Medical Marijuana Refugees

VENICE BEACH, CA - MARCH 13: People hawk "Medical Marijuana" on the Venice Beach Board Walk on March 13, 2011 in Venice Beach, CA

Early this week we posted a story about a little girl named Addyson Benton, whose family moved to Colorado specifically because their daughter needed medical marijuana treatment and could not get it in her home state of Ohio. This past week, with the advent of Ohio’s new medical marijuana legislation, she finally moved back to her hometown.

While reading this story, many questions came up for us, but one stood out about the rest: how often is this happening?

There are plenty of stories of people moving to states with medical marijuana to “strike gold”, either by starting their own dispensary or getting in somewhere else in the business. But something you hear far less of are stories of people leaving their hometown simply to get treatment that they desperately need.

Stats for this sort of thing are hard to find. After all, how many people admit to moving to access to marijuana? But this just shows another facet in why we need to get medical marijuana access in all 50 states. It’s not right that an American citizen has to uproot their lives and move to another state solely to gain access to a medication that will allow them to live a normal life.

If you had to leave Massachusetts and move to Louisiana in order to get a prescription for Amoxicillin, there would be riots in the streets. But, because we’re talking about medical marijuana, this sort of thing is allowed to happen.

In the coming weeks, we will be looking into other stories like this, and hopefully, find some stats on how common of an occurrence this type of move is. Even if it’s not that common, it’s still unbelievable that this type of thing has to happen in our country.

We’ll keep you posted as we find out more.

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