Drew Carey on Medical Marijuana and Minors
Seventeen-year-old Owen Beck played football and soccer for a local high school, but one day his thoughts abruptly turned away from sports and school. Doctors told Owen he had bone cancer, and would have to begin chemotherapy right away.
The young athlete suffered another blow—doctors would have to amputate his leg to try to keep the cancer from spreading. Chemotherapy attacked Owen's cancer and his body, leaving him bald, gaunt, and vomiting the food he needed to recover. The amputation introduced Owen to a bizarre, new agony called phantom pain, and although doctors gave him powerful medication, nothing helped.
A medical marijuana dispensary had recently opened in the nearby city of Morro Bay. Owen's parents knew the idea of giving medical marijuana to a 17-year-old strikes many people as scandalous. With a written doctor recommendation in hand, they purchased medical marijuana for their teenage son. The new medication eased Owen's pain and nausea like nothing else had.
You won't believe what happened next. Find out here by watching Drew Carey's latest Reason.tv video.
9 Comments:
Nice doc, something which leaves a question about the rigid laws system...which is even beyond human life!
Still wondering if laws came first or humans!
Traditional pain killers dull pain but do not block the nerve signal from the injury site. Repeated nerve signals from the site of injury over time often induce a permanent pain response as the brain associates that area of the body with pain.
There is now a drip feed which unlike traditional painkillers blocks the nerve signal from the sight of injury to the brain thereby preventing a permanent pain response what is known as phantom pain from developing.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/pain.html
Sigh. Simple economic solution to all these problems; legalize. Demand destruction efforts haven't worked, supply destruction efforts don't work. Instead we get violence in Mexico and up to 1/3 of the people locked up in jail are their for non-violent drug offenses. Lets not forget that the MJ is probably the #1 cash crop in several states.
Legalize, tax the crap out of it, cut the DEA budget, let all the non-violent MJ offenders out of jail.
-Frees up prison space
-Frees up legal system
-Boosts tax revenue
-Decreases profit incentives for Mexican cartels
-Decreases incentives for violence
Hey if you want, use that tax money to secure the border or give everyone a tax cut or whatever. In any case, it will pay for itself.
Legalize and then subject it to onerous taxation and a campaign of social stigma similar to those that have worked effectively to reduce cigarette smoking and drunk driving. Does anyone find it socially acceptable to drink on the job or to smoke at work?
What we have learned about the war on drugs mirrors the results of prohibition: Enforcement is expensive and ineffective. Attempting to lower supply elevates prices creating a lucrative, tax-free method of making money.
The amount of income tax and excise tax potential is staggering.
I'm forgetting the other wonder of the U.S. Tort law.
Imagine if we could inflict the marijuana producers with the kinds of lawsuits that every other company faces.
Yes, legalize all illicit drugs and let's sue the pants of the Hell's Angels.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Government must let people live in freedom. If someone want use drugs to have fun and destroy his/her life it is his/her choice.
This is the problem when governments want to force people to act like they want.
They see only the bad side and that's all.
I read once that a marijuana cigarette is more harmful than 20 normal cigarettes. So, we need to see both sides of the history.
And I agree with 'anonymous' when he said that enforcement is ineffective.
There was some truth to the original statement that a joint was '20 times' more 'harmful' than a cigarette, although this was a measure of 'tar', meaning all the particulates of the smoke.
Marijuana has no toxic chemical in it, unlike nicotine, which, were it injected into your body in an adequate dose, would kill you. THC, CBD, or any of the numerous other active chemicals in marijuana are physically addicting, nor are they toxic.
Or if you want, you can use a device called a vaporizer, which does not create smoke, but does heat the active ingredients to a point at which they vaporize and can be inhaled, producing almost no particulates. But ultimately, its your lungs.
This was actually the one issue that I felt Ron Paul could have gained a lot of support on, if he would have actually spoken about it more. You couldn't find anything about it on his campaign website. I think there are a surprising number of people who would welcome a progressive look at this issue, but he was strangely silent.
Post a Comment
<< Home