LETTER: Vote no on B-1 Tuesday

To the editor:

When I first started hearing friends sing the praises of medical marijuana I was skeptical to say the least. To hear them tell it, if I smoked enough pot and it would cure anything that ailed me. Their claims smacked of snake oil and medical quackery.

As it turns out though, many of those claims are true. Marijuana is one of the most effective and certainly the safest treatment for epilepsy. Marijuana does kill certain cancers and provides relief from the side effects of more traditional cancer treatments like radiation and chemotherapy. Marijuana prevents and may even reverse Alzheimer’s Disease, a condition that kills more people than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. Marijuana is a proven treatment for the pain and inflammation that comes with rheumatoid arthritis. In many instances, opium based drugs, which often lead to heroin addiction can be replaced with the much safer and more manageable marijuana.

Current treatments tend to be crude, based more on anecdotal evidence than hard science, but they work. Right now, in the Mat-Su, people are using marijuana to cope with a variety of medical conditions. Some will suffer greatly without it and there is a huge network of volunteers working to get medical marijuana to at least some of those who need it.

Leaving the black market to serve the rest. While the Mat-Su black market is huge, the marijuana it sells is untested so medical marijuana users don’t always know what kind of marijuana they are getting. Different strains have different combinations of cannabinoids and cannabinoids are what makes marijuana work. Some people, those with epilepsy need marijuana with a lot of the cannabinoid CBD while Alzheimer’s patients need more THC in theirs.

The State of Alaska has taken the position that there is no such thing as medical marijuana. Those in Alaska’s new legal cannabis market are not allowed to! make any health claims, despite a mountain of credible evidence saying otherwise.

If Mat-Su residents want to be truly compassionate towards their less fortunate neighbors they will vote no on Ballot Measure 1.

— Keith Searles

Wasilla