(Editor’s note: Ryan Hurley will be on CBS 5 at 5p.m. to discuss medical marijuana)
In an editorial in The Arizona Republic’ (Where do we go from here?), the newspaper uses a so-called study about teens getting marijuana from medical marijuana patients and caregivers as a basis for its myopic opposition to the Arizona medical marijuana act.
“Voters were misled in 2010 when they passed the medical-marijuana initiative. Medicine is prescribed by doctors and picked up at pharmacies. It doesn’t come through pot docs operating out of glammed-up head shops,” the newspaper claimed.
Ryan Hurley, co-chair of Rose Law Group’s Medical Marijuana Department and a national leader for medical marijuana, provides this forceful opposition to the editorial:
“Here is a real headline that parents should be concerned about: ‘100% of kids that got their hands on potentially fatal and highly addictive Oxycontin, Adderall, Xanax and Valium got it from somebody that had a prescription.’
But newspapers wouldn’t run this headline and certainly wouldn’t call for pharmacies to be shut down and for these medically beneficial drugs to be outlawed. But when a ‘study’ suggests that some teens (fewer than 10%) obtained medical marijuana from a cardholding patient, all of a sudden the whole program is a sham.
Related: Teen use of marijuana down in Ariz. since medical marijuana law passed
“It is tragic how myopic we can be. Cannabis has been used as a medicine for more than 5,000 years with nary a single overdose death. To call this a sham is an insult to patients and their human rights.
“Why do I fight so hard for this? I fight because of people such as my father-in-law. A veteran who gave his entire life to the service. he was hit by a helicopter blade and given a list of prescriptions a mile long to deal with the chronic and severe pain. Then he was given more prescriptions to deal with the side effects of the first ones. “These were all highly dangerous drugs and many potentially addictive, but none of them helped him manage his pain. Until he had the courage to ask me about medical marijuana.
“Now he is off almost all the other prescriptions and he has a much better quality of life. He is a male, he is in chronic pain; and if you believe the newspapers on this issue, then you are calling this decorated veteran a liar and a drug abuser.
“That’s the real bogus sham.”
