"'Marijuana is a gift from God.' A battle over pot pits the Mormon Church against an unlikely group: other Mormons"


http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-utah-mormons-marijuana-20180729-story.html


Edit: same article published in The Baltimore Sun:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation-world/la-na-utah-mormons-marijuana-20180729-story.html#nt=oft06a-2li2



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/2018 02:36PM by 3X.

I thought this was the LSD church. When you consider the beliefs and actions of church leaders and church members, it's more like LSD than marijuana. Maybe that's the problem.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/2018 10:43AM by azsteve.

There’s only water in those sacrament cups, but the way Mormons think makes you wonder.

That reminds me of that line from Star Trek: The Voyage Home, "he did a little LDS..."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/2018 01:29PM by doyle18.

I did so much LDS it turned me into a Jim Ignatowski.

I was living in Utah when that movie came out. That line in the movie got quite a chuckle out of the audience when I watched the movie in a theater in Salt Lake.

At the same time, they wonder why opioid and heroin addiction is such a huge epidemic in that state. Most often, they start out as something prescribed, when medical marijuana might have helped treat the pain. As for medical marijuana, it doesn't have to be smoked, as it can be made into pills, or edible forms. I'm fortunate to be living in California which was one of the first states to legalize the medical use of that plant before voters allowed it for recreational use as well.

It doesn’t matter if it’s weed, sexuality, movies, jeans in church, or tats—Mormonism constricts anything that it doesn’t approve of in the most narrow-minded means conceivable.

Personally, I’m skeptical about all the supposed health benefits of weed. But even a skeptic can see that it is proving to be a viable treatment for certain illness and that big business has vested interests in protecting their medical patents.

I’m not into weed, but I support full legalization for both medicinal and recreational uses. What I want with my support is RESEARCH. I want to know through rigorous scientific studies what is beneficial and harmful. I want to know what potential long-term effects of frequent use are. And, most importantly, I want to get kids away from drug pushers who supply kids with laced weed, spice, meth, heroin, or any other substances that dead-ends lives.

Legalize, tax, regulate, and RESEARCH. The Libertarian’s Boner.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/2018 02:40PM by BYU Boner.

+1

I support the medical use of marijuana. To me, it's a no brainer. My home state, Maryland, legalized it four years ago, and the industry to support it is finally up and running.

One thing that concerns me about the Los Angeles Times article is the statement about the man who is profiled, "He now takes a tablet of Tramadol most mornings. The powerful opioid can cloud his mind and make him drowsy..." The accompanying photo shows him helping his wife out of the passenger side door of a car, with the driver's seat empty. He's driving drowsy with a clouded mind? Personally, I would never drive on an opioid. I won't even drive on prescription strength Motrin.

My son has done drugs and he said druggies who go into ERs to get a fix laugh when the doctors offer them tramadol.

I was on hydrocodone for almost a year for shingles. My boyfriend had been on tramadol for his back pain. He only takes it when he needs it and has a regular refillable prescription. He suggested that I ask the doctor to switch to tramadol rather than hydrocodone. It still helped my shingles, but I didn't have the highs and lows that I got with hydrocodone. My last prescription was given to me over 2 years ago and I still have some of the prescription left. I didn't get hooked on either medication and I have a very addictive personality.

Myself, my son does much better with his anxiety on marijuana. He has been on suboxone for about 7 years after heavy drug use. He has cut WAY back on his suboxone use. His doctor agrees to marijuana helps, my therapist also says that marijuana helps most of his patients who have severe anxiety.

I can see a HUGE difference in my son when he has some marijuana compared to the drugs they've had him on. In fact, Adderall was the medication that got him started on heavy drug use.

Never did I think that I would have this attitude, but I've seen it with my own eyes. And I've also see kids who have many seizures. We had a neighbor girl who had a lot of seizures and had half her brain taken out. Yes, they do that. What could marijuana have done for her at that time? That was about 15 to 20 years ago. How can we turn our backs on these kids with seizures. I have a brother who is epileptic and luckily dilantin works for him, but if he had to have marijuana, I would do whatever it took to get it for him as I've seen his seizures and his illness was extremely difficult on my family, especially my mother.

To change the subject, you should all check out the statement the LDS put out about the concert they had in SLC yesterday to support the gays. lesbians, transgenders, etc. The lds acted as though they have been one of the groups in the forefront of helping these kids.

cl2, my understanding is that regular use of opioids for pain relief does not result in a "high" -- just pain relief. But IMO no one should drive on a medication that can "cloud his mind and make him drowsy" -- per *his* report.

I taught a girl once that had one hemisphere of her brain removed, and you never would have known it. Perfectly normal kid.

That makes me wonder even more about GAs, whose brains are fully intact.

babyloncansuckit Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That makes me wonder even more about GAs, whose
> brains are fully intact.

...as far as we know.

As if people are not getting all the pot they want now. Making it legal, taxed and tested just is common sense. Saying it is this big "gateway drug" just doesn't hold water when so many begin their opiate addiction through prescriptions. Nor is it causing an uptick in crime. We have half a dozen dispensaries in my little town and you wouldn't even know what they were if you don't read the signs. No one hangs out there, they do their business and go home. We have one minimart that is a problem where people hang out drinking and one tiny square where the teens hang out with their shirts off and skateboards and smoke cigs and pretend to be rebels. We have more money for more police to keep an eye on these two places because we have a 3% pot tax.

Medical studies keep saying positive things about marijuana treatment and there is now even some evidence it HELPS with opioid addiction. Hell, it may even help with cancer. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, has been doing a lot of study in the area and he says we need MORE. He has an important point in this article.

https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/08/health/gupta-changed-mind-marijuana/index.html

"Most frightening to me is that someone dies in the United States every 19 minutes from a prescription drug overdose, mostly accidental. Every 19 minutes. It is a horrifying statistic. As much as I searched, I could not find a documented case of death from marijuana overdose."

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/29/health/medical-marijuana-opioids/index.html

"Medical marijuana has been legal in Maine since 1999. The state has one of the top ten highest rates of opioid overdose in the country. In 2016, the rate of overdoses from opioid drugs in Maine was nearly double the national rate. The number of heroin related deaths has jumped more than fourfold since 2012. For a state deeply embedded in the opioid crisis, Dustin Sulak believes that medical marijuana could be part of a solution. "There's no pill, there's no spray, no drop, no puff [that] can completely solve this problem," Sulak told Gupta. "But cannabis, when it's used in the right way, can take a big bite out of it."
Sulak is a doctor of osteopathic medicine. He says he has treated hundreds of people with marijuana to wean them off opioid painkillers. He runs two outpatient clinics in Maine and started looking to marijuana as a potential solution when he noticed that a number of his patients were able to sustain their opioid dosages for years, never asking for more."

Reason? They were also medicating with marijuana.

James E. Talmadge!!!

After my wife's diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer in Nov., 2016 she asked our LDS family doctor to write her a prescription for medical cannabis oil which is legal in Canada...and he waffled and muttered something about alternatives so we didn't pursue it. We attended a clinic in Calgary who referred us to a physician there who would write the scrip.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/30/2018 12:18AM by Lethbridge Reprobate.

FOUR-HOUR SERVICE?! Good Lord, has the Morg added another hour?

THC-containing cannabis oil shows promise for treating Dravet syndrome epilepsy





BY SHERYL UBELACKER, THE CANADIAN PRESS ON AUGUST 1, 2018.

Toronto researchers have determined what dosage of a specially formulated cannabis oil is safe and can be tolerated by children with Dravet syndrome, a rare genetic form of epilepsy that causes lifelong seizures.

Researchers at the Hospital for Sick Children tested the cannabis oil, which contains CBD (cannabidiol) and a small amount of marijuana’s psychoactive ingredient THC (tetrahydrocannabidiol) in 20 children with Dravet syndrome, whose seizures were not well-controlled with standard anti-convulsant medications.

Cannabis oil containing only CBD has been shown to have anti-seizure effects in children with Dravet’s, but the Sick Kids research team wanted to assess the benefits of a preparation that also included THC, with a primary goal of determining a safe pediatric dose and any side-effects the drug caused.

Children with Dravet syndrome experience ongoing seizures – in some cases, more than a hundred a day – leading to developmental delays and significant learning disabilities. Dravet’s is responsible for up to 30 per cent of all cases of epilepsy; it is difficult to treat and has no cure.

“We saw an overall median reduction (in seizures) of 70 per cent,” said neurologist Dr. Blathnaid McCoy, lead author of the study published Wednesday in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology.

“And one of the things we tracked was seizure-free days … which went from a mean of 11.8 days to 18.3 days, which is essentially an extra week (and) which is clinically very meaningful.”

However, not all of the children responded positively: four saw their seizures increase in frequency while taking oral doses of the oil, a pharmacy-grade preparation produced by Tilray Inc.

However, McCoy said that increased seizure activity could also be due to the nature of Dravet’s, which is known to cause “peaks and troughs, even if we don’t do anything.”

For Laura Weightman, whose 16-year-old daughter Abigail had her first Dravet seizure at eight months old, the cannabis oil therapy has meant new hope for her child’s future.

The Pickering, Ont., mother of four said Abigail had experienced about 100 seizures a month from about age three to five, a number that was subsequently reduced to about 10 to 20 per month with surgical and pharmaceutical interventions.

But since enrolling in the study in April 2017 and starting treatment with the cannabis oil, Abigail has had only three seizures in the last eight months, she said.

“This therapy has turned our lives around.”

Abigail attends school, although she has a limited vocabulary and has cognitive and developmental delays as a result of her lifelong seizures. She is unable to dress or feed herself, but “motor-wise, she runs, jumps,” said her mother.

Among the potential side effects of the cannabis oil that the study found was sleepiness and reduced appetite leading to weight loss – a bit of a surprise finding because cannabis is used to promote appetite in cancer patients to stop them shedding pounds.

“As far as being tired, she couldn’t have more energy,” Weightman said of Abigail. “She’s so much more alert and aware and exploring the world more.

“I kind of call her my toddler teenager because she’s into everything now.”

Much of the scientific evidence for marijuana’s anti-seizure properties has come from research using a CBD-only product. But research suggests that preparations that also contain THC may be superior.

McCoy said the next step is to design a larger study of at least 200 children with any kind of epilepsy, not only that caused by Dravet syndrome, to assess the effect of the CBD-THC oil in better controlling seizures.

“Our study provides us now with an idea on dosing and safety,” she said. “Now we need to have much greater numbers before we can say more about effectiveness.”


What a tragedy if an LDS child were denied this treatment because the cult is against anything cannabis related.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but mormons have no problem taking opioids if Rx'd by a doctor, right? But heroin in a no-no...

1. every herb is for man.
2. thousand of years later except for tobacco that is for animals. So number 1 was a lie.
3. hundreds of years later. no word about Marijuana.
So it must be good. see number 1.