Holding Back the Greenest Spring, Part 2
Cannabis, Legalization, and New Hampshire
March 22, 2019
High in the hills of New Hampshire
Winter has renewed its attack against us here in the hills of New Hampshire. Sun and temperatures near 50 have been usurped by snow, sleet, and a steady 30 today. It’s a heavy snow, and wet. Travel becomes very difficult in these conditions. Days such as this are days best spent inside, or skiing, or perhaps in an Irish coffee stupor.
So today finds me inside working on some editing, housekeeping, and consulting several friends on how to utilize cannabis to help their medical conditions: pain and cancer. Typically when I talk about cancer and cannabis in the same sentence I get some pretty expectedly wild responses. I used to get wild responses when I told people I was using cannabis to treat insomnia, or pain and inflammation from Lyme disease. Used to. Now they have seen the results.
But, as I began in my previous piece, “Back to the Roots”, you can’t hold back spring. As you increase people’s circumstantial knowledge, their familiarity and comfort level with a subject, the boogeymen and fear go away. The uncertain remarks and suspicion of the unknown subside. A new baseline of acceptance is formed, new opinions.
I’ve watched this occur over the years of my adult life around me personally, and within the nation as a whole.
You can’t hold back spring, but they’ll try.
Cannabis is still nationally illegal, and recreationally illegal in a majority of states. Here in New Hampshire, the state’s medical program does not allow for those most in need to get the quantities needed, at reasonable prices. In fact, my journey with the state’s system left me questioning quite a bit about what the motives are behind the program. Cannabis helps people. There is a plethora — in fact, volumes — of empirical evidence out there.
There is also no question that high drug costs of pharmaceuticals drive many low-income people to go without vital meds, and the New Hampshire Therapeutic Cannabis program does nothing to address this.
There is also no question that high drug costs of pharmaceuticals drive many low-income people to go without vital meds, and the New Hampshire Therapeutic Cannabis program does nothing to address this. The costs are frankly far beyond street value. I found the whole flower and concentrates from the dispensary not to be of the best quality either. The flower was all poorly purged — a process needed at harvesting to rid the plant material of unwanted nutrients — resulting in a harsh smoking flower, with limited taste nuances. I have to question the validity of the quoted cannabinoid percentages on the labeling; in the course of extracting their flower for medicine I found that every run I made came out with less extract than I had calculated, meaning their numbers were wrong.
(Extraction is the process by which valuable medicinal cannabinoids are “washed” off of the plant material by means of a solvent, such as ethanol or coconut oil. This creates a highly-concentrated medicine.)
With only 4 operating locations in the state, it is also a hardship for many individuals in need to travel to them. For those in the northernmost areas of the state, a two and a half hour drive would be required to get to the nearest dispensary — case in point my choice of dispensary was an hour and a half from where I lived high in the hills. This is just one of the detractors that I’ve heard others make reference to as well.
But here in New Hampshire the cannabis issue goes deeper than the dispensaries. From Chris Sununu:
“When we are dealing with opioids as the single biggest health crisis this state has ever had, you are going to tell me legalizing more drugs is the answer?”
Governor Chris Sununu, fall of 2018
Yes, like Lyme disease goes politics: misinformation, gaffe, smoke and mirrors, fear, shaking the money tree — and in the arguments against cannabis, these are some of the few great truths.
And the fight against legal access to cannabis is not confined to one party here in New Hampshire, nor nationally. It is both Republicans and Democrats. For instance, Democrat Senator Jeanne Shaheen has resisted legalization and repeatedly expressed “concerns” over the issue here in New Hampshire. Senator Maggie Hassan, another Democrat, has also expressed a similar mindset. Nationally, other big names in the Democratic party such as Representative Joe Kennedy and Senator Dianne Feinstein have expressed “concerns” as well.
Detractors state everything from the threat of psychosis, to the “gateway drug” theory, to DUI, to upticks in criminality, to simply keeping at risk populations away from easy access to another drug. Of course there is the obvious here, which is that none of these issues are new, cannabis is not a new or even remotely recent introduction to our society — quite honestly, it has been widely available for decades — and to argue that any of these issues are somehow new to be grappled with is absurd. Completely — unless you’re playing the fear mongering hand and pandering to out-of-touch voters, and big campaign contributors.
Here is where our son of New Hampshire, Governor Chris Sununu comes into play, big time.
Sununu has also made reference to legal states having increased opiate deaths, and related opiate issues. The opposite is actually the case. In an April 2018 article run by NPR, research shows that for one, a percentage of people will choose to use cannabis over opiates if able, thus removing that population from the chance of opiate addiction and or death. Secondly, the research indicated that in medical states opiate prescriptions had dropped by more than 3.7 million daily doses. 3.7 million a day. Let that number sink in, then call Mr Sununu.
But federal regulators have approved every opiate to come to the marketplace, including Fentanyl, and, in November 2018, a new drug, Dsuvia — which is 10 times stronger. All of this without the enormity of public debate, outcry or political fear slinging associated with the legal cannabis fight; all without the cognizance of the undermining of an already failed 50 year old drug war; all without fact, or compassion.
Though it is true that opiate prescriptions have fallen from a high of more than 255 million in 2012 to 191 million in 2017, still near to 48,000 people died of overdose in 2017.
Despite Sununu’s battle cries against opiates, he received major campaign contributions from several large pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer. But, he knows spring is coming, stating in a December 2018 piece from the Concord Monitor regarding his potential veto of recent legislation to legalize cannabis here in New Hampshire House: “There is a good chance that veto could get overruled.”
And it should. The continued war on, or campaign against cannabis goes in the face of what is now becoming socially accepted understanding.
Cannabis helps people get off of opiates. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes.
A study reported in a 2017 Washington Post piece, that in Colorado the numbers in 2016 showed a 6 percent decrease in opiate related deaths. A 2018 article from The Boston Globe entitled, “Marijuana dispensaries reduce local opioid overdose rates, study finds”: the study found that in counties in states with legal access to medical marijuana, opiate overdoses were reduced 6 to 8 percent, while overdose from heroin had been reduced by 10 percent. Researchers were quoted:
“Importantly, these effects are limited to counties where dispensaries opened and do not apply to non-dispensary counties, in states that have legalized medical cannabis.”
This highlights the connection between legal access to cannabis and opiate usage and overdose reduction.
Three states, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, adopted wording to their medical cannabis programs that facilitate opiate prevention and or treatment from usage.
Still, sadly, the drum beats on: fear the weed.
In a December 2018 piece from the Concord Monitor, Sununu is quoted as saying, “Let’s understand that what we are facing in the next six months is the most significant, substantive change potentially to the negative, I believe … to what we’ve been doing.”
Once again, an example of the completely out of touch ideology of the anti-legalization camp. The data is out there, plenty of it, to refute his bluster.
There is truth here however — and hope. A mountain of truth that folks like Sununu and other naysayers ought to take serious stock in:
1: The political climate of this country is changing as our demographics do
AND
2: You can only keep the facts buried so long. The truth will prevail. People will get what they want
AND
3: Spring is coming — and even Chris Sununu can’t hold it back.
The snow is blowing circles around my house as I pound out the last of this piece. Chris Robinson Brotherhood is grooving out from the other side of the house, at volume, singing songs about darkness and light, the passing of seasons. I myself will be happy to see this winter pass. By this time of the calendar year, we’re all weary of the cold, the wind, the snow.
We can take stock that things will change, though often not fast enough for some. A dear friend reached out this morning to tell me his doctors were giving up on him — and my knowledge is his last hope. That, my friends, is heavy. Made heavier with the knowledge that if cannabis were widely available to the medical/cancer community situations like this may become a thing of the past.
So I’ll swing into action, try to place the right people together, provide the consultation, and, with hope, save a dear life. (See author’s note)
Spring will come.
WJM
[Author’s note: The cannabis cancer cure. Google “cannabis cancer cure” or “Rick Simpson oil”. That should blow your minds right there — a tale I’ll tell another time in full, but I’ve been in the process of helping a dear friend survive stage 4 lung cancer through cannabis oil. He had just months ago, gone from stage 3 cancer in multiple locations in his lungs, to stage 4, with growths on his lungs, on and around his heart, esophagus, and possibly on his liver. This expansion of his cancer happened while undergoing chemo and radiation. He began taking cannabis oil several ways with my guidance, and upon testing only six weeks or so later, all but one of the growths were gone . . . just simply gone. His doctors in Dartmouth said they’ve seldom seen such a miraculous recovery, and directly credited the cannabis for making the difference.]