Pretty good piece I was listening to as I was driving to get dinner last night. The piece highlighted how insurance and medicare/medicaid will subsidize opioids so much that they end up costing about $1-2/bottle, but cannabis isn’t covered by any insurance, so can cost in excess of $200 for an equivalent amount of use. And people wonder why there’s an opioid epidemic.
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I have a close friend that is a recovering heroin addict. He had back surgery done upon his doctors recommendation and they prescribed him a host of painkillers and other things for it. Didn’t sound like there was much help offered to wean him off of it (I hear this story all the time) and of course they wouldn’t keep filling his prescriptions after a certain amount of time. Over time he started doctor jumping until people started getting wise and those resources exhausted, then turned to heroin as a cheaper alternative. He’s been clean since I’ve known/met him and grows/consumes cannabis to help alleviate his urges for the cheaper painkiller (which seems to still plague him even today,) but it’s an interesting story to me and one shared by a lot of people I meet.
Shawn Lerma is the director for Operation Compassionate Care (I’ve mentioned them before on here,) a 501c nonprofit where they are promoting cannabis as an alternative to opiates and promoting healthier lifestyles using cannabis for USA veterans with PTSD (he’d have some stories to tell I’m sure, I asked him to check out the community here.)
It’s an interesting place we find ourselves in for sure wanting to provide something we all see so much value in (whatever that might be) and being beaten out by a cost effective status quo (that arguably does have a place at a certain time, but overprescribed and not educating people on hidden dangers, etc.)
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