Marihuana should be banned. This whole story is one sided. While it seemingly offers hope for pain relief, it actually brings misery with that false hope. It is well-known scientifically that the same “active” substance is available from one’s own doctor in chemical form by prescription. Thus, there can be no excuse for raising or smoking marihuana at all. Reality is that drugs including marihuana still cause serious problems and legalizing them even for postulated fleeting medical benefits is contraindicated. First, people don’t understand that marihuana brings crime. The Washington Post documented this recently (as a Google search of “Medical marijuana a frequent target for criminals” will establish). Second, marihuana smoke just like tobacco smoke increases risks of cancer not only to the user (PubMed reference 19449825), but likely to those around them. Third now that the healthcare bill has passed, the taxpayer should demand an end to all smoking (tobacco and marihuana) permanently. Moreover, the government should forbid healthcare to those that partake in health adverse activities after the signing date (or year’s end) whatever their invalid reasons for doing so. Healthcare simply must not be provided to those that can be documented through testing to put their own health at adverse risk when it is now the taxpayers that must now bear the risk associated with this consequence.

Of course they’re dragging their feet. It opens the door to legalization, gives profit to entities that aren’t huge pharmaceutical conglomerates, and the medical use of MJ will effectively treat enough ills that the MD community is running scared (yes, DocJohn…be real rather than rabidly prejudicial)…not to mention the fear the law enforcement community has of being out of work…

The Only reason it brings violence in very few cases is because of the money issue, Cannabis is worth a lot of money. Thats how the Mexican cartel can have to many guns and ammo. Its because 90% of there money comes from cannabis. Because its illegal, Because there is a market for it.

Lets face it This is a plant there are no chemist labs involved its simply a seed in some dirt its nature, all natural. Now how are you going to ban nature ? you cant stop nature and you will wast all the tax payers money trying to enforce this law that was based on all lies from the very beginning.

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No evidence that cannibis has any negative effects, huh. Well check out this (Google PubMed, the National Library of Science primary literature repository, then type 19449825 into the search line. The title of this 2009 paper is “Evaluation of the DNA damaging potential of cannabis cigarette smoke by the determination of acetaldehyde derived N2-ethyl-2’-deoxyguanosine adducts.” In other words smoking marihuana causes lung cancer. Specifically the author concludes, “ implying that the consumption of cannabis cigarettes may be detrimental to human health with the possibility to initiate cancer development.” But if that isn’t enough, again at PubMed type “cannabis, health risks” in the search line (without the quotes) and find 997 papers on the subject. Marihuana is not harmless and the taxpayers should NOT fund healthcare in those testing positive for use of it or any illegal substance!

Hey Doc John, maybe if you tried a little marijuana you will become enlightened,and get off your high horse

Marijuana is not the end all be all of medical drugs that can cure every ailment and brighten any day. Also it is not a demon weed sent to convert our righteous youth to corrupt criminals. Like almost everything else in this world, reality lies in between.

It would be a lie to say that no crime has been committed due to marijuana, but it also would be false to automatically warrant marijuana as a crime inducing evil. DocJohn, while I sympathize with your point of view and am sure you probably correct on many points, unfortunately your exact same argument can be made for any substance, medical or otherwise, used in excess. Healthy taxpayers will be paying for people who drink too much, smoke too much, text too much (carpal tunnel and such), watch too much TV, eat too much, take too much Xanax, even exercise too much.

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Hemp oil has been found to cure cancer and I suspect the Pharma giants have know this for awhile.Docj,please calm down.The medical benefits of Cannabis FAR outweigh these bogus lung cancer reports,where they were probably smoking some Mexican ditchweed coated with Paraquat.You’re seriously willing to deny some quadraplegic guy with chronic pain in the parts of his body that he can feel his medicine?It’s called compassion.

Marijuana is not a drug, it’s a plant.

Thank you Uh… What? for being a reasonable thinker. I agree 100% with what you say.

DocJohn: I see your point of view, but I agree with coolslayer that the medical marijuana act is a compassionate act. It is called “Lynn and Erin compassionate use Act” for a reason. I wouldn’t think it’d be fun if I had cancer and couldn’t eat because I was always sick. If you’re not sick, then don’t worry so much about medical marijuana. This isn’t a debate on legalizing it, just a debate on whether or not the state should hurry up and relieve patients of their pain.

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The responders want to portray this issue as a compassionate argument that bears action simply for that reason. At one point this may have been the case. But today this is simply no longer correct and has become a scientifically and medically invalid argument. Any remaining argument now is only about legalizing an otherwise illegal drug. Two points make this point very clear.

First, a just published 2010 study discovered that a oromucosal spray of “THC:CBD extract is an efficacious adjunctive treatment for cancer-related pain in patients who are not achieving an adequate analgesic response to opioids” (reference follows). There is no longer any justification whatsoever for smoking the plant to relieve one’s pain. Now compassion comes in a oromucosal spray. Doctors can prescribe this material directly and simultaneously eliminate known health risks to the patient or those around the patient from cancer causing marihuana smoke. For this landmark research by Johnson (J Pain Symptom Manage. 2010 Feb;39(2):167-79) goto Google, type PubMed, go there, then type at the PubMed search line this number: 19896326. There you can read or access the publication directly.

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If your mind is more open than your comments indicate,you should watch the documentary,“Grass:The History of Marijuana”.
You seem to have no idea why marijuana is illegal.
Remember,just because something is “legal” or not,does not make it “good” or “bad”.Morals cannot be legislated.

Regarding Zach Gould’s March 8 column, I would like to comment that the drug war is largely a war on marijuana smokers. In 2008, there were 847,863 marijuana arrests in the U.S., almost 90 percent for simple possession.
At a time when state and local governments are laying off police, firefighters and teachers, this country continues to spend enormous public resources criminalizing Americans who prefer marijuana to martinis.The end result of this ongoing culture war is not necessarily lower rates of use. The U.S. has higher rates of marijuana use than the Netherlands, where marijuana is legally available. An admitted former pot smoker, President Obama has thus far maintained the prohibition status quo rather than pursue real change. Would Barack Obama be in the White House right now if he had been convicted of a marijuana offense in his youth? Decriminalization is a long overdue step in the right direction. Taxing and regulating marijuana would render the drug war obsolete. As long as marijuana distribution is controlled by organized crime, consumers will continue to come into contact with sellers of hard drugs like meth and heroin.This “gateway” is a direct result of marijuana prohibition. Students who want to reform marijuana laws should contact Students for Sensible Drug Policy at SchoolsNotPrisons.com.

“Prohibition of any kind doesn’t work, and that is because prohibition is a regulation of morality. It isn’t finding justice, saving money or even keeping people from hurting themselves. Prohibition is the censorship of morality and any government body cannot be successful in that pursuit. The Temperance Movement was a religious movement to drive out the evils of America. At the time that evil was alcohol — people weren’t just opposed to alcohol but also to apples — which were almost exclusively grown to make alcohol. People started taking axes to apple trees all over the country and a campaign was waged against the “devil’s fruit.” Luckily the war against apples was never taken as far as the war against marijuana.
Dr. Leslie Iversen has published a new book titled The Science of Marijuana. Dr. Iversen, from Oxford University’s department of pharmacology, said in his book, “Cannabis is a safer drug than aspirin and can be used long term without serious side effects.”
In his book he said he found that many of the “myths” that surround marijuana use — such as links to mental illness or infertility and extreme addictiveness — are not scientifically supported. In fact, Iversen found cannabis was far less toxic than other drugs like heroin, tobacco, cocaine and even alcohol. Iversen writes, “By any standard, THC must be considered a very safe drug both acutely and on long-term exposure.”
He also found that “stoned” drivers posed less of a danger than drunk ones. Iversen said the side effects of cannabis are as follows, “cannabis does not cause structural damage to the brains of animals as some reports had claimed, nor is there evidence of long-term damage to the human brain or other, than slight residual impairments in cognitive function after drug use is stopped.” He also said the notion that long-term cannabis use is harmful should finally be put to rest.
Cannabis itself does not appear to cause cancer and poses almost no threat of mortality. Even compared with nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory compounds, otherwise known as aspirin — which reportedly kills upwards of 16,000 people annually according to the American Journal of Gastroenterology — marijuana kills zero annually — according to the Department of Justice.
Iversen is a member of the prestigious Royal Society, or the UK’s national academy of science, and his book is more than certainly going to force the British government to reconsider the legal classification of cannabis.
Most people don’t know how much that fight really costs America. The 2008 FBI Uniform Crime Report stated that 44 percent of all funding for the war on drugs is devoted to possession of marijuana and 6 percent is devoted to cannabis cultivation and sale. The total cost of the war on drugs for 2008 was $13.7 billion, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The current request for funding the war on drugs for this fiscal year has increased by 3.4 percent, or $459 million. So about half of all funding for the war on drugs, or about $6.85 billion, increases every year and is devoted to stopping marijuana possession, cultivation and sale.
In contrast the Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman has led a group of 500 economists from Cornell, Stanford, and Yale in a combined effort of calculation. They have estimated that legalization of marijuana would generate about $6.2 billion a year in revenue even in the current economic recession.
Richard Nixon started the war on drugs. He commissioned a report on the dangers of cannabis to give scientific data in support of making marijuana illegal. This report was called the “The National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse.” The commission, which was published March 22, 1972, concluded, “Neither the marihuana user nor the drug itself can be said to constitute a danger to public safety.” The commission’s official recommendation was that the possession of marijuana for personal use should no longer be considered an offense and that distribution in small amounts should no longer be considered illegal. Even though Nixon had commissioned the report, the president and Congress completely ignored the report.
Later, voice recordings came out of Nixon talking with former Gov. Raymond Shafer of Pennsylvania, who chaired the 1972 marijuana study. The recordings indicate that the president tried to “convince” the governor to reject the commission’s findings, saying, “You’re enough of a pro to know that for you to come out with something that would run counter to what Congress feels … and what we’re planning to do would make your commission just look bad as hell.” Nixon in other conversations had linked cannabis to the downfall of society.
The total cost of cannabis, staying classified as illegal, is increasing annually. So why have we decided to spend so much time and money on a plant? The more you start to research the prohibition of pot the less things make sense, that is, until you look at other things that have faced prohibition in America. Alcohol was drunk in the form of hard apple cider in early colonial times because the fermentation made it safer to drink than potentially dangerous well water. Cider was consumed not just in the afternoon but also with breakfast. In early America, there wasn’t much that was more American than a pint of hard cider. But through the process of prohibition of alcohol we see why marijuana is illegal. Because someone decided it should be, and a few politicians have made careers of attacking this “threat.” Like Nixon and those after him, when evidence surfaced that cannabis use has no real negative effects they spent money to fight it. We are now using an extensive amount of our tax dollars on a war to fight a new “devil’s fruit,” in a war that doesn’t make much more sense than one against apples.”

Smoking virtually anything including marihuana causes lung and related cancers either directly or indirectly to those around them! This whole marihuana legalization issue is no longer about compassion, because compassionate use can be achieved now (2010, see above comments) by an oromucosal spray using medically prescribed extract. This issue is NOW only about producing, selling, and using this plant product solely for the purpose of getting high regardless of whether that is through legal or illegal supplies. Comments about Nixon’s contrived health issues are no longer relevant thirty years later; what is relevant is growing evidence of real harm from smoking and from the use of marihuana. It’s use simply to get high not only establishes its effects on brain, but supports growing evidence of a significant risk of psychotic consequences maybe not immediately, but increasingly evidence suggests assuredly. Given that treatment of mental illness has questionable success, not to speak of being very costly for to achieve that questionable gain, smoking this substance or any substance presents a human health risk issue. Smoking marihuana should be prohibited, if not to protect the user from this growing evidence of potential cancer and mental health risk, then to reduce spiraling health costs for those being taxed directly or indirectly to provide healthcare for those that purposely choose to abuse their bodies and thus abuse this newly enacted healthcare right.

Simply put no one any longer has the right to abuse their bodies with drugs (legal or illegal) and expect their healthcare to be paid by the public at the very time they can be shown to be abusing those drugs. So abusers need to realize they will be on their own without healthcare if they choose to pursue this abuse, regardless of whether it is legal or illegal.

DocJohn, there are a lot of medical cannabis users who recognize the negative health consequences of inhaling combusted plant matter into the human lungs. This is why many patients have turned to edible cannabis products as well as newer technology in the form of “Vaporizers”. You would do well to study these alternative forms of medical marijuana delivery as they do NOT have the negative health consequences that smoking does.

You are not educated on the subject if you are only focusing on people that are smoking. Any form of synthetic THC or manufactured product is not what nature intended and I am sure we will be hearing about negative health consequences of these new (and quite radical) therapies at some point in the future too. There simply has not been enough time to know, whereas we KNOW that humanity has been using cannabis safely for thousands of years. This is WELL documented with many ancient examples.

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Taoseno:

Did you really read what I wrote not just immediately above your comment, but further up in this post? I was saying what you are saying (not alot of difference between oromucosal spray and vaporizers is there?). I was trying to draw attention to the long term side effects issue from any use of MJ.

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DocJohn, your arguments simply have no merit. Just watch 30 minutes of television and you will see a myriad of artificially created drugs that are quite toxic and exhibit a large number of side effects, pushed and marketed to the public, with sparkling colors and cool logos. Who are kidding?

Marijuana is simply NOT TOXIC to the human body, not one case of cancer or one overdose has ever been reported. What say you about the liver’s reaction to this plant compared to the drugs people are ENCOURAGED to use.

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hey john, did you know that 40,000 people die every year from prescription abuse? From drugs that enlightened doctors like you prescribed? Tell me, what about them? It’s nice you’re spending so much time railing against a drug that in it’s million year existence hasn’t killed a single soul, that you have forgotten that doctors suggest people take drugs that kill people on a daily basis.

Please get off your high horse.

I’ve personally met people that still believe marijuana is a Communist plot to take over america. What a bunch of delusional hillbillys. What will the Communists do? Make pot socialized like healthcare!!!?? hahaha