment centers and misdemeanor pot convictions.

The Washington State Institute for Public Policy commissioned the study. It found that pot use among teens fell from 20 percent in 2010, to just 17 percent in 2016. The survey asked nearly 11,000 high school sophomores if they’d consumed cannabis within the last month. The results indicate not only are fewer teens using cannabis on a monthly basis, but the fears that teens would become pot addicted were unfounded.

According to the Seattle Times, legalizing cannabis use and decriminalizing it also helped drive down the number of admissions into marijuana abuse treatment centers. The Times writes:

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On cannabis abuse, researchers found that admissions for publicly funded treatment fell in the three years after I-502 [decriminalization of cannabis in WA] was enacted. Admissions dropped from 7,843 in 2012 to 6,142 in 2015.

As for misdemeanor convictions for marijuana use, they also fell significantly.

misdemeanor convictions for pot possession by adults dropped sharply after legalization… Prohibitions for minors did not change under I-502; possession remained illegal for them. But convictions began to decline in 2012, dropping from 1,015 at the start of the year to 722 in early 2013.

Resulting from Washington State’s decriminalization of marijuana use for adults, not only did pot use among teens fall, but admissions to treatment facilities, and misdemeanor convictions for pot use also dropped. The results, if they can be duplicated nationwide, hold promise for the rest of the country.

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Indeed, the country as a whole is wrestling with a burgeoning opiate and heroin crisis. As TFTP reported more Americans died in 2016 from opiate and heroin overdose than died in the entire Vietnam War. Cannabis holds out effective hope to treat opiate and heroin addicted individuals by substituting addictive opiates with cannabis. In light of those facts, the legalization of cannabis across the United States cannot come fast enough for opiate addicts and their families.

Working against Americans’ freedom to choose a natural plant-based medicine, as TFTP reported, is Insys, an Arizona-based pharmaceutical company, and manufacturer of Subsys, a controversial fentanyl-based opiate. Insys actually paid $500,000 to sway voters against making recreational marijuana legal in Arizona. The money was given to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy (ARDP) which quickly launched an effective television and radio advertisement campaign declaring that marijuana is an “addictive product” that ensnares children leading to skyrocketing rates of pot use among teens.

As TFTP’s Matt Agorist wrote, the hypocrisy was glaring:

Insys Therapeutics, the company who makes insane profits from a drug behind one of the worst overdose epidemics in the nation’s history, fentanyl,  has donated $500,000 to a campaign opposing marijuana legalization in the US state of Arizona. In a glaring display of hypocrisy, the maker of the drug Subsys, a sublingual fentanyl spray, claims that marijuana is dangerous because it could hurt children.

What’s really hurting children are the nearly 60,000 deaths by opiates and heroin overdose which has taken countless parents away from children, addicted possibly millions of teens and young adults, and taken away grown children from elderly parents.

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The ARDP mission statement (which can be read on their Youtube channel) indicated that ARDP was dedicated to “fighting back against the for-profit marijuana industry that makes money from an addictive product”. Critics such as Agorist contend that not only did ARDP accept donations from one of the country’s most unethical pharmaceutical companies allegedly, to promote fallacies about cannabis, but ultimately ARDP helped enable Insys to keep marijuana illegal in Arizona. The ballot-initiative failed in late 2016.

Almost immediately following the failure to decriminalize cannabis in Arizona, Insys convinced the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to allow Insys to introduce a synthetic marijuana product, Syndros, to the market. Yes, that’s right. At the same time Insys was paying to keep safe and natural weed illegal, it was partnering the DEA to profit off of synthetic weed.

The latest facts from Washington State suggest Americans have nothing to fear from weed becoming legal in all 50 states and provinces. But the entire nation has much to fear from an increasingly unethical pharmaceutical industry which will stop at nothing to addict Americans to its powerful, deadly, and dangerous opiates.

DEA Approves Synthetic Weed for Pharma Co. That Paid $500K to Keep REAL Pot Illegal

After it waged a veritable war against cannabis legalization in Arizona, coughing up half a million dollars for the campaign, Insys Therapeutics recently announced the ultimate victory has finally come to fruition: the DEA approved one of the company’s groundbreaking pharmaceuticals — synthetic marijuana — to be listed as a Schedule II substance.

“Insys gave $500,000 last summer to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, the group opposing marijuana legalization in Arizona,” the Washington Post reported. “The donation amounted to roughly 10 percent of all money raised by the group in an ultimately successful campaign against legalization. Insys was the only pharmaceutical company known to be giving money to oppose legalization last year, according to a Washington Post analysis of campaign finance records.”

That flood of cash from the pharmaceutical company with a vested interest in killing legalization probably did just that.

Now, the equally profit-motivated government has bestowed on Insys Therapeutics what is tantamount to skirting federal cannabis prohibition — despite that synthetic Syndros contains the equivalent ingredient, THC, nature provided in the first place.

This coordinated effort between a profiteering, private entity and the U.S. government to not only crush, but scoff at personal liberties sounds a quiet but resounding alarm for America’s legal cannabis industry.

The fact the cannabis plant, itself still languishes as a supposedly dangerous Schedule I substance, while Big Pharma can profit from its imitation, did not occur by happenstance — in fact, Insys’ history should have flatly nullified this government-granted windfall.

Syndros garnered approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last summer for the treatment of the nausea, vomiting, and weight loss suffered by AIDS and cancer patients.

Now, Insys has received the green light from the Drug Enforcement Agency, which categorized the synthetic substance and its generic formulations as Schedule II — a classification placing it alongside substances from cocaine and methamphetamines, to Adderall, OxyContin, and even methadone.

Cannabis remains on the DEA’s hitlist of Schedule I dangerous substances the State vilipends as devoid of redeeming medical value, on par with heroin, LSD, ecstasy, and peyote — largely due to pressure from, if not surreptitious coordination with, Big Pharma.

Insys’ stupefyingly brash endeavor to crush cannabis legalization while attempting approval of a fabricated concoction that mimics the vilified plant must be the most astonishingly pretentious example of callous corporate profiteering in years — indeed, this loathsome hypocrisy has not escaped the cannabis advocacy microscope.

“It appears they are trying to kill a non-pharmaceutical market for marijuana in order to line their own pockets,” J.P. Holyoak, chairman of the Campaign to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol in Arizona, asserted last year.

Even a cursory examination of Insys Therapeutics’ anti-pot propaganda — imbued with all the patronizing semantics characteristic of an industry too experienced in cozying up to the U.S. government — belies the inanity in Big Pharma’s naked profiteering.

In short, it doesn’t matter to Insys and the federal government that scores of patients suffering a startlingly wide spectrum of ailments find relief from a plant, cannabis, in its natural state — together with loosening laws nationwide — cannot profit Insys.

But a fabricated version of the plant — and its oh-so-helpful categorization as less dangerous than what nature managed to produce — can.

During its shameless anti-pot campaign, Insys bloviated of legalization, “it fails to protect the safety of Arizona’s citizens, and particularly its children.”

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Perhaps targeting the heartstrings of family members whose loved ones use cannabis to treat childhood epilepsy and seizures, cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder, Crohn’s disease, addiction, depression, ADHD, or one of myriad other conditions, Insys deigned itself a shield between customers and the villain plant, adding it “firmly believes in the potential clinical benefits of cannabinoids,” and “we hope that patients will have the opportunity to benefit from these potential products once clinical trials demonstrate their safe and effective use.”

That socially-awkward attempt to seem compassionate fools no one — and hasn’t yet — considering Insys Therapeutics began seeking the boundless profits of synthesized cannabis more than a decade ago.

Insys predicted current staggering support for the medical and recreational use of cannabis years ago, as the company postured on the need to maintain the non-synthetic plant’s Schedule I status in a 2011 letter to the DEA, noting the “longstanding policy of the United States to disfavor domestic cultivation of narcotic raw materials because of concerns about the abuse potential from farming of this material.”

But evidence the pharmaceutical company’s hostility toward the cannabis plant pertained to profit deprived it, in actuality, came years earlier — Insys’ own words from nearly a decade ago substantiate fully the financial motivation.

As state-run RT pointed out, a disclosure filed by Insys on August 17, 2007, with the Securities and Exchange Commission proves beyond a doubt the profit-robbing factor would motivate killing legalization ten years later. Forgoing pretense, Insys asserted,

“If marijuana or non-synthetic cannabinoids were legalized in the United States, the market for dronabinol [Syndros] product sales would likely be significantly reduced and our ability to generate revenue and our business prospects would be materially adversely affected.”

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Of course, given Insys Therapeutics’ penchant for flying fast and loose with the law when profits are at stake aligns perfectly with the company’s insultingly-hypocritical, patently-fictitious moralizing on public health concerns.

Insys is now under investigation for off-brand marketing of fentanyl — an opioid painkiller 50 times stronger than Schedule I-listed heroin, and one of the most addictive substances available — a route pharmaceutical companies take when a drug is either found efficacious in treating an additional condition, or when sales for the approved purpose slump.

Worse, and lending further credence to the company’s profit-no-matter-the-cost modus operandi, several Insys executives were just arrested in December for conspiring to pay off healthcare workers to recklessly prescribe the medication — even when the dangerous opioid wasn’t needed.

“Several pharmaceutical executives and managers, formerly employed by Insys Therapeutics, Inc., were arrested today on charges that they led a nationwide conspiracy to bribe medical practitioners to unnecessarily prescribe a fentanyl-based pain medication and defraud healthcare insurers,” wrote the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts in an announcement on December 8, 2016.

“As alleged, top executives of Insys Therapeutics, Inc. paid kickbacks and committed fraud to sell a highly potent and addictive opioid that can lead to abuse and life threatening respiratory depression,” stated Harold H. Shaw, Special Agent in Charge of the Boston Field Division of the FBI, after the arrests. “In doing so, they contributed to the growing opioid epidemic and placed profit before patient safety.  These indictments reflect the steadfast commitment of the FBI and our law enforcement partners to confront the opioid epidemic impacting our communities, while bringing to justice those who seek to profit from fraud or other criminal acts.”

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Yet, the duplicitous nature of the U.S. government’s prohibition on cannabis now has the DEA, putatively Drug Warrior Number One, transparently forking over legal protections for synthetic THC, allowing the company to profit handily, while the plant’s scheduling makes criminals out of patients legitimately using cannabis for medical reasons.

It is this skirting of legality, deceptive marketing, duplicitous propaganda, offensively direct assistance from the government, and flagrant criminality that make Insys Therapeutics the exact corporate thug paragon of a monied-interest, authoritarian Police State.

If you need a case to abolish the State, look no further than its dealings with the cannabis plant — whether or not you are a user, the miraculously beneficial weed has flourished for centuries unmolested by self-important empires, until fiat currency made it a threat to unscrupulous profiteers.

The State’s farcical war on cannabis has effectively ended for most Americans — and it’s well overdue the government catch up with the rest of us.

DEA Approves Synthetic Marijuana for Company That Spent $500K to Keep Weed Illegal

(ANTIMEDIA) Lobbying in the nation’s capitol is a billion dollar industry, but sometimes, companies dip their toes into state and local politics, as well. When giant corporations want to influence bills and national elections, they generally spread their money around, cozying up to a number of politicians and shaking hands with numerous government officials. However, at the local level, high-dollar financing is a bit more transparent.

Insys Therapeutics is a small player on the national scale. The Center for Responsive Politics reported that they spent only $120,000 lobbying in D.C. in 2016. But in Arizona, where the company is based, they forked over $500,000 — and they did it to keep marijuana illegal in the traditionally Republican state.

Last September, the Washington Post first reported the large donation, which was “one of the largest single contributions to any anti-legalization campaign ever.” Insys’ money was given to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, a localized political action committee that opposed the state’s ballot measure to legalize cannabis in 2016. That measure was ultimately defeated, and now the group is fighting the Arizona Marijuana Legalization Initiative, a bill that could hit Arizona ballot boxes on November 8, 2018.

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According to the full text of the bill, acquired by Anti-Media via ballotpedia.org, the application was filed at the beginning of March. It states that “marijuana and cannabis have been used safely for thousands of years for recreational, medical, religious and industrial purposes.” The bill also cited a study funded in part by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that “did not show a significant increase in levels of crash risk associated with the presence of drugs.”

The bill proposes a number of changes that would essentially legalize marijuana. These include:

“There shall be no limit on the number of cannabis plants in a personal grow that are not yet in a state of florescence.”

“All persons at least twenty-one years of age are authorized to maintain a home garden provided the person obtains a transaction privilege tax license.”

“Commercial grows, home gardens and cannabis sales are not authorized within 1,000 feet of a school.”

According to the Washington Post, Insys has “developed a drug based on a synthetic ingredient, THC. Called Syndros, the drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in July for treatment of AIDS and cancer patients’ symptoms.”

Insys was just given preliminary approval for Syndros from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) this week.

However, Insys has a shady history as a big pharmaceutical company, as they manufacture Subsys fentanyl, a deadly painkiller. An NBC report found that as of 2015, Insys had enjoyed sales of $147.2 million for their high-risk drug. They also came under investigation for the aggressive manner in which they were marketing and selling their drug. The NBC study quoted the Oregon assistant attorney general, who stated, “I’ve been investigating drug cases for about 15 years now, and the conduct that we saw in this case was among the most unconscionable that I’ve seen.”

For Insys, the fight against marijuana legalization has been long and arduous. In 2011, they retained the lobbying firm Hyman, Phelps & Mcnamara to nudge the DEA against legalization. In a statement to the Post, the company claimed they oppose marijuana legalization because “marijuana’s safety hasn’t been demonstrated through the federal regulatory process.”

Safer Arizona, the group fighting for legalization, features the tagline, “We don’t have a drug problem, we have a political problem,” on their website. Marijuana legalization in Arizona would be a huge step for nationwide legalization, as the state is seen as a stronghold of traditional American values. However, if big pharma continues to bankroll the opposition, the political action groups fighting against legalization will have more money to fund campaigns for local politicians who share their sympathies.

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