Let the Elderly Have Their Weed!

On February 18, 2014, Reason TV released a short documentary,
“How Medical Pot Is Helping Seniors Get Off (Prescription) Drugs.”
Here’s the original text:

“Talk to almost anybody over 65-years-old and there’s a list of
medications that they’re taking. And very often, the side-effects
from those medications are worse than the symptoms they’re
supposedly treating,” says Steve DeAngelo of the Harborside Health
Center in Oakland, California.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has
a monopoly on the legal supply of marijuana for research
purposes. Because NIDA is more focused on studying marijuana abuse
than its potential benefits, researchers in the U.S. have had
difficulty getting their hands on marijuana to use in their
studies. One notable exception is a research project initiated by
the University of California in 2000. The Center for Medicinal Cannabis
Research has found that cannabis
may offer benefits to people suffering from pain as a result of
nerve damage, HIV, strokes, and other conditions.

The mounting evidence that cannabis has medicinal value is
becoming increasingly difficult to deny. For example, Dr. Sanjay
Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, was a medical cannabis
skeptic when he wrote a 2009 TIME magazine article called
“Why I Would Vote No on Pot.” After digging deeper into research
conducted in other countries, Gupta
changed his mind, saying, “We have been terribly and
systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and
I apologize for my role in that.”

At the Harborside Health Center, Steve DeAngelo and his team are
well aware that cannabis is an effective treatment for a wide range
of health problems, including many of the ailments that afflict the
elderly. The problem, however, is that seniors tend to be
uninformed or misinformed about cannabis. So a few years ago,
DeAngelo hired Sue Taylor, a retired Catholic school principal, to
reach out to seniors in the Oakland area. As Taylor puts it, “I am
here to remove the stigma of medical cannabis.”

Approximately 5:45 minutes.

Produced by Paul Feine and Alex Manning.