"You're really going to watch while I do this?"

[beachguy in thongs]

Emily, the healthy volunteer sitting in a half-lotus on a bed in room 29, is only going to smoke half of a joint, while David, the AIDS-related-pain patient reading his Bible in the room next door, won't smoke until tomorrow.

Emily, 26, is outfitted for her six-day stay at the research center--during which she will take pot each day at precisely 10 a.m., alternating between smoking and taking it through a high-tech vaporizer device called a Volcano--with a stack of books and videos, a suitcase filled with comfortable clothes, a boom box, and a cell phone.

She's been relaxed and chatty and looking forward to the study--"a lounging, couch potato-y thing to do," she says--but that was before nurses Lorna Aquino and Hector Vizoso took her through the final preparations. Aquino has just finished listing the various exams--the blood draws, the breath test for carbon monoxide levels, the survey of her levels of intoxication, the computerized pattern-recognition test--that she will be taking each day, once before she gets high and five times after.

Now Vizoso hands her the "Instructions to Smoke Marijuana"--a laminated card detailing the Fulton Puff Procedure. He goes over the method--5 seconds on the draw, hold it for 10, exhale, and wait for 45--and explains that Aquino will watch her from a window in the hallway to make sure she gets the timing right.

Now Emily seems self-conscious and flustered. "You're really going to watch while I do this?" she asks.

It's a perfect moment for Dr. Donald Abrams to come in. Although he's wearing a crisp pin-striped shirt and shiny shoes instead of a cardigan and sneakers, he looks like Mister Rogers, and he introduces himself in a neighborly way that immediately puts Emily at ease. "I need to do a little exam here," he says apologetically, fixing his stethoscope to his ears. "It's just that when you're stoned you don't want someone coming at you like this." His exam is brief.

On the table in front of Emily, Aquino has arranged a blue plastic ashtray, a Bic lighter, and a shiny hemostat--for a roach clip. In the ashtray is precisely half of a marijuana cigarette, as everyone around here calls the government-issued, machine-rolled joint, which is bright white and perfectly round.

Emily lights it up and draws deeply while Abrams coaches her through the Fulton procedure.

She starts to hack, and he assures her in his doctorly tones: "If you don't cough, you don't get off." Abrams, a professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco who was one of the first people to suggest that a virus causes AIDS, knows all about working with stoned people.

He's one of the few American scientists allowed to study pot in human subjects.

beachguy in thongs Reviewed by beachguy in thongs on 01-18-2006. "You're really going to watch while I do this?" Emily, the healthy volunteer sitting in a half-lotus on a bed in room 29, is only going to smoke half of a joint, while David, the AIDS-related-pain patient reading his Bible in the room next door, won't smoke until tomorrow. Emily, 26, is outfitted for her six-day stay at the research center--during which she will take pot each day at precisely 10 a.m., alternating between smoking and taking it through a high-tech vaporizer device called a Volcano--with a stack of books and videos, a Rating: 5

[JDiz]

This is possibly the most important thing done with this subject. Perhaps with this man's vision and talent the powers-that-be will realize that there are far more dangerous substances that are legal, whereas this illegal plant has many beneficial characteristics and few (if any) harmful side effects.

[beachguy in thongs]

You have to figure that he must be one of the most well-respected doctors in order to have government clearance for Herb. And then he tells his subject, "If you don't cough, you don't get off," which is something you hear from an everyday pothead.

And that's the thing, the side-effects are, rather, harmless.

[F L E S H]

5 seconds on the draw and hold it for 10 seconds? That's a lot... Even after smoking for years, I take something like half second draws, 1 if I'm confident :stoned:

If I took a 5 second draw, I'd hack out my lungs...

[Anonymous]

yah isnt the thc absorbed in the first few seconds why would she have to hold it that long

[Az.]

Excelent!!
could I ask where you got that from??
I want to read more about it.

[beachguy in thongs]

I thought the same thing, about THC absorption into the lungs. If you inhale a shitload of smoke, holding it in for five seconds means that you're lungs are empty of smoke, after five seconds. I guess.

Excelent!!
could I ask where you got that from??
I want to read more about it.

"Respectable Reefer"
October 19 2005
Mother Jones Magazine
by Gary Greenberg

http://www.maps.org/sys/nq.pl?id=651&fmt=page

[BizzleLuvin]

Mother Jones magazine is amazing, i subscribe to it and Adbusters and Body 'n Soul. its an activism leftist magazine. lots and losts of MJ related articles over the years.

[bonsaiguy]

You have to figure that he must be one of the most well-respected doctors in order to have government clearance for Herb.

Then again, knowing how our govenrment and the DEA feel about weed, I would have to wonder if he has that clearance because he has already been told what the outcome of his study will be. Sadly, although the feds put on a show about their "studies" of the effects of weed, most of which seem to have been taken directly from the directors cut of Reefer Madness, it is said that they actually grow some of the crappiest weed available at their Kentucky(?) lab facility and are extremely stingy about supplying researchers with the stuff. I have read quite a few stories about universities trying to do studies on weed only to discover that they can't get any from the feds for a variety of BS reasons. In other words, they get the approval for their studies but never get the smoke.

Almost makes one a believer in those conspiracy theories about Dupont and nylon.

[beachguy in thongs]

They get low-grade smoke. The University of Massachussets wants better bud, maybe growing their own.

Anything is possible, in the future, being tomorrow or the next day. Look at Arnold. One day he's smoking a joint, the next, he's governor.