Living with multiple chronic conditions really does drain you of life. The Post Traumatic Stress, the Chronic Pain, the Depression from both on top of a crippling anxiety –– It took me an entire week to recharge from the events of the prior week.
It’s really frustrating, waking up each day with your proverbial battery at less than 10% and having to pick and choose how you allocate that precious 10%, and even still ending each day in an energy deficit –– can you imagine if our phones or laptops were like that… the battery will drain, and when you hit zero, it will still keep running, but will keep counting into the negative, and each night when you recharge you don’t start back at zero –– you need to still pay back what you already took before you can even begin to think about recharging.
It’s like the worst bank ever!
But there is also something beautiful about human resilience and our ability to survive, even when where at zero. It does come at a cost though, but never the less you survive and keep on breathing.
It reminds me of one of my favorite Savage Garden songs, Two Beds and a Coffee Machine
Another ditch in the road, you keep moving.
Another stop sign, you keep moving on.
And the years go by so fast, a silent fortress built to last.
I wonder how I ever made it through.
Two Beds and A Coffee Machine
That song’s chorus has been one of my mantra’s to survival going back to high school, but it’s an anthem to survival, and how you have to keep on moving, keep pushing forward no matter what.
But man, when the wind gets knocked out of your sails from disability, mental illness, burnout, trauma, whatever the reason –– it’s damn near impossible to get going again on your own.
As I’ve said before, Cannabis helps so much. In fact I just popped 2 40mg Pineapple cannabis gummies from Riverside Farm. They’re still my favorite! I’ve also been taking rips on my vape pen with another Riverside Farm product. This one is the Jack Herer strain, its a Sativa with a high THC percentage as well as CBG, CBN and CBD, although in small quantities –– it’s the entourage effect that sometimes only needs small percentages of the other cannabinoids and terpenes that we get from whole plant full spectrum plant access to get maximum relief.
I like the Sativa strains like Jack because it has an energetic, creative and focused feeling which is great for needing to treat that pain and anxiety, but without getting couch locked and becoming unproductive.
I do really like blogging and talking about the different strains, their funny names, their history and also the individual overall effects that we get, and how each strain of cannabis is different, and has it’s own positives, and negatives.
Jack has a bad habit of giving you dry eyes and dry mouth, I’ve also noticed the cannabis chews also will trigger the ever famous Cannabis Cotton Mouth Syndrome.
I have a bowl of Dad’s Old fashioned Root Beer Barrels, or fruit snacks on standby that can easily take care of that problem during the daytime, but have yet to find a way to solve the problem at night, other than cutting off my gummies consumption by 3pm, and sticking to vape strains that don’t cause the same side effect. I have a few night time favorites, maybe I’ll get into those in a future post.
Over the weekend, my BFF and fellow cannabis advocate Christine Stenquist posted a question to a Utah Medical Cannabis community group asking the members to attempt to
define the difference between medical cannabis and adult-use cannabis
(Also known as in Utah Legislative circles as: recreational use.) 🙄 This was a really interesting thread, and over and over again I saw the same message from medical cannabis users across the entire spectrum of Utah’s population, including many active LDS church members. The reoccurring theme amongst the comments was that adult-use cannabis doesn't turn off its medical benefits simply because folks think it's all for fun.
Accessibility and affordability are the biggest differences between the medical and recreational programs. I’ve lived in California, I was in high school when Prop 215 back in 1996 passed making way for medical cannabis. I’ve seen a state also transition from being patient focused with an affordable medical program, and an adult use, “Recreational” state wide program where profits and taxes become the priority.
Utah’s program has the expensive cost of a recreational program, with limited product in a cartel like state run system.
One of the big talking points for states creating a “recreational” adult use program is the gigantic taxes the states get with 30% or more of each sale going to the state. But to tax a medical only program the same way one would a recreational one is immoral and wrong, which is why states that have duel medical/adult use programs where dispensaries will tax their Adult Use users at a higher rate than medical users.
Utah actually will charge each transaction a $3 State fee, instead of charging a tax on the medicine based on a total sales percentage most sales taxes receive.
I’d like to think I’m a pretty smart guy, I’m educated, I love to read and absorb knowledge from all different sources, areas of study and points of interest. Seek out new life, and new civilizations, boldly going... you know the rest!
It’s one of the things I like about being neuro-divergent, that also comes with the urge to write walls of text educating people in the comments section about the nuances, history and in-context matters relevant to whatever post or topic we’re all arguing about at that moment.
When it comes to cannabis, in many area’s I’m a qualified subject matter expert, but when I need to be further educated or get some deep background on any topic, there is one person I will always turn to.
I’ve called up on one of my good friends, Angela Bacca, cus if there is a distinction between the two she will know -- Let's dial her in. (Transcribed conversation) Drew
Angela. Thank you so much for joining me. Can you tell me the difference between medical cannabis and recreational or adult use?
Angela Bacca
The difference are government categories that allow them to classify you and control and talk you accordingly, in my opinion –– that said cannabis has therapeutic properties. It has medicinal properties, but when we started calling cannabis medicine and I blame us as the activist movement, we crossed a line into the government regulation of the word medicine, right? Like a medicine is defined by the government as FDA approved, these can be over the counter or pharmaceutical drugs, but cannabis and all plants have no pathway into being called a medicine under our legal definition. So to me, what is the difference? There's not much of a difference. I have a serious diagnosis, but I also just like to get high as much as a "recreational user" is. But I also think that we should beat up a lot of these categorizations that we've made, like just wanting to get high, because I don't know how appropriate it really is to how most people use. I think that by creating these lines and bifurcating the cannabis world, we've decided without real science to back it up –– whose use is legitimate and whose use is not. I just don't think that that should be up to the government to decide, especially because we don't decide what reason people can take all kinds of substances that may or may not be good for your body. I just think that we as a movement failed by creating that line.
Drew
Definitely states like Utah, even though it's a hundred percent, a medical program have attempted to codify into law, thousands of new lines of code, ensuring Utah's medical cannabis program avoids even the perceived appearance of a recreational type program with the state board, overseeing all products. Are they tilting at windmills with this imaginary boogeyman of their fear of recreation?
Angela Bacca
See, I, you know, it's funny because I don't know if this is a cannabis question so much as it's a Utah question, because what I've learned about Utah politics in my short time of being involved is that it always comes down to church and money, specifically the church's money. So anything that they're doing with the law there has nothing to do with whatever they say they're doing, it's about who is making the money and how they can direct it around again. And yes, Utah will be recreational one day, the whole country will, all of the states will move that direction. The church knows this. They're aware of it. All of their business partners are as well, but they're just making sure that they can carve out every piece of the market before it opens up.
Drew
Totally. The biggest difference between a recreational versus medical is taxes, affordability, access, and not often not talked about is the quality of the product for medical use versus product just to get you high, but has lost a lot of the full spectrum and variety of strains cultivated to specifically treat medical conditions. Is that an accurate statement?
Angela Bacca
No, I would say the thing that really defines medical from recreational cannabis is –– zip codes. Because it's really most of the time, same or similar products. Of course, there are things that I think you're referring to like distillates that lose the full spectrum, and I think that really comes from an uneducated market, right? Like we still have people who think that the more THC, the better –– although like people who really understand cannabis already know that it's not – there's a difference between a glass of wine and a shot of Everclear, right? And people who get to know good wine would never confuse that with a shot of Everclear because they know what the difference is. So it's a naive market on that note, you know well enough being in Utah of all places, which borders or is very close to California, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, all these states with legal programs.
I can tell you, the busiest dispensaries in the state of Oregon are right on the border with Boise –– and I've been in there before and been able to ask the people who own or work at the businesses or people who are in line –– all with Idaho license plates, by the way, about why they were there. And almost all of them had a very serious medical condition in my opinion serious. That was worth them driving across the border and smuggling in cannabis. And so it was the same cannabis that's sold to just "get people high" in Oregon, but it's being used medicinally in Boise –– and we see this happening in Utah, despite them having a cannabis program, Colorado recreational "dispensaries" serve the medical patient population of Utah as do Nevada dispensaries and California dispensaries. So I think like the whole thing is just like a big waffly joke.
And this is also where I say we failed as an activist movement by bifurcating it. It is that if we wanted to really have patient access, and we really wanted to make sure that we could learn everything about cannabis that we possibly could –– we would open the flood gates to everyone! Because even though not everyone has a serious diagnosis, people always are hurting in some way. Like they're always gonna go to either like bad food or like alcohol or something to calm themselves. And Utah Mormons will say, "oh, we don't drink coffee, we don't drink alcohol," but damn if they're not the biggest sugar addicts I've ever met in my entire life –– Right. But we're not going to restrict that. And I know I'm going on a bit of a tangent here <laugh> but I just, cannabis is not, there's no special, magical version. That's medical and a version that's not. And I think that this topic is just a joke <laugh>
Drew
Well, what I mean, especially as the diversity of products available for patients in a medical program, versus what we see, in, in just recreational program, we see a lot of specialty products like RSO, all of a sudden become super expensive and the super concentrates that like cancer patients would use or, or suppositories that are popular for use among hospice or HIV/AIDS or Crohn's Patients.
Angela Bacca
RSO is incredably easy to find in recreational dispensaries here and the prices are going down because there's more and more of it available than there was when the program started. So who do you think is buying the RSO in California Dispensaries? Probably some Californians, but probably a lot of people, not from California. People like Utah Mormons going to Disneyland on the weekend and picking up some RSO to bring home with them, It's recreational dispensaries that are catering to patient populations. And I would argue again that I think that I've seen more diversity of product and recreational dispensaries because the places where you see the best diversity of product and the best quality are the states that originated the medical cannabis laws and have recreational now. And that's where you're gonna find all the best products and the diversity of it. Like, I'm sure there's no diversity, and having not been in a dispensary yet in Utah, I'm sure the diversity is nill compared to something in Oregon or California.
Drew
It's sad, it's a cartel and, we know that... [interrupted] with their cartel pricing...
Angela Bacca
Thank you for using the correct term, people try to dance around the term and not use that term, but it's a cartel. The difference is collision.
Drew
Right. Give me a better term that can describe it. , but I know I kind of ask you this, the answer a little, little bit earlier, but do you see Utah becoming a full adult-use "rec state" within the next decade?
Angela Bacca
Yes. Um, well, within the next decade, I don't know. I guess I would go back and see how Utah's alcohol laws have evolved over the years and the pace of that, because I think it's a similar situation with cannabis. Remember when they were trying to do that central fill pharmacy in Utah? I think it was really about like, okay, fine, fine. You guys can have your weed –– but we need our cut. The government needs it's cut, the church needs it's cut. Like everybody needs it's cut. And we haven't really figured out like the best model to get our cut yet. And I think that this medical game that is being played is still so like, like the people who win in these limited license markets are the ones who have the most money to lose. Right? Maybe a few the guys got in there and got a license. But if the game is money losing the whole time, only the people with the deepest pockets can wait out the other people and buy their licenses cheap and consolidate further. And so I think a lot of the delay of the law is about the games they're playing on the business side. I don't think it has anything to do with the perception of use because look it, everybody in Utah goes to these other places right around it too. Like all the time. Like most of the Mormons I know are conservative people they are pro cannabis now too. Like it's not, it's not a thing people are against. It's a thing that the church is against at the moment because they haven't figured out how to make sure they get their hands in every piece of the pot.
Drew
Thank you Angela for joining us, you're listening to the pothead veteran. Please check out my website potheadveteran.com and as always smoke long and prosper.🖖🏻
Additional Media Links:
TWO BEDS AND A COFFEE MACHINE
by Drew Reese & The Harmonic Collective
Available on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, and other streaming platforms.
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