Posted by concerned Doctor, a resident of the Shoreline West neighborhood, on Dec 10, 2010 at 9:07 am This letter to the editor in a Santa Barbara newspaper was written by a group of Physicians to urge the closer of Medical Marijuana Dispensaries in their city. Please read... I agree with the physicians comments and I am concerned that the youth in our city and surrounding cities will come to MV to obtain pot for recreational use after receiving the cards from corrupt Doctors.
"We urge Santa Barbara voters to vote
YES on Measure T, to ban marijuana
stores within city limits. It’s a vote to
preserve our city’s character, to control
crime, and to protect youth and other
vulnerable populations from marijuana
proliferation.
We are practicing, board-certified
physicians in Santa Barbara. We’re real
doctors, not ones whose sole practice is
selling marijuana recommendations for
money. We’re also parents involved in
the local schools. We’re speaking out
because we’ve seen too many 18-yearold
patients in our offices with “medical
marijuana cards” often issued by nonboard-
certified physicians who sell such
recommendations. These recommendations
are usually medical nonsense—
what we and most doctors view as an
abuse of the original language and
intent of Proposition 215, the
Compassionate Use Act of 1996.
We support compassionate use of
marijuana for appropriate patients but
have concerns about promoting use in
healthy people. Negative health effects
of chronic use include the same problems
encountered in tobacco abuse and
because of healing problems marijuana
smokers are not good candidates for
several types of operations and some
cancer therapies. More serious are the
cognitive impairment, serious psychiatric
problems, and safety concerns.
Genuine compassionate use patients—
for example the seriously ill for whom
marijuana is an effective pain reliever or
appetite stimulant—are a tiny minority
of marijuana store customers. After
surveying board members of the Santa
Barbara County Medical Society and
local physicians, we believe that there
are approximately 40 valid recommendations
per year for medical marijuana
on the South Coast. Yet one now-shuttered
pot store on upper State Street had
more than 5000 customers in its database.
The vast majority of pot store
purchases are for recreational use by
“patients” whose medical “recommendations”
are made by doctors in the
business of selling access to intoxicating
drugs.
What about the roughly 40 patients
per year on the South Coast for whom
marijuana is a beneficial drug? The best
argument for banning pot stores is simply
that those patients don’t need them.
Opponents to Measure T have spouted a
great deal of misinformation about
maintaining “safe access” for marijuana
patients. The pot store proponents
claim that patients need storefronts so
they don’t have to deal with the “black
market”. Real patients, even the profoundly
disabled, can get all the marijuana
they need from the multitude of
pot cooperatives which are already
legally sanctioned and available to anyone
who can do a Google search or dial
a phone. A completely paralyzed MS
patient can get marijuana delivered to
his home from legitimate local collectives,
or just have a caregiver go online
and order from www.medical-marijuana.
com. They deliver via FedEx. These
organizations will still exist with or
without Measure T (and with or without
Proposition 19).
If the original plan for marijuana cultivation
and distribution promised by
Proposition 215 were the extent of it,
we probably wouldn’t see the problems
we are having currently with cannabis.
As pot stores proliferated openly on the
streets of our city—the only city in the
tri-counties to allow them—they have
made something formerly low key into
a high visibility retail business.
Clearly, marijuana is being diverted
from these stores to teenagers. Earlier
this year the police arrested a City
College student who was buying mass
quantities of weed from pot stores and
mailing it out of state for resale.
(Evidently pot stores had no problem
with multi-pound purchases by healthy
young men.) When arrested, this man
was in the process of selling to a local
high-school-age student.
Our school administrators often confiscate
cannabis from students who have
it in dispensary containers, not even
bothering to conceal the name of the
store on the bottle. Chronic marijuana
use by teens delays and some believe
may permanently limit development of
many life skills. We don’t need more
25 year olds with the maturity of a 14
year old.
It’s very difficult to stop diversion of
medical marijuana to inappropriate populations.
The best way to prevent diversion
is to reduce the number of outlets
where marijuana can be purchased.
This by itself won’t cure the problem of
drugs in schools, but having government-
sanctioned drug outlets on the
street sends a terrible message to our
kids. Measure T is about banning pot
stores because they
1) Bring crime, and are difficult and
expensive to regulate
2) Are increasing the supply of marijuana
brought into our city that is being
diverted to teens
3) Promote the idea that the regular
use of intoxicating drugs is an acceptable
way of dealing with the vicissitudes
of everyday life and
4) Are an “attractive nuisance” that
degrade the fabric of our community
and promote Santa Barbara as a pot
haven.
To protect our young people and our
city, banning marijuana stores is a sensible
idea whose time has come."
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