Pets on pot: Is Medical Marijuana giving sick animals a necessary dose of relief?
By Josiah Hesse 23.5.2016
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/23/medical-marijuana-sick-animals-california
As owners tout benefits and usage in
compassionate care, the battle for legalisation
mirrors humans’ own medical marijuana
fight….. “It sounds ridiculous, until you experience it
yourself,” said Bernie’s owner, Anthony
Georgiadis, who says his dog hasn’t had a
seizure in four months.
The Georgiadis’s dog, Bernie, who hasn’t had a
seizure in four months Many pet products are not made from hemp,
though, but rather straight marijuana
containing trace amounts of THC.
So anyone wanting these products for their
animal’s chronic pain, anxiety, inflammation,
appetite stimulation, or epilepsy have to live
in a state where medical marijuana is legal –
and even then, they need to have a
prescription for themselves just to enter a
dispensary.
Last year, Tick Segerblom, a Nevada state
senator, introduced a bill to create a medical
marijuana registry for pets.
Bernie, a 130-pound Swiss mountain dog,
began having grand mal seizures when he was
six months old.
About once a week he would violently
convulse, foam at the mouth, and urinate on
himself for several minutes before recovering
an or so hour later.
The medication he was given seriously
disoriented him, was harmful to his liver and
for the most part didn’t work.
At the end of their rope, Bernie’s parents
decided to put him on a pet supplement
derived from cannabis.
Gradually, his seizures became less severe
and less frequent, before disappearing
altogether.
Despite a large amount of promising
anecdotal evidence like Bernie’s story, and a
growing industry of cannabis-based pet
products, many people have a hard time
taking medical marijuana for pets seriously.
“They thought it was a joke,” Segerblom said
of his senate colleagues. “It was the talk of the
country for a while.”
“Look at this moron!” Dennis Miller
screamed on the O’Reilly Factor, deriding the
senator’s bill, calling it “the end of culture as
we know it”.
“I have fish at home that want medical
marijuana,” O’Reilly joked.
“I’m not exactly sure how to deliver that to
them, because if you put the cigarette in there
it all gets wet.”
Despite the public ridicule, Segerblom said,
he had been looking forward to the issue being
debated in a hearing, but that hearing never
happened. In the end, he said, “it went to a
committee headed by a person who hates
marijuana, and he made sure that it died”.
Amanda Reiman, manager of marijuana law
at the Drug Policy Alliance, said that today’s
battle over animal medical marijuana mirrors
the clash over human medical marijuana in
1990s California.