Should marijuana be a medical option?

Should marijuana be a medical option? To some, marijuana is the devils lettuce and to others is a sweet release from pain. Marijuana has been around for thousands and thousands of years and the earliest mentioning of it comes to us from China of the year 2727 BC. At the beginning of the 20th century cannabis was still legal in the United States, but it soon gained he label of poisonous and it started to be prohibited in the 1920s. One decade later, marijuana was being regulated in all of the states in America. In the 1990s, marijuana started to be legal again, but only for medicinal uses and only in certain states. Nowadays, there are 24 states which consider the use of medical marijuana to be legal and, on top of that, there are some Americans states that have also legalized marijuana recreationally, 4 in fact, Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington.  

Marijuana cannot cure you of any disease, but it can alleviate symptoms such as pain. There are many medical conditions where pain becomes an increasing issue and it is believed that marijuana can relieve it for the patients. Some of the conditions which can be treated with the help of cannabis include the flowing: Pain that is related to specific conditions (i.e. nerve pain) Headaches, migraines, HIV symptoms, cancer-related symptoms, seizures, nausea, vomiting, and multiple sclerosis.

Several research projects have been made on the topic and some of them revealed that patients who tried marijuana and were on placebo for  consecutive days (without knowing what dosage they received in any of the days) reported that they felt better while under the higher marijuana dosage and that they felt worst under the placebo.

Lester Grinspoon, MD once said: “I suspect that a day’s breathing in any city with poor air quality poses more of a threat than inhaling a day’s dose.”  

So with this much evidence you would think that marijuana would be legal for medicinal uses in all the states. But an article from the American Lung Foundation urges that marijuana is unhealthy and dangerous. They argued that 3-4 cannabis cigarettes a day are associated with the same evidence of acute and chronic bronchitis and the same degree of damage to the mucosa as 20 or more cigarettes a day.   They also argued that marijuana has the “Gateway” Effect, a new federal report concludes the younger children are when they first use marijuana, the more likely they are to use cocaine and heroine and become dependent on drugs as adults.

“Gateway” Effect, an alternative, simpler and more compelling explanation accounts for the pattern of drug use you see in this country, the people who are predisposed to use drugs and have the opportunity are more likely than others to use both marijuana and harder drugs. Marijuana typically comes first because it is more available.

Cannabis can lead to psychological dependence, but there is scant evidence that it carries a risk of true addiction. Unlike cigarette smokers most users do not take the drug on a daily basis, and usually abandon it in their twenties or thirties. Addictiveness of marijuana, craving for marijuana, decreased appetite, sleep difficulty, and weigh loss reliably changed across the smoking and abstinence phases. Aggression, anger, irritability, restlessness, and strange dreams increased significantly during one abstinence phase, but not the other.

I believe that if marijuana can be legalized for medicinal uses in all states that a lot of people could benefit greatly from is effects, and with every new generation marijuana will lose its infamy. And with every new generation we learn more about marijuana and if research continues we might find that marijuana can be used for much more than medical purposes, sadly I might not live long enough to see that happen worldwide.