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New Study Shows Why Big Pharma Hates Medical Marijuana (washingtonpost.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Christopher Ingraham writes in the Washington Post that a new study shows that painkiller abuse and overdose are significantly lower in states with medical marijuana laws and that when medical marijuana is available, pain patients are increasingly choosing pot over powerful and deadly prescription narcotics. The researchers "found that, in the 17 states with a medical-marijuana law in place by 2013, prescriptions for painkillers and other classes of drugs fell sharply compared with states that did not have a medical-marijuana law... In medical-marijuana states, the average doctor prescribed 265 fewer doses of antidepressants each year, 486 fewer doses of seizure medication, 541 fewer anti-nausea doses and 562 fewer doses of anti-anxiety medication. But most strikingly, the typical physician in a medical-marijuana state prescribed 1,826 fewer doses of painkillers in a given year."
[P]ainkiller drug companies "have long been at the forefront of opposition to marijuana reform, funding research by anti-pot academics and funneling dollars to groups, such as the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, that oppose marijuana legalization..."
[P]ainkiller drug companies "have long been at the forefront of opposition to marijuana reform, funding research by anti-pot academics and funneling dollars to groups, such as the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, that oppose marijuana legalization..."
The numbers here are doses, not prescriptions. Keep that in mind, folks. Not nearly as big a reduction as the blurb is trying to make it sound like.
The study says the drop is greatest in states with legal MM, but implies there is a drop in other states as well. That information (the drop in other states) is conspicuously missing. What, then, is the reason overall for that drop? Also, since is a drop in prescriptions, maybe they could ask a few doctors why they are prescribing less. In some states like FL, there has been major crackdowns on excessive pain killer prescription writing.
Big Pharma is only one of five industries spending big money to keep it illegal. The rest are aggravating, too. Private prisons, prison guard unions, and actual law enforcement are also involved. Law enforcement should just enforce the laws, in my opinion. They should not be involved in lobbying for or against them, though.
http://www.republicreport.org/...
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
Companies in the US already have strong restrictions on "political donations".
They may have "restrictions"-- but they find ways to donate anyway. Nice thing about corporations; they have lawyers to find the loopholes.
Here's the top contributors list from OpenSecrets.org: https://www.opensecrets.org/or...
What they can do is communicate on issues.
Yes, that's the biggest loophole: the Political Action Committee ("PAC"). It's "supposed" to be to "communicate issues". Every candidate has one.
"Political contributions, which used to go directly to candidates, now often flow to Super PACs, independent organizations that can raise money to either help or defeat a political candidate. Historically, traditional political action committees have been prohibited from accepting donations from unions and companies. However, following rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals, Super PACs are now allowed to accept unlimited donations from unions and companies, provided the money does not go directly to the campaign.
The rise of the Super PAC has opened the door to a new generation of fundraising, changing how money is used to elect candidates and increasing the amount candidates need to raise to be competitive as they seek office.
(source: http://247wallst.com/special-r... )
So, are you going to start massively censoring speech by companies? How exactly is that going to work? Does "company" include the New York Times, or only companies you don't like?
A start would be a law mandating that money donated to political action committees has to be disclosed: if you're funding political campaigns, you have to do it openly, not secretly. This wouldn't even require overturning the Citizen's United decision: the Supreme court already said that this would be legal.
Companies don't have "political power"; they can't vote, they can't serve in Congress.
To the contrary, companies have plenty of political power. What we've discovered in the 20th century is that the money to run political campaigns is power.
Companies simply inherit the right to free speech from their owners;
Yes, that's the basis for the Supreme Court "Citizens United" decision. It is on questionable logical grounds however: corporations are not citizens, and while the people composing a corporation have first-amendment rights, it is not at all clear that the corporations themselves do. The belief that an object inherits the properties of the pieces composing it is one of the logical fallacies: this is the fallacy of composition.
(Or see: Logically Fallacious: Fallacy of composition.)
The alternative would be to say that the people themselves have the right to donate to political campaigns, but if they want to do so, they must do so personally, and not from the corporations. This is also perfectly reasonable: corporations are legal entities, not persons, and can be subject to different laws then people.
Note your OpenSecrets list is for 2016 only, and is only what has been reported through Q1 2016. Many organizations hold their spending/influence until after the conventions. Looking at how the spending ends up is much more illustrative of where the money comes from.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
We tried that. The net effect was that corporations don't donate to politicians anymore but they found a branch and employ said politician as a consultant and pay him for consulting. Which led to an interesting bonmot in a trial for corruption around here where a politician asked his "employer": "Uh, hey, say, what was my service to you again?"
Yes, our politicians are even too stupid to be properly corrupt.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There is such a thing as "weed in a pill" and it is sold under the brand name Marinol. It is a schedule 3 drug under US law which means that prescribing it is under considerable scrutiny from the DEA. Low dose opiates and many mood altering drugs are schedule 4 and 5, which means the DEA is much less likely to scrutinize the physician for running a pill mill for addicts.
I'm stepping a bit further into speculation here but it appears that there is a social aspect here on not wanting to be seen as a quack for prescribing "weed in a pill" when there are a number of other schedule 3 drugs which are widely accepted to treat pain, even though those pain pills contain opiates. Cannabinoids have been shown to treat issues besides pain but again there are other drugs on the same level of controls or lower that are more socially acceptable.
If you are getting high from your pain meds then you are doing it wrong. I've been prescribed opiates for years for chronic pain and I take my pills carefully so that I don't get high from them. That high feeling was fun for a while but as you also found out that is no way to go through life. So I'll space out my doses, sometimes cut pills in half, so that I get the pain reducing benefits without that warm and tingly feeling.
I have no formal medical training so my speculation on what you've experienced is from that of a pain patient, not a licensed medical provider. People can have different kinds of pain. People can react differently to medications. I've gone through a number of medications for my chronic pain and I've had some side effects that seemed to baffle the physicians that prescribed my meds. One example is Tramadol, some people love this drug as it reduces pain but has no significant side effects for them. Apparently I'm in the 1% of people where Tramadol produces sleeplessness. Tramadol will help with my pain but if I take it before noon then I may not be able to get to sleep that night.
I've learned that just because something does not work for you does not mean it will not work for someone else. Humans are unlike many other species of animals out there. We've got such a varied genome that drugs can have a wide variety of effects. Animals like horses, cattle, and domestic cats don't have such variation so when drugs are tested on animals they don't always tell the whole story. The only animal that seems to be as widely varied as humans are dogs. My sister in law is a veterinary surgeon and she has to treat certain breeds of dogs as if they are a different species.
Which brings me back to why the drug companies can't just put "weed in a pill". The effects for marijuana can vary widely on the person and so dosage is difficult. If put in a pill form the marijuana would have to be in a wide variety of dosages and/or the physicians may have to prescribe a rather unrealistic number of pills for some people. This would make the regulation difficult and make them expensive. Marijuana in its natural form is easy to meter in that it is dilute, just take a bite of a marijuana cookie if that is all you need or eat the whole thing. Marijuana is naturally cheap to produce, it's a plant that grows like a weed, processing it to a pill form would make it expensive.
Probably the biggest reason that drug companies don't just put it in pill form is that there would be no profit in it. It would take only a minute for someone to see that the pills they are prescribed are just the same thing the stoner on the street corner is selling. Drug companies cannot compete with that.
Then this quickly turns to politics. For a drug company to sell a drug derived from marijuana on the market they'd have to lobby the DEA to reschedule the drug. Since there is now a large gray market for this in many states the big drug companies know they cannot act quickly enough to get any profit from it. Their potential customers would be quickly grabbed up by the existing marijuana dealers. Those taking what the big companies are offering now might just s
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.