Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
All of my best wishes for that recovery and thank you for a wonderful telling of a horrendous episode. A retelling can be a kind of emotional cauterization, a bookend to a chain of thoughts.
I fully get the whole thing of not accepting help, even though you probably regretted it in hindsight. Sometimes there is only so much help you can accept, sometimes taking command of your own emotional recovery is compelling. You seem to have the wisdom to have seen when the threshold of not-coping had been crossed enough that getting help was the better course. It's important to realize that we can't take that kind of resilience for granted.
-
Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Ben Austin,
This is quite different from people who belong to groups/class/areas that usually or used to vote Labour.
Quite. The units we're interested in are people, not areas of people. When you don't actually poll people with the two questions at once, you can't establish what structure exists in the interaction of the questions. It is quite possible to have a strong relationship between UKIP support and Labour support in an area without that implying that UKIP and Labour supporters are the same people. The opposite could be true, that Labour supporters are anti UKIP, but happen to live in the same areas.
-
Hard News: Grenfell: a signal moment, in reply to Hebe,
The London firies had no way of reaching the top of that building from the outside.
This is why you don’t clad a high rise in a flammable material, ever. How are you going to stop it if it it starts? Inside, there’s sprinklers, maybe, and there are walls containing the spread. Outside, it goes up like a bonfire. I could not believe what I was seeing in a country like Britain.
-
I think a fire like this is a particularly poignant disaster because it can not really be blamed on anything other than pure human incompetence and greed.
-
Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Rich Lock,
Labour voters were twice as likely to have supported UKIP than Tory voters?
-
Hard News: Genter's Bill: Starting at…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
And you are wrong it is entirely possible to do controlled trials on the benefits of pain relief, some of the results are kinda fun.
I never said any different. Just that considering the way controlled trials about pain relief work, by treating as the response the subjective evaluations of the pain levels reported by the subjects, I’d consider the centuries of people doing exactly that pretty damned compelling evidence that it’s worth a shot. We should also do more controlled trials, but I just don’t see the compelling reason to hold things up over them. We also don’t have to reinvent the wheel on this. There is an entire planet of evidence to look to.
I’d be happy with regulated tested certified products that the medical profession could asses and prescribe with confidence.
As would I. I’d just also be happy with them prescribing, in some circumstances, access to “experimental” stuff, by which I mean stuff that’s been consumed by millions of Americans, and derives from plants that have been consumed for thousands of years, with very little evidence of toxicity.
You wouldn’t and shouldn’t accept that for any other prescribed medication.
It isn’t how it’s usually done, sure. But we are talking about something that does not have an involved or difficult production process. The reason it’s “prescription” is to allow it at all, not to provide carefully measured doses of something that would otherwise be toxic, or might even be outright toxic if made wrong. The prescription will almost certainly “use as needed”, like it is for many prescription medications, like ventolin, or all the topical steroids I’ve been on for decades. They’d give guidelines of how to establish a reasonable dose, something that is not rocket science, since it’s to stop pain, so it’s “increase dose until pain improves”, and “watch for side effects”. Like it is for so many other drugs, the patient is experimented on in a somewhat systematic way. Doctors also do very frequently make health recommendations that are not via prescriptions, just advice and guidelines for managing health.
And lets focus on what they’d probably do it for, if they thought their reputation was at risk – people who are dying in pain. People for whom there is an extremely good case for this even on the less than perfect information we already have. As the evidence begins to roll in on the effectiveness in pain relief and/or the general harmlessness otherwise, they can get wider. I think I’d rather doctors were making that choice than some politician, frankly.
But jam the two together? Nope.
I’m struggling to see the downside, and definitely struggling to see that downside trading off well against the upside. Your concern is for the public respect for the medical profession? Frankly, I neither see it as likely to be affected, nor as my responsibility to maintain. Or is it that you’re genuinely worried someone will get hurt by growing their own medical cannabis? If so, I’d like to see some evidence of that actually happening. I don’t see the onus being automatically on people seeking to free something like this to prove the lack of harm, but quite the other way around, given what the blanket ban costs people in unnecessary misery and suffering. I’m pretty sure you’ll find the evidence for that every bit as shaky as the evidence of the benefits, for all the same reasons.
ETA: Forgot to add: Also, once again, it’s not legalization of recreational cannabis. It’s not the same thing at all. It’s legalization of the consumption and supply of medical cannabis. Yes, the idea of it being available for people to grow is strange. But how else is anyone going to make it? What amazing magic process are they going to use in some tightly controlled medical cannabis plantation? They’re going to take cuttings and plant them, then water them, fertilize them and sun them. Like what I do on a daily basis in my backyard, producing products every bit as good (I would actually maintain that they are in many ways better) as what is available in the shops, at a fraction of the cost (in some cases).
-
Just to clarify, since obviously I've had harsh words for incrementalism over the years. My position is that I don't think incrementalism is in any way optimal, and can entrench suboptimality. But that does not mean that when an increment comes along I'd oppose it. That's just cutting off nose to spite face.
There is at least some argument that the medicinal pathway eases legalization too. It could work backwards, but Jesus, I'd prefer it to complete stasis. Quite aside from any free-the-weed master plan, there's the rights of people in great pain to consider. I think some proportion of people against legalization can probably accept that, and there's a real human consequence if they do.
-
I get it. The Greens and a whole lot of New Zealanders (a significant minority if not a majority) want to legalise marijuana. This amendment acts to do that without actually doing the hard thing and saying prohibition is stupid and hasn’t worked.
Yes, it's incremental. It's a hard sell to me, too, but I would take a medical cannabis bill in the hand over 2 legalization bills in the bush, especially if it's one that doesn't insert big pharma business completely unnecessarily into the equation. Yes, it's not the bill I'd put forward, but it's also not a bill I'd oppose. It might help some people in pain, however much it doesn't get me any sticky icky.
-
Hard News: Genter's Bill: Starting at…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But you’re happy to risk the credibility of doctors to achieve functional legalisation?
I'm happy to give them the choice about it, yes. Very much so. They know a lot more about health than I do. The law would not force any doctor to prescribe it. But it would enable any to do so if they deemed it worthwhile, and I totally disagree that the evidence of the benefits in pain reduction are shite. There are millions of first hand testimonies to that effect. When it comes to pain relief, first hand testimony is the only direct evidence there is.
Oh and BTW doctors belong to a real professional society (unlike real estate agents), there are pretty serious restrictions to that. Prescribing is not done casually.
Yup, they can apply their appropriate level of seriousness on a case by case basis. The terminally ill cancer patient finding pain relief and nausea reduction from it is hardly a casual prescription, it's an act of mercy, potentially increasing the quality of life for a suffering human being tremendously. Quite a lot of doctors believe in that. I also believe in it.
-
I mean, lets face it, cannabis use is very widespread. There are a lot of doctors who have direct personal experience of it, and continue in their high functioning jobs in perfectly good health. I expect these ones would be less inclined to dismiss the enormous plethora of existing evidence already in place for medicinal cannabis, and would know from personal experience that it's pretty difficult to stuff up the production of a plant you grow in your garden, and literally impossible to overdose on it. Maybe they have concerns about recreational cannabis on mental health, but they're not prescribing that, and they're certainly not accountable for what illegal activities patients get into.