Medical Marijuana

This is another one of those posts that comes with a caveat of "opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of everyone at Potomac Highlands Conservative, etc. etc. etc."

However, with that caveat in mind, the time has come to consider the positives of introducing some form of marijauna for medical use.

In 2003 almost five million people reported using opiate pain medication for "non medical purposes" according to a National Institute in Drug Addiction study. (In comparison, experts believe that two million people have a cocaine addiction.) Now this number has certainly A) risen sharply in the past six years and B) was underreported to begin with because a lot of people do not like admitting to this kind of behavior. Opiates include darvocet, percocet, oxycontin and other pills derived from opium.

For anyone, opium based drugs are highly physically addictive. All too many people have a predisposition towards addiction that makes them highly vulnerable to the "high" created by these medications. Mix a vulnerable person, physically or emotionally, with a highly concentrated opiate such as oxycontin and you are sure to get an addict nearly every time.

Enter marijuana. As a medication or social drug, marijuana has a much lower physical addiction rate. Certainly the high can create emotional dependence in many cases, but that is much easier to break than the physical dependence created by opiates. Marijuana when properly used has almost the same pain killing effect as most of the opiate drugs. Getting a similar benefit with a much lower rate of desperate addiction is a strong argument in favor of legalizing marijuana for medical use. As far as abuse is concerned, misuse and addiction to opiates is rampant already. Any measure that could stem the tide of normal people growing addicted in the course of taking a legitimate prescription is a bonus for society.

Medical marijuana gives us a potential alternative to the highly addictive opiates, but the problem does not stop there. We need to reign in some of these "pain clinics" that have as much concern for their patients as Mexican drug cartels do for their customers. Doctors that knowingly hand out pills to addicts for no real medical purpose at all need to be treated in the same manner as crack or meth dealers. Their degrees and nice clothes do not make them any better than any other drug dealer. Some highly addictive drugs need to be used only in cases of terminal illness or the most severe and debilitating conditions, the kind of real pain problems that would preclude a normal life anyway.

Medical marijuana is only part of the solution to runaway pain pill addiction in this country, but it is an important step towards keeping good people from sliding down that path in the first place.

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One last thing. Those of you that support this and have rallies and meetings that end up on TV, here is a public relations hint. Get rid of the long hair and beards. Wear a button down shirt, maybe even a tie. It does not help the cause of medical marijuana to have on television the Jerry Garcia look alike contest. Now I used to have a lot of friends that looked like this, maybe still do. However, seeing these people wandering around in the background of TV coverage does not advance the movement. Not trying to be mean or discriminatory, but just take it as food for thought.

Lookin' For Ugleeeeeeeee

Those darned McGraws. They can't seem to avoid shadowy conspiracies. First the photographers roaming Marmet trying to take ugly pictures of Warren McGraw, now the Bush administration is plotting the demise of West Virginia's Attorney General.

West Virginia at one point brought suit against the manufacturers of painkilling products such as OxyContin, challenging the manner in which they had been advertised. OxyContin and like drugs are highly addictive and untold thousands suffer from this problem. At issue here is how the settlement money ended up being spent.

The Attorney General's office paid the lawyers who fought the case (fair enough) but placed the rest into the Attorney General's Consumer Protection Fund. The federal government argues that it ought to receive some reimbursement for the Medicaid dollars it pours into the state annually. State Legislators assert that McGraw violated the law because only the Legislature can disburse money.

What is worse is that the Consumer Protection Fund pays for billboards, pencils, and other items that feature the Attorney General's name. Allen Loughry, former Caperton administration official, has blasted this practice as taxpayer funded campaigning. McGraw's office paints this as a Bush administration political move to discredit his office.

Now come on. President Bush sits in his Oval Office every day trying to think of ways to discredit our state attorney general? Kind of unlikely. This money ought to go to the Legisture to be budgeted and sent out to the proper recipients.