Letters to the editor

Letter to the Editor: Education on prevention

Last week, The Parkersburg News and Sentinel featured an article indicating Parkersburg Mayor Tom Joyce has been selected to the committee to help distribute the over $1 billion West Virginia will receive in opioid settlements.

While I was glad to read there is significant headway being made on helping to bring us back out of the dark void the opioid epidemic has brought us into, I was disheartened to read some of Joyce's words. "My focus is going to be on the prevention piece … this gets fixed long term by raising a generation of young people who do not turn to, whether it is opioids or methamphetamines or marijuana or whatever," Joyce is quoted.

In particular, Joyce's assessment that the drugs killing our citizens in droves are inclusive of opioids, methamphetamines, and marijuana is worrisome. For Joyce to include a medicinal plant--one that has helped countless individuals live higher quality lives (no pun intended)--in the same category as the ones our people are becoming severely addicted to, overdosing, and dying on is an egregious miscalculation in understanding what our younger generation is about.

I find it especially troubling that Joyce would mention marijuana in league with these other harmful drugs when our state has implemented a medical marijuana program to help its citizens get the treatment they need and that works for them (without harming them) for serious and life-altering conditions such as cancer, severe neuropathies, seizures, mood disorders, and PTSD.

In relation to rehabilitation treatment for those suffering due to the opioid epidemic, marijuana is being studied as a suitable and safe treatment option. There are countless medical journals containing supporting evidence. Suitable and safe compared to what, you ask? To mixed opioid agonist-antagonists such as Suboxone--which, by the way, can be overdosed on and cause death. Furthermore, there are countless West Virginians who can personally attest to how marijuana treatment helped pull them from that deep darkness of addiction and put them back on track to the more "salubrious" way of life Joyce mentioned in his interview.

If Joyce wants to understand "the prevention piece" when it comes to the epidemic that has plagued our great state, he must first understand there are some things we must stop associating with that epidemic. We must stop associating marijuana, a medicinal plant with proven health benefits, with the actual, fatal drugs such as opioids, heroin, and methamphetamines wreaking havoc on our citizens.

We must teach the younger generations that there are options for health and healing, and we must recognize all the options. We must become aware and educated on how to properly discuss those treatment options and stop operating on outdated stereotypes. To perpetuate these stereotypes is not only harmful to the cause of true drug prevention and treatment, but to the minds of those who might be considering marijuana as a treatment option for a serious condition but are afraid to due to lies passed down over generations.

Prevention starts with education, and the education needed to heal from this crisis is one inclusive of recognizing and accepting the health benefits of medical marijuana. It is one inclusive of the recognition that it would have been more appropriate for Joyce to include "alcohol" in his assessment of the drug preventions we should be focusing on. I truly hope the individuals responsible for allocating that $1 billion, including Joyce, make these recognitions so they can make the best decisions for the citizens of our state.

C. Marie Poling

Goldtown, W.Va.