Placebo

In the Trib this morning, there is an article about the FDA declaring that marijuana has no medicinal value. Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. Since this is a controlled substance we're talking about, getting a good basis of scientific data one way or the other is difficult. It's probably just politics as usual, anyway. But I digress. Everyone knows about the placebo effect. You take a pill, having been given the notion that it will help you, and it does, even though it is devoid of any medicine. If cancer, HIV+, and other patients believe that a hit of THC will aid them in getting well or at least not declining further, isn't that also a type of placebo effect? Aren't we encouraged to believe things all the time with no definitive basis in fact? We went to war using such a mind-trick, right? We had no imminent threat from Iraq, but the government repeated so often that they might attack us, that they could be harboring terrorists, and so on, that people started to believe it. A placebo isn't just a sugar pill. It is a concept given power by our mind; individually, it is very weak, but collectively, it can change a nation's viewpoint.