Credit: www.thetegmentum.com
On Thursday the National Academy of Sciences released a comprehensive review of research on marijuana and concluded that marijuana does indeed have medical value.
The review concluded: “One of the therapeutic uses of cannabis and cannabinoids is to treat chronic pain in adults. The committee found evidence to support that patients who were treated with cannabis or cannabinoids were more likely to experience a significant reduction in pain symptoms. For adults with multiple sclerosis-related muscle spasms, there was substantial evidence that short-term use of certain “oral cannabinoids”—man-made, cannabinoid-based medications that are orally ingested—improved their reported symptoms. Furthermore, in adults with chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, there was conclusive evidence that certain oral cannabinoids were effective in preventing and treating those ailments.”
This is not the first time that the scientific community has made claims about marijuana as medicine.
The La Guardia report was commissioned by then-Mayor of New York Fiorello La Guardia in response to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, the Feds’ first attempt at controlling marijuana use in the general public. The report confirmed what La Guardia suspected, that the effects of marijuana did not […]
This will continue to be hampered as long as Federal law is not changed. Medical Marijuana generates a lot of cash, but banks won’t take it because they are regulated by the Feds. If you can’t deposit it, you can’t pay taxes, so you also end up violating the IRS code.
I note that this Alternet article failed altogether to report the negative side of the study it so lauds. While there do indeed appear to be medical benefits to marijuana, there are also negatives–e.g., substantial evidence of increased risk of schizophrenia and of incidence of bronchitis among users, as well as lower birth weight of babies from prenatal use by mothers, and so on. A much more complete and balanced treatment can be found here: http://www.businessinsider.com/new-national-academies-sciences-report-marijuana-cannabis-health-effects-2017-1 That article gives us another important takeaway totally missing from the Alternet piece: “’The policy has outpaced science, and it’s really too bad,’ Staci Gruber, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery program at McLean Hospital.” I am for the idea that we ought to be researching the heck out of marijuana before we start legalizing it willy-nilly, as many seem to be advocating right now, and laws ought to be changed to allow that. It seems that the National Academies report also supports this “research it first” idea much more than it does the “legalize now” polemic Alternet embraces.