Sunday night, April 19th, on the Prescription Addiction Radio Show, Judge Jim Gray, a Superior Court judge in Orange County, California and the author of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed and What We Can Do About It spoke with host Larry Golbom and myself about his proposals to address the drug epidemic in our country.
Judge Gray is an articulate and thoughtful man who has seen the countless numbers of repeat drug offenders and has determined that several things must be done:
Take the money out of selling and distributing these drugs
Strictly regulate the distribution of these drugs through legal channels
Educate people as to the actual effects of drugs
While Larry and I were in agreement about education being needed, we both are very doubtful that simply taking the profit motive away and regulating the distribution of illegal drugs like marijuana, cocaine, crystal meth and heroin is the answer.
In most states, like Florida, the deaths from overdoses of legal and highly regulated prescription drugs like OxyContin and methadone far exceed the deaths from illegal street drugs. We posed this question to the Judge: If there are abuses of these Schedule II drugs that require a prescription from a medical doctor, how would he propose regulating these dangerous street drugs so that they would not be similarly abused? Judge Gray did not have time, due to the constraints of an hour show, to really address this issue, but to me it is critical.
IS MARIJUANA HARMLESS?
During our discussion, I explained to Judge Gray that almost all of the addicted people who came to Novus were daily smoking marijuana, and often marijuana was their first abused drug. The Judge responded by citing a study that found that 80% of the people who smoked marijuana did not go on to illegal drugs. I was not able to further discuss this study with the Judge, but If it is the same study that I saw, it also said that people who routinely smoked marijuana had a much higher likelihood than 20% of using illegal drugs. Of course, the real omitted data is that I believe that the study was only looking at people using illegal drugs and not at the number of people who abused legal drugs like OxyContin which is interchangeable with heroin.
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