FAVORS POT OVER BIG PHARMA

After spending more than a week celebrating the new health care law
with editorial columns and cartoons, on Sunday The Herald (Rants and
Raves) manages to pick on little old medical marijuana, questioning
the motives of the patients who use it. But health care "reform" will
pour unprecedented volumes of new prescription drugs into the America
people. Already an estimated 20 percent of people in the United
States have used prescription drugs for nonmedical reasons.
Prescription drugs cause most Advertisement of the more than 26,000
fatal overdoses each year, says the Centers for Disease Control. No
deaths have ever been attributed to overdoses of marijuana!

Frequently discharged from sewage treatment plants unaltered,
pharmaceuticals can be toxic to the environment. They enter aquatic
environments at concentrations approximating well studied
agricultural pesticides.

So if we want to wage a war on drugs, let's go after Big Pharma
rather than medical marijuana storefronts. Let's put an end to the
requirement that taxpayers fund this industry no matter how toxic and
dangerous the drugs it produces.

Thomas F. Lee

Seaside