Medical marijuana ought to be legal. Since my teen years I've thought it should be legal as an intoxicant too since it's mild and less dangerous than alcohol in terms of physical problems it creates. It's also less dangerous in the behavior of its addicts.
Years later I've known drunks and putheads by the score. Drunks can and do easily get violent. Potheads only get aggressive if they don't have their substance, when they have it, they turn into annoying but ignorable doorstops who have a personal problem that's less of one for those around them. Cold but true.
We know how bad Prohibition got and how useful it was. So naturally we've been in the middle of the same sort of thing. Marijuana is illegal because the loggers feeding paper mills did not want hemp paper to be the cheap alternative that it is. Now that people are more aware of the environment, hemp paper managed to get legalized in its own right.
But the fallout that a mild herb with many beneficial uses got turned into the great bugaboo Illegal Drug, supposedly a gateway drug to heroin and cocaine et al (for which there is no evidence), is treated as if it's as huge a danger to society and the user as heroin or other opiates.
As a result, people with chronic pain do not have the use of this drug to relieve it. People with glaucoma do not have the use of this drug to relieve it. Cancer patients who are dying in agony don't have the right to ease it unless they manage to leave the country and its jurisdiction, just to get some peace in their final days. And this is when all common sense would say -- hey, turn on the morphine for them, give them anything that would make it easier for them on the way out.
Honestly, if you have a month to live, drug addiction is not high on your list of priorities. Managing to stay cognitive enough to recognize your loved ones and say goodbye would rate a lot higher.
I used marijuana socially in high school. I enjoyed it a lot. It was like a beer without any down side -- no indigestion, no heavy full stomach and no hangover. I eventually quit before I was legal age by one good argument from my grandmother.
"I know you'd be willing to go to jail for your civil disobedience. But do you realize your grandfather and I could go to jail for your civil disobedience?"
No lectures about why drugs are evil or any of the rest, no BS, just a simple legal fact and plea to personal responsibility that went right to my heart. I flushed the couple of joints she found and that was the end of it for me. I would not put other people at risk for my personal decisions in life.
I had many of my current physical disabilities at that age.
The euphoria of pain being lowered and mobility extended is indescribably wonderful. It's a golden memory. I remember those pot parties and I remember doing things I couldn't -- without causing my back to spasm, without forcing damage to my knees and joints. I had more mobility because the pain went down and it was enough of a relaxant to keep the spasms from starting their vicious cycle as soon as I moved to do something.
I'm not sure I even know what other people feel when they're stoned. Chronic pain has been a brake on my life as long as I can remember. Most of my physical problems go back to early childhood at least and some are skeletal, must have been there as long as I existed as a separate critter. Stress causes fibromyalgia flares.
My fibromyalgia didn't start up later in life, some of its symptoms were there all along when I was a kid. It got worse of course, a lot of things did along with the cumulative damage of trying to live at the pace of the abled. But it accounts for one amazing thing about me that I didn't question as a teenager.
I was sometimes smarter stoned than not.
I was an eloquent and relatively graceful drunk, in part because I caught on fast to the knack of getting exactly buzzed enough to function without getting so blotto that I'd get sick -- reach the pain kickdown point and hover there. I'd eat, I'd drink slowly, it took only two or three booze parties to start learning this trick. Pain relief is a reward system that's real and visceral.
I never took to using alcohol for it because it was expensive and it would have other problems -- most of all it tends to knock me out fast unless I have a lot of emotional excitement and physical energy to begin with. If I'm too sick, alcohol either a) puts me right to sleep, which is why I base my best cold remedy on it, or b) makes me very sick and very depressed fast because I start relaxing, feeling the pain of any stressful situation I'm trying not to pay attention to but too sick to do anything about it.
That "pain knocked down" level on alcohol is a step that also involves euphoric circumstances.
The times that I had marijuana weren't like that. It worked better.
I learned how to drink in ways that improve my life and add some pleasure to it. Alcohol is no relief though, because it also knocks out my judgment worse than the marijuana did and it will bring up every grief I've ever had in my life. After the first fifty years of it being in essence unlivable, I don't want to find what's in the dang bottle. I'm all too familiar with it anyway.
My personal rules for drinking involve eating, not having much, not doing it often and always only if I am already in a very high, happy mood to celebrate something. This completely confused the people at the homeless shelter or various charities. They're used to alcoholics and codependents, either people with a huge problem or people who lived with an alcoholic and that's their huge problem.
They're not used to someone who neither hates alcohol and wants to make sure everyone quits, wishes it were not on their planet, nor has an addiction. I didn't like losing my annual New Year's drink. I didn't like the thought that if my book sold I couldn't leave the premises and quietly celebrate at a bar somewhere, maybe tell the bartender "My novel just got published pro" and get a cheer.
I didn't like being questioned over and over as if the idea that a handicapped person could be a social drinker who doesn't need or want much but does enjoy having adult status is so unthinkable that I must be lying. They do the interrogations to catch addicts who are lying about it. The process of interrogation is stressful and humiliating, just one of many scars that mean I should be in a good frame of mind with something good to occupy that mind if I put any alcohol in my system.
So here I am, one of many individuals with chronic pain who could benefit from a physically nonaddictive drug taken at lower than social doses. Seriously, I would not be abusing my medical marijuana to party because it would then start to lose its effectiveness as a pain killer. I'd need more and more of it over time. I've been aware of this with any pain medication, prescription and other, and for most of my life avoided taking anything on the true awareness that if I started taking it every time I hurt, I would never stop.
I now have maintenance pain medication that is adequate, it's much better than living without it and improves my cognition. The number of bad days that I can at least sit at the computer and make sense has tripled with my pain meds. I may not be able to get up and do all of my Activities of Daily Living as if I were abled, but I can at least socialize and write articles and do some art.
When I think of how effective marijuana was at knocking it out, how much energy I had for projects I wanted to do, especially creative ones ... the difference might be whether I was productive enough to be self supporting.
But I'm stuck in a Puritanical country that doubts and fears anything that's remotely pleasurable. A drug that's useful could not, should not be pleasant. It should have nasty side effects and give no joy unless you have pain for it to knock out -- exactly the situation of my regular meds except that I'm lucky enough to be helped by one that's nonaddictive and has no effects on anyone not in pain.
The drug I'm currently taking is classed with the worst addictive drugs and I have had trouble getting it from GPs till I got it signed off by a chronic pain specialist because "it's a high dose of a controlled substance." Controlled because it doesn't make you sick if you take too much, it's safer than aspirin and over the counter in Europe. Doesn't even need a prescription there. Treated like Aleve or Acetaminophen.
That's the only thing that makes it "too easy to abuse" -- you can't kill yourself on it without taking three times as much as you would if you were killing yourself with aspirin. It does absolutely zilch to get anyone not in pain high. Yet it too gets controlled as if it's some kind of gateway drug to taking morphine and then meeting blokes on street corners to buy heroin.
I refuse opiates for anything but dental or surgical uses, where it's acute and extreme and not the pain I'm used to. I know darn well what would happen if I took any opiate daily. It'd stop working unless I upped the dose and turn into a nasty vicious cycle, gaining me only temporary help and turning into an added medical condition of kicking a dangerous physical addiction. I'm critical of all drugs and cautious about the ones I take.
Yet I wish I lived in Canada or somewhere that medical marijuana was legal, because its safety and lack of physical addictive properties would put it very high on pain specialists' list of preferred drugs. People only become potheads the way they become video game addicts or shopaholics -- it's a social phenomenon, riding on a deep instinct and nearly unstoppable but without any physical drying-out problems like the opiates or alcohol.
Others have made this argument before me.
I probably wouldn't use it socially now that I know what it is I got out of it, for the same reason I don't take extra doses of my Ultram. I don't want it to lose its effectiveness if I ever get it -- the clinical doses are good enough. But a great many otherwise innocent people could be let out of jail, a great deal of money and expense could be spared to chase the real drug dealers, the opiate and cocaine dealers, the country would gain a new source of revenue if it were legalized as an intoxicant and made over the counter.
And the people using it could count on their supply not being dosed with something addictive and nastier, which is an ugly sales trick dope dealers have used all along. It's not such an extreme desire that I'll risk what I have in order to try it for myself outside a clinic.
I just wish I could get it on prescription, though I really hope someday anyone could pick it up at a liquor store for a party.
