Can the legalization of one drug help decrease abuse of another drug? It's possible that medical marijuana could be used to fight the epidemic of opioid addiction that has resulted in numerous deaths from overdoses in Pennsylvania and throughout the United States. According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2014, 46 people die every day in the United States from an overdose of prescription opioid or narcotic painkillers, such as Vicodin (hydrocodone-acetaminophen), OxyContin (oxycodone), Opana (oxymorphone), and methadone. The CDC found that in 2012, health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for painkillers, which is enough for every American adult to have a bottle of pills. [continues 205 words]
Medical marijuana has been legalized in Pennsylvania, as well as 23 other states and the District of Columbia, but there are still many questions about how exactly the drug can be used as medicine. Pennsylvania's Medical Marijuana Act (MMA), or Senate Bill 3, lists 17 "serious medical conditions" that qualify for treatment with medical marijuana. These conditions include cancer, HIV/AIDS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), epilepsy, inflammatory bowel disease, neuropathies, Huntington's disease, Crohn's disease, posttraumatic stress disorder, intractable seizures, glaucoma, sickle cell anemia and autism. [continues 1287 words]
Can the legalization of one drug help decrease abuse of another drug? It's possible that medical marijuana could be used to fight the epidemic of opioid addiction that has resulted in numerous deaths from overdoses in Pennsylvania and throughout the United States. According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2014, 46 people die every day in the United States from an overdose of prescription opioid or narcotic painkillers, such as Vicodin (hydrocodone-acetaminophen), OxyContin (oxycodone), Opana (oxymorphone), and methadone. The CDC found that in 2012, health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for painkillers, which is enough for every American adult to have a bottle of pills. [continues 308 words]
Legalization Has Patients and Businesses Seeing Green Pennsylvania joined the growing list of states to legalize medical marijuana when Gov. Tom Wolf signed Senate Bill 3, the Medical Marijuana Act, into law on April 17. To date, 23 other states and Washington D.C. have legalized either medical marijuana, recreational marijuana or both. It's been about a month since the passage of the MMA, as the law is known, but it will be a while before marijuana growers and dispensaries are up and running. [continues 1659 words]
