Maybe I should just pack up my drug rehab clinic and go home.
The Los Angeles Times practically endorsed the idea of legalized marijuana with its Aug. 30 story titled “Marijuana’s new high life,” which documented changing attitudes toward marijuana in fashion, films, TV and politics.
The Times also cited a recent California Field Poll, which found that 56 percent of California voters supported legalizing and taxing marijuana, and quoted politicians from every political persuasion who support the idea, including Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn. “In this current economic crisis,” she said, “we need to get creative about how we raise funds.”
As a former addict and longtime manager of Southern California drug treatment centers, I know the destruction that marijuana can wreak in people’s lives. I know how it can cloud people’s thinking, destroy their work ethic and ruin their relationships with the closest members of their family, while delivering a high that can put themselves and others at risk of engaging in dangerous behaviors.
I also know that people can turn their lives around with intervention and treatment. It takes hard work, commitment and an unwavering sense of personal responsibility to do this. But, hey, these are some of the values that kept America strong for more than 200 years.
Unfortunately, the voices of people who take responsibility for their actions are increasingly being drowned out by the weakest members of our society, the people who prefer sedation to starting over. Even more alarming is the fact that cities and states across the country are equally desperate for their own kind of fix, a financial one, and legalizing marijuana seems to be the funding mechanism of choice. Voters in 13 states have already approved the sale and possession of marijuana for “medical” use, and more are expected to follow suit.
This movement started innocently enough. When Cannabis advocates pushed for the legalization of marijuana for medical use in California, they argued that it should be made available for elderly people with terminal illnesses.
Dubbed the “Compassionate Use Act,” Proposition 215 appeared in the November 1996 ballot with endorsements from two oncologists, a cancer survivor, a nurse and San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinen, who argued that he didn’t want “to send cancer patients to jail for using marijuana.” The ballot initiative passed with 55 percent of the vote.
Since then, a dramatically different scenario has emerged, with growing numbers of doctors writing medical marijuana prescriptions for virtually anyone complaining of pain. At A Better Tomorrow Treatment Center in Murrieta, we regularly treat young people who freely admit having lied to their doctors about various ailments in an effort to obtain a medical marijuana prescription. Visit your local cannabis dispensary and you will find that young people outnumber the elderly patients with terminal illnesses or the handful of patients who justifiably seek relief from the pain of glaucoma.
Meanwhile, the federal government is doing nothing. While federal laws prohibiting the sale and possession of marijuana remain on the books, the Obama administration has been silent on the issue of legalizing marijuana. The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the sale of everything from aspirin to Viagra, hasn’t even made an attempt to regulate marijuana, which, in addition to having several times as many cancer causing chemicals as cigarettes, is a “gateway drug” that can lead the user to experiment with other more harmful drugs, such as heroin and cocaine.
The federal government, of course, has never focused sufficient attention on fighting drug addiction at home. Funding for the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which provides grants for public and non-profit drug rehab centers, has never kept pace with demand, which is why so many people of limited economic means are unable to get the treatment they need.
Instead, the federal government has focused most of its drug-fighting resources on drug interdiction efforts in Mexico and overseas, as if to suggest that America’s drug problem has more to do with the activities of foreign drug cartels than the failure of Americans to take responsibility for their own behavior.
In his book, The Greatest Generation, Tom Brokaw lauds the World War II generation, noting that despite the enormously difficult challenges they faced during the Great Depression and subsequent world war, “They stayed true to their values of personal responsibility, duty, honor and faith.”
Where are these values today? That’s the question the Times and everyone else should be asking.
But while it may be tempting for me and other managers of drug treatment centers to simply throw in the towel and let the weakest, most irresponsible members of our society determine our future, I, for one, am not going to remain silent. I’ve used therapy, self-determination and hard work to turn my life around, and my clinic and staff have helped more than 400 clients do the same. I’m not going to let them down. To do anything less would merely undermine the values that made this country a beacon of hope, prosperity and moral conduct for the world.
Jerrod Menz is president of A Better Tomorrow Treatment Center in Murrieta, a Forterus Healthcare company.
