{"id":185710,"date":"2014-08-30T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-31T01:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/30\/the-more-we-know-about-pot-the-better-it-looks\/"},"modified":"2014-08-30T20:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-31T01:00:00","slug":"the-more-we-know-about-pot-the-better-it-looks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/30\/the-more-we-know-about-pot-the-better-it-looks\/","title":{"rendered":"The More We Know About Pot, the Better it Looks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Note that I do not know the extent of the statistics, but the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rawstory.com\/rs\/2014\/08\/26\/states-with-legalized-medical-marijuana-had-25-percent-fewer-prescription-od-deaths-study\/\">fact that states with legal marijuana have a 25% lower opioid overdose rate<\/a> bears further investigation:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">States that allow legal use of medical marijuana have lower rates of fatal overdoses from prescription medications.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found the 13 states where medical marijuana is legal had 24.8 percent fewer annual opioid overdose mortality rates.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The results indicate alternative treatments may be safer for patients suffering from chronic pain, researchers said.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">About 60 percent of all deaths from opioid overdoses happen in patients who have legitimate prescriptions, and the number of patients who are prescribed opioids for non-cancer pain has nearly doubled over the last decade.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Deaths were nearly 20 percent lower in the first year after a state legalized medical marijuana and 33.7 percent lower five years later.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Clearly, the answer to this is to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.webmd.com\/news\/20140821\/us-to-tighten-access-to-certain-narcotic-painkillers\">tighten restrictions on opioids<\/a>, and we need to ditch all those medical marijuana programs.<\/p>\n<p>Our drug policies are wasteful, destructive, and stupid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Note that I do not know the extent of the statistics, but the fact that states with legal marijuana have a 25% lower opioid overdose rate bears further investigation: States that allow legal use of medical marijuana have lower rates of fatal overdoses from prescription medications.A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1013,1074,985,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drugs","category-medical","category-regulation","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185710"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}