Meadow is the Amazon of weed
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Friend of mine went to a doc and complained about an old knee injury to get medical weed and the doc just wink-winked him a prescription.
Then again, I would do it if I was in the US and smoked and anything to decriminalise this is a good thing.
There is no good decision here, the alternative, refusing on medical ground is not correct either. There is no medical ground to refuse the guy some weed, when it is perfectly legal for him to buy unlimited quantities of alcohol which, medically, is as bad or worse.
In both cases, the law puts the doctor in a position where he needs to bullshit. Some will chose to ignore the global context and look at the patient request in isolation, other will do the opposite.
edit: also "pain" is intrinsically difficult metric for a doctor.
The doctors who do this (largely running a cash-only practice) are really a disgrace to the profession.
It's good to be willing to think outside the box and practice with compassion, but it's another thing entirely to create prescriptions for surreptitious indications that is motivated by personal profit.
What you do get is a recommendation by a doctor that you would benefit from cannabis. This is a critical difference. It’s merely a doctors opinion you would benefit.
And as many have noted, sone doctors appear to hold the opinion most adults would benefit. They might not be wrong.
Btw, old injuries can have lasting pain for the rest of your life. Difficult to control pain. Medicine recognized this in the 90s, and one result was the opioid crisis. (Turns out opioids aren’t great for chronic pain.)
Oh and it isn’t a bs script either. Because it’s not a script. As I noted above. To quote a certain movie, that’s funny not a single word you just said was correct.
However an opinion is not. Thus building a moral barrier there.
Some other opinions that many doctors have: everyone should drink more water. Everyone should exercise. Many people will get this advice/opinions without a prescription for such.
As a doctor who sees patients with a legitimate use for compounds that come from the cannabis plant, the people who want recreational access just bog down the health system.
I am strongly in favor of federal recreational legalization, if for no other reason than to get it out of my office.
Prohibition has failed, and legalization is a far superior public policy option.
Recreational use should be available through places like Meadow, and medical use should come through conventional pharmaceutical manufacturing methods (like you would want for any other medication you take).
In a sad way, it's been very successful in the context it was enacted: as a tool to oppress "minorities". It was never about actual dangers from cannabis itself.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
1994, talking to journalist Dan Baum, Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, Harper's Magazine, April 2016
Doctors either only did cannabis recommendations, or they didn't do them at all, so conventional doctors weren't bogged down by this.
Your dismissive attitude is counter-productive.
My state, CA, has legalized recreational, but I am keeping my prescription (obtained legally from a doctor).
Note also the FDA just approved a cbd med.
There are cannabis products that happens to be (gasp!) enjoyable, so it should just be available next to beer and wine in stores as well. Puritanical attitudes about fun aside, look where banning alcohol got us. It's not about having fun though.
When was the last time when, because you like drinking beer so much, that you called your local politician to support beer? Medical marijuana did not come about from a bunch of 20-something college students who merely enjoy getting high. The "recreational" aspect is, honestly, derogatory towards legitimate medical applications
Cannabis has practical medical applications. DEA restrictions have successfully prevented any real research into the compounds that make up cannabis, however the tide is slowly turning. Just yesterday The FDA approved Epidiolex[0], a cannabis-derived treatment for epilepsy. Cannabis treats certain kinds of chronic pain like nothing else known to man, without the same possibility of death when used improperly like morphine, heroin or fentanyl. Just like asprin or acetaminophen (Tylenol) is available over the counter, so, too, should other types of products that treat pain.
The context for this, is in the US, over the counter, is a box of 50 packets of 1g acetaminophen pills, next to a bottle of 200 ibuprofen pills, at 200 mg each, each costing around $20. Last time I was in Europe, that kind of thing was not readily available. Small amounts of various NSAIDs for acute pain were available, but not the chronic, "alternate OTC pain medication to make it through the day" amounts. I am not bragging about how "things are bigger in the US". This is "some people are regularly in this much pain, untreated (!) by our healthcare system" admission.
The heart of the matter is how poor the healthcare treatment is for poor people in the US, and life-improving surgery is often not performed due to lack of money. That missed surgery often results in a lifetime of unimaginable intolerable pain, and patients are simply told to "deal with it".
Cannabis can help them.
It isn't a sham.
Our healthcare system is.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/health/epidiolex-fda-cann...
Instead, they went full rec a few years ago, and now we all admit that most people smoke weed because it's fun.
It has legitimate medical effects, but the vast majority of med patients are fakers looking for a discount here. I know a few.
the industry will do fine