By Letitia Pepper | June 29, 2011
In May, 2011, Ronalee asked for help at a MAPP/patient support group meeting. She needed someone to cultivate cannabis for her because she has numerous health problems: she needs knee replacement surgery, has chronic pain and digestive problems, and was underweight.
And after that, she fell, fractured some ribs, and was in even more pain. A member of our group, with the help of Joe Grumbine from the Human Solution, was able to get some indica to Ronalee.
I was able to give her a supply of edibles. And as a consequence, she has been able to stop taking ALL her prescription drugs: no more Xanax, no more Norco and Oxycontin.
I saw Ronalee yesterday and took her some more edibles. And she looked and sounded much better! She told me that June 8, 2011 she got her 17 year “chip” from her sponsor for being clean and sober from alcohol and street drugs.
As she told me that, she also told me that detoxing from precription medications had been much more difficult than drug treatment costs.
Ronalee attributed her ability to stop using prescription drugs to cannabis, and again asked me to thank everyone for their support.She needs to gain a little more weight, and will have knee surgery soon.
And as I said earlier, she looks and sounds MUCH better.The decision to seek addiction treatment and spend for all the remains the sole prerogative of the drug user himself, and understanding the difference between use and abuse in imperative.
Is it any wonder that it’s harder to detox from prescription drugs than street drugs? The big pharmaceutical companies have the government and most doctors on their side. They even PAY doctors to push their medications. And they can afford to have two paid lobbyists at work in Washington D.C. for every single elected Senator & Congressperson.
In a past e-mail, I may have mentioned that I became involved in the “cannabis as medicine” movement as a direct consequence of TERRIBLE experiences with prescription drug side effects from more than one of the prescriptions I took for my multiple sclerosis.
The big pharmaceutical company, Cephalon, that manufactured one of those drugs ended up pleading guilty to only one (1) misdemeanor count of marketing its drug Provigil to a lot more than one (1) person. And that was only because a whistle-blowing employee turned it in.
I was really interested — after going crazy because of an unreported side effect of Provigil (a drug developed for people with narcolepsy, not multiple sclerosis) — about just what had been going on with this drug and its marketing, so I read some of the court documents.
Remember that I said these companies PAY doctors to push their drugs? Well, part of the deal when Cephalon plead guilty was that it had to promise not to pay doctors in California MORE than $2,000 per year to recommend the use of its drugs.
Is the federal government, via its minions the FDA and DEA, really on patients’ sides, if it allows pharmaceutical companies to not only charge whatever the market will bear, but to PAY doctors to push pharmaceutical drugs? And if it allows the DEA to give cities and counties in states where medical marijuana is legal funding to go after marijuana?
Yes, one reason that California law enforcement continues to make “marijuana” a big issue is that it gets money from the DEA to do so, and will indefinitely until the plant is de-scheduled or at the very least, rescheduled out of the Schedule I classification, which maintains the fallacy that the plant has no medical benefits, even nearly a third of the States in the Union disagree.
In conclusion, Ronalee sends her thanks for your ongoing support, and so do I. If you’d like to send Ronalee an e-mail of support and congratulations, I will forward them to her.
Letitia Pepper for Crusaders for Patients’ Rights
(Editor’s Note: The decision to seek addiction treatment and spend for all the remains the sole prerogative of the drug user himself)