As reported by Natural Blaze, Egg Harbor resident Andrew Watson signed up for the state’s medical cannabis program in 2014, then attempted to get reimbursed for buying medical marijuana over a three-month period.

Watson, who was suffering from neuropathic pain in his left hand after being injured on the job, had a medical condition that qualified him under New Jersey law for medical marijuana. That said, his initial workman’s compensation was turned down.

In court, a psychiatrist and neurologist testified on behalf of Watson, telling the judge that by using medical marijuana, Watson would be able to decrease his use of prescription opioids, which would in turn lower any potential dangerous side effects and risk of becoming addicted, which has been deemed a nationwide epidemic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (RELATED: Prescription opioid deaths surpass gun-related deaths… Big Pharma literally killing more people than GUNS.)

After hearing those arguments, the court ruled that indeed, Watson’s medical cannabis was not only helpful but also necessary to his recovery and ability to function and as such, ought to be covered by medical insurance.

“The evidence presented in these proceedings show that the petitioner’s ‘trial’ use of medicinal marijuana has been successful,” wrote Judge Ingrid L. French, in her ruling. “While the court is sensitive to the controversy surrounding the medicinal use of marijuana, whether or not it should be prescribed for a patient in a state where it is legal to prescribe it is a medical decision that is within the boundaries of the laws in the state.”

She noted that Watson’s decision to try medical cannabis to relieve his conditions over opioids was “cautious, mature, and… exceptionally conscientious.”

The decision is the latest in a series of positive steps aimed at decreasing the use of dangerous, deadly opioids in lieu of medical cannabis that many experts believe is not only far less risky, but very effective as well.

The majority of drug overdose deaths (more than six out of ten) involve an opioid,” the CDC said on its web site. “Since 1999, the number of overdose deaths involving opioids (including prescription opioids and heroin) quadrupled. From 2000 to 2015, more than half a million people died from drug overdoses. Ninety one Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.”

The agency said that opioid deaths have been increasing for the past 15 years, which coincides with a steady, yet dramatic, rise in opioid prescriptions. Since 1999, the CDC said, the number of opioid prescriptions has nearly doubled, while deaths from drugs like oxycodone, methadone, and hydrocodone have more than quadrupled. (RELATED: National Academy Of Sciences: Marijuana Can Be Used As A Medicine.)

As medical practitioners cut down on prescribing opioids, there has been a resultant rise in heroin use – because it’s cheaper and widely available – and in overdose deaths from heroin. In August the Washington Post reported:

In terms of both rates and raw numbers, drug overdose deaths have exploded in recent decades. Since 1982, the drug overdose mortality rate has risen by 425 percent, adjusting for population.

They have eclipsed motor vehicle fatalities as a leading cause of death in the United States, according to a new working paper from Christopher J. Ruhm from the University of Virginia. In 1982, motor vehicle deaths were seven times more common than drug overdose deaths, according to Ruhm’s analysis of CDC data. By 2014, overdose deaths had become considerably more common than vehicle fatalities.

In the U.S., a number of states have recently moved to decriminalize both medical marijuana and recreational pot. While recreational consumption remains against federal law, some hope the Trump administration will remove marijuana from the Schedule I list of banned substances. That may go a long way towards requiring medical marijuana to be covered by health insurance.

As HempScience.news reported recently, the country of Israel is moving to decriminalize recreational pot use.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources:

NaturalNews.com

NaturalBlaze.com

WashingtonPost.com

In recent years, several cities and states have sought to hold the pharmaceutical companies behind the drugs accountable for their role in the proliferation of opioid drug addiction. Purdue Pharma, which is widely considered to be the company that started it all, has paid out millions upon millions of dollars in settlements over the course of the last decade or so. The state of Kentucky, for example, filed suit against the drug company for “fraud, conspiracy and negligence in the development and marketing” of their star drug, OxyContin. Purude reportedly settled that suit for $24 million, but no admission of wrongdoing was ever uttered.

Purdue has a laundry list of legal complaints frequently related to their aggressive and misleading marketing tactics. The pharma giant has come under fire for billing OxyContin as a 12-hour drug, despite knowing that in many people, it wears off far sooner than that — and leaves consumers writhing for more as they experience narcotic withdrawal.

A new lawsuit filed by lawmakers from the city of Everett, Washington, has a different sort of spin on it: they claim that Purdue Pharma knew that their drug was being illegally trafficked, and did nothing to stop it.

Washington state officials are accusing the drug company for gross negligence, and they have proof.

LA Times investigation prompts legal action

The lawsuit follows a massive investigation led by the Los Angeles Times that traced illegally prescribed pills from LA up and down the West Coast. Reporter Harriet Ryan, who was part of the investigative team, recently spoke with NPR’s Rachel Martin.

During the interview, Ryan explained that it all started with a fake clinic in downtown LA where corrupt physicians were writing hefty prescriptions of opioids to the homeless. The drug ring would then take the homeless person to the pharmacy to fill their prescription and inevitably, the pills were then being sold in cities along the coast. Ryan believes huge quantities of these so-called medications were being illegally trafficked throughout the western portion of the U.S.

Eventually, an employee of Purdue Pharma noticed what was going on, and flagged the behavior as “suspicious.” The pharma giant apparently does have security in place to monitor for diversion of their pills, and the corporation even launched an investigation of the clinic’s lead prescription-writing doctor. Their investigation led them to decide the doctor should “go on a list that the company maintains of physicians that are suspected of misprescribing or colluding with drug dealers and addicts.”

Of course, this “list” did not ensure that the company would report what they knew or suspected to law enforcement. Instead, Purdue chose to wait until three years after the drug ring had shut down for other reasons to give up what information they had to the U.S. Attorney General’s office in LA.

Purdue’s actions in this drug arena — or rather, their lack of action — are what have prompted Everett’s lawsuit. But this lawsuit is different than others because the city is saying Purdue knew about the black market trade of their products and did nothing to stop it. As Ryan puts it, “And Everett is suing solely on that basis and saying, you are responsible for the damage that criminals did to our town with your product.”

How the lawsuit will pan out for the city of Everett is still up for debate. Some legal experts believe that they have a shot because Purdue’s own internal records show that they had evidence of illegal drug trafficking. But others say it’s a long-shot.

This also begs the question: what else do they know and haven’t reported? Who knows how many other unreported doctors and clinics are on that little list of theirs; there could be hundreds of people on that list engaging in illegal activity.

Should Purdue be held accountable for their failure to report a suspected drug trafficking ring — and the consequences their failure has had on communities across the West Coast?

Sources:prey

NPR.org

TheWeek.com

CDC.gov

SoutheastPennsylvania.LegalExaminer.com

LATimes.com

Drug companies have orchestrated and encouraged the over-prescription of powerful opioid painkillers for the past couple of decades – a policy which created problems now threatening to spiral out of control as the overdose death toll continues to rise dramatically each year.

America’s current opioid crisis can be traced directly to the introduction of extremely potent – and highly addictive – opioid painkillers such as OxyContin, which was first marketed in 1995 and soon became a problem, both with patients who became addicted and with recreational drug users, who could snort or inject the drug much in the same fashion as heroin, and with similar results.

The federal government has finally ordered stricter limits on the prescription of opioid painkillers, but that has driven many opioid-dependent people to the streets in search of substitutes like heroin or increasingly, synthetic opioids such as fentanyl – an often illicitly-manufactured drug many times stronger than heroin and far more dangerous in terms of overdose potential.

From The Week:

“Now that federal regulations have finally caught up to the pharmaceutical drug problem in this country and doctors have wised up to the sinister realities of the drug nicknamed ‘Hillbilly Heroin,’ the hard and fast days of OxyContin are over.”

“Many are now arguing that the epidemic hasn’t gone away so much as it has evolved: Heroin use is again on the upswing. Like a shrewd virus that mutates once it confronts a vaccine, Americans’ addiction to opioids has survived the government crackdown on OxyContin and fled to the seedy asylum of heroin.”

It’s true that heroin use is on the rise – fatal overdoses from heroin have quadrupled over the past five years. But increasingly, overdose deaths are being attributed to synthetic opioids, particularly fentanyl, which is often mixed into street heroin.

Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin and has been the cause of waves of deaths in many communities throughout the country – in one week during the spring of 2016, forty six people died from fentanyl overdoses in Sacramento; in August of 2015, twenty seven people died from fentanyl overdoses during a 48-hour period in just one Pennsylvania county.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Fentanyl played a major role in driving opioid deaths in the U.S. up nearly 16% to 33,091 in 2015, according to the most recent federal data, and hard-hit states have reported even more grim statistics for 2016.

Much of the fentanyl hitting the streets of America appears to be coming from China, and a ban on four fentanyl-class opioids will go into effect in China on March 1 of this year. The DEA says the ban will be a “game changer” but some are skeptical whether it will make a real difference.

Some believe it will only force fentanyl production to go underground, with the possibility of even more dangerous analogs ending up mixed with street heroin and killing addicts in America.

There are no clear and easy solutions to America’s opioid addiction crisis, but it’s clear how and why it became a problem in the first place. At the very least, Big Pharma should be responsible for funding drug rehab for all the addicts it has created.

But of course that will never happen as long as the big drug companies are able to continue to influence policy in Washington.

President Trump has promised to clean up the pharmaceutical industry – if he makes good on his pledge, it will be one of the greatest single achievements of his political career.

Sources:

TheWeek.com

DailyCaller.com

TheHerald-News.com

Vocativ.com

Fentanyl is another type of opioid that is  much, much more potent than hydrocodone. While some fentanyl produced legally by pharmaceutical companies does tend to make its way onto the black market, illicit manufacturing is also problematic. Since 2013, underground production of fentanyl has skyrocketed to unparalleled levels. These products are usually made to resemble other drugs that have a higher street value, such as oxycodone tabs or heroin. Users are often not aware that the drugs they are taking are not what they appear to be, which greatly increases the risk for overdose and death. Fentanyl has also been found in counterfeit Xanax, which is a medication used to treat anxiety.

Fentanyl is not an opioid that is derived from nature, such as heroin. Rather, fentanyl is a synthetic drug that is entirely created in a lab. The most potent opioids tend to be man-made, which isn’t terribly surprising. These types of opioids look nothing like what is made in nature. With about 50 to 100 times the potency of morphine, it is easy to see where fentanyl has quickly become a black market favorite. Medical Daily writes, “Fentanyl, often called ‘China White’ on the street, has historically been sold as a heroin substitute because it is incredibly potent, entirely synthetic and cheap to manufacture.”

Of course, fentanyl isn’t the only illicit drug of choice anymore. Carfentanil, which is a form of fentanyl used to tranquilize large animals such as elephants, was found in heroin last month in Ohio. The New York Times  reports that more than 200 people have overdosed in the Cincinnati area in just two weeks. State officials believe that many of these overdoses were caused by carfentanil, which is up to 100 times stronger than fentanyl. The Times writes, “Experts said an amount smaller than a snowflake could kill a person.”

So, while the DEA goes off battling innocent plants like marijuana – which has yet to be linked to any kind of overdose – people will continue to die from using opioids as an ineffective, toxic and deadly way to manage their pain. The sad truth is that our very own government has contributed to the opioid epidemic by keeping medicinal plants illegal.

Sources:

MedicalDaily.com

NYTimes.com

Science.NaturalNews.com

Well, the fact that Big Pharma has spent nearly a billion dollars on lobbying efforts to ensure that cannabis remains illegal surely helps one understand.  Spending $880 million dollars over the course of nine years is surely one way to get what you want. Is it the right way? That may be up for debate. Some might say that providing actual evidence to support both claims about your own products and those of your adversaries would be the respectable way to go about things. But why do things in a respectable manner when you can just pay off a few patsies though, right?

Clearly, the legalization of marijuana, even just for medicinal purposes, is a huge threat to Big Pharma. After all, if people could use a plant to soothe away pain, how would they keep people addicted to their products? God forbid that people who suffer with chronic pain and other health issues actually be given options.  The truth is that Big Pharma knows that most people would rather use a plant that is considered less addictive than tobacco and alcohol, than the prescription pill equivalent to heroin.

In addition to fighting marijuana legalization, Big Pharma has also used financial strong-arming to prevent the regulation of opioid drugs, and in this way they continue to contribute to the opioid epidemic that is plaguing America.

Fortunately, the government hasn’t yet made hemp products illegal — though the growing of hemp is strictly regulated. At least natural, hemp products are still available, though. Hemp supplements can also help to support good health. That’s why the Health Ranger has joined up with Native Hemp Solutions to provide you a hemp extract you can trust. These extracts are tested and validated in Mike Adams’ very own CWC Labs — an independent, ISO-certified lab — to make sure that they’re 100 percent authentic. The CBD content in this hemp extract undergoes some of the industry’s most accurate verification processes, to ensure accuracy.

Hopefully, certain federal agencies won’t also decide that hemp needs to be demonized, too.

Should the government be able to tell you what you can put in your own body? Absolutely not. Medical freedom, and the freedom to choose what kind of care you want to receive is the right of every American. This is why the failure of the DEA to reclassify marijuana is so disgusting. It is downright shameful. Medical marijuana is successfully used to treat opioid addiction, and has relieved hundreds of patients from their suffering. What does that tell you about the medical necessity of opioids?

Dr. Gary Witman of Canna Care Docs, a network of facilities that qualifies patients into medical marijuana programs in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Delaware and the District of Columbia, states that medical marijuana is not addictive, and is a much safer alternative than opioids.

Opioid addiction kills about 78 people every day, according to the CDC. Can the government make the same claim about marijuana? No – even after all this time, there still hasn’t been a marijuana overdose.

Big Pharma isn’t spending all this money to help people; they are doing it to protect their profits.

Sources:

TheDailySheeple.com

HuffingtonPost.com

DrugFree.org