Recently the New Mexico Tourism Department decided to launch its New Mexico True Certified program, highlighting products that are “uniquely New Mexican.” While this is a great program, it is limiting its success by denying access to one of the state’s most promising products.

It’s green. And no, it’s not chile.

The program requires all plant and nonmeat agricultural products to be 100 percent produced in the state with traceable documentation to where it was grown. Ultra Health products fit this requirement, as its high quality, medical grade cannabis and other products infused with medical cannabis are grown and produced at its cultivation center in Bernalillo.

Continue reading “Medical Cannabis Should Be New Mexico True Certified”

New Mexico is experiencing vast budget shortages stemming from a historically limited private sector economy and lower than expected oil and gas revenues. Rarely, if ever have the state coffers been sufficient to fully fund the programmatic needs for improved education, a stronger justice system and expanded but needed healthcare. Of the three largest budget demands, only one is both a true economic and social positive multiplier to the improved well-­‐being of the state’s individual residents and the overall state wide economy: Medicaid. New Mexico is in an envious position of being able to obtain $3 in Federal match for each $1 the State provides. Likewise, every single dollar cut from the Medicaid program results in a combined $4 dollars less being released into our communities for hospitals, caregivers, medicines, healthcare workers, behavioral health services and those who often time care for our most vulnerable populations: single parents, children, working poor, chronically ill, the aged or disabled.

Continue reading “SALUD: New Mexico Needs to Adequately Fund Medicaid”

As the prescription drug overdose epidemic in the United States is increasingly getting out of control, it is time to explore safer alternatives to these highly addictive narcotics.

More than 14,000 people died in the United States from overdoses involving prescription opioids in 2014, according to the Center for Disease Control. During that same year New Mexico had the second highest total drug overdose death rate in the nation.

Between 2010 and 2014, 85 percent of New Mexico’s 33 counties had higher rates of drug overdose than the national average, some NM counties reaching 5 times the national rate, according to the New Mexico Department of Health. As this epidemic continues, more people are lost to prescription related deaths each year.

Continue reading “Legalization to Avoid Overdoses”