Off the Editor’s Desk – 12-26-2018
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What’s your feeling on legal marijuana?
I don’t know how most people feel about legalizing the use of marijuana, but as a nation it appears that it has the support of a large majority of the population.
Currently, 33 states and the District of Columbia have laws broadly legalizing marijuana in some form.
Ten states and the District of Columbia have laws legalizing marijuana for recreational use. Those states are Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington, all of which have adopted the most expansive laws legalizing marijuana for recreational use. Michigan recently voted to approve permitting adults over 21 to purchase and possess recreational marijuana. Minnesota and Illinois are just two of the sates where medical marijuana is broadly legalized.
I have received information from an outfit telling me to invest in marijuana farms and I found out that the official name for marijuana is “Cannabis”. They claim that there is millions to be made from this cash crop. I do not recommend that you invest. But I want you to know that there are people going to grow marijuana for profit as we as Americans pass laws to encourage its use.
I am totally against the recreational use of marijuana, because it becomes just a step into harder drugs. And here folks is what is happening in the United States with the use of drugs. It is the biggest problem that we have in this country and Americans are dying by the thousands each year by using and abusing legal and illegal drugs.
A report from The Guardian noted that United States drug overdose deaths rose to a record of 72,000 last year. Centers for Disease Control figures show the drug epidemic, fueled by the rise in fentanyl, has become more deadly than gun violence and car accidents. The CDC estimates that 72,287 people died from overdoses in 2017, an increase of about 10 percent from the year before.
“A majority of the deaths, nearly 49,000, was caused by opioids, according to new data. And the biggest driver was the dangerous synthetic opioid fentanyl, which killed more than 29,000 people, followed by heroin and other drugs,” the report concluded.
More Americans died in 2017 from drug overdoses than were killed in the entire Vietnam war.
The rising overdose numbers make the drug epidemic more deadly than gun violence, car accidents or AIDS, which have never killed as many people in a single year. It represents nearly 200 people dying from overdoses every day in 2017. The highest death rates are in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Last week, the Trump administration proposed that U.S. drug makers cut production quotas of the six most abused opioids by ten percent next year. Last year, the Trump administration declared a “public health emergency”, calling the epidemic “worst drug crisis in American history”. He also suggested the death penalty for dealers, a proposal that has gained little support from drug abusers and judicial experts.
The surge in fentanyl, which is synthetically produced and can be 50 times stronger than heroin, has led to a sharp spike in deaths even as the use of opioids overall has been rising.
This story did not include the drugs that come into our country illegally or those that come in across the Mexican border. Drug addiction will be the end of this Country as we know it.
Thanks for reading! ~Carlton