… and I’m not talking about the people who use it.
The saga of a Colorado Springs teenager struggling with a rare neurological condition best controlled with medical marijuana lozenges became a little more surreal when Harrison School District 2 informed the student’s father that the child cannot return to school on any day that he consumes medical marijuana.
“They say if he takes his medicine he cannot come back to school,†the teenager’s father told The Colorado Independent. The boy attends Sierra High School.
The child missed most of the last school year when he was diagnosed with diaphragmatic and axial myoclonus, which causes seizures that can last for 24 hours or more. He spent extensive periods of time hospitalized and used morphine and other narcotics to control the seizures until doctors discovered that THC works better than any other medication.
He was able to return to school in January but as the district would not allow him to possess or consume his prescribed medicine on campus, he transferred to a school closer to home so that he could walk home as needed to take his medicine.
After the district’s latest salvo was delivered, the teen’s father said he spoke with both the district superintendent and the district attorney and that neither were receptive to his arguments that his son needs the medicine to function, does not get high and does not smell like marijuana.
The district has refused to comment to us, other than for a spokesperson to say that the district intends to follow the letter of the law, which is that no student may possess or consume medical marijuana on school grounds.
Here’s a kid where a sane school district should be bending over backwards to help make it possible for him to attend, and a student who really wants to learn. But no, they make him stay home.
The school, by the way, has clarified that the teen can come to school after taking vicodin, but not THC.
Hopefully, this will change.
Best reaction:
Senator Greg Brophy, R-Wray, reached by email, said this: “Tragic. Zero tolerance policies are for people with zero intelligence.â€
Personally, I see this more as a problem with public schools and their one size fits all offering. A private school could kick your child out of school for medical mj, but you could always look for another, more understanding school. With a public school you are stuck.
If there was a system in place that let people shop for schools, like a voucher system or some similar scheme, one school’s crazy policy becomes their loss, not yours. You just walk away.
But with public schools, every policy becomes a potential political football, mostly to the detriment of the students.
But I shouldn’t hijack the thread with my libertarian whining about the union controlled public school system. Obviously, if a student has been prescribed MORPHINE for their illness, their problems are very real. Certainly being zonked on morphine would affect their school performance and behavior much more than THC.
Also, the article mentioned that the form of the medical mj was a lozenge. So the kid was just taking another medicine orally, not lighting up a big honking doobie in the middle of math class.
This isn’t a one size fits all situation. This is one school BOARD (made up of parents and doctors and lawyers and Christian freaks who don’t have any children of their own and want to tell you how to raise yours). Sounds like you’re blaming the school system, and not the School BOARD system (which should be exclusive to parents and educators, in my opinion). There’s an organized and well funded campaign on via the Koch Brothers and other people who want the corporations in charge of educating your kids, to demonize Teachers, Teacher’s Unions and public education. They want the “Public” out of the term altogether.
They want to chuck Teachers and teacher’s Unions to the curb because they’ve fought long and hard for reasonable pay and workloads, retirement etc. They are expensive to educate and, it seems, once you show people the correct way to do things, it’s difficult to make them turn around and do it wrong because they’re told to. No other developed country treats it’s professional educators as badly, pays them so little and gives them no support. Now the move is on to replace them with minimum wage “para-professionals” and take away the pensions they negotiated as part of their inadequate salaries. Talk about fucked up. We do a dismal job of educating our kids, and it isn’t the fault of the people who’ve dedicated their lives to it. It’s our fucking fault for just not prioritizing education in this culture. “What about the Chillun’s?” indeed.
When the Mainstream Media clucks it’s tongue and shakes it’s head, and begins to tell not what is wrong, but what to do to fix it, it’s time to prick up your ears and look around for somebody pulling strings. This move to gut education is one of the most blatantly, corporately directed and downright EVIL lies we’ve ever been subjected to.
MAMAMAMADDNESS reefer madness ,poor kid let him go to school ,they’re hypocrites,they need to quit watching 1930’s comic horrors
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I guess some people like having the ACLU take them out to the woodshed and give them a spanking. I don’t believe they know what spanking means to a Fijian. Lots of people are bent over for a spanking in Colorado. Since when can a legislature restrict a Constitutionally protected right by a simple majority? What’s the point in having a State Constitution in that case?
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Say, the LA Times has a story about it and believe it or not it’s fairly well balanced, treated with the gravitas a story like this deserves, and the author gives people a link to http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/ and give the idea consideration.
http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-teen-medical-marijuana-20110210,0,5346370.story
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Say, would anyone entertain the idea that we’ve been going about this bass ackward? Instead of demanding our freedom we could instead demand that the government protect us from ourselves. I’m proposing that drinking alcohol and whole tobacco products need to be added to the CSA schedule 1 with all due haste.
Somehow people seem to think that drinking alcohol is different, not a mind melting and highly addictive drug that should by all rights be on Schedule 1 by any reasonably coherent reading of the DEA’s scheduling criteria. Sorry Mr. Linkletter, the fact that some people who use drinking don’t use it to get high is not a mitigating factor, just like the fact that some people use hemp for stuff that doesn’t get you high isn’t important. The fact that a supermajority of the country prefers one particular MAD over others is not on the DEA list for consideration.
If these people are going to insist that the litany of harms which come from enjoying cannabis that they list in their hysterical rhetoric demand that society and it’s citizens be protected from by the force of criminal law then the 14th Amendment demands that those citizens be equally protected from a drug that rightfully belongs in the same class with heroin.
Why should I have to risk become a drunken degenerate likker addict because some clowns like to sip champagne or wine tasters enjoy swish and spit? I demand the protection of law if you’re going to claim that I need to be protected.
Just thought I’d run that flag up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes. Is it really reasonable to protect me from pot but not from drinking alcohol?
how many kids at that Co Spgs school are being treated for ADHD?
And yes, Reefer Madness does exist, truth is always far stranger than the best fiction and Lordie! how ducking fumb some people are… petty bureaucrats and their microscopic wedges of power are a pox upon the land.I become more and more convinced that the dream of my childhood imaginings – the perpetual motion machine – is a reality and its name is bureaucracy. How very disappointing that is to that boy I once was.
Desoxyn = methamphetamine.
http://www.lundbeckinc.com/usa/products/cns/desoxyn/default.asp
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The gateway drug to Desoxyn is Adderall if I recall correctly. Love it when the Know Nothings say “what’s next, medical meth?” I don’t know, isn’t the Adderall working anymore?
Adderall = dextroamphetamine and amphetamine (is that like blended whisky? blended speeds)
What about the children? Yeah right, what about ’em?
In a nutshell – what ails American education. Cowardly, authoritarian, ciphers in positions of responsibility that require leadership but whose occupants are worse than useless.
Talk about a decadent society – this is it. This is what happens when you allow morons to occupy leaderhsip positions. I am trying not to conclude that the moron quotient in America is higher than average but stories like this make it hard to conclude otherwise.
I saw this story yesterday,yup you are all right Reefer Madness,No tolerance policy’s and Cowardly authoritarians all rule the day and bring stupidity and madness to the situation.
Oh that’s right let’s give him vicodin at that young age it will bring maladies from continual use. A tragedy to start people on pain killers to soon side effects slow intestinal problems,yeah I don’t need to go further you get my drift,Marijuana less side effects no Od’d to happen.
I think Judge Napolitano already spoke of this on his Freedom Watch Show.
divadab, I don’t think native intelligence is particularly important. Besides, the mouth breathers deserve representation too.
It is the desire to serve in the elected offices of government that is the problem. Some how we have to eliminate those who desire political power from consideration. There has to be a detectable difference in the physical architecture of their brains so we should be able scan them if we figure that out. Of course then we have to go to conscription, now how can that be fair if it isn’t random? Are you going to IQ test the entire population of non-politicians and keep them on file? Well maybe we could IQ test the conscripts, and give them the jobs that require lesser intelligence, like Secretary of State.
The only way we fix this country is to get the damn politicians out of office, once and for all.
Man all I got are cuss words in my brain. The morons strike back! Flipping Unabombers!
http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/02/10/montana.medical.marijuana/
Go get ’em Duncan, I’m mostly out of action this week due to Daddy-duty and other responsabilities. My back-yard-fence neighbor, Jim, was diagnosed Friday with advanced Prostrate Cancer. Seems the rising age of screening for P.C. has insured another victim that won’t get treatment in time. Sick that I’m going to be his palliative care provider, and not providing supportive care to his primary treatment. But with the insurance companies in charge, it’s cheaper for them to let him die than provide treatment to save his life in a timely manner. So that’s how they do it (breast cancer too, the age of first screening gets pushed up when they KNOW it is only survivable if you catch it early). He’s really advanced and they say it’s an agressive one too. Shit. He just got married last year.
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Isn’t it sacreligious for a banker to refuse money?
Medical Marijuana Sellers Can’t Take Their Money to the Bank
Conflict between state and federal laws over the legality of marijuana has left owners of medical marijuana dispensaries finding that their financial services can go up in smoke. They’re caught in a legal gray area that makes big banks wary or downright hostile.
This is the sort of case that renders every single “trojan horse” argument about medical marijuana laws irrelevant and morally repugnant.
I’d like to know the trade-off here; how many people do we need to stop from getting high and watching infomercials to justify denying one sick kid a functioning life?
Key words: Functional life.
Other people don’t comprehend the enormity of the discomfort when their own bodies are not suffering.
the answer to the question: a century and a half of spoon-fed government bullshit.
Aw for crap’s sake. This is a High School. A HIGH School. And how many of their charges are skipping out at lunch and burnin’ a doobie in the woods behind the school? Only to return in time for P.E., stoned to the proverbial bone? Naw, if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.
When I went to high school there was a bootlegger with a keg of cold beer on tap in the woods selling beer to all comers. Some days there was literally a line of high school students waiting to be served, usually when they emptied one keg and had to go fetch another. 18 for beer & wine at the time in VA. I wonder if that still goes on now that it’s 21 and we’re not saying “aw shucks boys will be boys, chug one for me out there” anymore?
In the mid sevnties around my area it was infinitely easier to get pot or acid or even speed (old fasioned “truckers” and Bennies, the occasional Fastin, stolen from somebody’s mom) and the like. Even exotics like DMT and MDA and mescaline. Shrooms don’t thrive in the midwest so they were kinda rare. Booze you had to know somebody’s older brother, give him a cut and then take the risk he’d take the cash and buy what he wanted before ditching out the back.
If you knew your onset times you could dose sometime after lunch and start rushing right about three o’clock.
I shadowed my two oldest kid’s every movement in high school, just to make sure they did not have as vice filled an adolescence as their Pop. Turns out I wasted my time. They just weren’t interested in that stuff like I was.
Anyway, point was, anything BUT alcohol was available without even having to leave school grounds.
Maybe we should prohibit education,if it is as effective as the prohibition of marijuana has been,all our kids will be rocket scientist.
the drug war has taught whole generations of kids the metric system
At least in units of weight, if not distance or volume….(I suppose if you want to be an acid chemist, volume counts,too)
lol…
“I suppose if you want to be an acid chemist, volume counts,too”
boy howdy! Don’t wanna mix up yer micro and milli grams…
flashback…
Austin, Texas, 1971… there was a local chemist, college chem student and she brewed up what we called “the Green Mystery”… yow… but a fine brand for an intro into the weird and whacky world of psychedelics
And re Pete’s question…
“hippies”
… hmmm… better add “black jazz musicians” and “Mexicans” too.
why is it the schools business what medicine he takes anyway?
The schools consider everything their business.
If not policed and watched the overlapping school boards and vast groups of power players operating in the education system would meddle even more then they do now. In 2004 the president signed into law a prohibition against mandatory medication, one which, due to some amazing abuses that had been occurring, had to explicitly prohibit schools from requiring children to be medicated in order to attend school / receive aid etc. Not sure if it was ever repealed.
Children and young adults tend not to be viewed as having any rights. Mandatory drug testing is routine, as are searches and seizures. Arbitrary and often contradictory policies abound, ones that consider our children not as self aware offspring of self aware individuals but as experiments, or some form of state owned chattel that need to be controlled and shaped.
It does not take mj to make them morons they were and always will be stupid.