Doctors, Nurses or “legalizers”, I call them white coats or blue.

There is a view, a perception, that we are they, and that we are of the same cloth but white and blue, completely allied in purpose and mission. Journalists, police, academics, talking heads, governments and just plain folks hold this notion the best I can tell, at least some of them do.

Mr. George Soros’s funding of anti drug war efforts; the marijuana court and legislative lobbying conducted with Mr. Peter Lewis’s financial backing; and the generous contributions spent yearly by California recluse John Gilmore attest and affirm that commingling of thought. That blue is white and white is blue.

These men and the employees who represent them to the media and public are the blue coats. Blue coats: lawyers, lobbyists, advocates and others, lightweights in medical knowledge, but the proud owner of a white shirt, a tie, a blue blazer, and a job to go forth and talk about medical marijuana. Regardless of their intentions, which I see as noble, they wear blue coats and they do not speak for me, a patient.

I’m a blue coat guy but I hang with the white coats a lot and when we get together to teach health care professionals and US citizens about cannabis and its therapeutic health uses, I let the white coats do all the talking. When the white coats talk about medicine you should listen. They are the ones with the medical education; they went to Nursing School or Medical School, not law school. Blue coats did not participate in a medical education, they do not see patients, they have no credibility in a discussion of clinical protocols, and they have no designation that allows them to speak with medical authority.

White coats do. That’s why I let doctors and nurses speak for me, for Patients Out of Time, for patients. It just seems so sensible.

When a blue coat at NORML, the DEA, the Drug Policy Alliance, the White House, the Marijuana Policy Project or whomever starts telling you about the therapeutic use of cannabis, be polite. When a white coat expresses knowledge about medicinal cannabis, take notes.

When the blue coats of the legalizers speak, they echo the orders of their bosses to pursue marijuana legalization and the return of cannabis to the US pharmacopoeia, and to do so in tandem. The blue coats of the law, a slightly darker more menacing blue, now say in chorus, “see, we told you so, the medial use is a ruse”, and they have a point well made by other lighter blue coats. If you hear only the song of the blue coats, if you listen no more, if you write and publish only that set of lyrics, enunciated by those faint of cannabis knowledge and clinical experience then you have missed part of the opera.

Off Broadway, far from the theatre of the blue coats, over hill and dale from “foggy bottom”, in the streets of the cities and in the dust of country roads the subject of the performance, the patient, is ignoring the relentless vacuous blue breath of bullshit and focusing mind and reason on the aria of the white coats; the clear voices of scientific studies and clinical success sung with a background arrangement built on compassion for the less fortunate.

The blue coats of any shade will not go away, their bosses will pay their way into your ears and eyes.

The white coats will also stay around for a good while we hope, giving you plenty of time to listen to what their song about medical cannabis sounds like. The fat lady has not made it on stage yet so it’s your choice as a citizen, a patient, a cop or a cannabis advocate to make. If you really want to know about medical cannabis as a patient, a student, a caregiver, a lawmaker: White coats or Blue?

Al Byrne