Marijuana's wide-ranging medical applications

Alternet has a great article up today on "mental marijuana". Now that the medical applications for the herb are beginning to gain some acceptance among medical providers treating cancer and other "wasting" illnesses, it's only natural that the psychiatric practitioners would also want to scruntinize the medical benefits of the herb for their own work.

Our government fights this tooth and nail saying there is no scientific basis to prove the new theories that cannabis can also afford relief to those who suffer from psychiatric disorders including depression and bipolar disorders. Of course this ignores the fact that most modern medicine breakthroughs were initially based on anecdotal evidence.

For example, four years ago, the Washington Medical Quality Assurance Commission was petitioned to add mental illness to its list of approved uses of medical marijuana. The commission denied the request. It argued that there was no lock-solid scientific evidence that weed worked for mental illness. The odd thing is that it had approved pot for treatment of Alzheimer's, Krohn's disease, chronic pain, and wasting syndrome based upon - you guessed it - anecdotal evidence.

The feds would like to suppress the research of course and quote reports out of context to make their case, conveniently ignoring any data that supports the use of the herb.

As proof, the DEA touts the following from a 1999 scientific report: It states that " . . . there is little future in smoked marijuana as a medically approved medication."

The report was prepared by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), part of the independent National Academies of Science. Interestingly, the feds lifted that quote from deep in the report. But perhaps more telling is that only one sentence later, the report says: "The personal medical use of smoked marijuana, 'regardless of whether or not it is approved' to treat certain symptoms is reason enough to advocate clinical trials to assess the degree to which the symptoms or course of diseases are affected."

The IOM backed that up with several strong recommendations that medical marijuana should be thoroughly studied -- you know, like scientists study every other treatment under the sun.

Philip Dawdy, looking through the microscope of personal experience, sums the problem up well and has the last word on the argument that the side effects of this plant preclude it's use as a medicine.

So let's assume that weed works for a minority of the mentally ill. Doctors usually come back with the assertion that pot has too many side effects, such as respiratory ailments, to even consider its use. I wonder what universe they live in. Long-term use of psych meds themselves carries a host of side effects, which have been poorly evaluated in long-term studies ; kidney and liver damage chief among them, along with nausea, weight gain, sexual dysfunction, sleep interference, and hair loss. And they talk about the side effects of marijuana -- By comparison, pot's side effects are almost minimal. So, I'll take that medical marijuana any day -- I'd simply like to do it legally.

And so, I believe, would most of us if given a choice.