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Medical Marijuana – Conversation Lesson

Joe: Hey, AJ, I don’t know if Kristin told you about this couple that we met the other day who were from Florida. We were actually having some drinks over in that beer garden over on Hayes, I guess it is, Hayes Street, and we met this couple from Florida and we actually ended up going out to dinner with them after we had some drinks. Did she mention anything about them?

AJ: Nope.

Joe: Well, it was kind of interesting. Y’know, they were just visiting and, y’know, we sat down, we had some drinks with them and they were really nice. And the woman started to tell me that they had a son who unfortunately has a medical condition where he has a lot of seizures. I don’t know if he has epilepsy or what the cause of the seizures is. Do you remember?

Kristin: He, he…no I don’t remember, but he actually has many, many seizures throughout the day.

Like it’s constant.

Joe: Yeah, and they had him on all these like medications and they were having really detrimental effects on him, y’know, they had really bad side effects and he was taking just like, y’know, lots of medication every day and, y’know, things that were really not good for his liver.

Kristin: So yeah, they…they found out in trying to help him they found out about the movement of medical marijuana and how there’s, there’s…it’s actually a compound in marijuana, I think it’s called CBD, which is not psychoactive, like the THC. So you can get the CBD oil and it can help children who have seizures.

Joe: Yeah, I was just telling them about it because when they told me they had a child who had seizures, I asked them if they had heard about this CBD oil because I had just read an article in National Geographic where they were talking about medical marijuana and in particular this CBD oil. And in National Geographic they talked about this one child who is 9 years old and she was having hundreds of seizures a day. And she started to take this CBD oil which, y’know, is made from marijuana but as Kristin said it has no psychoactive properties or whatever, no effects I mean from using it. And anyway this girl started taking this medication, this CBD oil, and she now has, y’know, either 0, 1 or 2 seizures a day and she’s not taking all those other medicines that they had prescribed to her.

Kristin: Yeah, so this particular couple, they live in Florida, they go over to Colorado… Joe: No, they were going to go over there, they hadn’t done it yet.

Kristin: Oh, I thought they already had. They were going to be going over to Colorado to get the CBD oil. The problem is, y’know, Colorado has legalized it both medically as well as recreationally, the problem is in Florida it’s not been legalized for either and it’s a problem if you try and take it across state borders then. So there’s actually a lot of parents apparently who have children with seizures who want access to this CBD oil, a lot of them are moving to Colorado.

AJ: Ah, interesting, yeah, that’s interesting. It’s not, and of course with the medical at least, there’s a…there are a lot of states now. It’s obviously a growing movement, and even recreationally becoming legalized. It’s recreationally legalized what, in Alaska, Washington, Colorado, probably coming to California very soon. So I think overall it’s a movement medically or otherwise that it’s becoming legal. I mean I think eventually it’s just going to be legal everywhere in the states.

Joe: Yeah, I agree. I mean, we’re definitely seeing a shift in marijuana policy. I mean it all started with the government in like 1937 when they passed that Marijuana Tax Act which made it like illegal to possess marijuana unless you paid a tax on it and they only allowed you to get it pay the tax on it if it was used for like medical and industrial uses. But really, the real problem started like in 1970 when the U.S.

government changed the classification of marijuana to a Schedule I drug, meaning it has no medical uses and that it’s…

Kristin: It’s ranked up there with heroin is what that means, a Schedule I drug.

AJ: Hm.

Joe: Anyway, a Schedule I drug means that it has no medical uses and it has a high potential for abuse so they also classify heroin in that category. But what that meant was it’s made it impossible for people to conduct any research using marijuana because the government says there’s no medical use so they don’t allow anyone to actually get the substance that would allow the research to happen.

Kristin: Yeah, there’s apparently a couple of guys, there’s been one guy, he’s Israeli and he’s been studying it since the ’60s I believe. He’s now in his 80s and he’s like, we’re just tapping into the potential of this drug. We’re just scratching the surface. There’s another guy, he’s…he’s Spanish, he lives in Spain, he’s been doing research for about 20 years and he’s basically saying the same thing. His research actually is kind of focusing on how, unfortunately, they’ve tested on rats, but how, y’know, they’ve injected rats with a human tumor, y’know, injected it so a tumor starts growing in their brains and by then injecting them with this CBD oil or maybe it was even THC, a mixture…I’m not, I can’t remember.

But it started shrinking the tumors. Now, y’know, the guy admits there’s so much more research that needs to be done because we’re not testing this on humans. But there is obviously potential that it can shrink tumors.

Joe: Yeah, the pharmaceutical industry is probably salivating right now at the thought of being able to conduct research and make different medicine from marijuana because they’ve been prohibited from doing it and you know that once the government allows it, the pharmaceutical industry is going to jump in, y’know, right away and start producing this.

AJ: Yeah, but sadly the problem is the pharmaceutical industry, they’re only interested if they can create synthetic chemical versions that they can patent and make tons of money from so they are against, I imagine, the actual legalization of just plain old marijuana because anybody can grow it. Anyone can use it. It’s widespread. They can’t make tons of money off of it, which I imagine is the whole reason it was declared illegal in the first place.

Joe: Yeah, it’s true. I mean the only reason I think that the government has been open to allowing legalization in some of these states is because they know that they can tax it and they can have a big influx of revenue from it. It’s not because they feel like this compassion towards people who are sick and who might actually benefit from it. It’s all just because they know that they can solve some of their budget woes by taxing the people who are using it.