Cannabis is on my mind.
I have a friend with whom we discussed things at the swimming pool. He sells cannabis or cannabinoid products. It might be that I wanted him to clear or clarify it in my mind. I said, "So, in short, you are a drug dealer". I believe that didn't make him happy. He was a certified natural health pharmacist and had a certificate from the government for dealing with natural remedies. These are professionals and tend to avoid the label of being drug dealers. However, he explained that he was using natural remedies to treat complicated ailments.
He indicated that because the body has "cannabinoid receptors" for cannabinoid products, it is natural. This is part of the endocannabinoid system of all vertebrates. I wanted to say that our body also has Opioid receptors, which means we should be taking Opium, but that thought was lost in our discussion. He went down a rabbit hole, a conspiracy theory of the CIA supporting research to discredit the smoking of cannabis. However, it was less toxic and had fewer side effects than alcohol and could be imported from third-world countries.
He believed that naturally growing cannabis never causes any side effects. I told him of Acute Paranoid Psychosis. He was clearly on the side of legalisation. Apart from the fact that he already had a successful business, he had assured me that he had done his research and spoken with various doctors and current great thinkers on the topic. He said that the natural cannabis had not been associated with mental illness and tried to state that he had been using it for the past years for his treatment of Multiple Sclerosis.
As a former medical doctor and someone who has worked as a resident doctor in psychiatry, I told him of my personal experience. There is a high association between Mental illness and cannabis abuse. Even among Consultant Psychiatrists, there is a theory that the reason for the high usage among Psychiatric patients is that they are safe medicating and using it as a tranquillizer. I told him that there was a school of thought that the patients were using the medication for self-therapy. He hit the roof with the word "association". Also, I mentioned that cannabis, to a high degree, does cause Acute Paranoid Psychosis. He even refused to believe that smoking "natural" cannabis causes one to be paranoid: "It relaxes you" and "calms you down", he stressed. He believed that adding impurities was responsible for the psychiatric symptoms.
Looking back on life, I guess I would count myself lucky. I do not drink alcohol, nor do I take any drugs or have been exposed to it. It is not that I have not tried drinking alcohol at occasions and Christmas to see what the fuss was about. Alcohol is bitter, and your body has to get used to it. I think that this is done by friends and peer pressure. None of the people I associated with drank Alcohol. My brother, on the other hand, drank a lot. Also, my father, before his conversion, enjoyed his alcohol. I never really liked it, and I guessed. It is as if I have a natural level of Antabuse (a medication given to alcoholics to induce vomiting on drinking alcohol) in my blood. As an Adventist, I feel guilty when drinking coffee and eating meat. But this was when I returned to the UK and did not grow up in Nigeria. In Nigeria, as of then, only a few Adventists were reading Ellen G White's writings on Health and diet.
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