Brandon pharmacist pushes for medical marijuana

The pain is strongest at night – so searing that painkillers plus a sleeping pill aren’t enough to give Jennifer Wullstein the relief she needs for a good night’s sleep. 

She suffers from chronic, work-related radial tunnel stress injuries. Seven surgeries haven’t helped. 

One option for easing her pain is to increase her narcotics, which neither she nor her husband, Dr. Tom Wullstein, wants to do. 

“She still has to function. She’s a stay-at-home soccer mom, president of the PTA, highly involved in the community,” said Wullstein, owner of Brandon Pharmacy. “She can only be on a computer for about 5 minutes at a time. Even things like folding laundry and driving long distances are impossible for her without severe flare-ups.  

To some Wullstein might seem an unlikely candidate to support medicinal cannabis – and for many years, he didn’t. 

“There’s a huge opium epidemic. As a pharmacist, you get a little bit jaded with people who have chronic pain. Now that I’m on the other side, I certainly have a different perspective,” he said. “People don’t care strongly about something until it affects them personally.” 

When Wullstein began researching medical cannabis as an alternative pain option for his wife last year, what he discovered surprised him.

“There were a few different factors I wasn’t aware of. Once I saw them I was like, ‘Why aren’t we doing this? This is insane that we aren’t doing this,’” he said.

His first discovery was that medical marijuana is safer than pain killers; a person can’t fatally overdose on medical marijuana, unlike other pain medications, including over-the-counter products like Tylenol. 

The next thing Wullstein found in his research was that medical cannabis works for relieving chronic pain – not only repetitive stress injuries like his wife’s, but also glaucoma, Parkinson’s, IBS, Crohn’s disease, cancer, seizures, and many more.   

“There are lots and lots and lots of people who have been tremendously helped with their pain. And if that means they are taking less opiate prescriptions and supplementing with this, that’s absolutely safer,” Wullstein said. 

Supplementing with medical marijuana – for instance, reducing intake of painkillers to half – also takes a burden off the healthcare system, he said, which is inundated with prescriptions for painkillers like Oxycoton, Oxycodone and other controlled substances. 

In states where medical marijuana is legal, patients visit a dispensary with a doctor-approved condition and receive a card stating they need the substance for medicinal reasons. 

Wullstein would like to see South Dakota have a pharmacist or doctor at the dispensary to help patients make the transition from painkillers to medical marijuana, make suggestions for adjustments to what they currently take. 

“There are going to be people who will abuse it. But for those who legitimately want to use medical marijuana to help their condition, it would be a good idea to have a pharmacist on staff to look at their meds and say, ‘Okay, let’s look at getting off this, or switching this and replacing this,’ to help people make that transition.”

Medical marijuana isn’t new to the South Dakota legislative ballot. The measure has come close to passing and been thrown out due to a technicality with petitions.   

“It’s kind of like a non-controversial, controversial subject,” Wullstein said. “It has such a high approval rating across the country.”

One common consensus about marijuana he quickly dispels is that it’s a gateway drug, meaning it leads to use of harder substances. The real gateway drug, he said, is prescriptions – mostly painkillers.

“There was a study, and I think it’s 4 out of 5 people addicted to heroin started out with prescription drugs. If there’s anyone giving out a gateway drug, it’s the legal pharmacists. It’s all these pharmaceuticals that have been engineered to be very potent, but they’re also highly addictive,” Wullstein said. 

Research has shown that marijuana doesn’t create a physical addiction.

Medical marijuana would be available at dispensaries in several forms: loose leaf, vaping, oil, cream and edibles. 

“Vaping gets the medicine into you but it doesn’t have as strong of a smell or involve breathing in burnt material,” Wullstein said. “And with vaping or smoking it, it absorbs right away. For people in pain, one of the issues is they have is they can take two pills, and it takes a half hour or hour for those to kick in. Then they take two more, and pretty soon they’ve overdosed legally.”

“We have petitions here,” he said. “I don’t stand outside or anything, but 

“There’s so much misinformation out there,” he said. “Once people find out the truth, it doesn’t make sense that it’s been under prohibition for so long. It can help people and it can decrease the amount of dangerous medications we have,” he said. “Alcohol is so much more dangerous – by immeasurable amounts. Oxycodone is so much more dangerous.

Wullstein has owned Brandon Pharmacy for 7 years. He lives in Brandon with his wife, Jennifer, a Brandon native, and daughters, Annie, 6, and Emma, 9.For more information on the medical marijuana measure proposed for the 2018 South Dakota legislative ballot, visit newapproachsd.com or find New Approach South Dakota on Facebook.