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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..."
Yes, their voices need to be heard, but companies ought not to become politically powerful entities. They are there to make money, produce goods, and make our lives better, not to tell us how to live.
Whatever the drug companies think is bad for their business, must be good for the consumers.
-SR
In Canada the "Royal" Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) make tens of billions of dollars a year on cannabis. They completely control the trade. Confiscate, resell, confiscate, resell. They can sell the same product over and over and over. They decide who their approved dealers are and the rest got to jail. They even spike it with harder drugs like they always accused the Hells Angels of doing (which they never did). The RCMP kicked the Hells Angels out of Eastern Canada in the early 90's and then promptly took over the Cannabis market. The national paramilitary police force in Canada answers to no government or civilian authority. They control the laws and governments at every level. It is racketeering. It will take armed revolution to unseat them from their position of absolute power over the people of Canada.
Selective law enforcement. They get to decide who is a criminal and who is not. The laws and courts have nothing to do with it.
What is required is an international standard of law enforcement with accreditation and continual audit by civilian authority. Democracy is meaningless when law enforcement is not accountable to the people.
The DEA is another problem. Some people actually need pain medication and now whether you get it or not depends on things like how timid your doctor is, how much of an agenda your politically minded law enforcers have this week, and of course what kind of person you appear to be. If you're very young you'll get over the counter crap that doesn't work but if you have a good job, live in a rich part of town, etc it's different. I fall in that latter category. Had minor surgery a couple of years ago. Got strong, almost too strong pain pills temporarily no problem at all. Yet I've seen people younger than me who work service jobs get injured, be in worse pain than I was ever in, and get denied anything but otc garbage. Of course some of that stuff can destroy your liver when you take too much because it doesn't work but the government doesn't care because at least it doesn't make you feel good while you're taking it. That's what this is about. It's puritanism at its finest, and it's absolutely sick and disgusting.
I'm glad for a whole lot of reasons I don't need that stuff for something long term. One of those is the notion of cops or anybody else besides my doctor looking over my medical history makes me sick to my stomach.
Yeah, like I said, we are going to need new laws, not new "free trade" agreements. The criminal corporate overlords need to be taxed into submission, broken up into smaller companies and regulated until they scream Uncle!
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Where are big pharma's recreational drugs? The ones they engineer from the ground up to provide a pleasant, short-term euphoria with designed-in features to prevent overdose, mitigate overconsumption and abuse, and cheap enough that they could be priced lower than mass-produced marijuana?
Drug manufacturers have a poor track record on that.
In the 1800s, they noticed that opium worked as an analgesic, but had people using it simply for pleasure. So they engineered a new drug to just have the analgesic properties, and named it "morphine."
That didn't work. It had a bad side effect: people who took opium or morphine experienced a side effect where they started craving it, called "opium appetite". So, pharmacies thought, well, we need to find a deliver it without the people eating it-- it could be delivered directly to the body, so people wouldn't have the craving (how could you have a craving for something you don't even taste?) So they invented needle injection to solve the opium appetite problem.
That didn't work. Opium and morphine both turned out to be addictive, so they developed a new drug to solve that. This one they name it "heroin".
That turned out to be even worse. So they went completely synthetic to make a new painkiller which didn't trace to the opium flower: Oxycodone.
That turned out to be even more addictive...
A corporation does not inherently have rights. You still do.