A patient who visits a cannabis dispensary leaves with cannabis. Someone buying marijuana from a drug dealer may leave with cannabis, but what if the dealer is out of his supply? Selling drugs is his business, so he probably has something else to offer the disappointed customer. What about some Xanax for anxiety? Or possibly a little Oxycontin for pain? It can be safely assumed that the commonly prescribed 0.25mg starting dose of Xanax probably isn’t worth much on the black market, so the unfortunate cannabis seeker buys several 2mg Xanax pills not knowing how strong they are. (For those who aren’t familiar with Xanax, or alprazolam, it is a potent and short-acting benzodiazepine. It has a higher potential for abuse compared to other drugs in this class due to it’s rapid onset and short duration of action – the effects noticeably “come on” and “wear off” resulting in frequent re-dosing and effects that are easily attributed to taking the drug.) Benzodiazepines are schedule 4 drugs – federal law says drugs in this category have a mild potential for abuse. For the most part, they are safe when taken as prescribed. A notable characteristic of benzodiazepines is the possible dangerous withdrawal. Abrupt discontinuation of any benzodiazepine that has been taken long term can result in seizures, which can be life threatening. They must be tapered, and it is not uncommon to hear of patients attempting to “taper off” a drug like this for YEARS. So if the cannabis seeker chooses to buy alprazolam from his drug dealer he could potentially get addicted to something not legally prescribed and then return to the drug dealer to get anything available to ease the withdrawal symptoms.

If the cannabis seeker chooses to purchase Oxycontin instead, serious addiction potentially lies ahead. While Oxycontin is used safely by some patients, it’s popularity comes from it’s unfortunate abuse. Oxycontin has been reformulated in the last year to deter past practices of misuse that involved crushing the tablets and getting the entire 12-hour dose at one time, resulting in an extremely euphoric, heroin-like high. Regardless of the reformulation, it remains a drug that has been the cause of many fatal overdoses.

There isn’t a single death attributed to marijuana use but it remains a Schedule 1 drug. Ridiculous amounts of our tax dollars are spent trying to eliminate marijuana use; meanwhile drug companies generously “donate” funds to political parties. How is it ethical to allow this behavior to continue?

At the very least, stop calling marijuana the “Gateway Drug.”

-J

As many (love to) point out, the medial marijuana system in California is flawed, and is headed towards its end unless significant changes are made. Legislation allows a physician to recommend the use of marijuana based on certain self-reported symptoms of patients. More often than not, this physician does not know anything about the patient, and will never hear anything regarding the patient’s condition until the following year, when the ‘recommendation’ must be renewed for a hefty fee. Anything from occasional migraines to AIDS related illnesses can authorize a patient to enter the cannabis dispensary of their choosing. This is when things start to get scary.

Dispensaries provide cannabis to qualified medical marijuana patients. Would any MMJ patient think of a dispensary as a part of the health care system? No. Getting “verified” and buzzed into the dispensing room is nothing but weird. Exciting maybe, but nothing involved in this process leads anyone to believe that the employees or owners of the dispensary have any interest in their health or improvement of the condition that led them to their establishment in the first place. Most dispensary owners and operators are MMJ patients with cultivation experience, but this does not qualify them as health care professionals. Given the severity of MMJ patients’ conditions and the use of an “illegal drug,”  it is extremely surprising that this current practice is accepted. The only answer is to mandate involvement of qualified health care professionals that can offer their continuing services and recommendations to patients in the medical marijuana community.