Things have come a very long way since I started enjoying recreational cannabis way back in the late 1970’s.
Back then it was all secret, hiding from the cops, and the idea that it would be actually legalized in states was a distant dream. Pie in the friggin sky.
The idea cannabis would help people medically? Preposterous.
Now, fast forward to 2016: cannabis is legal in Colorado, Washington State, Oregon, and Alaska. And it is available in some form or another as a medical card or other-type program in a variety of other states.
Meanwhile, opioid medication abuse and deaths are on the increase:
New research on opioid deaths.
Simply put, the prescription opioid crisis is getting worse, not better. The personal toll that opioid abuse takes on individuals, their friends, and their families is alarming. On top of that, the financial cost of opioid use impacts not just these individuals, but also their communities and their employers.
In response to this growing crisis, states have enacted legislation to limit the duration of first-time opioid prescriptions, expanded access to naloxone (a drug used to treat the effects of an overdose), and enhanced Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs (PDMPs) that monitor for suspected abuse. At a federal level, President Obama proposed a $1.1 billion investment to fight opioid addiction7 and the U.S. Senate passed bipartisan legislation along with the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. In the healthcare industry, a number of key players, including pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), are taking similar actions to address this urgent situation.
We have this increasing opioid issue partly thanks to the DEA:
DEA policies are causing pain management doctors to severely restrict prescribing of these meds, because people abuse them and/or sell them, but cutting back on everybody is fueling this nation’s heroin epidemic:
This past October, however, the DEA decided to change a variety of painkillers from Schedule III to Schedule II drugs. This change, though seemingly small, requires, among other things, that patients be seen by a doctor before getting a prescription. Prescriptions for Schedule II medications cannot be called or faxed into a pharmacy, and doctors may only write prescriptions for a 30-day quantity.
The shift in scheduling was prompted by a sharp increase in the use and abuse of painkillers in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control, enough painkillers were prescribed in 2010 to medicate every adult in America for a straight month. Sales and deaths related to painkillers have increased markedly since 1999.
While these DEA rule changes may sound like a good idea, they result in serious unintended consequences. My father only required one trip to the doctor, but others are less fortunate. Thousands of Americans suffering from chronic pain rely on those drugs to function. The new regulations mean these individuals now face greater difficulties getting their needed medication. In a recent article, the Washington Post reported that the rule is taking a particularly difficult toll on veterans suffering from battlefield injuries like missing limbs and PTSD.
An aside: Opioid addiction appears to have taken Prince from us:
Two days ago, investigators told the media that they are focusing on the role that painkillers might have played in the musician's death. This news came shortly after a TMZ report claimed that Prince's emergency landing days before his death was caused by a drug overdose. Today, the county sheriff investigating the death has asked for help from the Drug Enforcement Administration, as prescription painkillers were found in Prince's possession when he died.
Historically I had always heard Prince eschewed drugs, and I have no idea why he would be using them, but maybe this will emerge soon. I am still actually shocked by his passing. I digress.
Reducing Use of Pain Meds helps reduce the potential for overdose
So, as cannabis is becoming more legal in more places in America, a lot of the propaganda we have been choking on for all our lives is being turned upside-down. The hard evidence — that has been emerging for some time — is that cannabis is truly helpful and beneficial, not an evil weed with roots in Hell.
One MAIN tenet of marijuana propaganda is that it will lead to heroin abuse and death. That has always been bullshit, but now we can say, with certainty, how much bullshit it has been. Counter-productive bullshit, at the very least.
The fact is cannabis availability reduces deaths from opioid medications, in two — count ‘em — two ways. So far from causing “heroin addiction,” legal cannabis actually prevents it or helps prevent it.
One way is by reducing the urge or need to find other drugs on which to “get high” — like when the Netherlands legalized it to separate the hard drug market from teenagers. When people can experiment and enjoy cannabis without being confronted with dangerous drugs, they do not use dangerous drugs nearly as much.
The other is that cannabis appears to help opioid and other pain medications work “better,” allowing people to use LESS of these clearly dangerous medications.
The DEA limits doctors from prescribing pain meds and people end up addicted to them and when their supply is truncated they go for heroin. It’s a common reality now.
And allowing people access to cannabis reduces and limits this phenomenon.
Cannabis: It’s Just Not like Heroin
Investigators assessed anonymous prescription reporting data from over one million employees between the years 2011 and 2015.
In states that did not permit medical marijuana access, 5.4 percent of individuals with an opioid prescription qualified as abusers of the drug. (The study’s authors defined “abuse” as opioid use by an individual who was not receiving palliative care, who received greater than a 90-day cumulative supply of opioids, and received an opioid prescription from four or more providers.) By contrast, only 2.8 percent of individuals with an opioid prescription living in medical marijuana states met the criteria.
The findings are similar to those reported by the RAND Corporation in 2015, which determined, “[S]tates permitting medical marijuana dispensaries experience a relative decrease in both opioid addictions and opioid overdose deaths compared to states that do not.”
Data published in 2014 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine also reported that the enactment of statewide medicinal marijuana laws is associated with significantly lower state-level opioid overdose mortality rates, finding, “States with medical cannabis laws had a 24.8 percent lower mean annual opioid overdose mortality rate compared with states without medical cannabis laws.”
More from the Castlight Study:
OPIOID ABUSERS ARE MORE LIKELY TO LIVE IN THE RURAL SOUTH.
22 out of the top 25 cities for opioid abuse rate are primarily rural and located in Southern states. Opioid abuse rates range from 11.6% of individuals in Wilmington, NC to 7.5% of individuals in Fort Smith, AR who received an opioid prescription. Alabama, Florida, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas
have multiple cities that are in the top 25 for opioid abuse rate. The three non-Southern cities in the top 25 are: Terre Haute, IN; Elmira, NY; and Jackson, MI.
This is NOT about “bashing” the south: most of those states are openly hostile to cannabis reform, other then maybe New York. Georgia didn’t make the list but I would say, just based on what I have seen and heard for the past few years, methamphetamine is even more prevalent here than heroin. I have no clue why.
Florida made the list but ALMOST re-legalized medical cannabis in 2014, the bill getting 58% percent of the vote. It needed 60% to pass so really not bad considering Florida is SO BACKWARD it reelected Rick F*cking Scott.
Clearly, then, adult access to cannabis (which means the ability to obtain it without fearing ruination or death at the hands of the police) is stemming the tide of what would be MORE deaths from prescription pain medications, opioid and others as well. Does that seem so difficult?
And just for good measure, remember that access to marijuana ALSO reduces the suicide rate, so let’s recap: Cannabis
- helps pain meds work better and so it
- helps people use less pain medication which, in turn
- helps people use LESS pain medication, which, in turn
- helps reduce and prevent overdoses and overdose deaths
- also helps reduce the suicide rate.
So … why is cannabis STILL illegal?
Richard Nixon and the GOP.
That's according to an anecdote in a lengthy cover story for Harper's, in which journalist Dan Baum recounts an interview he conducted with John Erlichman, a former Nixon staffer who was jailed for one year due to his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Unprompted, Erlichman confessed the true purpose of federal drug prohibition:
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
People are still being ruined and are still being denied benefits of cannabis because of this. People are suffering needlessly, being forced to consume dangerous drugs when better alternatives are already available.
The evidence is that people must be allowed access to cannabis to save lives and improve the relative quality of life for very ill people.
How do you ask somebody to be the last person whose life was ruined for a lie?