braintissue

Marijuana is a safe alternative to pharmaceuticals available by prescription by a medical doctor. In some cases, Marijuana is still illegal, even though it has never been shown to cause the same dangers as do many of the other, traditional and presumed safer-because-they-are-FDA-approved drugs most doctors prescribe to their patients for a myriad of conditions.

I will not lie to anyone reading this - I LIKE marijuana. I like it for all the reasons that a lot of people like it. It mellows me when I am in the middle of an uncontrolable fit of rage, and it soothes the cramps that many OTC medicines do not. It does not nauseate me the way that Vicodin does, and it makes me fall asleep gently unlike the Baclofen that I am prescribed, along with the Temazepam and the Xanax that I am supposed to take that I get prescribed by my doctor. I cannot take these meds for a variety of reasons, but the one reason that I prefer to not take them is simple.

I am a legally prescribed patient covered by California’s SB420, also known as Prop 215, better known as Medicinal Marijuana. Because of this plant, I am able to cope with all those maladies, real or imagined, WAY better than I do when I am passed out from one of those others that I have access to.

Killing the Ignorant Monsters

We all know - ALL OF US KNOWS - that there is nothing implicitly unsafe about Marijuana. In short, it is a plant, a plant that has been around longer than any one reading this has been. Sure, its main purpose for it being in a lot of peoples’ lives is so that they can get high. (Yes, today’s strains are WAY better than the ones that were over-glorified in ANY of the Cheech and Chong movies…those guys would never even know what the hell to do if they got ahold of this stuff on a regular basis). Yet there is a large majority of people, I am one of them, who has grown tired of all the wrong rhetoric being slung around by a media that would not know its own head from its ever-widening ass if they bothered to look at it. No one can, unless they try it themselves, say anything about how I medicate away the migraines, the depression, the anger. No one, and unless and until people decide that they are going to ask instead of assume that what they are saying is right, people will sooner stay cloaked in a cloud of ignorance, more worried about being wrong all this time than finally dealing with the truth.

Yes, I was once a pothead for sport, but these days, given the way that life has come at me in full force and has seemingly decided that I can hang with my travesties, I have to get rid of all my maladies the way that I and many others like me have done for generations - toking it away.

May God send me to Hell if I am doing something wrong to someone else

If you have been reading what I have been writing about all these years, then it is not a secret that I am a huge believer in God. I am also a huge believer in the idea that if God did not want Marijuana here, if it did not have a purpose, or further, was not the herb that the book of Proverbs is talking about when it says “Physician, heal thyself,” it- the marijuana - would be gone, just like the dinosaurs.

I blame the ridiculous claims made by people who have no clue about this plant other than that it is “technically” and federally, illegal still. The state of California can use the boost in profits and taxes that can and should come from the revenues taken from the sale of it. I am all for making legal those things that are studied and measured and known to be safe.

Some meds on the market are still in the testing phases, but doctors still prescribe them.

My husband, the one to whom I refer to as “Heart Attack Guy,” was prescribed a blood thinner at the time that he was being released from the hospital after he’d undergone Quadruple Bypass surgery over the Christmas holiday. I will not say what the name if the medicine is, but I will say that it is currently being prescribed to those people in need of blood thinners, especially to those who have, like my old man, been through open heart surgery.

We tried unsuccessfully to fill the prescription for this blood thinner, only to find out from the pharmacist that it was not covered by our insurance, or by any insurance for that matter. It perplexed me to think about how it is that a person who was just released from the hospital after undergoing major invasive surgery would be given a drug that he or she cannot pay for and one which was not covered by any insurance plan. We later found out that the drug in question was not covered because said drug is still in the testing phases.

That’s right- those commercials you see are there just to make you feel safer without a guarantee that you are really safe.

I was told that drug makers release drugs into the wild blue yonder long before they are deemed safe for use by actual people who need them. The pill that my husband was supposed to take comes with a multitude of possible calamities, sold to the public as “side effects.” If you read some of the warnings on the side of the box that those little magic pills come in, you would find somewhere in that rhetoric are small inklings, hints of the multitude of bad things that can happen, yes, even death.

No one is going to tell you about this because if a doctor tells you what he knows about the meds, and said doctor is somehow in cahoots with any one of the major drug manufacturers, that doctor will end up losing his ass in court because when he chose to be what I refer to as a “test doctor,” he chose to side with the drug maker and not the side he is ethically supposed to - with the patient.

Marijuana has no side effects

In sharp contrast to what we are not told about manufactured medicine, we are told a lot about the benefits of marijuana as medicine. This is not to imply that it does not come with its own set of things that can go wrong, but in comparison to what has gone wrong with other, legal and marketed drugs, marijuana is benign. Yes, if you smoke it you could end up with cancer, but again - show us the stats on that one instead of the stats on the number of deaths caused by manufactured drugs (at least the deaths that happened where we heard about them) and put them up against the stats for marijuana in any form and you will see what potheads have known for generations.

We got it right.

We know what the effects of our medicine is, and if eating, laughing and then falling asleep is a side effect, I think that I will take my chances with a plant and not with the cheesy smile hiding the slithering tongue of the guy wearing the suit that was bought with heartache and addiction. We are the most prescribed bunch of people in the Universe, we Americans are, and we continue to be because we know that whatever the guy in the white lab coat says is golden, because after all, he’s a doctor and you can trust him.

NO, you cannot trust them all. Although I trust my doctor as much as any one stranger can trust another one, the same cannot be said for many doctors throughout the nation and the world. Many doctors’ licenses are currently in question because they have found out that there is a lot of money to be made becoming the dope dealer of choice to a mass of people who started out having pains, ended up getting a pain med script, and went on with their lives, never realizing that the say that went back to the doctor’s office to ask for a refill of their pain meds began the addiction, not only to the medication, but to the false idea that what they are taking is better for them than much else is because their doctor told them it was.

If you believe that, then you probably believe, too, that the converible Jaguar he drives is not his but belongs to the medical group he is working for.

Just a thought
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