Indiana’s Attorney General, Curtis Hill, invited our least favorite, weed-hating Governor, Chris Christie to be the keynote speaker to his upcoming Symposium on Prescription Drug Abuse, October 30 and 31st in Indiana.
Why is this concerning? Because Chris Christie hates marijuana patients and doesn’t want to help them obtain their medicine of choice. Christie recently ranted to a group of reporters calling marijuana legalization “beyond stupidity” and said the entire movement is supported by “crazy liberals who want to say everything is OK.”
Which means he must not like opioid addicts either because he is ignoring the pain relieving and medicinal effects marijuana could provide for them. Picking Chris Christie as the keynote speaker at a conference on opioid addiction is not a good sign for those in crisis or those headed for addiction. Slating, Thomas J Gorman as the first speaker on the agenda is a metaphorical nail in the medicinal marijuana coffin for Indianans. Neither of these two key speakers believe medicinal marijuana should be legalized and neither view marijuana as a tool to help curb the opioid epidemic.
Gorman is known to many in the marijuana community as a leader of the “war on patients” and is the current Director, of the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program (HIDTA). Gorman, a self described “born again Christian”, works closely with the National Drug Control Policy office that helps coordinate local drug task forces and other large-scale narcotics efforts in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Utah.
He was an undercover officer for the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement in the late 60’s. Worked his way up to director of statewide narcotics operations in the late 1980’s to retire in 1997.
However, he felt his mission wasn’t complete in law enforcement and jumped at the chance to be the director of HIDTA. Gorman stated in an interview in 2010, “I’m a big believer in what we do in law enforcement. When you put a violent person in jail, you are preventing someone, somewhere from becoming a victim, although he or she will never know it. I will do this until the day I die.”
So, this guy, the guy medical marijuana advocates call the leader of the “war on patients”, is the guy who is going to tee off Indiana’s two day conference on prescription drug abuse and heroin addiction with his report titled “The Impact of Marijuana Legalization”?
And, this is the only speaker who has the word marijuana associated with his report. The entire four page agenda on prescription drug abuse and heroin addiction only lists marijuana once and it is in the context of how legalization may impact society. No medicinal reports from doctors and researchers about how marijuana could alleviate the opioid addiction? Not one speaker?
Indiana’s are dying at a catastrophic rate from opioid related overdoses and have been hit hard by this crisis. “More than 1 in 20 people in Indiana report having engaged in nonmedical use of opioid pain relievers. Even worse, the number of Hoosiers who have died from drug poisoning has increased 500 percent since 1999. More people now die in Indiana from drug poisoning than in car accidents.”
How could this 2 day conference address what will be our nation’s most catastrophic epidemic not bring one medicinal marijuana advocate to the table for discussion? Wake up Chris Christie. Time is almost up as NJ’s governor and you are on the wrong side of history when it comes to the people you represent and the medicine they need.
Written by: @StonedandStuff
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