Honey You Are a Junkie

My husband and a friend once told me I was a junkie and I thought they were crazy and laughed at their assessment of me. Because in my mind a junkie was someone strung out on crack cocaine, heroin, meth, or white powder cocaine. I also visualized a junkie as someone like my brother. I try to live as normal a life I can, while I battle pain, spasticity, tingling, numbness, dizziness, nausea, fatigue, insomnia, blurred vision, and ms depression while living with Remittance Recurring Multiple Sclerosis. This is not including my prescriptions for high cholesterol and osteopenia which I developed because of Solu-Medrol infusions that I have to take when I have an exacerbation.

Their statements made me think and inventory myself. For each one of my ms symptoms I have a prescription that could cause serious side effects at anytime while taking the drug. I found out the hard way you can still suffer a serious side effect from a prescription even if you had been taking it for months or years with out any problems. I also realized taking and depending on my medication to combat each of my above described symptoms, I am a bonafide legal prescription medicated junkie . If medicinal marijuana was legal to prescribe that one prescription would take the place of most of my prescriptions except for Copaxone. My insurance carrier pays out $35,000.00 a year for the prescribed medications that help control my ms symptoms, which is more than what many Americans earn a year.

I use to worry every year during insurance open season; that my health insurance carrier would find a technicality to stop insuring me or raise my cost to where I cannot afford to purchase insurance. I was worrying about the wrong thing I should have been more concerned about accidental drug overdoses. The cause of death for the infamous Anna Nicole Smith and other high profile individuals. I knew ANS death was going to be ruled an accidental overdose once the media reported the kind of medication she was taking. I understand how easy it is to accidentally overdose because it almost happened to me taking the prescribed medications to control my ms symptoms. I went from four prescriptions a day to ten prescriptions a day taking four pills a day from six of the prescriptions.

Legalizing medicinal marijuana would also lower the risk of accidental overdoses in chronically ill patients. Studies have shown medicinal marijuana would eliminate many of the prescriptions prescribed to chronically ill patients. It will also lower the risk of severe side effects that can be fatal to patients from legalized man made prescribed medication such as methotrexate.

I wish someone can help me understand how marijuana is classified as a schedule I drug with no medical benefits and the following drugs morphine, phencyclidine (PCP), cocaine, methadone, and methamphetamine are classified as schedule II with medical benefits with the United States Drug Enforcement Agency.

When will our government start listening to the sick in America and stop the unsubstantiated rhetoric that marijuana is more harmful than the above mentioned schedule II drugs for medicinal purposes.