From former Congressman Joe “What’s this dead girl doing in my office?” Scarborough’s show on MSNBC:
Scarborough: Let’s talk about you specifically. What does marijuana do for you at night before you go to bed that helps ease that pain, helps — helps to take away what you’re going through?
Williams: The same thing — the same thing that a person who might take Vicodin or OxyContin.
For me — and I’ll tell you something. I could take six OxyContin and get the same relief. But then I’m just going to drool in the corner and possibly urinate on myself this evening. I could take seven or eight or nine or 10 or 11, 12, 13 or 14 Vicodin, OK? I have taken up to four at a time at the same time together to get the same kind of pain relief.
It’s — believe me, see, what people — the misconception is that there are a lot people sitting around smoking a joint. Marijuana can be eaten. It can be drank in a liquid form. I utilize it and eat it the same way as I would take a pill about an hour and a half before I go to bed. And then it gives me about four or five hours of relief while I sleep.
If I wake up in the middle of night and it kicks back him, I can take another pill or I can take another piece of a cookie and go right back to sleep. And it’s the same thing as if somebody else took any other any opium-based drug that they sell or get from a pharmacy.
Look, I have a doctor right now who can write me a prescription for morphine, OxyContin. And guess what, Joe? I can get a prescription of cocaine that’s given to me from the pharmacy right down the street, because it’s a schedule two drug. If we think our doctors are smart enough to prescribe cocaine, morphine, other barbiturates and amphetamines, why is that same doctor not smart enough to be able to prescribe marijuana, if he thinks it works?
It is the most ridiculous thing on the planet that we have something else that is available. And believe me, it doesn’t work for everybody. There are probably only 25 percent of people out there who suffer from the type of pain that I have, suffer from, that medicinal marijuana will work for. But why not make it available to those that it will work for under a doctor’s supervision? That’s where the ignorance in this is all about.
And if our government has been sending it out for 25 years, spending taxpayer dollars, investigating this drug’s efficacy at the University of Mississippi for 25 years, and they haven’t figured it out yet, then, first off, anybody involved in the program should be fired. And, secondly, we ought to be able to sue the federal government, because we can say that, after 25 years, if you have not figured that this works, how could you have been poisoning people if you didn’t think it works?
And we know it works. The argument is so ridiculous. That’s the reason why the Supreme Court had to decide this time on an interstate commerce ruling. And the lead justice even said that this is an issue that should be brought before Congress and the will of the people will be heard. Look, 70 percent of the people polled in America today will tell you that, if their child, their mother, father, sister, brother was laying in a hospital in pain and the only drug available to relieve that pain was medicinal marijuana, they would all agree to give it to their child. I don’t understand what the problem is.
