L.A. County Officials Ignore The Facts, Refuse To Solve Any Problems

[Ganjarden]

California is experiencing a serious political freak out. Well, they are in Los Angeles County, and they've taken to the local country club to figure out a way to fight that darn marijuana! The group of older law enforcement agents, lawyers, and politicians are out on a personal mission to close down every single dispensary in Los Angeles County.

So let's see, there are too many dispensaries? According to the University of Maryland Medical Center, there are an estimated 86 MILLION people in the United States that suffer from chronic pain. That's almost three California's full of people suffering from chronic pain. If there are 305 Million people in the United States, that means slightly over 25% (28% to be exact, but for ease in calculation, I am using 25%) of the population of the United States suffers from ONE of the qualifying conditions for medical marijuana in all 13 states with medical marijuana protection.

So ask yourself, are there really too many dispensaries in Los Angeles County? There are almost 10 million people in Los Angeles County. If 25% of these people suffered from some kind of chronic pain, and chose to get a medical marijuana permit, 2.5 million people in Los Angeles County alone would require medicine to treat their chronic pain from a place like a dispensary. 800 dispensaries doesn't really seem like enough. Especially since there are well over 12,000 pharmacies in Los Angeles county.

Now let's just pretend that 25% of the chronic pain patients in Los Angeles County chose medical marijuana to help treat their pain. That's 625,000 patients in the County. Now if there are only 500 dispensaries that means each dispensary would have to provide for an average of 1250 chronic pain patients. This doesn't include anyone given a recommendation for wasting, HIV/AIDS, cancer, nausea, or mental illness.

The simple gesture of closing down dispensaries suggests these people are not only displaying a knee jerk reaction to the unfamiliar, but they are actually making it impossible for any dispensaries to operate without making a profit, since there are really not enough dispensaries in Los Angeles County as it is.

Beyond all this, requiring dispensaries to make no profit is the same as telling a pharmacy they have no right to make a profit. Does this make any sense?

Now, let's talk about the 12,000 plus pharmacies in Los Angeles County that hand out drugs that are known to kill thousands of people every year. How about the 17,000 plus stores (liquor and grocery stores) in the county that sell alcohol? So you want to talk about a carcinogen? How about all the stores that sell cigarettes, bleach, food grown with fertilizers and pesticides, and too many others to list.

What's really criminal is to keep a drug from people that helps them survive a better quality of life, regardless of the assumptions made about medical situations by people with absolutely no medical training.

If the so-called politicians, law enforcement officers, and prosecutors had just taken five minutes to look at the data, they would know that closing down dispensaries will only make any problems they have associated with dispensaries way worse. Strange how the people being paid to fight crime would come up with such a ridiculous and failed attempt to solve such a simple problem.


News Hawk- Ganjarden http://www.420Magazine.com
Source: Examiner.com
Author: Angela Macdonald
Contact: Examiner.com
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Website: L.A. County Officials Ignore The Facts, Refuse To Solve Any Problems