Search Results: painkillers (43)

Personal Liberty Digest

Should health care facilities have the power to make lifestyle decisions for you — and punish you when your choices don’t measure up to their ideals? More and more hospitals are making exactly those kinds of decisions when it comes to people who choose to use marijuana — even legal patients in medical marijuana states. Apparently, these places don’t mind looking exactly as if they have more loyalty to their Big Pharma benefactors than they do to their own patients.

A new policy at one Alaska clinic — requiring patients taking painkilling medications to be marijuana free — serves to highlight the hypocrisy and cruelty of such rules, which are used at more and more health care facilities, particularly the big corporate chains (the clinic in question is a member of the Banner Health chain).

Tanana Valley Clinic, in Fairbanks, started handing out prepared statements to all chronic pain patients on Monday, said Corinne Leistikow, assistant medical director for family practice at TVC, reports Dorothy Chomicz at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer tied the regulated marijuana industry to opioid addiction last week. At a press briefing, he told reporters: “I think that when you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming in so many states around this country, the last thing that we should be doing is encouraging people…. There’s still a federal law that we need to abide by when it comes to recreational marijuana and other drugs of that nature.”

Opioid addiction is a well-documented epidemic in the United States; 33,000 people died from overdosing on prescription painkillers, heroin and similar drugs in 2015 — a number on par with those killed by firearms and those who died in car accidents in the same year. But opioid use is down in Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational marijuana.

Dear Stoner: My very Christian, conservative, Texan in-laws wince when I even say “marijuana,” and any discussion of its benefits or the industry sends them into a tizzy. How do I convert them?
A Faithful Prophet

Dear Faithful: My go-to campaign has always been CBD benefits. Epileptic children can suffer dozens of seizures while on prescription medicine, but hundreds of videos and articles online show how CBD can reduce those seizures to fewer than one per day. And that’s only CBD’s benefits for epilepsy cases. Retired athletes, senior citizens and patients suffering from various chronic conditions have all documented how CBD helps treat their inflammation and pain better than prescribed narcotics and painkillers. A combination of talking up CBD benefits and warning of the life-threatening dangers of opiate addiction has been my winning formula for quite some time now, and I’ve made a lot of conversions.

Photo by Sage Ross, CC by-sa


It’s an almost cliched stoner adage that Big Pharma is actively working to keep marijuana illegal so they can keep you on their pills. We’ve all had the at least one encounter with a pro-pot zealot who will delve deep into this subject at the drop of a hat.
But the thing is: it’s all true. Take Dr. Herbert Kleber, a leading anti-pot academic from Columbia University who has fought hard against marijuana legalization for years – all while on the payroll of Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin, as well as several other high-profile painkiller manufacturers. He’s not alone, either.


Week after week, we report on headlines and stories regarding the many, many potential health benefits there are to responsible cannabis use. From epilepsy to cancer, and from ADD to PTSD, cannabis, in many cases we are told, can possibly cure them all.
Reactions to these headlines usually bounce back and forth between the anti-cannabis crowd saying something like, “No way…” to the pro-pot people saying, “Holy shit!” But the results of a study just published in JAMA Internal Medicine have merged the two reactions into a pretty universal reply of “No shit!”


The story of Richard Kirk allegedly killing his wife after eating a pot cookie has spread like wildfire. But what news reports aren’t telling you (or are burying at the bottom of their stories) is that the guy was also potentially on prescription painkiller drugs. But apparently people will still believe that marijuana is somehow more dangerous than prescription painkillers.

Like any politician these days, Senator Claire McCaskill wants to talk about jobs, the economy, and how she can create more jobs and a better economy. But during her town-hall meetings across Missouri this week, McCaskill was bombarded with questions about marijuana legalization — and she’s really surprised about that.
Fortunately, that didn’t stop people from asking McCaskill about marijuana reform, including whether rape survivors and war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder should be allowed to medicate with marijuana instead of powerful pharmaceutical painkillers.

Think the New Jersey Department of Health has your back if you’re an MMJ patient? You’re wrong.
Only 78 percent of New Jersey’s 1,670 medical marijuana patients have made a marijuana purchase from one of only three medical marijuana dispensaries around the state, things are going just fine according to the state Health Department. Not only that, but the department has no plans to expand the list of qualifying conditions until at least next year. Sorry those of you with severe, chronic pain or post-traumatic stress disorder – you’ll have to go on being a criminal if you choose to use cannabis.

Congressman Raul Grijalva, a southern Arizona Democrat, has joined 17 other congressmen in asking that President Obama to help reclassify marijuana in the federal drug “scheduling.”
Marijuana is a Schedule I substance at the federal level, which the Justice Department describes as the “most dangerous” drugs that have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” alongside LSD and heroin.
The Schedule I drugs generally are associated with higher penalties. For example, trafficking between 50 and 99 kilograms of pot calls for a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. A first-time offender caught with any amount of a Schedule III drug — which includes certain prescription painkillers, ketamine, and anabolic steroids, among other things — is supposed to serve a maximum of 10 years.


Although Obama himself can’t just reorganize the drug scheduling himself, the 18 lawmakers — mostly Democrats — have asked Obama to instruct Attorney General Eric Holder to use his authority to reclassify marijuana.
Our buds over at the Phoenix New Times have more on this groundbreaking development

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