Fiorina Misinformed About Medical Marijuana
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Carly Fiorina’s latest lie was told to the wrong person.
“I was trying to be brave,” Shelly Van Winkle told ThinkProgress minutes after a tense exchange with Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina over medical marijuana.
Van Winkle, a Gulf War veteran, is also the “first and only certified cannabis nurse” in Iowa. At a voter forum at St. Ambrose University on Friday morning, she asked Fiorina what she would do to make it easier for patients — like veterans with PTSD, and children with cancer — to access medicinal marijuana.
“You’re not going to like my answer,” Fiorina responded before hearkening back to her breast cancer diagnosis in 2009. At the time, she recounted, her doctor asked “if I was interested in medicinal marijuana.”
“I said ‘No,’ and his response was ‘Good,’ because its a chemically complex compound that we do not understand — we do not understand how it reacts with chemotherapy and all of the other statements,” she said. “It is true today …. [that before you get chemotherapy] you cannot have any marijuana in your system for at least 30 days …”
Van Winkle interrupted. “That’s no longer true, ” she said.
Fiorina paused. “So I will also tell you something else. We lost a daughter to addiction,” Fiorina said, before recounting the death of her daughter due to drug and alcohol abuse.
According to the Annenburg Public Policy Center, it is no longer true that doctors don’t know how marijuana reacts with other drugs. “Prescribing information for approved versions of medical marijuana does contain drug interaction information, and studies have turned up few problems in terms of interactions with cancer therapies, as well as other types of medication,” the organization’s FactCheck.org website reads.
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