I don’t know how I missed this, but a study that I have to share just showed up in one of my social media feeds. It’s about medical marijuana, which isn’t really one of my top ten issues.
I’m for legalizing marijuana for any use under the sun. Recreational, medicinal, I don’t care. The war on drugs has only been good for the private prison industrial complex. Throwing people in jail and destroying their lives has turned into a profit center, and it’s not helping anyone in this country, other than a handful of utterly talentless people who can’t manage to make something people want to buy so they had to get into the incarceration business.
I probably missed this story because this isn’t one of my main issues, and I’m already on board with legalization so I rarely click on the pot stories. This one is really interesting, and may move people who are on the fence regarding this issue. In states where medical marijuana is legal, they are seeing a 25% decline in pharmaceutical opioid overdose deaths.
According to the study, these numbers started to change precipitously, and almost immediately after legalization happened in each of the 13 states that allow for legal medical marijuana use. If that isn’t a crazy good basis for legalization, I don’t know what is.
To be clear, the study doesn’t pinpoint how this is happening. Are chronic pain patients substituting some of their oxy with pot? Or are recreational Vicodin users just turning to pot because where medical marijuana is legal, marijuana is that much easier for everyone to get? We know that it’s impossible to overdose on pot, so is that the reason?
Who gives a damned. We can drill down to get details later. The pattern is clear; fewer people are dying from overdosing on pain killers. I say, let the nationwide legalization begin!
Sorry Purdue, but you rode that addiction gravy train for nearly 100 years. That’s right, oxycodone was first used in its current form to treat pain in 1916. Marijuana might finally take a bite out of Purdue’s outrageous abuse of the pharmaceutical patent system. It’s time for people to live, and for you to actually discover a cure to something in order to maintain your stock price.
