California voters passed the country’s first medical-marijuana law in 1996, but many are having second thoughts. Last year, five California cities voted on initiatives to allow marijuana dispensaries, and all five voted no. Oregon also voted down dispensaries. These liberal West Coast states have seen medical marijuana up close, and learned it’s barely medical at all.
That
shouldn’t surprise anyone. The idea that smoking pot is medicine didn’t come
from doctors or groups representing the seriously ill. Neither the American
Cancer Society nor the National Multiple Sclerosis Society supports it, and the
American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics strongly oppose
it.
The
idea to call marijuana medicine came from the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws and the Marijuana Policy Project. These two
organizations are part of a national marijuana lobby that represents drug
users, growers and sellers. They’re behind every medical-marijuana law in the
country.
They
advertise these laws with an impassioned plea to allow suffering, terminally
ill people access to medicine. However, once these laws pass, most
medical-marijuana patients claim pain, not serious illness. In Arizona, 90
percent get their marijuana for pain. In Colorado and Oregon, it’s 94 percent.
Pain is every drug addict’s favorite complaint; it’s easy to fake and
impossible to disprove.
Good
doctors try to screen out drug abusers, but medical-marijuana laws are designed
to circumvent good medical care. Most marijuana patients get their
prescriptions from a few unethical doctors who see patients one time only and
hand out marijuana recommendations to anyone.
Pot-smokers
know who these doctors are, and they line their waiting rooms. Before Montana
tightened its law, eight doctors wrote three-fourths of all the
recommendations. In Arizona, 24 doctors did the same.
That’s
why there’s a backlash. People feel hoodwinked. They voted for compassionate
care, not drug abuse.
I’m
a partisan Democrat who supports most liberal causes, but I’m also an addiction
psychiatrist. I work with drug abusers. They’re amazing con artists who will
say anything to get their drugs. And the marijuana lobby is no different.
For
example, based on scant evidence, advocates claimed for years that marijuana
could treat glaucoma. Today, ophthalmologists believe marijuana can damage the
optic nerve and make glaucoma worse. The Glaucoma Foundation now warns patients
not to use the drug, yet no marijuana advocate has ever apologized for handing
out bad medical advice.
The
pot lobby paints the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Food and Drug
Administration as blue meanies, depriving people of needed medicine. But
science consistently proves these agencies right. For every illness possibly
helped by marijuana, there are safer and more effective medications already
available. There aren’t thousands of people suffering because they can’t use
pot; that’s a fiction the marijuana lobby invented.
In
Arizona, they actually called their campaign “Stop Arresting Patients.” They
wanted us to picture grannies in prison, doing their knitting surrounded by
tattooed gang-bangers. But in a live debate, the Marijuana Policy Project
lobbyist could not name even one genuine medical patient who’d been arrested
solely for possession. That’s because there aren’t any. Medical-marijuana laws
protect drug dealers and drug users, not the seriously ill.
Even
worse, these laws hurt innocent people. An analysis of several studies,
published in the British Medical Journal, found that drivers under the
influence of marijuana had nearly twice as many serious and fatal car wrecks as
nonusers. California, Colorado and Montana all documented increased traffic
fatalities caused by drivers with marijuana components in their bloodstreams,
coinciding with increased use of medical marijuana.
The
biggest damage, however, is done to our kids. The National Survey of Drug Use
and Health shows that teenage marijuana use is 30 percent higher in
medical-marijuana states. Teens who smoke pot do worse in school, do worse in
their adult careers and have twice the school drop-out rate of nonsmokers. No
parent wants that.
Last,
these laws cost states money. The marijuana lobby promises that taxes on pot
will fill state coffers, but it’s just another deception. States with these
laws pay out of their general funds to regulate marijuana, and for the
increased health care, substance-abuse treatment and law enforcement needed any
time an addictive drug becomes more available.
So
don’t be taken in; medical marijuana is a ruse. It’s bad medicine that helps
hardly anyone and has serious social and economic side effects for all.
Dr. Ed Gogek is an addiction psychiatrist in Prescott, Ariz., and board
member of Keep AZ Drug Free, a group that opposes legalization and
medical-marijuana laws.
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