| Those of us who are disabled
and for whom their current pharmaceuticals no longer work,
and their physicians no longer have any answers, we end
up in this illegal place, almost as accidental tourists.
We don’t really want to be here, but there is no
other way to stop our bodies from screaming at us.
For the most part, we end up dealing with criminals and
thieves, all for those rare minutes free of pain. Even
in places where there is some kind of legitimate distribution
of therapeutic cannabis, the laws and regulations governing
its use are so poorly written that they are useless, legally
unsupportable and indefensible.
The non-government organizations (NGO’s) that have
been largely responsible for this approach have made things
worse. Groups like the Marijuana
Policy Project, the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and
the Drug
Policy Alliance have championed distribution systems
that work outside the normal approval and distribution
channels used for the introduction of new drugs. Medical
standards of therapeutic grade cannabis are non-existent.
There has been no work by these groups educating doctors
how to use therapeutic cannabis.
Researchers involved in the study and development of
therapeutic cannabis based pharmaceuticals end up being
“tarred with the same brush” as these NGO’s.
Physicians and nurses, treating patients based on this
worldwide explosion of medicinal cannabis studies, are
reprimanded and publicly attacked by their peers, who
are lacking both compassion and scholarship. This confusion,
the co-mingling of legitimate science based study of therapeutic
cannabis applications with the quite different effort
of marijuana legalization, by some NGO’s, has been
exploited by the federal government to the detriment of
all patients.
The legalization movement, especially its figurehead
NGO’s, must completely and permanently severe itself
from the therapeutic cannabis debate. It has become counterproductive
for a handful of very wealthy individuals and groups to
continue to pursue an agenda that places patients and
health care professionals in a position that has and is
causing protracted patient suffering by this needless
melding of interests.
Neil Jacobs, Board of Directors |
