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| Medical Marijuana |
The hypocrisies that exist between state and federal regulations concerning marijuana bring questions that go to the heart of American justice, as it takes away from patients rights to have medication that might work. It also removes from many doctors the additional item in the arsenal of treating glaucoma, diabetic neuropathy, chronic pain and a host of other conditions. Many diseases, like glaucoma, and eye condition that can lead to blindness, are said to be treated well with marijuana, with the science of this going back to the 1970's.
Recentlys there have been raids by Federal authorities and closures of hundreds of medical marijuana clinics in the State of California and other states where the laws allow the use of medical marijuana. At the same time, the Department of Justice and state authorities several times weekly, on respective websites and in press releases, the authorities underline how crime doesn’t pay but the recitation of crime events specifically with transporting marijuana from place to place along the United States corridors. As growing marijuana is a crime under Federal law, despite a number of states passing legislation to allow the drug for medical purposes, the drug is associated in crime stories with cocaine and heroin when crime and drugs are discussed.
And as the Federal and State laws conflict, the increase in suppliers going underground and becoming part of that world where violence and other crimes occur, the solutions to reduce crime, provide a humane approach to legislation, waver unsolved because of the lack of humanity in the regulation of marijuana.
Jennifer Southby, who asked her real name not be used for this article, is a patient of one of the doctors who fills prescriptions for marijuana in Portland, Oregon. Her scars tell the story of physical pain, pain she observes often required large doses of addicting painkillers. Sciatica can be very painful, and Southby said, “I tried everything, and nothing seemed to work. One day someone gave me heroin, telling me it was no different than marijuana, which I had never tried. Besides I was told that it was just as safe and would help me more with the pain. That led to me becoming a junkie. I could have avoided that had medical marijuana been legal at the time. As it is, you can see the tracks in my arm that offer evidence of the addiction that took my years to break.”
So is marijuana a gateway drug? Not if Southby is right, for she lacked the medical information that had the moral authority to help her with her pain with medication that has been observed to be non-addictive and that is legal in the State where she lives. But like many people she thought marijuana and cocaine were comparable.
In fact some researchers maintain that marijuana is a reverse gateway drug, causing people to seek prescribed, addictive painkillers because of marijuana's status as an illegal drug. And whereas some researchers maintain there is new research substantiating marijuana to be addictive, the study on your people did not look at other behaviors surrounding the use of marijuana and the legal or illegality of the drug with respect to personal, not medical use. Marijuana was found to be associated with other drugs such as nicotine and alcohol, but again without differentiating between adolescent behaviors outside of drug use nor does it prove that marijuana causes addiction to other drugs, which would go against the scientific notions that because two things are associated does not mean one causes the other.
It is the lack of education and fairness to those who dispense medications of marijuana to patient, and the contradictions that take place between Federal and State laws, that makes many people question the motivations of those who continue to create more and more barriers for medications that some people find helpful and maintain they would suffer without.
