By Lauren Payne | January 9, 2013 What does “safe access” to medical marijuana mean, anyway? To patients as a whole, it means being provided access to convenient, reliable, affordable medicine. The specifics of safe access are where things get a little murkier. Some patients enjoy safe access through their local collective or dispensary; some [...]
Friends, I am writing today out of frustration and rage. During the first Board Meeting of the NCIA in Denver, I shared that medical cannabis was at risk in the State of Montana and that over 20 bills for regulating medical cannabis were on the docket. Please remember that the Montana legislature meets every two [...]
Oregon boasts the country’s cheapest pot, with the price of a high quality ounce running $259.13, according to PriceofWeed.com, a site that uses crowd-sourcing methodology to track marijuana prices around the country. (Anonymous users who buy the drug on the street input what they paid — and for how much — and the site averages out prices for the state or territory.) Montana comes in second at $273.87 per ounce. Both states are among the 14 to have passed laws allowing the medicinal use of the drug.
Republican Majority Leader Morgan Griffith announced to the subcommittee that though he opposed the bill to decriminalize marijuana possession he had, in fact, drafted the bill to allow for medical marijuana and he supported its passage.
He then gave a fairly impassioned defense of the idea that doctors should be allowed to prescribe cannabis, arguing it is no more dangerous than many drugs already allowed for medical use. “I truly believe that if we allow the use of morphine, opiates and oxycotin, we ought to allow for this,” Griffith said.
Virginia is one of 18 states where the government operates a monopoly on the distribution and sale of hard liquor. Virginia’s Alcohol Beverage Control stores are a holdover from alcohol prohibition. Lasting from 1920 to 1933, alcohol prohibition was repealed when it became clear that prohibition was financing organized crime while failing miserably at preventing alcohol use.
Making the case for ABC privatization, Gov. Bob McDonnell has argued that selling alcohol is not a core government responsibility. Neither is criminalizing people who use marijuana.
State alcohol sales generate state revenue. Virginia brings in $324 million a year from alcohol sales. Marijuana prohibition, on the other hand, squanders tax dollars and creates opportunity costs as police focus efforts on nonviolent consensual vices. Virginia police made 19,764 arrests for marijuana offenses in 2009. Six percent of all Virginia arrests are for marijuana offenses. Police time spent busting marijuana consumers is time not spent going after child molesters, rapists and murderers.
There’s white, there’s black, and then there are varying shades of gray. But it is human nature to see the black first and longest because it is the most striking of the lot. So it is with medical marijuana — people fail to see its potential as a therapeutic drug that helps relieve pain and other symptoms of diseases and instead perceive it as a drug that is and could be abused for personal pleasure. This is why there are laws against using this drug even for therapeutic reasons. But those in the medical community, especially nurses, approve of medical marijuana
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