http://www.addiction-treatments.com/substance/Cocaine/index.html

Unlike the many other hepatitis C books, they use their own personal and successful experiences with hep C to teach you everything you need to know as a patient, caregiver, or advocate. Taking the form of a conversation between a patient and doctor, they offer guidance, humor and hope while showing you how to face this disease head on and meet with success.

More information can be found at http://www.healinghepc.com and a copy can be purchased at http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780061879012/Healing_Hepatitis_C/index.aspx

My very best to your organization which is in that same toolbox. May you continue to help many addicts like all the others.

Geo

Thanks for being.

I began smoking pot at 15. When I did so, my grades went up. I was a d-f student, and after I began smoking pot, I became an a-b student, all the way through graduate school, in a foreign country, where I was valedictorian.

While 15, I computerized the payroll of my family’s small restaurant, a thing simply not being done at that time by small businesses or teenagers (1982). This turned a two day chore into a two hour task. The program also generated quarterly reports, making the accountant’s bill smaller. All while stopping to smoke pot regularly.

Pot lead me to a fabulous education in Hawaii at the Brigham Young University there with kids from 47 nations, and afterward it lead me to 15 years studying, living and working in more than two places in both the Netherlands and Germany, and to a relationship with my foreign exchange family that continues now for its 24th year.

I smoke 2 grams/day and I speak three languages. I am familiar with the entire country of the Netherlands, from the center of Amsterdam and radiating outward to all points north and west in Fryslan, south and east to Maastricht, site of my grad school experience, north and east to Groningen, and southward in the Western agglomeration that is the big and ancient cities and towns of North and South Holland. Germany is much bigger, but I know at least the Rhineland, Hessen and the Southwest very well.

I know Dutch politics and issues, especially the political machinations between May 2002 and April 30 2009 in the Netherlands when there was an attack on the Queen’s Day public, where a man killed 6 and himself as he drove into the crowd while the Royal Family looked on in horror. Major members of the Dutch news media meet with me when they come to LA.

I have 4000 digital photos of the Netherlands and Germany taken from cars, bikes, feet, trains, boats, ferries and yachts I rent in the summers. I have 30+ hours of video as well of yacht trips into Hanseatic league cities like Zwolle.

I wrote a “central working document,” in the form of a book about KLM’s price and capacity management system while working at its head office in the hottest department there was at the time. I extracted information from professionals on the job to write a book, set for worldwide distribution, containing information not ever written down anywhere else. It was used from 1995 until 2003 when KLM and Air France merged, necessitating a rewrite of that book.

I managed to make a career in American politics prior to leaving the country, managing Republican political campaigns, including executive positions in 2 presidential campaigns. I hold credentials from the Republican National Committee’s campaign management school in DC as well.

And it goes on and on…

I moved back to the USA when it appeared that sufficient availability of medical cannabis in California would be there for the foreseeable future.

Yes, I did all that and more with a severe neuromuscular disease, HMSN type X, which causes me great pain, severe fatigue, and renders things like running and manipulation of small objects difficult or impossible.

And the cannabis was all the pain relief I needed until 1997, when a mixture of pain drugs became necessary, a mixture that still includes cannabis.

Now what was that you were saying about no motivation?

And did you ask me if I was overweight? I was. But stress was the major factor, and when I reduced the stress, 25 pounds fell off with little else but 1 hour of yoga once a week. And I still smoke the same 2 grams/day, and I did so during the weight loss period. So your declarative statement “you gain weight,” is super dependent on the other stuff the person does. Wyy leave that out?

(Could we perhaps say that if you write stuff on anti-cannabis websites you will have to lie, or at least omit a very great deal?)

Why would you refuse to qualify such a statement? In other words, why do you need to lie?

As for paranoia, if they are out to get you, are you really paranoid? The UK government rescheduled cannabis in 2008 back to an arrestable offense, against the advice of the well-respected (except by G. Brown and J Smith) ACMD, its own advisory committee on drugs.

The US government defines any possession or use of cannabis as a felony, and it demands a state remove your children, driver’s license, your ability to get government guaranteed student loans, and imposes mandatory minimum sentences for various drug offenses. In addition, say your great uncle resides inUS government housing in Philadelphia, and you get caught with some pot in Utah on your way skiing. Such a conviction can cost your great uncle his government housing, ecven though he know nothing of the drugs or drug use, and even though he had mno control over you.

You can’t enter Japan and Canada if you have a drug conviction, cannabis included. The Japanese even caught Sir Paul once, I believe.

Most states have heavy criminal sanction against any possession or use.

The UN has its own drug policy office which is continuously, or has been, until it just said “uncle,” on the concept of continued cannabis prohibition, since 1961, pressuring national governments to both criminalize cannabis and other drugs, and to enforce these prohibitions fiercely, brutally, and violently. And, for new members, the UN requires adoption of this and the supplementary treaties of 1971 and 1986.

And the target seems to be cannabis users, for the USA arrested in 2007 a record number of people, 770,000, yes, seven hundred seventy thousand, for offenses that Jacqui Smith and Barak Obama have done and enjoyed. Smith even ignored the law at the class B level.

Between 1993 and 2007, nearly 10 million people were arrested for simple cannabis possession in the USA, according to annual FBI crime statistics.

So, if the entire world’s law enforcement apparatus and much of its political apparatus wants to see you, a cannabis user, either capitulate such that you quit cannabis with major guilt or a legal conviction attached to you, or to see you jailed or better yet dead, (look up how many people suggest this) are you really paranoid?

(I could go on and on and on about the worldwide draconian punishments for cannabis use, like say in Saudi Arabia or the USA or Iran.

New York City alone arrests 350/day for simple possession of cannabis alone. the UAE is prosecuting people for trace amounts found in the cracks of the soles of shoes, for it has installed extremely sensitive detection equipment at its airport. Also, poppy seeds you spilled on your pants at Heathrow will get you 8 years upon entry of the UAE.

So you may call it paranoia for your own reasons, but Icall it legitimate fear due to the evidence of a worldwide witch hunt for cannabis users.)

You lose friends….. hmmmmm

“Once you get addicted to weed…”

This assumes facts not in evidence, and assumes that use is equal to addiction, and that addiction is the only and natural end for a cannabis user.

These are outrageous assumptions that are not supportable by evidence.

This a lie. Ask Barak Obama, Bill Clinton, or Jacqui Smith how they avoided a humiliating death a a heroin addicted prostitute in a gutter somewhere covered by snow. This is what yo8 say will happen. Why did Barak Obama not lose all his friends?

How did Mr. Obama and MS.. Smith overcome their addictions to cannabis?

“marijuana becomes your best friend,”

Sorry, my best friend is the same best friend I have had since the 4th grade. He, too, uses cannabis, and he is married and has two children. He is a photo journalist, a second career he switched to after I introduced him to digital photography.

“You don’t want to do anything else except to spend time smoking pot all day and all night long.”

Outrageous! You get high, you enjoy the 45 minutes of the peak, then you go about your business.

One likes also to go to a movie, go for a walk, or a bike ride, or into the city for dinner out or to explore. Not doing anything would exclude listening to music, watching TV or a movie at home, or conversing with each other, which is what you will find going on at any and every Amsterdam coffeeshop. It would also exclude cleaning, which is good to do after using cannabis, for it makes boring things interesting.

Your honesty is to be questioned after printing stuff like this.
Eric Johnson
Los Angeles