MEDICAL POT, LICENSING ARE JUST CON GAMES

Personally, I don't care if people use marijuana; my particular view
of controlled substance laws probably leans more toward the
libertarian than conservative, because I believe all they accomplish
is the empowerment of organized crime. In addition, as an advocate of
natural medicine, I do not doubt there are certain ailments for which
patients utilizing cannabis have found relief where allopathic medicine failed.

That said, I don't hang out with people who use pot or other
so-called "recreational drugs," and I believe people have a duty to
raise their children to eschew both. Marijuana deserves its
reputation as the "gateway drug," and there's more than enough
evidence to support this.

Having some experience with addiction as well as with research
science and physicians, my take is that the proliferation of medical
marijuana use is far more about people getting high and other people
profiting from this than the legitimate amelioration of otherwise
desperate physical maladies.

As with abortion laws, which were sold in order to address the
ostensibly "rare" instances of pregnancy by rape, danger to a
pregnant woman's life and things of this nature, medical marijuana
use was touted as a last-resort measure for patients who could not
otherwise find relief for painful and debilitating chronic conditions.

As we've seen the pot shops spring up, it crosses one's mind that
occurrence of the aforementioned conditions can't possibly be as
common as the number of these shops suggest.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, which
administers the Medical Marijuana Registry program, maintained that
(as of December 2009) approximately 30,000 Colorado residents had
submitted applications to be included on the state's medical
marijuana registry. Larimer County currently has the fourth highest
number of marijuana card holders behind Denver, Jefferson and Boulder counties.

Harris Jensen, M.D., a board certified psychiatrist practicing in
Fort Collins, witnesses the results of the abuse of "marijuana card"
privileges by both patients and physicians on a regular basis.

"Addiction is complicated," Jensen said. "It involves dysfunctional
behavior that all revolves around what is good for the addiction."

Jensen opposes medical marijuana use, largely because of the
insidious nature of the addiction process, something from which even
those who use it to relieve pain are not immune.

"It (marijuana) was originally prescribed for a pain problem, now
long since gone, as the young woman was doing heavy lifting in her
work," Jensen noted in his blog at
gooddayjournal.com/medicalmarijuana. "But the back pain didn't bother
her: she was using medical marijuana to cover it up, or so she said.
It was all part of the con game of an addict."

There's nothing to prevent an individual from falsely claiming they
have pain and that they've "tried everything." If the doctor is
laissez-faire in his medical philosophy, believes people ought to be
allowed to get high if they like or just plain unscrupulous, he's
likely to prescribe.

So much for the rare, "untreatable" conditions for which we've been
advised patients require marijuana, I suppose. I mean - pot for back
pain from lifting? If you ask Jensen (and, according to him, many
colleagues), doctors now see this sort of thing "all the time."

As he said, it's just a con game; the licensing issue is just a con
on a larger scale.