Medicinal Cannabis and more

Medicinal Cannabis

Sir: There is no agreed definition of medicinal cannabis. The term is used to refer to the therapeutic use of herbal cannabis and its constituents. There are about 100 cannabinoids and other compounds at present, of which psychotropic tetrahydrocannabinol and nonpsychotropic cannabidiol have been the most studied.

In the July-August edition, Professor Whitehall correctly discusses the multiple problems that can and do occur when cannabinoids are promoted for the management of ADHD. Similar difficulties are present in assessing the value of cannabinoids for many of the other conditions for which they are now being promoted. Most of this rapidly increasing use is based on poor clinical evidence and it will take a long time before the correct place of cannabinoids in medical practice is established. Long-established hospital brandy only disappeared as a therapeutic agent in the late 1940s.

All cannabinoids have numerous pharmacological properties, but this does not equate to therapeutic efficacy. None of the cannabinoids used in medicine have been subjected to the standard toxicological and pre-clinical evaluation required for any new drug. This makes it appealing to any enterprising company, as it costs over $1 billion to take a new chemical agent to the final stage of pharmaceutical marketing. Cannabinoids have been in some form of medical use for centuries. There are spectacular reports, both positive and negative, relating to their use in prestigious medical journals such as the Lancet published as far back the late nineteenth century. Their use has considerable support in the general community. In addition, they are free of any patent or similar restrictions and only need to comply with manufacturing standards and regulations on poisons and prescription. Internationally, cannabis is a multi-billion-dollar industry.

Wise physicians should have a working knowledge of the pharmacology of cannabinoids and should remain very sceptical of industry promotion, anecdotal case reports and poorly designed clinical trials before prescribing any cannabinoid to a patient. Unfortunately, industry and consumers will not wait for this to happen.

Michael Kennedy
(consultant physician and clinical pharmacologist)

Religious Bigotry

Sir: I found Richard Harrison and Frank Salter’s article, “Anglophobia: The Unrecognised Hatred, Part III” (June 2022), to be dated and deeply unsett­ling. Its defence of the so-called Anglosphere veers close to racism, its focus on Australian Jews smacks of anti-Semitism, and a full seven pages out of this twelve-page article displayed religious bigotry.

The authors levelled invective and innuendo against the Australian Jewish community, based on the views of just two of its 100,000 members, George Newhouse and Miriam Faine. If it’s true that Newhouse saw fit to refer to Andrew Bolt as a neo-Nazi, that is wrong and reprehensible. However, it does not excuse Harrison and Salter from the shocking allegation (which they attributed to Bolt) that “the prosecuting lawyer used a slur likely to affect the judge’s ethnic sensitivities”, having of course emphasised the Jewish identity of the judge. Such an implication against the impartiality of this judge or any judge of Australian courts should horrify the judge in question, the Victorian legal system, the Jewish community, and the wider community. The authors also rail against the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies—twice named—presumably to highlight a Jewish role in Anglophobia. Driving home this alleged source of Anglophobia, the authors state that “It seems possible that the prosecuting team could have been motivated in part by their shared ethnic identity”, an anti-Semitic speculation, incompatible with a reputable journal.

Do Harrison and Slater not recognise that the twenty-three British Jews who arrived in Botany Bay in January 1788 and their descendants plus the many more who have made Australia their home since are indeed “Anglo” too?

On page 44, Harrison and Salter change tack briefly with the information that “Ethnic motivation might also have been involved in the development of Critical Race Theory”. This was developed by Noel Ignatiev, an American, Harvard-trained scholar, nothing to do with Jews. Nevertheless, the Jew-blaming rhetoric continues. We’re told that Ignatiev “would have had personal experience of the Jewish subculture”, including such (presumably reprehensible) characteristics as “minority ethnocentrism, endogamous marriage and ethnic networking”, these being “more intense … than among those of white Gentile Americans”.

Harrison and Salter then pick out a second “Jewish advocate”, Miriam Faine, editor of the Australian Jewish Democrat. This journal espouses the far-Left ideology of the Jewish Democratic Society, a small organisation with views opposed by most Australian Jews. To present Faine as a representative of the Australian Jewish community is disingenuous and misleading.

The article continues with three pages vilifying Greg Sheridan and Irish Catholics, again wrong and improper in Quadrant. I can only hope, indeed I trust, that your readers found this section equally distasteful and objectionable. That the editors should publish an article so replete with anti-Semitic tropes and innuendoes is sad and worrying.

Religious and racial tolerance are values that underpin our beloved modern Australia, values that we need to uphold, cherish and work to strengthen. Quadrant, a learned and (I had previously believed) fair-minded journal, should be in the forefront of strengthening religious and racial tolerance, not undermining them.

Dina Raizel Kaye Burgess

Woeful Catholic Schools

Sir: As a former teacher in two Catholic diocesan schools, I can confirm what Rocco Loiacono says in his article “A Church Being Eaten from Within” (Quadrant Online, July 24). I recall my bemusement at the last school I worked at when, during the opening whole-school mass for the year, the priest had to continually stop the flow of the Mass so he could tell the congregation (students and teachers alike) when to sit, stand, kneel and when to say amen. Most teachers had no idea, since only a few attended Mass and the rest were agnostics at best. 

In order to obtain employment in a Catholic primary school, one must have a qualification in religious education. I have it on good authority that at the Australian Catholic University, anybody can enrol in the required units and obtain the certificate in religious education, belief in God being an optional extra. Students increase their chances of employment success while the university profits.

Meanwhile, students in Catholic schools are able to quote a laundry list of the latest progressive-Left fads and fashions; they’ll know about “sorry days”, “earth days”, the “oppressed” Aborigines and alphabet people, yet nothing about how to emulate the lives of the spiritual giants who populate the Church calendar, or about the Natural Law or Holy Hour, the Catechism or how to say the Rosary.

Meanwhile, most bishops tuck themselves away in their salubrious homes, remaining in their clerical safe-spaces and avoiding the task of actually preaching the faith, and making sure the schools do the same. Notable exceptions are Bishop Columba Macbeth Green in the Wilcannia-Forbes diocese and Bishop Porteous in Tasmania.

At another Catholic diocesan school I foolishly decided to work at a few years ago, the students had to engage in “sorry day” activities. This “sorry day” fell on one of the feasts of the Church calendar. I asked the principal why the students were not attending Mass or at least a liturgy for the celebration instead of an obviously secular and politically inspired stunt. She nonchalantly gave a royal wave before saying, “It doesn’t matter, none of them go to church anyway and most aren’t Catholic.” I knew I would not last much longer at that school. Signalling virtue makes Catholic schools more popular and, especially, marketable than openly demonstrating adherence to the faith. After all, the goal of the modern Catholic school is to produce successful, materialistic robots, who kneel towards the latest fad, not faithful young people, aware of a transcendent end to life.

I can also attest to Peter Craven’s comment that a “new Catholic managerial class has emerged”. The administrations of Catholic dioceses are run along business lines and its managers inhabit their own little administrative islands, and taxpayer-funded ones at that. They even communicate in their own language. I still recall the wooden text of the harridan at the last diocese I worked at, in the “acceptance of resignation” form letter she sent me: “Thankyou for choosing our diocese as your employer of choice …” she insincerely droned on, as if the diocese was a superannuation fund and not a part of the Church. Organisationalism has replaced Catholic spiritualism.

I think it is a type of fraud that Catholic diocesan schools accept taxpayer funds and yet do not differ from government schools, apart from having a cross out the front.

I now very happily teach in a different system.

Peter Mulholland

The Bible We Have

Sir: Michael Giffin’s review of Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible in the July-August Quadrant left me puzzled as to Alter’s reason for making this new translation. His motivation appears to be that modern translations are error-ridden. This is scarcely a new idea; many Christians have been making it ever since modern translations began in the late 1800s.

The review states that modern translations use other words in place of seed when speaking of descendants. The King James Version, however, uses the word seed in this context over 150 times in the Old Testament (as well as over thirty times in the New Testament).

The review also speaks of “the difference between biblical syntax and modern English syntax”, showing that Alter “preserves the original repetition and rhythm of the Hebrew ‘hook’”, by using the word and many times in narration. Yet in the sample passage, Genesis 24:16–21, the King James Version uses the same number of ands as Alter’s version. Anyone familiar with the King James Version is aware of this technique.

Robert Alter could have saved himself much time and effort, and the public could save itself the better part of US$120, by not joining the Bible Version of the Month Club. We already have all the Bible we need. Does Alter really believe he has done a better job of translating than did the six groups of highly intelligent and educated men who translated the King James Version? If not, then why make a translation to correct the errors of modern ones, as though nothing else existed?

It seems to me that, whatever his intention, Alter is in fact assisting Satan in one of his greatest deceptions of the past century—a deception as old as the Fall: “Yea, hath God said?” The market is flooded with “Bibles”. How can one be sure which is God’s Word (it is impossible for all of them to be)? Do we even have the Bible? It seems Alter is telling us that we do not have the Old Testament, at least, unless we pay for his, at a price that would put it out of reach of many of what were once called common people—bringing us right back to Satan’s tactic of the Middle Ages: preventing most people from having the Bible. 

There is no need to reinvent the wheel: God has preserved His Word for English-speakers in the King James Version, which is available to all.

Rebekah Meredith

The Other Side of the Story

Sir: Michael Giffin’s review of my book The Other Side of the Story: Essays on Jews, Christians, Cults, Atheists and Artists (July-August 2022) has similarities to Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho based on an invented Jewish character, “Trypho”, to whom Justin presses his case on the misguided nature of the Jew’s faith. Giffin also has invented a version of me that does not exist. He removed my crucial qualifier that cults “in some cases, present … a clear and present danger to their hapless followers. The pre-eminent example being People’s Temple” (who led their 900 followers to their deaths in a mass suicide murder pact) and then asserts that I viewed Hebrew Christianity in a similar light, which my essays do not in any way suggest.

On the topic of Jewish and Christian affinity to scientific thinking, Giffin further asserted that I believe Judaism has a greater affinity to science than Christianity does, which I neither argue nor believe. Indeed, my previous book, Curious Obsessions in the History of Science and Spirituality, demonstrates that Christian believers in God’s universe promoted scientific knowledge and continue to. Giffin’s admission that “there is truth in The Other Side of the Story” seems a tad patronising, but I do thank him for pointing out an egregious error in proofreading regarding the three synoptic gospels which mysteriously turned into four. 

Rachael Kohn

Correction

Sir: In my review of Rachael Kohn’s book, The Other Side of the Story, in the July-August issue, I wrongly attributed a quote to Maimonides which should have been attributed to Ibn Ezra (also from the twelfth century). — Michael Giffin