Cannabis & Alcohol Are Not the Same

If you have ever cared for someone with End Stage Alcohol Addiction or Alcoholic Cirrhosis you can understand how frustrating it is for alcohol to be so widely accepted while Cannabis is stigmatized to the point that some of my friends can’t even like my Human Resources Company Linked In page out of fear of judgement and retribution because it is associated with the Cannabis Industry. So, I decided I will share what that is like for those who have been lucky enough to not experience it. Working as an ICU nurse for many years in a Trauma 1 Hospital that was the Liver Transplant Capital of the United States gave me a unique perspective about what alcohol really does to the human body. Hint: it destroys it in way that leaves a person highlighter yellow, weeping smelly fluid from their entire body, and forced to be on a medication called Lactulose that’s entire purpose is to make them shit uncontrollably to ease the hepatic encephalopathy. This exercise will be best served if we put a face to the destruction. So let me tell you about a patient I cared for who abused alcohol for 1 year in her mid twenties. I’ll change the names and some details but everything else will remain the same: I met her 6-year-old daughter and 28-year-old fiancé terrified and beyond confused in the waiting room walking into my shift when Isabella first got admitted. They airlifted her from some hospital in the boonies who didn’t have the level of care she required. She was sick as shit. My charge nurse and I looked at one another as we got prepared to transfer her from the raggedy MedFlight stretcher to our ICU hospital bed. Her blood pressure looked more like the score of a March Madness basketball game than the 120/80 that we’d like to see. She needed to be intubated too which would tank her blood pressure even more. It wasn’t even 15 minutes into our shift, and we were already putting the code cart next to the room in preparation for the next 12 hours of our night. Isabella had this fiery red hair and a smile in her pictures that made you feel like you knew her. Her Fiancé described to us what the last 12 months had been like for him, Isabella, and their daughter. Isabella had unexpectedly lost her job. She struggled for months to find a new one. Her fiancé would work all day while Isabella was home. He. like many in his shoes, didn’t realize that Isabella was filling her teacup every day with Vodka instead of Chai. By the time, he started to realize the change in her complexion and inevitable shift in her personality, it was too late. One year in and Isabella needed a new Liver before her 26th birthday. One thing a lot of people don’t realize about alcohol abuse is how quickly it can hurt your body. A majority of the patients I cared for hadn’t spent decades downing bottles of Whiskey but instead, just had a bad a couple of years. We intubated and stabilized Isabella that night. Her long road started there. A person won’t even be considered for a liver unless they have been sober for 6 months. This meant that when we received a patient who had been actively drinking, we had to then keep them alive and sober for 6 months before the real treatment even starts. I know this probably sounds harsh, but the research shows that it is necessary for success when they do receive a new liver. So, the process began with Isabella and her family. We started her on CVVH which is continuous dialysis because she was too unstable for regular dialysis, we put her in our biggest corner room knowing that she’d be a long-term resident, and we hoped that we could get her to her new liver. Isabella had her good days and bad throughout the 5 months she was with us. There were times when the encephalopathy was improving, and we got to remove the breathing tube and hear her speak. But mostly, the small wins were overshadowed by really big losses. I remember coming in one night to Jack, her fiancé, in a panicked voice telling me he thought something was off. She seemed more lethargic to me as well. Her oxygen levels on Nasal Canal was reading normal but I decided to do some labs. As we both suspected, her oxygen levels were tanking. We reintubated her that time for the last time. She and Jack ended up getting married inside a hospital room. We made decorations out of hospital supplies, got flowers from the gift shop, and played "Here Comes the Bride" over the hospital loudspeaker. Isabella would never get her liver. She ended up passing soon after their wedding. I wish I could say this was the exception, but it was not. Most of my liver patients never made it to their new liver. I say all of this to say, The New York Times reporting is incredibly irresponsible. Cannabis has been shown to successfully help treat Opiate and Alcohol Addiction. Describing some of the medicinal side effects as adverse reactions or signs of cannabis addiction is just… I can’t say stupid.. misguided and uniformed. I'll leave you with this. In 10 years of nursing, the worst I saw of a Cannabis related Hospital Admission was a 77 year old woman who unknowingly ate a 200 MG Chocolate Bar and had to be kept for observation until we figured out that was what had happened.