NEWS ITEM: Religious leaders — from Reform to Orthodox — are increasingly supportive of the medical use of marijuana.
Should marijuana be forbid
To everyone who is a Yid?
Is puffing on the suspect weed
Offensive to the Jewish creed?
Or is cannabis kosher now,
On grounds it soothes the fevered brow
And eases torments of the ill
Who can’t be helped by any pill?
(Some brand such pity criminal!)
What patients crave, the law forbids!
(A blow to valid invalids!)
Officials point to drug abuse,
And sad effects of over-use.
(Adjust each dosage! Count each puff!
How many drags comprise “enough”?)
The thorny arguments persist
Twixt gendarme and the activist.
Now many members of the tribe
Would choose to let the docs prescribe.
These questions stimulate debate
O’er what is marijuana’s fate.
In Israel (don’t act surprised)
The weed has long been legalized
If authorized by an M.D.
— Sometimes it is provided free!
It often seems beyond our scope
To keep up with the latest dope.
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I appreciate the frivolity with which Reb Siegel addresses the subject. A country so much governed by the drug industry. that has 'drug stores' on every corner, wakes up one morning in 1925 and decides a plant is evil and makes it illegal, criminalizes its population, declares a 'war on drugs' and wonders why everybody is so cynical.
1- It's a war on only some drugs: The ones corporate America cannot profit from because anyone can easily grow it.
2- America conditions children to be drug takers with long lines for Ritulin in schools, but condemns those same children for freely choosing 'other drugs' and wonder what went wrong in society.
3- Policy in America is never founded on a 'truth.' It's founded on the strengths and weaknesses of competing power interests. It's therefore continually amazing to see how people buy into prouncements about 'good and bad' from politicians, as if any of them are interested in truth.
4- The religion of Jews in America today: CONGNITIVE DISONANCE!
The social conservatives who seem to be setting the cultural trend in this nation are blatent, unrepentant, uncompromising hypocrites, who make so much noise and chatter that the sane people think that their talk is the mood and intent of all the nation. If you dont legalize medical marijuana say for lung cancer patients then criminilize tobacco. With the lobby money spent by the tobacco industry to buy our congress, it will be a snowy day in hell before that happens.