Medical Cannabis in Vermont vs. Colorado, and Thoughts on America's Drug Policies

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

I’m gonna get real for a sec.

As I write this, pain and frustration have me in their grip. I have been crying all morning, consumed by Great Vengeance and Furious Anger.

Yeah, this is how I feel about US Drug Policy...

You see, I am running low on my plant medicines, specifically cannabis, and my Fibromyalgia symptoms have been running around unchecked. My already severely limited quality of life is being impacted even further, because of lack of safe access to this plant. I’m in the process of applying for Vermont’s Medical Cannabis Program, but its much more involved than where we were living just two months ago, and it will be at least a month before I will be able to purchase from a state-legal dispensary.

Toto, we certainly aren’t in Colorado anymore.

Moving from somewhere where this ancient plant medicine is legal and respected, to New England, or anywhere that doesn’t recognize its value in the same way as those states who have legalized or have less restrictive medical cannabis programs, is like stepping back in time 50 years. I appreciate and understand to a certain extent why Vermont is so strict, it keeps that legal Mob known as the Feds off their case. But it makes things infinitely more difficult on the patients. To start, it costs much more money to apply out here than in Colorado, with no options for fee waivers or adjustments for those who are below a certain income bracket. I can’t shop until I get my official state card, unlike Colorado where patients can shop with their temporary paperwork until they get official documents in the mail. Also, unlike Colorado, upon application approval, I have to pre-select a designated dispensary for procurement, and can only shop at that location. And its not like I get to check the quality or variety before I choose, and anytime I want to switch dispensaries I have to send in more money to the state and fill out more paperwork. Oh yeah and you can only shop by appointment. Talk about frustrating. Being a Los Angeles native, and having relocated here from the booming Green Rush of the High Rockies, and having worked in the industry in both states, one could say I have very high standards of quality. And with the Fibro I have found that specific strains and methods of ingestion are more effective for some symptoms than others (will be discussing in detail in a future post). But I don’t get to shop around or know what my options will be before I drive an hour to the nearest dispensary to purchase my medicine. Awesome.

Leaving the bubble that is Colorado has really driven home how ass-backwards drug policies are in this country. How is it, that in 2014, with the World Wide Search Engine known as the Internet at our fingertips every moment, that we are still attacking plants? It just boggles my fucking mind. It is open information now, and has been for some time, that cannabis was made illegal for political and racist reasons, not for the health and well being of the citizens of this fine country; that this plant is safe, efficacious, and potentially profitable to boot. Should you happen to believe otherwise, you are in complete denial, I know you have no science to back up your claims, only beliefs, biases, and convoluted data. Argue with me, please, I fucking dare you. When I look around Vermont and see the overwhelming poverty and all that comes with that; drug and alcohol abuse, shuttered windows, closed stores and gas stations, entire neighborhoods with For Sale signs in front of each home, abandoned homes, buildings and properties, I don’t understand why lawmakers wouldn’t be jumping all over the chance to boost their economy and bring safe alternatives to their sick populous. Especially when you consider Vermont’s exploding opiate abuse problem, why wouldn’t you want to offer people safe alternatives?

Why are Cannabis and other plant medicines still illegal and stigmatized? 

I just don’t understand. It just doesn’t compute. 

And why are processed opiates legal, but you can't harvest your own opium from poppies? Opium is much safer than refined opiates, and much less addictive, altho it still must be handled with care. People would save a lot of money if they could grow their own poppies for opium.

What’s my beef with the medicines already legal and available? I don't feel pharmaceuticals shouldn't exist at all, I just don't feel they are the only solution, and think its only fair to have options about how one manages their health. What works for some might not work for others, or what's safe for one person might be detrimental to another.

For example, I have severe allergies to most medications, including the highly praised Penicillins, as well as suflas, and opiates. As someone who has been dealing with monthly Level 10 pain for going on 15 years, I have tried pretty much every pain pill imaginable to manage it, to no avail. And I have seen firsthand the detrimental effects of long term opiate use and abuse. I have lost several people to overdoses or complications from withdrawal, and all but one were prescription related. I never thought I could be grateful for my opiate allergy until I saw how addicted my friends were becoming. The most recent one I lost was like a brother to me; he passed while in jail, withdrawing from Methadone. His family hid the news out of shame or something, I’m not sure why, and he never even got a formal memorial. He was one of the most talented people I’ve ever known, and it breaks my heart. Methadone is the one they give you to get off Heroin. Which makes NO fucking sense to me because its so fucking dangerous and addictive in itself. How in the fuck does it make sense to treat an addiction with another addiction? All the people I knew who got into Heroin started with pills. And the majority of them wound up preferring Oxycontin over Heroin when they could get that. “It’s way easier than mainlining bro. I like to drink grape gatorade so that when I vomit it doesn’t taste bad.” Cannabis has not been shown to be physically addictive, and as someone who has been using it regularly for over a decade, I can tell you it is not. Habit forming, yes. Physically addictive? No. You will not puke and shake and rob your own family to feed your need for cannabis. 

"You ever suck some dick for some marijuana?" "No, I can't say that I have..."

As someone with a chronic illness, meaning I have it FOR LIFE and it will NEVER go away, I have to carefully consider the long term safety of any symptom management regiment I choose to follow. Besides my monthly pain I also have developed severe daily chronic pain and other symptoms over the last several years due to the onset of my Fibromyalgia. Opiates, NSAID’s, and other commonly used pain management methods are definitely not safe when used for years. I used Ibuprofen for so long that I started developing stomach problems and had to stop. 

So what do you do when you are in constant pain? When you wake up every morning feeling like you are going to shit yourself and puke at the same time? When you can’t sleep, can’t eat? When your quality of life has been severely impacted by your health?  When it feels like there’s needles poking thru your retinas and your head pounds like its in a vice? The generally accepted answer is pills, pills, and more pills. I’ve been lurking immune disease forums for the last couple years, and the members are almost always on a myriad of pills. One to help with pain, a laxative to help you poop since pain pills bind you up, an SSRI or some other anti-depressant because being chronically sick fucking sucks, a pill for nausea, a pill for appetite stimulation, a pill to help you sleep...pills, pills, pills! Processing all that shit has to be super hard on the body, especially the kidneys, which are already at risk of being attacked by an immune system gone awry, as happens in immune mediated diseases. Not to mention manufacturing pharmaceuticals is poisonous to the planet (which is why the majority are made in other countries...they aren’t under US Environmental laws and so forth), and involves a bunch of gross stuff that you wouldn’t want to put into your body. (I will procure references for all my claims in another, better organized post. For now, I just need to rant.) 

So what if I told you I use plants for all my Fibro symptoms? Primarily cannabis, one of the first plants known to be cultivated by man per archeological carbon dating, a plant whose entire parts can be used, from roots to flowers, for either medical or industrial purposes, a plant that can be grown on the same soil for years before needing to rotate crops, a plant that is ridiculously safe. 

Speaking of the topic of safety, let’s get Scientific for a second. Whenever assessing the potential danger of a drug, one should know its LD-50. The term “LD-50”, refers to the dose that kills off 50% of a population in a drug study. So if you have 100 rats in a lab and you give them X amount of Z drug and half of them die, then that’s the LD-50 for that drug. Ideally, one wants to be working with drugs whose LD-50 is much higher than the effective dose. LD-50’s can be affected by animal type (mice vs. rats. vs. humans, etc), age, gender, and tolerance (Especially with opiates and alcohol. What would kill a non-user would not affect an addict, and addicts usually die from overdose when they have been clean for a while and then use again, at a dose they were used to when they still had a tolerance.). Published LD-50’s show that opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, and antidepressants have relatively low LD-50’s, whereas cannabis has a much higher LD-50 (generally around 1500 pounds in 15 minutes....good luck with that shit, homie! You’d most definitely pass out long before you reached that goal!). In the case of LSD, the LD-50 remains unknown. Meaning nothing has ever died from any dose of LSD, even crazy high doses. Hmm. Interesting.

With this information in mind, doesn’t the way the Federal Government has scheduled drugs seem a little confusing? How is it that cocaine and opiates’ medical value has been recognized, which can kill you quite easily and are incredibly addictive, yet cannabis remains Schedule 1, meaning that it has “no medical value and is incredibly dangerous”? This in spite of the fact that the Federal Government established the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Study program in 1976, giving medical cannabis to over 30 patients until 1992, when George Bush the 1st decided there was “no medical value” to it and scaled back the program. Now there are just 4 patients under this program. But it still exists. So the Feds say “this is a dangerous drug with no known medical value, so we shall make it Schedule 1. But we have this medical program where we give this drug to patients because it has been deemed a medical necessity.” WTF?!?

And this is what REALLY pisses me off. They sure as hell didn’t ask the patients they kicked off the program about the medical value of it. They didn’t say, “Hey, does this help you? Okay, sweet.” Nope, they just fucking decided, because the Bush administration wanted to be “hard on drugs”. 

Let’s not even look at the science for a sec...

How in the fuck can you tell me or anyone else who suffers what has medical value?

How can you tell me how to manage my pain, my nausea, my cachexia, my vertigo, my eye pain and headaches, my daily living?

How can anyone tell someone who suffers how they can and can’t manage it?

You have NO fucking idea what its like, unless you are in the same shitty boat. Some people get handed a raw deal in this life, and some get really lucky. If you have your health, consider yourself one of the lucky ones. I don’t give a fuck if you are broke, or you just got dumped, or you failed a class or got fired. I don’t care. You cannot buy health, you cannot earn it, you can’t get it back once its lost. I don’t care how shitty your life situation is, if you are in good health and free of chronic pain or other chronic symptoms, you are one of the richest people on the planet. Truly, you are lucky. 

Like drawing cards from a deck. Some people get a full house, or royal flush. Others wish they could trade in their hand and pull from the deck again. A fresh start. But life doesn’t work like that. 

Now, looking at Science, let’s talk about the Endocannabinoid System. I will produce a more detailed post dedicated specifically to this system and to the numerous cannabinoids found naturally in plants and animals in the near future, but for now a quick overview. One of the most common receptor sites in the human Central Nervous and Peripheral Systems is the cannabinoid receptor. The purpose of endogenously produced cannabinoids remains poorly understood, as does the majority of the inner workings of our bodies, but it is speculated that they are involved with the regulation of pain, appetite, motor learning, and synaptic activity. Interestingly, studies are showing that the amount of cannabinoids produced by our bodies exceed the amount of cannabinoid receptors, which suggests cannabinoids are used by our bodies in other ways that we still don’t know about. 

Now why would we restrict people from using things that our own bodies make? I’m just as puzzled over this as I am with DMT, which is also Schedule 1. DMT is made in our brains and is in our bodies. We also don’t understand much about its role in our physiology, but its there, so obviously its important. Mother Nature doesn’t conduct processes over billions of years and keep things for Shits’n’Giggles. But if you, or I, or your sweet innocent Mom, or your preacher/rabbi/sensei, or your child, or anyone regardless of whether having purposely ingested DMT or not, were to be forcibly tested right now for it, we’d “all be holding”, to quote the late, great, Terence McKenna. 

Fuckin' love this!!

In short, our brains run on drugs. They would not function without them.

We need to re-evaluate the way we use the word “drug”. Why are pharmaceuticals accepted as medicine, and anything else demonized and called “drugs”? Why don’t we recognize that we all use drugs everyday? Caffeine, nicotine, refined sugar, alcohol; the products praised and supported by our consumerist nation, those are some of the most dangerous drugs on the planet. 

So why don’t we have the option to use Cannabis? Why is it still illegal? Why can’t I buy cartridges for my vaporizer pen from Amazon, and grow cannabis in my garden next to my tomatoes? Why must countless people suffer needlessly due to lack of safe access or proper education? We are still fed Reefer Madness bullshit, in this, the Age of the Internet. 

I miss my Colorado bubble more than words can express. I’m freaking out about my Fibromyalgia breaking thru the curtain I manage to keep up everyday by using Cannabis. I am in massive pain right now, the only things allowing me to type are Kratom (Mitragyna speciosa, a post on that is coming), ginger (also have a post coming on the science behind that), and Great Vengeance and Furious Anger.

You see, I have a Dream. 

A dream that someday all the residents of this beautiful and fragile planet will have safe access to alternative methods of treatment and symptom management. 

A dream that we can free ourselves from deadly addictions and toxic habits. 

A dream of having the freedom to explore our own consciousness as we see fit. 

A dream that one day we will be able to discuss plant medicines with our doctors as easily as we currently discuss SSRI’s and opiates with them. 

Perhaps I was pulled out of Colorado for a purpose. 

I would have remained complacent there, lazy in my surroundings, forgetting that is the exception rather than the norm. I wouldn’t have felt the need to become more involved, to make my voice heard, to stand up for what is right and push for continued reform. Every voice counts.

The time has long been overdue for some serious change in the way this country views drugs. Too many people have suffered for too long. Too many good people have stood by and done nothing, too many presidents have said cannabis should be accessible but haven’t done anything to change it, too many innocent people have been and remain incarcerated. 

Being sick is not a crime. Pain is not a crime. Consciousness exploration is not a crime. 

There is hope on the horizon, with reform taking place at the state level, and the re-examination of plants and alternative drugs in medical studies, like the ones taking place at John Hopkins. I personally believe its only a matter of time. But some of us don’t have much time to wait. And It doesn’t change all the injustice that has taken place since the advent of Harry J. Anslinger and Prohibition. 

Thank you for reading this rant. Maybe it will do some good in this world.

I promise my future posts will have specific and scientific references accompanying my claims. 

And I promise to fight for the plants.

*Peace & Plants*

*Love & Light*

Renata Carmen 

Please, if you find any value from this blog, please consider making a donation to the PayPal link at the top right of the page. I don't create these posts expecting anything but to help/entertain others, but I am a disabled mechanic/artist who is not currently receiving SSI/SSDI and when I'm flared up it's hard if not impossible for me to get my hustle on. I'm also working on adding Bitcoin here! :)