blog 6

     "Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me." Tupac once said. Marijuana discrimination has been a controversial topic for years. You can’t have multiple states around the country legalizing marijuana, 28 states making medical marijuana legal, and all of a sudden say we want to continue keep marijuana illegal. There’s an amendment that doesn’t allow the federal government to use dollars to prosecute legal states’ use of marijuana. From a medical perspective, marijuana should be taken off the category one, making it equal to heroin as a drug. It is not equal and every single medical society says it isn’t. If its taken off of category one, medical research on marijuana would continue and people would see whatever parts of the plants would work for medical use.  

     Drugs aren’t good in general, but when people are dying from alcohol related deaths and you have zero deaths from marijuana, you have to wonder and double check your thoughts on the subject. Even the people who think legalizing marijuana is a great idea don’t say it’s a good thing. The argument for legalizing pot isn’t that pot is good, but that the war on pot is bad. There’s a way in which legal marijuana could be a public health win. There’s one drug that you won’t see in the drug group which is alcohol, even though it is a lot more dangerous than marijuana or cocaine. Alcohol is really bad for you, lethally bad for you. The centers for Disease Control and Prevention say there are thousands of deaths each years attribute to alcohol. Alcohol is a big contributor to violence, crime, and addiction. It gives people cancer and liver failure. Compared to alcohol, marijuana is a lot safer to use than alcohol. People don’t die from it... they rarely kill others while on it.  

     People using marijuana for fun might have a very different relationship to alcohol than people using marijuana because they’re sick. This isn’t just something we can study, its something that we can affect, that we can change. Dani, I believe this subject is very debatable and people would have countless opinions about it. I really enjoyed reading your article and I really hope we solve this issue soon! 

Blog 5

     There are 1.4 million people that are uninsured in Texas. Medicate is being denied to parents with children, who are making $3,737 a year. They don’t qualify for medicate. What’s it going to take to convince governors to opt into this? Is it antagonism? Or is it persuasion? People have tried the whole range of it. The governors’ decision to reject the medicate is very unconscionable. 1 out of very 4 Texans doesn’t have Healthcare insurance. About 30% of Texas women and 38% of hispanics in Texas don’t have Healthcare coverage. A change in the politics, in the government and of the party leadership in Texas, is what its going to take to really make a difference.  There’s no economic argument about about not expanding medicate. Democrats are liberals who make their decisions from the heart, and republicans are conservatives who make decisions from their mind. In this case, in both the heart and the mind, it’s clear what should be done. Medicate should be expanded. People work and work and work and then, they don’t have basic Healthcare. This isn’t the country we all believe in.    

    Republicans are so opposed to the medicaid expansion. Across the country, in every single state, republicans are saying that they really don’t want to take the medicate expansion money, and they would rather leave hundreds of thousands of citizens totally uninsured and totally without access to Healthcare. David Hogberg,  who’s a Health Care Policy Analyst with the National Center for Public Policy Research, opposed a public policy that would give Healthcare to roughly 5 million people who don’t have it, and according to Harvard University, that would save at least 17,000  lives. It would also create hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country. Hogberg is opposed to it because he believed that Medicaid doesn’t give that much access. He believed  that the country should have a system where Primary Care doctors don’t take most types of insurance. He believed that Primary Care is relatively cheap, and what all people are doing with an insurance system is putting more cost in terms of paper work. He thought its a matter of not giving false hopes to people.