Why it's not easy being green

Once upon elysian days in halcyon fields, I loved the color green. It vied with blue for my favorite color, until I came out and fell in love with orange as well. (Blame Very.) But for the past year or two, my love for green has steadily dwindled, and uggh...if I open up the pages of the local alterna-screed and see one more shade of green, I'm gonna puke. Green puke, of course, just to purge it from my system once and for all.

Why is this? Well, as a leftie health care professional who does not prescribe drugs (can't even do it legally if I wanted to, which I don't), I can say the color green has been linked with our profession, at least to some extent. You know...it's the color of that beaten-to-death sacred cow, The Environment. And my colleagues and I are nothing if not tied with the environment. Pretty much all our healing techniques are dependent on the health of our planet: herbs, homeopathy, clean water, fresh air, high-quality food, and other such stuff. If it goes down, we start to struggle. Digression over.

So I can sum up my aggravation in two words: Medical marijuana.

The only real objection I have against marijuana in general is that I really don't care for the smell. (That, and the "we fear what we don't know" argument...I've never ingested marijuana in any form other than second-hand smoke.) I'm not against medical marijuana...I've heard numerous stories about how it has dramatically helped people seemingly after all other (allopathic, traditional) methods have failed. And medical marijuana has been available in Colorado for a few years legally...as long as you have a, uh, doctor's "prescription." It's been about as easy to procure said ganja as limping (truthfully or not) into a dispensary, claiming joint or low back pain or some other such thing, and getting someone to write a prescription for it. Again, there's a legitimate use for it, but when 18-25 year old males are the demographic that uses medical marijuana most, it kinda makes you wonder about that legitimacy.

I suspect there's been a lot of abuse of the legal right to use medical marijuana here in the (ahem) highest state in the nation (average elevation just shy of 7,000 feet). And it gives medical marijuana a bad name. There was a law passed this past year making it significantly more difficult to run a medical dope shop (read: you gotta have all your licensing creds together), which, knock wood, will raise this profession's standards. But until that law gets enforced, there's plenty of evidence of an economic marijuana bubble about to burst all over the place. And the most readily visible evidence of that is in the back pages of the local rag, where every ad for a place that dispenses marijuana is, of course, green.

For that matter, I seethe when I see the word "wellness" or "holistic" used in such context. Marijuana, on its own, does not constitute "wellness." It is not a "holistic" treatment. And for health care professionals such as me, using these words in the wrong context a) gets at my craw, b) usurps a word that really, should be about the medicine that my colleagues and I practice, and c) could potentially damage what little reputation our profession has.

Overthinking things, mayhaps? Guilty. But fergawdsakes, I can't WAIT to see the green ads for medical marijuana be reduced from 6+ obnoxious pages of poorly-regulated, low-quality shoppes down to maybe a page of ads for a handful of reputable companies.

And while I'm at it, I'd like to have a pony and peace in the Middle East.