After praising an Alexandria Echo Press editorial examining the tragic murder-suicide of two drug addicts who were experiencing meth-fueled hallucinations, Senator Bill Ingebrigtsen writes in a letter to the editor, Third killer should not be legalized:
As the editorial states, prescription and illegal drug use is on the rise. As your legislator, this is very alarming. I stand strong on preventing any addictive drug to cause the destruction we saw recently. I strongly oppose recent legislation to legalize raw marijuana. . . .
I along with many other legislators, Governor Dayton, Minnesota Law Enforcement Coalition and physicians who comprise the MMA stand in opposition to legalizing raw marijuana. Alcohol and tobacco contribute more death and destruction than all illegal drugs combined. We should not legalize a third killer.
Senator Ingebrigtsen's letter leaves a gapping hole in the list of legal killers, while suggesting that marijuana is both addictive and a killer. Let's walk through this one.
Pharmaceutical madness: opioid analgesics killing pain and people
Meth itself is a Schedule II drug, although next to none of the street product enters the black market via the legal drug trade. It's nasty stuff, addictive and hard on the body and mind.
In 2013, the CDC reported in Drug-Induced Deaths — United States, 1999–2010:
Prescribed drugs have replaced illicit drugs as a leading cause of drug-related overdose deaths.
In 2010, the CDC Online reported in Opioids drive continued increase in drug overdose deaths:
In 2010, nearly 60 percent of the drug overdose deaths (22,134) involved pharmaceutical drugs. Opioid analgesics, such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methadone, were involved in about 3 of every 4 pharmaceutical overdose deaths (16,651), confirming the predominant role opioid analgesics play in drug overdose deaths.
CDC researchers analyzed data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics 2010 multiple cause-of-death file, which is based on death certificates.
The researchers also found that drugs often prescribed for mental health conditions were involved in a significant number of pharmaceutical overdose deaths. Benzodiazepines (anti-anxiety drugs) were involved in nearly 30 percent (6,497) of these deaths; antidepressants in 18 percent (3,889), and antipsychotic drugs in 6 percent (1,351). Deaths involving more than one drug or drug class are counted multiple times and therefore are not mutually exclusive.
“Patients with mental health or substance use disorders are at increased risk for nonmedical use and overdose from prescription painkillers as well as being prescribed high doses of these drugs,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. “Appropriate screening, identification, and clinical management by health care providers are essential parts of both behavioral health and chronic pain management.”
These are legal drugs, often using illegally, and as noted in the Washington Post's 100 Americans die of drug overdoses each day. How do we stop that?, many of the users of the very illegal heroin begin their path to addiction via prescription drugs:
Many people are focusing on the return of heroin and saying, "It's all the fault of criminals." You've got to remember, 4 in 5 of people today who start using heroin began their opioid addiction on prescription opioids. The responsibility doesn't start today with the stereotypical criminal street dealer. We basically created this problem with legally manufactured drugs that were legally prescribed. This really flies in the face of the argument that if we just had a flow of legal drugs, the harms would be minimal.
The expert notes the role that the prescription painkiller industry had in the real addiction crisis:
In the late 1990s, many medical societies became appropriately concerned about poor pain management in the United States. Many patients were not receiving needed pain relief, which was and remains a very serious problem. That worthy concern for improved pain management became fused with the pharmaceutical industry’s profit-seeking goals, which they pursued through aggressively pushing opioids in primary care settings and doing a lot of deceptive marketing.
Purdue Pharma was fined $600 million for deceiving regulators, doctors and patients about the addiction and overdose risks of OxyContin. They told prescribers not to worry, saying that the drug wouldn’t be abused and there was little risk in even very high doses. These claims turned out to be untrue.
Many good-hearted, well-intended prescribers were so swept up in the need to relieve pain that they were not sufficiently critical of the potential downsides of flooding the country with these medications. Here’s one stunning statistic. The U.S. accounts for 99% of the world’s hydrocodone consumptions is a spectacular level of prescribing.
U.S. prescribers also write more prescriptions for opiate painkillers each year than there are adults in the United States. When an addictive substance is prescribed on that scale, there will inevitably be substantial leakage out of the medical system. . . .
How addictive is marijuana?
Less than tobacco, about the same as alcohol.
Now, it's likely that those who oppose legalizing medical marijuana will step in and say, as Ingebrigtsen does, that marijuana is addictive. According to the National Institute for Drug Abuse Drug Facts page for marijuana, about nine percent of users become addicted to pot, although the rate is higher among daily users and those who start young.
In Is Marijuana Addictive?, Harvard Medical School faculty member and psychiatrist Wes Boyd writes:
The question about whether or not marijuana is addictive comes in various forms. Will I experience physical withdrawal symptoms if I suddenly stop marijuana? Is there anything to the idea that I might be psychologically dependent on a drug? Could I quit if I wanted to?
. . . Marijuana is different from a lot of other drugs of abuse in that although there usually are some subtle physiological signs of withdrawal when a chronic user stops smoking—mildly elevated pulse, irritability, and so on--these physical effects are generally fairly mild, and they are dramatically less obvious or powerful than those seen when a habitual user of alcohol, opiates (either heroin or any of the opioid pain pills), or benzodiazepines (such as Xanax or Klonopin) abruptly ceases use. In these latter instances, individuals in withdrawal can hallucinate, have greatly increased pulse and blood pressures, be visibly and dramatically uncomfortable, and in worst cases have seizures and even die. . . .
Even though the physiological effects of cannabis withdrawal are generally mild, it is not correct to conclude that marijuana is not addictive, because being addicted to something is more than simply being physically dependent on a drug and experiencing physiological effects if the drug is stopped suddenly. “Addiction” refers to behaviors that are compulsive, partially out of control or worse, and often escalating in severity and intensity.
Given this definition of addiction, nobody should conclude that folks who are taking pain medications exactly as prescribed around the clock for legitimate health reasons--and are thus physiologically dependent on them--are addicted if they are taking their pills as prescribed, if they are not causing problems in the person’s life, if the individual is not engaging in dangerous behaviors in order to procure them, and if the use is not continually escalating to a point that is out of control.
. . . Obviously, the vast majority of marijuana users are neither addicted nor almost addicted to cannabis. Their use doesn’t escalate over time, they can enjoy its effects without endangering some major element of their lives. . . .
. . . most people who smoke marijuana do so the way most folks who drink alcohol do: in moderation, once the day’s major responsibilities are done, and so on.
Does medical marijuana equal death?
Is marijuana a killer, as Ingebrigtsen insists? Unlike the legal painkillers that have helped fuel rising drug overdoses or severe alcohol intoxication, not a single marijuana overdose has occurred in 10,000 years of the substance's use and abuse by humans.
Only two marijuana-related deaths have been confirmed, in a recent German study that linked risks of heart attacks for users with underlying heart problems, and the autopsy of a recent English woman suggests that the same risk was in play.
It's not a killer.
Will medical marijuana provide a safer painkiller?
One of the rallying cries that law enforcement sounds about legalizing medical marijuana is that it will be used to alleviate pain. Autumn Leva of the Minnesota Family Council testified to a House hearing on HF1818 that pain relief was the use most common for medical marijuana prescribed in Colorado.
Given the relate safety of marijuana, and the alarming statistics produced by prescription painkillers, Bluestem has to wonder if Sheriff Bill, Ms. Leva and the rest of the anti-medical marijuana crowd simply has this bassackward.
Remove marijuana from Schedule I and the research ban implied in that classification, open it up for doctors to prescribe and researchers to study, and severely restrict the real killers among us
Photo: A meme from Marijuana MAKES You Violent Facebook.
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