Medical Marijuana comes to Maryland - 10 years late

 

It's the nice governor is dropping his opposition to the medical marijuana law now being considered by the legislature. It would have been an important first step if this were 2003 ("O'Malley administration backs medical marijuana bill," March 8).

 

However, it's 2013, and Maryland is once again behind the curve. The front lines in the battle between big government and individual rights are being waged in Colorado and Washington state, where state governments have the courage to listen to a majority of the electorate rather than to the big pharmaceutical companies and their million-dollar bribes. But perhaps I'm being too cynical.

 

At least Maryland is finally going to join the 18 states and the District of Columbia that have at least enacted some sort of reform. And anyone doubting the efficacy of medical marijuana can go look up the double blind, placebo-controlled study just published in this month's The Journal of Pain, conducted at the prestigious University of California at Davis.

 

The researchers studied vaporized marijuana of varying THC content — the active ingredient in cannabis — and found reductions in pain comparable to the opiates for all varieties of marijuana tested.

So when you start getting the letters of condemnation from Drug Enforcement Administration agents, members of the police/prison industrial complex and, of course, the random "experts" from the government (who are really just paid hacks for Big Pharma), remember this latest study that proves their objections to be just as dishonest as the "campaign contributions" they've been using to keep politicians doing their bidding all these years.