It’s funny, there are still many people in this country who are concerned with medical marijuana.That making pot available to patients will unleash some horrible drug genie. And yet one never hears these people complaining about medical heroin, and we have widespread legalized medical heroin, aka oxycodone and oxycontin in this country.
These drugs are far more dangerous than cannabis. One can’t overdose on pot. With the widely available legal opioid drugs however overdose is tragically common. Even still the risks associated with the highly addictive opioid drugs are considered manageable by the medical establishment officially. Pot however, non-opioid, non-physically addictive pot, remains on the margins and in most places still can’t be prescribed.
I get that medical marijuana is a ruse to a large degree. It is a halfway step toward legalization, which for the record I have no problem with. But for some people who must deal with chronic pain medical marijuana is a Godsend and it should be readily available.
Unlike medical heroin (oxycontin) which is often prescribed for pain, pot is not physically addictive. (It certainly can be psychologically addictive.) It also isn’t as heavy and all encompassing a drug as opioids. Many people remain human beings while under the influence of cannabis, whereas on opioids they simply are not themselves.
And there’s one other very important factor in the cannabis/opioid debate. Pot is cheap. One can grow it in one’s back yard if one needed to. And it’s not like marijuana is like growing an orchid or something. Just stick it in the ground and it grows.
That pot is effective for pain for many and also effectively free, in conjunction with the deep puritanical streak which runs through America, is the reason why the plant remains illegal even today for many people who suffer but who would benefit greatly from using it.
Legal heroin you see is just more profitable. And if the drug companies can keep the anti-competitive legalization barrier up around the cannabis plant they sell more pills. Pills which often enslave people with physical addiction and on occasion kill them.
It’s not surprising to me that researchers have found that overdose deaths are sharply lower in states with medical marijuana. More research should be done.
(From Healthline.com)
According to the American Academy of Pain Medicine, 1.5 billion people worldwide suffer from chronic pain. Opioid painkillers have long been an option for treating that pain, but their use comes with an inherent risk of addiction and death from an overdose. Chronic pain is also a major driver of medical cannabis use, which is why the researchers wanted to see whether medical marijuana laws and deaths from opioid overdoses were linked at the state level.
Bachhuber and his colleagues wondered how having access to alternative options for pain relief would impact painkiller use.
“We thought maybe, if people chose marijuana over prescription painkillers on a large scale, medical marijuana states might see relatively lower rates of painkiller overdoses — and even overdose deaths,” Bachhuber says. It turned out that his hunch was correct.
Click here for the article.
And since we are on the topic of medical marijuana I thought that this video might be informative for some of our readers who still dismiss legalization out of hand. Below is the story of a little girl named Charlotte who suffered terribly through sometimes hundreds of seizures a week. Since using a special strain of cannabis, now called Charlotte’s Web, her condition is manageable and she now gets to be a little girl.
Suffering is overrated.
States with Legal Marijuana See 25 Percent Fewer Prescription Painkiller Deaths
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