Senior Citizens Support Medical Marijuana Initiative in Florida

This November, Floridians will vote on a ballot initiative that
would legalize the use of medical marijuana in the state. A
Quinnipiac University poll conducted this spring found strong
support for the intiative, including, amazingly enough, among
Florida’s senior citizens. A whopping
84% of voters over 65 support Amendment 2.

Earlier this year Reason TV took a look at how seniors in
Oakland, California, are benefiting from medical marijuana in a
program called “How Medical Pot Is Helping Seniors Get Off
(Prescription) Drugs.”

Original release date was February 18, 2014. The original
writeup is below.

“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.