Dangers of Marijuana Experienced Firsthand

Dangers of Marijuana Experienced Firsthand

I recently finished my residency in emergency medicine and began to practice in Pueblo, Colorado. I grew up there, and I was excited to return home. However, when I returned home, the Pueblo I once knew had drastically changed. Where there were once hardware stores, animal feed shops, and homes along dotted farms, I now found marijuana shops—and lots of them. As of January 2016, there were 424 retail marijuana stores in Colorado compared with 202 McDonald’s restaurants.1

These stores are not selling the marijuana I had seen in high school. Multiple different types of patients are coming into the emergency department with a variety of unexpected problems such as marijuana-induced psychosis, dependence, burn injuries, increased abuse of other drugs, increased homelessness and its associated problems, and self-medication with marijuana to treat their medical problems instead of seeking appropriate medical care.

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Drugged driving eclipses drunken driving in tests of motorists killed in crashes

Drugged driving eclipses drunken driving in tests of motorists killed in crashes

Of the drivers who tested positive for drugs, more than a third had used marijuana and more than 9 percent had taken amphetamines.

“As drunken driving has declined, drugged driving has increased dramatically, and many of today’s impaired drivers are combining two or more substances,” said Ralph S. Blackman, president of the foundation, a nonprofit founded and funded by a group of distillers.

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What the national drug crisis requires

What the national drug crisis requires

Extraordinary times we live in — not least because supposedly responsible people are promoting drug abuse, which everyone knows cascades into addiction, drug-crime, overdoses — that are killing us. So what gives? No one wants to stand up and take responsibility for saying — stop this madness, and fix the crisis. America’s greatness depends on a lot of things — and stopping the rolling, expansive, destructive drug crisis is one

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When the drug crisis hits home

When the drug crisis hits home

No one wants to read about drug addiction, abuse, overdose numbers and young death. Why should they? Why should anyone who is steady, healthy and cogent enough to be combing a newspaper, or scanning news on their iPhone care much about someone who — all the world assumes — lost their own future, made avoidable mistakes? Not my lane. Not my worry. Not my world, right? Wrong.

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