Posted by:
Susan I/S
(
)
Date: July 29, 2018 08:29PM
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.