The people of Staten Island have a problem that no politician has been able to address. Many give it lip service, like Democratic candidate Max Rose, but no one has advocated for the legalization of Medical Marijuana at the Federal level except former candidate Frank 'OttO'Faconti, who appeared as 'OttO'on The Morton Downey, Jr. Show some 30 years ago advocating such legalization. He is no longer running for Congress in the 11th District of NY, but he still plans on getting it done. He has taken up a World War II battle cry, Hemp for Victory, which was the title of a little-known film that was made by the U.S. Government to promote the growing of hemp by farmers, so that it could be used for rope and parachutes by the military during the war.
Today, Staten Island is involved in another war, facing an opioid crisis which the use of Medical Marijuana could make a real difference in. Marijuana is classified as having no medical value, the same as Heroin and LSD, so for veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the Veterans Administration (VA) is not allowed to prescribe it, owing to its classification under Federal Law. Last month, Army veteran Jose Belen filed a suit asking a judge to declare marijuana safe under U.S. law. He was one of five plaintiffs in the lawsuit which claimed the government's classification of marijuana as dangerous, irrational and unconstitutional was not based on scientific evidence.
Belen, who suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), has expressed finding Medical Marijuana effective for taming PTSD symptoms and that other VA prescribed medication pushed him closer to depression and possibly suicide. His most frightening moments came when the side effects kicked in from two powerful pills the VA gave him for his PTSD – Venlafaxine and Nortriptyline, which turned him into "basically the incredible hulk." He scared his wife and kids, was furious and "I nearly snapped," he said. "Cannabis, for me, has allowed me to find the smile that I lost the day I got into combat...It's not about getting high. It's about me being able to have eight hours of sleep without a nightmare,"Belen stated in a Newsweek article.
Marijuana's Schedule I designation was part of the ranking or 'scheduling' of drugs under the 1970 Controlled Substance Act. According to the lawsuit, Republican President Richard Nixon ignored an expert panel's recommendation to decriminalize possession of marijuana for personal use because he wanted to use drug policy to target anti-war protesters and black people. Quoting John Ehrlichman from a 2016 Harper's Magazine story, the lawsuit claims he stated, "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against 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."
It should be noted that the lawsuit was subsequently dismissed on February 26, 2018 by U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan because the plaintiffs had failed to use the administrative procedures within the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to challenge the ban. While Hellerstein said that his decision "should not be understood as a factual finding that marijuana lacks any medical use in the United States," he claimed the authority to change the law lies with the DEA. There is little hope that the DEA is going to make a change regarding marijuana any time soon, so this further necessitates the need for Congress to act to pass a law that will reclassify marijuana as having medical value.
Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids have quadrupled since 1999. In 2015, opioids were involved in the deaths of 33,091 people in the United States. Most of these deaths – more than 22,000 (about 62 people per day) – involved prescription opioids, according to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data. A study from the American Society of Addiction Medicine for 2016 found that prescription pain relievers – almost entirely opioid-based ones — are the cause of roughly 40% of all drug overdoses. That makes drug overdoses by far the leading cause of accidental death in the United States.
For soldiers coming home from their tours of duty, the battle has often only just begun. Studies estimate that one in five returning soldiers suffer from PTSD. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of soldiers that are now living with this crippling condition. It’s not just soldiers who are implicated here. Roughly 70% of all Americans have suffered from an emotional trauma and many will go on to show signs of PTSD. The Centers for Disease Control believes that 24.4 million Americans are living with PTSD. That’s nearly equivalent to the population of Texas. There’s a huge financial cost to PTSD as well. The Sidran Institute suggests that PTSD and other anxiety disorders account for $42.3 billion in medical and psychiatric care each year.
The trouble is, that may not be money well spent. Many PTSD patients are slow to show any kind of improvement. The mainstream drugs from AstraZeneca PLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., and Otsuka America Pharmaceutical Inc. clearly aren’t working, although they are lining the pockets of these Big Pharma giants to the tune of about $11.3 billion a year, according to the Inner Circle posting of online service Radical Technology.
Marcel Bonn-Miller of Israel-based OWC Pharmaceutical Research Corp. thinks there’s a more effective way to treat PTSD. He’s been an outspoken advocate for cannabis as a frontline tool to help reverse the effects of PTSD. He has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and grant funding from numerous agencies, and he serves on the editorial boards of six journals, including Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research. Right now, Bonn-Miller is overseeing a landmark study that is assessing “Four Different Potencies of Smoked Marijuana in 76 Veterans with Chronic, Treatment-Resistant Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).”
According to a Newsweek article dated February 14, 2018, Raphael Bones, a physician and Navy veteran himself, stated that cannabis helps his patients' PTSD better than any other medications he's tried with them. "Vets that use Cannabis do not 're-live' their war experience, they do not have flashbacks." In addition, a new study by Israeli researchers reported in The European Journal of Internal Medicine found that Medical Marijuana can significantly reduce chronic pain in elderly patients without adverse effects. Many patients were also able to stop or reduce their use of opioid medication in the study at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) which surveyed over 2,700 patients 65 years or older who received medical cannabis. After six months of treatment, more than 93 percent of respondents reported a drop in their pain from a median of eight to four on a 10-point scale. Nearly 60 percent of those whose quality of life was reported as "bad" or "very bad" stated their lives improved to "good" or "very good".
Unfortunately, such treatment is threatened by the head of the Federal Government's Department of Justice, Jeff Sessions, who periodically goes on a crusade against its use, describing marijuana as "a dangerous drug"(the KKK fell out of favor with him when he found out they used marijuana). This week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared that marijuana—a drug on which no person has ever overdosed—was nearly as dangerous as heroin, a drug that killed 12,989 Americans in a single year. Back in January, he also directed all U.S. Attorneys to enforce the laws enacted by Congress and to follow well-established principles when pursuing prosecutions related to marijuana activities.
Last year, 286 Staten Islanders were saved from death by the overdose reversal drug Naloxone, thanks to responders having the chance to bring them back. Still, Staten Island led all other boroughs in the number of deaths per 100,000 people in all but one category – the age group of 45 to 64 (just barely). While some may say that Medical Marijuana is already available here in NY State, it can only be obtained at limited dispensaries and will cost over $200 a month without healthcare coverage. The only way that Medical Marijuana will ever be covered by one's healthcare plan is if it is made legal at the Federal level. Given the choice of what to do for their pain, most people are going to continue to take addictive prescription drugs that can be had legally for as little as $5 a month through their health insurance coverage.