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Wednesday, December 28, 2005 at 10:27AM I recently penned a letter to the editor of the McComb Enterprise-Journal that sums up my opinion on medical marijuana. You can read it here.
Briefly, what I said was that doctors should not be used as pawns in the game of legalization of marijuana. Legalization may have its merits, but marijuana's medical uses are few and far between.
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Reader Comments (1)
It is true that there are potheads out there that want to see medicinal marijuana become a reality, because glacial movements such as these serve as a back door to legalization. However, there are those that advocate medicinal marijuana for the purpose of controlled sale of the product only.
Let me give you an example; I'm a medicinal marijuana advocate. I do not smoke marijuana, I don't like the smell, and I don't care to deal with people that use it just to get high. I do on the other hand, believe that medicinal marijuana should be an option for certain people. True medicinal marijuana advocates (and when I say true I mean those that advocate it for medicinal purposes, not as a backdoor to legalization) mostly feel that only terminally ill patients should qualify for it. Verifiable, provable, terminally ill patients. This eliminates the problem that you suggest of people basically doctor shopping for pot, unless they can fake terminal cancer or HIV. Furthermore, true advocates do not want to see marijuana handled like alcohol and tobacco, they want to see terminally ill people have marijuana as an option, not as a legalized drug.
Furthermore, if it were true that marijuana can cause cancer or other health problems, wouldn't we agree that this would arise out of long term usage? Given that the only people to receive the drug would be terminally ill, this is also a moot point.
Think of it being regulated in the way that say, a morphine pump would be. To have procedures like this done require extensive medical testing and treatments prior to using this option. Nobody doctor shops for a morphine pump, and if marijuana was handled in a similar fashion the same would hold true.
The last thing that terminally ill people need are barriers to possibilities that can make their remaining days more comfortable because some doctor or institution has some hangup about this drug or that. But as far as marijuana being legalized in a fashion to where I could get a script at an ER for glaucoma, I'm totally against that.