Should Medical Marijuana be legal?
By: Abbie Vincent
Tags: Marijuana

Many people around the world are suffering from disease, sickness, and pain. Of these people, many have not been able to find a treatment that helps them. Medical marijuana is one of the ways in which some of these people can find relief. However, there is limited access to the drug because of the legalization problems in America.

An example of someone who could benefit from medical marijuana is Charlotte. Every since she was three months old, she has had seizures that progressively got worse. She would have around 300 grand mal seizures a week. It was getting to the point where she couldn’t talk, walk, or eat by herself. Doctors soon concluded that she had Dravet Syndrome which is also known as Severe Myoclonic Epilepsy of Infancy. When she reached the age of five he parents had almost lost all hope when the hospitals told them they couldn’t do anything else for their daughter. Around that same time Charlotte’s father saw a video of a boy who had the same problem as his daughter and saw that he was treated with cannabis and it was successful. Finding doctors to sign off on the marijuana treatment for Charlotte was hard because of her age along with the legalization problems but they finally found two doctors that would treat her; Dr Margaret Gedde and Alan Shackelford who have both had experience with marijuana in their background. After obtaining the marijuana from a dispensary in Colorado they retrieved the oil from the cannabis and started her treatment. The effects almost immediately took place. Charlotte did not seize for 7 days straight. The marijuana treatment had been a huge success for Charlotte as her seizures occurred less and less. Charlotte now only receives a dose of oil twice a day in her food and the seizure only come two or three times a month, most happen during her sleep. (Young 2013)

I think Marijuana should be legalized for medical use, but the steps to legalizing haven’t been wise. I think the FDA and the federal government should play a bigger regulatory role in its legalization. If the steps to legalizing marijuana had been regulated, it could’ve helped Charlotte sooner and maybe some of the problems she struggles with physically and mentally now could’ve been avoided had this been an option earlier. Still the drug has not fully been researched and there could potentially still be some long term effects that Charlotte has to deal with but this trail run could save lots of people who are dealing with the same problems as her.

The use of medical Marijuana has been a big controversial topic in recent years because of the recent findings on the drug. The drug has been proven in the limited research that its had, that it can help nausea and vomiting during chemotherapy, pain, and seizures. The problem is that right now it is not legalized by the FDA so the research and the use of medical marijuana is not legal so it cannot prescribed by doctors. The process of getting marijuana is through a dispensary instead of a pharmacist which can be a legal problem as well.

While this drug has been found very successful in the ways that it can help with people who can’t use other drugs there are steps that need to be taken in order for it to be legalized properly so that people who really need marijuana are the ones getting it and that people are also getting the right amounts of marijuana so there is not a possibility for addiction. However, since marijuana is known as an addictive drug, it has been proven difficult to find a balance between how much and how often should be given to a patient. If the FDA were to legalize one of their responsibilities should be to observe the pros and cons for the drug and find the appropriate amount that should be allotted if legalized to patients so there is not a high rate for addiction.

Since this is such a controversial topic, many people have found platforms where they can voice their opinions on these controversial issues such as the internet.

While reading about my topic, I found many different opinions. Scott Adams commented online and said,

“I like that you talked about how cannabis could be used to eventually replace anti-inflammatories. I have been looking for ways to deal with arthritis pain. It would be nice to use something besides opioids for inflammation because it would be less addictive.”

Another comment by Freddie Arvidsson said,

“The medicine that they continually use is making things worse, because it can ruin a person’s intestine and can worsen internal inflammation. Study of Marijuana as an alternative is not a joke. It can help change our society and our industry.”

This is important because if the drug is helping people more than what they are already taking and it has less side effects then what are we waiting for? Both of these people think that medical Marijuana is a good idea because it can help with pains that other drugs can’t. On the other side, Dr. Daniel Clauw says,

“We are learning that the higher the dose of opioids people are taking, the higher the risk of death from overdose. This magnitude of reduction in our study [owing to medical marijuana] is significant enough to affect an individual’s risk of accidental death from overdose.”

There are a lot of people who believe that medical marijuana can be used for good and bad, but whether it becomes legal to use in hospitals or for medical reasons or not is something that we we continue discuss because it is a topic that people feel strongly about.

In the story I mentioned earlier, none of the medication that the doctors were giving Charlotte were working, because of this her parents were ready to say their goodbyes to their daughter. They had tried everything but marijuana. At first Charlotte’s mother did not want to try marijuana because it seems scary putting your child on a drug that could become addictive, but at this point it was their last option. It’s as if she was holding her child over a cliff and hoping she wouldn’t drop her. After the success from the medicine working Charlotte’s father said,

“I literally see Charlotte’s brain making connections that haven’t been made in years…My thought now is, why were we the ones that had to go out and find this cure? This natural cure? How come a doctor didn’t know about this? How come they didn’t make me aware of this?”(Young 2013).

After the treatment Charlotte had with the marijuana, her dad was both grateful that it had worked but also frustrated because they had to seek out the treatment themselves instead of the doctors knowing about what to do because of the legalization situation.

There are many ways to go about the problem of legalizing marijuana it’s just the fact of actually figuring out which way to legalize it and come up with rules and laws so that certain problems with drugs can be avoidable. There is a lot more going on behind the scenes of legalizing marijuana because it is a schedule 1 drug and rearranging it would cause political problems. We also have to remember that marijuana is still not researched as much as other opioids so when it is legalized it should be put into research first so that more people are benefited from marijuana then not.

If legalized I feel it needs to be taken advantage of and fully researched for the people who can benefit from it. The FDA needs to become involved if the drug is legalized so that precautions could be taken so the drug is not abused and for people who use don’t become addicted or dependent on the drug. Many doctors also believe strongly that there should be money put into researching this drug. Doctors are always looking for new ways to improve medication and methods of healing patients. It’s a doctors job to help people so why wouldn’t we do everything possible to do that?

Like I mentioned earlier marijuana is the least addictive of the schedule 1 drugs but that does not mean it is not addictive. Marijuana is an abused substance and can cause difficulty when you don’t need the drug anymore. Some people become dependent on the drug and this is where addiction takes place, some don’t even know that they are addicted to it until they don’t have it anymore. This poses the question, if patients are using medical marijuana will they become dependent on the drug?

For the legalization of marijuana to take place there are some rules and boundaries that need to happen in order for it to be more effective than non-beneficial. Medical Marijuana can be the answer to many conditions, such as, nausea, vomiting, pain, and seizures. That is only somewhat scratching the surface. We have such limited information about this drug because it is not legal under the federal law. This can be good because we know that so far it has helped a lot of people with conditions that couldn’t be treated otherwise, and bad because there is still a lot of information that we can get from research that could be used to help other conditions that we don’t know how to help yet.