Always the hot topic during election season; who is the next state to legalize medicinal or recreational marijuana?
Study after study shows it has many health benefits from dealing with rheumatoid arthritis and seizures, to helping veterans with PTSD or stopping cancer from spreading completely. While all this has very lengthy scientific research behind it, many conservative states, places, and the “feds” are not on board with the legalization.
The Nixon administration was the first to coin statement, “War on Drugs”. The anti-marijuana propaganda itself had started long before he was president; however he found a way to benefit from it.
His lead adviser, John Ehrlichman, has been quoted saying, “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.”
Because of this campaign, many people are facing the repercussions of this today thanks to it not being legalized medicinally in 44% of the United States and only eight states have it legalized for recreational use. CDB oil is also still considered federally illegal and only legal in 11 states; despite it being non-psychoactive and used heavily in the medical community for helping end seizures completely and to get rid of anxiety to name a few.
So why is it so important that ALL states have the Devil’s Lettuce legalized both medicinally and recreationally?
Because the medical community has already inflated the prices of obtaining a medical marijuana card to turn a high profit. In Oregon, just the application fee is $200; which does not include fees for when you actually receive the card, or when you have to renew it. There are a few insurances/exceptions who help lower this fee significantly… but only four exceptions. In Colorado, the application fee is only $15, but you do have to renew it every single year. With that being said, in Colorado you can go to doctors who will “diagnose” you with an issue that qualifies you for one of these cards and you can be paying upwards of $300 for that consultation itself.
Do you see a problem yet?
Colorado has seen a boom in their population since the legalization because most Midwestern states do not have it legalized even medicinally. So families who really need these treatments are having to either:
1) Purchase it illegally and face excessive jail time
2) Uproot their families to move to a state where they can get treatments
In Oregon, because of the high cost of even applying for a “green card”, many people are also not able to access medicinal marijuana, especially those in rural communities. When you buy at a recreational dispensary not only are you paying extremely high taxes on the reefer, you’re only allowed to buy an ounce at a time. If you buy medicinally you are an exception to this and can purchase more than one ounce at a time.
So lets set the scenario for you; you are someone who lives in Eastern Oregon; very rural with only two recreational dispensaries, and only two medicinal dispensaries in the whole half of the state. Not only is legal access to ganja few and far between, but most counties have a ban on it recreationally.
So you are on Medicaid, you are a retiree dying of cancer. Medicaid is NOT one of the exceptions for lowering the application fee for a medical card. Spending $200 for this medical card is not something you can afford on top of your constantly piling medical bills. You live in an area where the closest recreational dispensary is over four hours away, and can’t afford to make that trip twice a month.
But you’re dying, the chemo is killing you faster than the cancer is solely because you do not have the nutrition to help recover from all the radiation. You know marijuana would help with not only the pain, but the lack of appetite and nausea; resulting in you having a healthier body to recover from the chemo and help fight the cancer. You endure the pain for months while you try to figure out how to get enough marijuana to last you a long time; making sure it has the correct amount of THC and CBD ratio for your specific needs and type of cancer.
And then you finally pass in your sleep.
This is a common occurrence; a reality for more people than you think. This situation happened to my great-grandpa. It’s also happened to family friends, and childhood friends. Most of them were for cancer, and some of them still drive hundreds of miles twice a month just to get oils for their kids or spouses suffering from seizures or Parkinson’s disease.
It’s time to end the propaganda against marijuana. It’s time to end the stigma. Because if we don’t end it, lives will be ended from something completely preventable. People will suffer their whole lives from something they don’t actually need to suffer from.
Because honestly, how is rolling up a joint and getting the munchies and curing cancer equivalent to doing bath salts and eating a human alive?
Instead of criminalizing it, we should appreciate and utilize it for what it does to help so many people around the world.
So thank you, marijuana; we truly don’t deserve you.
Less Than Elegant 