First it was Colorado and Washington, afterwards came Alaska, Oregon and Washington, DC. Last to join the bandwagon for marijuana legalization was Pennsylvania. Now it is New England that is considering legalizing marijuana to suppress the opiate crisis in the country.
However, this vast liberal region is battling with the destructive effect of opiate abuse, which disrupts families, taxing law enforcement agencies and taking lives. Many lawmakers and public officials are holding back the idea of making a banned substance legal, seeing possible social costs, MSN reports.
"The shadow of the heroin epidemic is something that people think about when they think about the legalization, and they ask themselves, 'Are we sending the right message about legalization?'" said Shap Smith, the speaker of the House in Vermont, who is open to legalizing marijuana. "I think in the public's mind, it's making passage of this bill more difficult."
But the bill is crippling through the House, where it was removed of the parts that would enable legalization. Since Friday, it only contains a careful stipulation to allow home-growing and legalized possession of small amounts of marijuana.
The biggest concerns of lawmakers are those that surfaced in state after state as the legalization effort has taken off, the use and abuse of young generation, impaired driving and commercialization.
As The New York Times cited, the opiate crisis in which fentanyl, heroin and other drugs have taken lives of more than 2,000 people in New England in the last year, is an important confounding obstacle which complicates efforts across the region and figures into anti-legalization political alliances.
According to Scott M. Gagnon and William Paterson of the Substance Abuse Prevention at the University of New England, treating opiate addiction with medical marijuana with the law enforcement, treatment and prevention task forces will not take effect as medical marijuana does not meet the basis for scientific and evidenced-based. Journal of the American Medical Association researches said that it is only best for the conditions of nausea related to chemotherapy and multiple-sclerosis symptoms, the Bangor Daily News reported.
Emerging science stresses that marijuana threatens to worsen and not improve the opiate epidemic. More people are not only exposed to a serious deterioration of cognitive and mental-health functioning but also for potential unborn children and more opiate addiction and brain changes.
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