Rocky mountain high or Sensible Colorado?

I have very religious friends saying there should not be medical marijuana for anything. They add to this thought that people will abuse it, never once considering that people will abuse everything but everything is not illegal. They forget that pot has helped a lot of people with illnesses just as they have forgotten that cocaine used to be used by doctors to ease pain. Saying it will be abused does not erase the help it delivers.

Vietnam veterans used it to help their combat PTSD because when they came home, there was nothing for them and narrow minded people called them "pot heads" simply because the few media reports about Vietnam veterans involved arrests. No one was talking about them they way today's veterans are talked about. Had it not been for Vietnam veterans, what is being done to address PTSD today wouldn't have happened.

PTSD research, all PTSD programs and treatments, crisis intervention and trauma specialists along with most mental health experts started because of them pushing for all of it.

So now we over 40 years of veterans doing their own research using pot to calm down and treat side effects of medications they are on but other people would prefer to just label them instead of learning the facts. If they stopped to read the side effects of the medications our veterans are given, they would understand the need for a less harmful drug.

I support medical marijuana because it helps more and harms less.

Stress test
by Jeff Koch
In Colorado, folks can acquire marijuana to treat their chronic illnesses, as long as those illnesses qualify as "an appropriately diagnosed, debilitating medical condition," as defined by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

The approved list includes muscle spasms, chronic pain and even severe nausea, but what's more interesting is what's not included. And that you can easily see in a much longer list, covering more than a dozen conditions the department has received petitions to add, but rejected. Among them: asthma, diabetes, Hepatitis C and post-traumatic stress disorder.

However, with its second PTSD petition in as many years, Sensible Colorado, a marijuana advocacy group based in Denver, hopes to do a little list revision. "The state health department is still examining the petition," says Brian Vicente, the organization's executive director.

It's an interesting situation, because since its inception in 2000, the Colorado medical marijuana law has never OK'd anything but the original maladies. Contrast that with states like New Mexico, which put PTSD on its list of approved ailments at the behest of its veterans; California's already lenient law — which was written to allow doctors to prescribe MMJ at their discretion for what the California Department of Public Health calls "any other chronic or persistent medical symptom"; and Arizona, which has already done exactly what Sensible Colorado is trying to do.
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