Ventura County Marijuana News

Learning to lighten up on medical marijuana

By Michael Sullivan 07/30/2009

I met Lori about five years ago. She was engaged to her boyfriend,
living a quiet simple life in Ventura. Around the time she was about to
get married, she became violently ill, beginning with unexplainable
nausea, then throwing up repeatedly, unable to hold down food and losing
weight rapidly. She had a good job, but her illness, which doctors to
this day have been unable to successfully treat, got in the way of her
working — at least full time.

Then one day, a friend recommended that she recreationally smoke a
joint. Hesitant at first to break the law and smoke pot that came from
an unknown source, her desperate situation led her to justify trying it.
It wasn't a shining moment for her, but once the herb delivered the
desired results — calming down the vomiting and nausea and giving
her an appetite — she decided to get a prescription for medical
marijuana.

She now has a medical marijuana card, and whenever she recognizes
symptoms of her illness, she smokes and even eats marijuana for a milder
buzz — a buzz which, according to her, provides longer-lasting
effects. She is frustrated with the fact she has to drive to Santa
Barbara or even Los Angeles to get her prescription filled. She thinks
as long as the cities work in conjunction with the state laws, medical
marijuana should be available in Ventura County.

Her biggest gripe, though, is not that it isn't found here, but that
people who have never needed or had the desire to consume marijuana make
judgments about the people who do, and that anything related to it is
bad. She also feels that people seem to overlook the incidence of crime
related to alcohol, a legal drug, and make pot out to be some notorious
narcotic. Upon speaking with enforcement officials, they relayed that it
is rare for them to find someone who has gotten into an accident or
committed vehicular manslaughter because the driver was stoned. The
biggest problem with marijuana is that it is illegal and people are
willing to go to great lengths to buy or sell it.

On Monday night, Ventura's City Council unanimously approved a
one-year moratorium on opening any marijuana business within city limits
in order to craft language for not-for-profit marijuana collectives that
would adhere to federal and state laws. The council agreed that
dispensaries were not an option — collectives are lower key,
typically run by patients, whereas dispensaries work more like
pharmacies or retail stores.

The reality is that many people need it for severe ailments and
debilitating diseases but too many people are getting it for minor aches
and pains, making "medical marijuana" a joke. So there is only
one practical long-term solution: legalize it for everyone. Pot should
be just as accessible to adults as pharmaceuticals or alcohol.

The government should stop spending millions of dollars on clogging the
courts and sending people to jail for marijuana offenses. Instead, the
substance should be legalized, controlled and generating as much tax
revenue as possible just as is done with alcohol or even cigarettes.
Even if people could grow it in their backyards, professionally grown
weed would still be in demand.

This isn't a new thought, and now the federal government seems to be
the closest it has ever been to legalizing marijuana but is not there
just yet. In the meantime, consideration should be given to those like
Lori, who use it just to get through the day. For the sake of those who
need it and despite those who abuse the privilege, I hope Ventura will
take the lead with a progressive stance on the issue and become the
first city in Ventura County to open a legal pot collective.

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