[420 Girl]

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.

http://www.420magazine.com/forums/in...marijuana.html