PUBLISHER’S PERSPECTIVE: It is now time to stop the charade…about “medical” marijuana

Posted on 13 February 2014 by LeslieM

If you truly have Parkinson’s disease, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis or certain types of cancer (the main “legal” reasons now being mentioned), and your doctor recommends for you to smoke marijuana for relief, be sure to get it in writing from the doctor. That is so that when you suffer the negative consequences of smoking marijuana, such as emphysema or cancer, there is someone else to blame and perhaps sue.

It is shameful how this issue is being manipulated by certain politicians, especially a certain former governor, who is proving again that he has no shame, and will do or say anything to try to “win” an election.

Negatives far outweigh any benefits from people smoking pot, at least based on my experience as an employer. One of my first negative experiences a number of years ago was when I sent three of my young mechanics down to a Caribbean Island to install some of our equipment on a sugar plantation. The job should have taken a week.

However, three weeks went by and we had not heard from them. This was before cell phones. Therefore, I called the customer, who checked on them and complained that my guys were just sitting around smoking “pot.” I ordered them back home, fired them immediately and sent a supervisor with some others to finish the job. That one incident cost us tens of thousands of dollars and lost a multi-million dollar customer. Lunch time started becoming a problem as some of our folks began indulging themselves in their pot smoking during lunch and came back to work causing accidents. Our workers compensation rate doubled, then doubled again before we figured out what was causing the accidents and took proper action with drug tests, etc. However, just one of the after lunch “accidents” put a man in the hospital for several months and cost over a million dollars in medical costs.

As a final example, a few years ago thousands of brochures on our products had to be thrown away when our man in charge got high on pot and changed the instructions to the printer to weird colors which made them unusable. We fired him, of course, but thousands of dollars were lost, as the brochures had to be corrected by others and reprinted.

These are just a few examples, and we are just one small company. The Florida Supreme Court recently agreed to put the issue on an upcoming statewide vote requiring only 60 percent approval. Certain special interest entities who will make big money are positioning themselves already to finance pushing it through. If it passes, and I’m being told there’s a good chance it will pass, many people will lose their jobs as many employers will simply “throw in the towel” and invest elsewhere.

David Eller, Publisher

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