by Roxanne Cottell

Created on: May 23, 2008

Too many people are worried about marijuana being abused, but it seems that there is a blind eye being turned to an even bigger problem - the abuse of prescription pain medication. In the Los Angeles Times (May 21, 2008), there was an entire article about how it is that many once reputable doctors are losing their licenses because they are now the dealer of choice! Yet, there seems to be less oversight of this problem, because the DEA is busy chasing us "criminals" legally using this plant as medicine. Don't worry about the guy who is ready to rob your house, the corner drugstore, his own grandmother, the guy who is doctor hopping, and the guy who is willing to call his friends late into the night just so that he can score.

I have said it over and over again - there is nothing inherently evil, neither dangerous about Marijuana. It is grown, not manufactured, and that, my friends, is the real problem. Too many pharmaceutical companies have their hands in the pot of profits, and it is because they cannot regulate this drug, cannot control it because it can be grown. When you cannot control Nature, God, Gaia, whatever you want to call your own Creator, you do what you can, and in this case what can be done is criminalization of a plant. And let us get that much straight - Marijuana is actually a very benign thing, a plant of all things, and is far less dangerous than is a guy with a gun and a pill habit. I have maintained for many years now that pot is not a drug, it is an herb, and though there are a lot of people in this world who would call me a dope fiend, there are many more who suffer daily from the lack of appetite that their prescription meds give them.

The problem is that there are more people willing to vilify this plant, and perhaps it is so that they can justify why it is that their once 6 tab daily prescription has doubled or tripled, and now in those lonely moments alone when they are contemplating robbing the local drug store to get their fix, they are sitting alone, biting their nails, wondering who will put up with them at whatever time of day, night, wee hours of the morning, and who begs friends and people who can no longer stomach their addiction. I know people who will call and call and call for my meds, meds which, thanks to my real medication, marijuana, simply sit in the medicine chest, collecting dust and getting closer to their expiration date than my doctor thought they would (apparently there is a huge epidemic of overuse of painkillers

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