I live in the Chicago area and medical pot is legal here. They are trying to legalize recreational pot as well. I have several disabled friends with diseases like MS, Glaucoma and Cancer who cannot afford to buy their pot from the high priced pot dispensaries.
My friend with MS lives on disability which only pays him
$1100.00 a month to live on, which hardly covers his rent in Chicago, let alone very highly priced dispensary pot. So he doesn’t buy legal, he goes to the street corner to get the medicine he needs.
If it was really a medication, and made properly by a pharmaceutical
company then he would be able to get his insurance to pay for it. But, instead, the Deadly Drug Gangs on Chicago are selling pot because the disabled, and just about everyone else who’s not rich, can’t afford to buy the pot from the legal pot dispensaries.
Everyone is crying about how the crime is skyrocketing in Chicago and how the murder rate is higher there than it has ever been….Has anyone considered that the wars and killings are between Drug Gangs fighting over street corner turf so that they can sell their drugs?
If pot is TRULY MEDICINE then I beg the legislators to hand it over to BIG PHARMA to make medication out of it which will be covered by prescription, and paid for by people’s insurance…. instead of this deadly battle that is going on in Chicago, and in other ways all over America. Corporate Pot doesn’t care who dies as long as they make a profit.
If it’s really MEDICINE then take it out of the hands of the street drug dealers, and PLEASE give it to BIG PHARMA.
Editor – Thanks for your commentary. Our information is that the Food and Drug Administration did not approve Sativex, the nasal spray for MS. There were some complications. Yesterday the DEA created a new class for scheduling marijuana extracts. Here is the government document.a
Of the viability of using marijuana as medicine, Dr. Miller gives the following information: “The potential of THC in pain relief will always be marred by its serious psychiatric, cardiac and cognitive side effects. It is not a potent pain reliever, having failed in clinical trials for acute cancer pain for e.g. (GW Pharma’s results). For neuropathic pain, there are mixed results, so until better data is available, I don’t think pain relief should be presented as one of its attributes.”
This testimony is from a mother in California who spoke in front of the capital in Sacramento with Moms Strong on October 4, 2016.
Today’s pot can be far more dangerous than it used to be. There is “weed” 300-800 times stronger than it used to be, “edible cookies and candy,” and honey oil or “dabs” sometimes called hash oil, which is up to 90% THC.
I learned all of this the hard way. Thankfully, I’ve joined a group no parent would ever want to belong to called Moms Strong. How does one become a member of this group? You don’t want to know …It began 5 years ago with my gifted son who went off to college. His elite state college on the central coast warned us of the dangers of alcohol but nothing about the dangers of drugs.
He was seeking a way to belong by joining a fraternity and a consulting club, tutored students and lived in a dorm with roommates. He tried drinking, despite the warnings, but found he couldn’t handle it.
Friends in the dorm offered him pot and he thought it would be safer. That first hit took him down a long path into darkness.
He was able to obtain a medical marijuana card from a doctor over the phone–to treat insomnia. The doctors rarely suggest which type of THC product the patient should use. Here in California, marijuana edibles, as well as weed and “dabs” (butane hash oil) are delivered to medical marijuana cardholders via the Internet dispensaries.
By his 2nd year, there were early warning signs that things were not going well. The changes were:
Falling off the Dean’s list
Disconnecting from close friends and family
Increasing fears, paranoia, insomnia and stress
Breaking the law by selling pot to friends
Fighting with roommates and quitting the frat
Decreased feelings of self-worth
During his 3rd year, he went from a casual to an addicted user. From weed, he went to edibles and onto dabs which triggered psychosis within a few months. He noticed he couldn’t carry on a normal conversation or work math problems. His college friend contacted me via FB reporting my son’s disturbing voice mail:
“Hey..I’m not sure if I want to live. I’m seeing flying mustaches. So call me if you think I should live.”
We brought him home, took him to our local ER where we hoped to get help for him. The doctor thought he was having a 1st time schizophrenic outbreak, tested his blood and found “just pot” and placed him on a 72 hr. involuntary hold. It was the worst night of my life seeing my son so afraid and being powerless.
A psych expert sent him to a behavioral hospital to rule out bipolar mania.
At that hospital, the experience was a nightmare. They had no knowledge of cannabis-induced psychosis, instead diagnosed him as bipolar and prescribed Lithium. He forced to be among people trying to harm themselves or others.
That doctor suggested he take a leave from college and go into an outpatient therapy program. Within 3 days, he started smoking pot again. In a couple months, he stopped taking the Lithium as he hated how it made him feel. We were powerless over his drug use.
He returned to college for his fourth year, but then withdrew with failing grades. Just a year and a half after his 1st psychotic break, he experienced symptoms for 3 days reported by this same friend:
Hearing voices, distrusting everyone (including his best friends)
Getting lost in his head and then suddenly saying “That’s what they want you to believe” or “They’re coming for me.”
Running from friends through traffic, scaring bystanders, with his friends trying to make sure he didn’t hurt himself or anyone else.
They waited for him to snap out of it, to no avail. They took him to the Emergency Room where he got no help; they called me AGAIN. We had 2 more ER visits which resulted in a medication to help the psychosis, advice on how to stop smoking pot.
My son just couldn’t kick smoking pot. Within a few weeks, his rock bottom hit when he had a car accident, totaled the vehicle, and got a DUI. Thankfully he did not harm himself or others.
He called me begging for help to quit smoking pot. We agreed he would go to a dual diagnosis drug rehab where he was first thought to be schizophrenic. But after proper medication, he was diagnosed with cannabis-induced psychosis.
My son learned he has a sensitivity to THC. He quit and is struggling to stay clean. He takes medication to counteract the THC cravings from his three-year marijuana addiction. He is still hoping to finish college and his future is still not set in stone. He doesn’t see flying mustaches any longer, or any other hallucinating visions, but it sure was scary. We are thankful that his whole life has not gone up in smoke.
Prop 64 will make it easier for anyone to try the “Russian Roulette” of today’s pot, without any warnings. Marijuana must be avoided, especially to those under age 25 — and maybe up to age 28 — because the brain is still developing, marijuana must be avoided.
Please vote No because of all the young minds that are at stake.
Born in Massachusetts, our son started out life with a very bright future. As a toddler he was interested in things with wheels, and anything his big sister was doing. As he got older, Legos was his obsession. In his early school days he tended to get really into a subject, even those of his own choosing. For a while it was Russian language and then it was the Periodic Table. He begged me to buy him a 2½-inch thick used Chemistry textbook before he was a pre-teen. I did.
I was able to be a stay-at-home parent until our son was 8. I tried to do all the right things. We played outside, limited screen time, and got together with other little ones and their moms for play groups. I read to him and his sister every night until they both reached middle school and wouldn’t let me anymore. Our son routinely tested in the 99th percentile on standardized tests and at least 3 grade levels above. Now, at age 17, he has dropped out of high school.
My husband and I both have Master’s degrees, and my husband is a public school administrator. His father is a retired architect. My mother is a retired elementary school teacher. Our family believes in education, we believe in learning and growing. When asked why he continues to use drugs, mostly marijuana, my son said, “I think it’s because of the people we’re around.”
In reflecting back on “What happened?” I blame marijuana. We now live in Colorado, where marijuana is legal and widely available to everyone. What if we had never moved here?
How it All Began
My son’s first time using was in 7th grade when marijuana was legal only if used medicinally with a “Red Card,” if recommended by a physician. Coloradans voted on legalization in November 2012 and marijuana stores opened in January, 2014. But back in 2012, he and some buddies got it from a friend’s older brother who had a Red Card. From what I can tell, the use just kept escalating until his junior year in high school when he was using at least once a day…and when he attempted suicide.
Between that first incident in 2012 and the suicide attempt in 2015, his father and I waged an all-out battle on the drug that was invading our home. We grounded him; I took to sleeping on the couch outside his bedroom because he was sneaking out in the middle of the night; we yelled and screamed; I cried, we cajoled and tried to reason with him: ”You have a beautiful brain! Why are you doing things that will hurt your brain?”
We did weekly drug tests, we enlisted the school’s support, we enlisted our family’s support and we even tried talking to his friends.
But nothing worked. Our son was in love with marijuana. Our sweet, smart, funny, sarcastic, irreverent, adorable boy was so enamored with this drug that nothing we did — NOTHING — made any difference. And we slowly lost him.
At the same time I was battling marijuana at home, I was also leading a group in our community to vote against legalizing it in our small town. I had teamed with a local business-owner and a physician and the three of us got the support of many prominent community members, including the school superintendent, the police chief, and the fire chief. We ran a full campaign, complete with a website where you could donate money, a Facebook page, and yard signs.
Why does he continue to use marijuana? “I think it’s because of the people we’re around.”
My son’s use isn’t the reason I got involved. I had started advocating against marijuana legalization long before I even realized he had a problem. My background is in health communication and I work in the hospital industry. I sit on our local Board of Health, so allowing retail stores to sell an addictive drug just doesn’t make any sense. I did think about my children; what I was modeling for them; what kind of community we were raising them in, and the kind of world I envisioned for their future. Those are the reasons I got involved. My son’s use is actually the reason that I’ve pulled away from any sort of campaigning.
Unfortunately, we lost our fight. So in 2014, it became legal in our small town to purchase pot without a Red Card. And the following year, his junior year, he almost slipped away from us forever.
It Got Scarier and Scarier
His use by then had escalated to daily (and I suspect often more than once a day). Pot seemed to be everywhere! We found it hidden all over the house — in the bathroom, on top of the china cabinet, in his closet, outside, even in his sister’s bedroom. It’s a hard substance to hide because of the strong smell. Even in the “pharmacy” bottles and wrapped in plastic bags, the skunk stench still manages to seep out. But it sure seemed easy for a young boy to get!
He started leaving school in the middle of the day, or skipping school altogether, and his grades plummeted. Where he was once an A/B student and on the varsity cross-country team, he was now failing classes and not involved in anything. This boy who had tested in the 99th percentile was failing high school. And this boy who had once been the levity in our home, who used to make me laugh like no one else could or has since, this boy became a stranger.
Our son withdrew from everything except his beloved drug. His circle of friends (never big in the first place), was reduced to only those who could supply him with marijuana. His relationship with his older sister all but disappeared. And his relationship with his father has been strained beyond almost all hope of repair.
Then in late 2015 our son attempted suicide. He was hospitalized, first overnight at the very hospital where I work, and then for a 3-day locked psychiatric unit stay. I remember very little from this difficult (and surreal) time except learning that it wasn’t his first attempt, and that he blamed us for how awful he felt. He started taking an antidepressant and after he was released we took him to a drug counselor for a total of three visits but after that he refused to go — he threatened to jump out of the car if we tried to take him. We tried a different counselor and that only lasted for one visit.
Changing Strategies and a Truce
At this point I convinced my husband that we had to approach things differently, because obviously what we were doing wasn’t working. We stopped the weekly drug tests (we knew he was using so there seemed to be no point anyway). We stopped yelling and punishing. And basically my husband stopped talking to our son altogether — they are both so angry and hurt that any communication turns toxic very quickly. He refused to go back to school so we agreed that he could do online classes.
More and more, our son is feeling isolated from the rest of his family.
There is an uneasy truce in our home right now. Now it just feels like waiting. Waiting for what will happen next. Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Our son, 17, still lives with us. His sister left for college this past summer. I acknowledge that he uses pot and doesn’t want to quit, but I continue sending the message that it’s not good for his brain. The one thing my husband and I won’t bend on is no drugs on our property. He has started five different online classes, but has so far finished only one. He doesn’t feel any pressure to finish school — he says he’ll get a GED, but hasn’t made any effort towards that end. He doesn’t drive and doesn’t express any desire to learn, which is probably good because I doubt he could be trusted to drive sober. He started working at a local restaurant recently and has been getting good feedback from his managers, which I take to be a positive sign. (I’ll take any positive signs at this point!)
Trying Something Else and Blacking Out
I don’t know if the suicide attempt and hospitalization were rock bottom for our family, but I suspect not. Just this past weekend our son came home and I could tell he was on something — and it wasn’t marijuana or alcohol. I checked him periodically throughout the night and in the early morning he was awake and asked me how much trouble he was in. I replied that it depended on what he had taken. He said Xanax. He also said that he had blacked out and couldn’t remember anything that had happened from about an hour after he took it.
Later in the morning, when we were both more awake, I asked him about the Xanax (he got it from someone at the restaurant) and the pot use and what he saw for his future. He has no plans to stop using, but said that he probably wouldn’t take Xanax again (he didn’t like blacking out). He said that he’s very happy with his life right now, that he knows a lot of people who didn’t go to college who work two or three jobs and live in little apartments, and that he’s happy with that kind of future for himself.
I tried not to cry. Imagine that as the goal for a boy who started life with so much curiosity and such a desire to learn.
It’s not that I don’t think he can have a good and decent life without a college education. But I know that he’ll have a much harder life. Statistically, Americans with fewer years of education have poorer health and shorter lives (partly due to lack of adequate health insurance), and Americans without a high school diploma are at greatest risk. It’s not just life without a college education, but it is life with a brain that has been changed by marijuana. Will he be able to give up pot? If he does give up pot, will he recover the brain he had at one time? Will he lose motivation?
I asked him why he used pot when he knew how his father and I felt about it and when we had tried so hard to steer him in a different direction.
He said: “I think it’s because of the people we’re around. And all the drugs that are around.”
I’ve finally accepted that his use is not in the range of normal teenage experimentation, and I’m barely surviving on the hope that he’ll eventually grow out of it…and that he doesn’t do any permanent damage. In the meantime, I’m sorry that we ever moved here.
Marijuana Lobby Depends on Selling a Lie to Pull off a Scam
If you tell a lie long enough, people start believing it’s the truth. We found a “medical” marijuana box in the middle of the soaps and toiletries of a gift shop in a state where lobbyists have been trying to commercialize “medical” marijuana through the state legislature. Marked “For Daily Use Only,” it gives the appearance of necessity, much like a pill box. The marijuana industry is finding good ways to trick the public into believing marijuana is “medicinal,” just as the tobacco industry claimed cigarettes were healthy. However, there are 450,000 marijuana-related hospitalizations in the US each year.*
This summer the head of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) said he would be making a decision about rescheduling marijuana which would mean a change from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2. However, this past week a federal magistrate judge in New York rebuffed a challenge to federal laws which place marijuana among the most dangerous drugs.
Under the lid of the “medical” marijuana box in a Shenandoah Valley, VA gift shop. Virginia has a limited medical marijuana program and doesn’t allow joints to be smoked as “medicine.” There was a petition to fire the DEA Administrator for calling “medical” marijuana a joke, but who can claim this box is anything other than a joke?
It should be no surprise, as Judge Kimberly Mueller made a similar ruling against rescheduling in April, 2015. Her decision followed a Court ruling of January 2013, which followed many years of studying the issue, by the DEA, with input from the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Ruling of July 12 in New York
In his ruling, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jonathan Feldman said, “There can be no dispute that public opinion on whether marijuana has legitimate medical uses is changing in this country.” But Feldman ruled that Charles and Alexander Green, two brothers accused of marijuana trafficking, had a to prove that current federal laws are “so arbitrary and irrational as to be unconstitutional.”
The Greens, who are from California, are accused of major roles in a marijuana trafficking operation that brought the drug into western New York. They have challenged how federal law classifies marijuana, in the same category as heroin. The category known as “Schedule 1” drugs suggests Congress and federal authorities consider it among the nation’s most dangerous illicit substances.
Marijuana, as a plant or a weed, is not medicinal. Derivatives may have medical application, but those are derivatives of the plant not marijuana. National Families in Action put a good explanation of the difference between marijuana and marijuana-based medicines.
NORML always planned to use the medical idea as a scam to advance the cause of legalization.
It is possible that the DEA may reschedule cannabidiol, one of the cannabinoids in marijuana, which gives relief to some children with seizures. Today’s high-THC marijuana has lower proportions of CBD than the marijuana of the 60s, 70s and 80s, which makes marijuana far more dangerous, on par with heroin. (Any medicine derived from a plant does not go by the plant name, but the marijuana lobby tries to mislead the public into confusing the extract from the plant.)
Quotes by leaders of NORML reveal that medical marijuana was planned as a scam from the start. On February 6, 1979, at Emory University, Keith Stroup said: “We are trying to get marijuana reclassified medically. If we do that, we’ll be using the issue as a red herring to give marijuana a good name.” Richard Cowan and Ed Rosenthal followed up with statements saying that getting people to buy into the idea of medical marijuana and getting hundreds of thousands to do it will be the key to getting full legalization.
Watch the video.
*Information comes from checking the long DEA report that was available online until recently showed a growing number of hospital treatments for marijuana up until 2010. Obviously, it is more now. Here is the summary available online.
