NORML

The Purple Brain: America's New Reefer Madness

The feds' new sequel to Reefer Madness
By Marsha Rosenbaum and Paul Armentano
AlterNet

June 23, 2007

More than 70 years in the making, the long-awaited sequel to the notorious 1936 film, has arrived. It's called The Purple Brain, and just like its unintentionally campy predecessor, its purpose is to frighten Americans about marijuana.

The particular target audience for the Feds' new production is the millions of parents who may have, without incident, experimented with marijuana in the 1970s, when they were about the same age as their children are today.

Recent Research on Medical Marijuana

Emerging Clinical Applications For Cannabis & Cannabinoids
A Review of the Recent Scientific Literature, 2000 — 2006

Despite continued political debates regarding the legality of medicinal marijuana, clinical investigations of the therapeutic use of cannabinoids are now more prevalent than at any time in history. A search of the National Library of Medicine's PubMed website quantifies this fact. A keyword search using the terms "cannabinoids, 1996" reveals just 258 scientific journal articles published on the subject for that year. Perform this same search for the year 2006, and one will find close to 1,000 published scientific studies.