PTSD Patients should have all options open
There’s a changing tide in this country for a widely misunderstood (but still much enjoyed) drug: marijuana.
Almost 45 years ago, it was deemed illegal, I assume with a scene similar to the one depicted at the start of “Pineapple Express.”
But now it’s legal for medical use in 20 states and recreational use in Colorado and Washington. Colorado reported making $5 million off of its 37 new dispensaries within the first legal week. That’s $5 million taxable dollars in just seven days.
There is state legislation pertaining to pot being proposed and denied seemingly every day, but the biggest roadblock remains the federal government. This is probably because in 1970, the federal government classified marijuana as a schedule 1 drug (the highest of five levels) along with heroin, LSD, peyote and ecstasy. For clarification, a schedule 1 drug must have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
Ongoing research with synthetic THC and cannabinoids has shown that cannabis aids in physical and mental health for diseases like glaucoma, cancer, PTSD and AIDS. It’s also widely recognized that marijuana is nearly impossible to overdose on, unlike the other schedule 1 drugs heroine and ecstasy.
Colorado and Washington’s legalization votes were like giant beacons of hope for pot advocates everywhere, only to be improved on by stories like the Maryland police chief who thought a satirical news article about 37 pot overdose deaths was real.
More history was made last week when the Department of Health and Human Services passed a proposal from the University of Arizona to study the effects of the marijuana plant (not synthetics) in treatment for war veterans’ PTSD. The major holdup after being approved by the Food and Drug Administration was approving researchers to purchase marijuana from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which is currently the “only federally-sanctioned source of the drug,” according to The Associated Press.
I wrote earlier this week about how we need to withdraw our 38,000 troops from Afghanistan. At our peak involvement, we had more than 100,000 soldiers occupying the country, so there are tens of thousands of veterans from the war on terror alone who might suffer from PTSD. The number of Americans suffering from PTSD is even larger when you add in victims of violent crimes or sexual assaults. For veterans, to talk about PTSD often means career suicide, so soldiers looking to move up in the ranks must keep quiet about the problem they got from the very system they’re trying to succeed in.
Right now, sufferers of PTSD and the other diseases marijuana could help with are given pharmaceutical concoctions made from various chemicals. With the organic and health food movement ongoing, why shouldn’t the drugs we put in our bodies be all-natural, too?
This step forward in marijuana research is a huge one, but the federal government needs to take a look at the outdated law that classifies marijuana as dangerous as heroin and ecstasy, drugs that have real body counts behind them.
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