Imagine sitting in your living room and watching one of your closest family members collapse and begin having terrorizing convulsions.  Standing over the person you love and seeing them suffer, your emotions tear at you in way that many people have never experienced.  Watching a loved one suffer without a solution is a terrible feeling, but watching someone you love suffer when you know there is a medicine that can help is enraging.  Epilepsy inflicts 2.8 million people in the United States alone and one out of every 26 people will develop epilepsy at some point in their lifetime. Studies have shown this epilepsy epidemic can be drastically reduced and even neutralized through the legalization of marijuana.  Many (removed an extra “y” from “many”) questions have been brought up of whether not the government is losing money by pursuing the so called “War on Drugs”.  Following the government’s issues on the medicinal side of the legalization of marijuana, scientists that research cannabis have also disproved some of the most villainized facts about cannabis.  The government should legalize the use of medical cannabis due to the highly beneficial medicinal properties of the plant such as epilepsy, chronic pain, anxiety, PTSD and the overall improvements it could bring to our country.

Per Joshua E. Wilk and his colleagues, 52% of veterans receive minimal adequate care (four to six visits within six months) after returning from a deployment due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Symptoms of PTSD include: nightmares, replaying of terrorizing events through an individual’s mind, flashbacks, and many more traumatizing symptoms.  According to Marcel O Bonn-Miller, cannabis use decreases the scores for an individual on a PTSD tests which means the lower the score, the less symptoms of PTSD have occurred.  This increase in use relates to these individuals consuming cannabis for them to be able to sleep in peace at night without waking up to a fearful nightmare.  Although nightmares and flashbacks are bad, the worst outcome from PTSD is death.  Arif Khan writes in his article that over a one year experiment there were 298 suicides and 770 suicide attempts throughout 168 VA centers across the country.  Of these 298 suicide related deaths, 44 of them were linked to severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Research has shown that THC also known as tetrahydrocannabinol, the active ingredient in marijuana, has shown great reduction in the amount of hyperarousal spasm in individuals with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Tetrahydrocannabinol, the compound that is the highest of concentration in cannabis; this is the compound that produces the psychoactive effects after consuming marijuana.  Cannabidiol, also known as CBD, is the highly medicinal part of the cannabis plant and is the most sought after compound throughout the entire plant.  The preferred ratio of CBD to THC is 18:1, this allows the patient to medicate their body but in a less mind altering state.  This ratio is provided for patients with cancer, severe pain, nausea, and other diseases.  CDB in comparison to an opiate based pill that the government prescribes for these same illnesses is not only more beneficial but it is also less addictive.  Marinol is an artificial form of THC in the form of a pill capsule that has been designed in a lab by researchers to mimic the effects of ingesting THC.  Does the pill provide more or less beneficial medicinal properties for the patients?  Doctors and researchers are divided on the data because, some of them believe the Marinol pill can handle the symptoms of the people who claim they need medicinal marijuana.  Other doctors, researchers and pro cannabis individuals claim that the pill is lacking some of the other cannabinoids (e.g. THC, THC-A, CBD) that the plant itself withholds.  Author, Fred Mogul, supports his information by incorporating links to doctor’s research on cannabis and the cannabinoids within the plant.  The cannabis plant contains upwards of 465 different compounds depending on the genetics of the plant and each of these compounds works on the human body in their own unique way.  

Big pharmacy wants to recreate these compounds and make their own versions of THC so they can sell them and record profit.  Since these compounds are still federally illegal the government still allows the pharmacies to sell opiates.  Opiate based pharmaceuticals are highly addictive in comparison (removed the word “rate”) to cannabis alone.  From 1997 to 2011 the use of opioids in America more than doubled for hydrocodone and the use of oxycodone increased by 500%.  Within these fourteen years, the mortality rate of opiates over this time span nearly quadrupled.  If the government were to legalize cannabis this could help to greatly reduce these horrific numbers in our country.  Join Together Staff’s “Opioid Addiction Being Treated With Medical Marijuana in Massachusetts” states that in Massachusetts, Dr. Gary Witman, performed a test on eighty individuals to see if medical marijuana would help them with their opioid addictions according to.  His results were simply amazing; over 75% of his eighty patients stopped using the opiates all together.  If this could be implemented across the country the numbers would tumble to more tolerable amounts of mortalities and addiction rates.  The downfall to this experiment is that some of the individuals that continued the opiates will now abuse both substances.  If a doctor had an ideal outcome from this type of treatment it would be to replace an addictive substance that can cause death with cannabis to help this individual gain their life back and eventually become drug free.

Cannabis is a great medicine in treating individuals that suffer from anxiety.  Anxiety is a lead cause of getting prescribed drugs such as Xanax, Klonopin, Valium, and others.  These drugs can consume an individual’s life because they are overpowering and can alter an individual’s mind to a state of dependence on these drugs.  The addiction level of these pills is extremely high and have really became a problem in our youth today.  Nearly 125,000 individuals visit the hospital every year due to complications and near death experiences with Xanax.  Many people get this prescribed to them due to anxiety or insomnia.  These two disorders can also be treated with cannabis.  For people with anxiety, consuming cannabis can help decrease their anxiety level and help them become more sociable.  This is due to the euphoric high that the marijuana induces on this individual by connecting cannabinoids to their brains receptors for short periods of time to block their anxiety raising thoughts.

Many people compare alcohol and marijuana in relation to the legalization status of the two because both substances have been prohibited by the United States at one point in time, but now alcohol is legal and cannabis is not.  In order to purchase alcohol in the United States you must be twenty-one years of age or older.  For the states that cannabis is legal in, whether it be recreational or medicinal you must also be twenty-one years of age or older.  If the age limit is set at this twenty-one, why does the government not legalize cannabis the same way they legalized alcohol after the prohibition era?  The government claims that the amount of adolescence that would begin to consume cannabis in the critical periods of their brains growth would drastically increase due to the amount of cannabis that would become available to them.  The government’s vision on this was proved wrong when the amount of adolescences that consumed cannabis after Colorado legalized marijuana recreationally dropped.  The percentage fell from about 20.8% in 2013-2014 to 18.3% in 2014-2015 according to Christopher Ingraham’s, “After legalization, teen marijuana use drops sharply in Colorado.”  Not only has this rate dropped in these two years but it has continued to drop at around the rate of 2% per year.  Cannabis is proved to be 112 times less toxic than alcohol according to Lisa Roughs, “Should Cannabis be Legalized? 10 Arguments in Favor of Legalization”, this alone should stand out to the government and the individuals who continue to consume alcohol.  Tobacco is estimated to kill around 200 million people in the year of 2025 if the rate of tobacco smokers continues the route it is currently moving, according to Prabhat Jha’s “Global Effects of Smoking, of Quitting, and of Taxing Tobacco.”  If cannabis was legal this could help reduce the amount of tobacco smokers in ‘the nation by allowing them to use an alternative to cigarettes.  Is this a complete fix? No.  People would continue to smoke tobacco and some would smoke both tobacco and cannabis.  Cannabis isn’t a 100% safe alternative to smoking, but it is safer and more beneficial to your body than cigarettes.

Many people argue that cannabis can slow down an individual’s thought process, motor skills, and decision making ability.  This statement can be true for non-daily users because they aren’t quite as immune to the effect that the cannabis is going to have on their mind and body.  Under the influence of cannabis, an individual’s motor skills do become impaired because of the euphoric state that the THC induces on the user.  This state of euphoria can cause certain people to space out, undergo periods of time without recognition, and develop short term memory loss.  In 2011, 32,367 were killed in fatality accidents, of these fatal accidents 31% of them included drivers under the influence of alcohol and 16% of them under the influence of marijuana.  The legal BAC (Blood Alcohol Content) is set at .08% in every state across the nation except for Arizona.  Arizona will allow the same amount of alcohol in the blood stream but an individual can still be arrested if their driving shows they are too impaired to be operating a motor vehicle.  The legal BAC is .08% but even at this legal limit an individual’s muscle coordination becomes weaker, perception becomes impaired, depth reception is lost, speed control is hard to keep stable, and many more negative side effects of alcohol become persistently more dangerous as the amount of alcohol increases.  On the opposite end of this point if an individual consumes to much marijuana their motor skills also become slower, they become tired, time is considerably hard to keep track of, mood changes, and many more side effects are present after the consumption of marijuana.  The amount of marijuana needed for a person to overdose is 1500 pounds to be consumed in 15 minutes or less considering the average person consumes 1 gram or less when they medicate and 1500 pounds comes out to over 60,000 grams.  

Chemotherapy is a very brutal and life changing experience for many cancer patients.  Often shortened to “Chemo,” this treatment consists of many different drugs and chemicals that travel through a person body to target the cancer cells that may have travelled to other areas of an individual’s body. This treatment causes nausea and vomiting in majority of patients that undergo chemotherapy.  Appetite is at a major loss for cancer patients that receive chemotherapy treatment because the nausea and vomiting is so bad that they can barely keep anything down and they lose the urge to try and eat.  This causes many people to become extremely weak and in some cases they slip into a worse state than they already were.  Medicinal marijuana can greatly improve marijuana in chemo patients because of the effects it has on the brain.  According to Lisa Rough’s “The Science of Munchies: Why Does Cannabis Stimulate Your Appetite?” the cannabinoid receptors in the cannabis “dance” or attach themselves to neurons in the human brains hypothalamus.  This part of the brain controls an individual’s sex arousal, hunger influence, and other areas of everyday life necessities such as awareness.  By attaching neurons to the cannabinoid receptors of a person’s brain this persuades them that they are hungrier than they may be.  This may cause problems for the habitual marijuana smoker but for chemotherapy patients it can greatly improve their everyday life after their brutal chemotherapy treatments.  

In comparison to real cannabis and its effects, Dronabinol (an artificial form of THC) had some of the same positive effect such as appetite increase, reduced nausea, and lower pain level but also had more negatives.  Artificial cannabinoids such as Dronabinol was also proven to cause serious dizziness, fainting, increased depression, and mental illness.  In comparison, the natural cannabis, and the compounds it withholds better medicinal purposes for the patient.

Medical marijuana can be a great aid in the lives of individuals who have contracted HIV (human immunodeficiency virus).  This disease seeks out and destroys the white blood cell count within the human body.  After someone’s white blood cell count drops this reduces their bodies ability to fight of other sicknesses and viruses all while trying to fight a never-ending battle with the HIV disease.  The weaker a person’s body become the more opportunistic infections begin to take their tole within the individual’s body.  Opportunistic infections are sicknesses and diseases that come with a lower white blood cell count because the human body cant fight them off without its first line of defense missing.  Pneumonia, meningitis, and cancers are some of the more relevant sicknesses that move in when the white blood cell count begins to fall.  Living with HIV is not a painless trek because this sickness causes the body to be so weak that with the slightest movement you can send waves of chronic pains throughout your entire body.  Peter McWilliams, in interviewee for a Leafly article, stated that “One of the best reliefs that my medicinal marijuana has given me since I have had HIV is the complete ability to relax.”  Upon conceiving HIV many patients begin to lose weight at a rate that is impossible for them to eat enough that they can maintain their weight due to the nausea and stomach sickness that the disease causes.  Once again medical marijuana can help these patients with their appetite and weight management in a very positive way because if a HIV patient can’t eat anything this is only going to allow their bodies to become weaker than they already are.

Multiple sclerosis is an extremely unique disease that can cause severe fatigue, numbness, blurred visions, and several other complicating symptoms.  With multiple sclerosis comes terrifying spasms that some individuals can suffer as frequently as every day and some of these tremors can be very painful due to the damaged tissues on the spinal cord of the patient.  A research conducting in the United Kingdom on 279 individuals with multiple sclerosis via the National Multiple Sclerosis Society that proved great improvement with the use of cannabis in these patients.  Of the 279 patients 144 were given real cannabis medicine that was to be taken orally, and the other 135 patients were given a placebo and the results were recorded.  Each of the 144 individuals that received the real cannabis medicine reported amazing results in the quality of sleep, their tremors weren’t quite as painful or as often, and spasms were reduced.  On the reverse side this experiment also determined some of the negatives that came with the experiment.  The placebo receiving patients received no changes in their symptoms whether they were positive or negative, but the patients that received that actual cannabis medicine noted that under the effect of the cannabis they had increased dizziness, dry mouth periods, and paranoia in certain locations of medication.  Throughout the experiment these benefits and side effects were both recorded and put on record but in the end the positives outweighed the negatives considering how minor the negatives were in comparison to how great the positives were.

In conclusion, marijuana has far more medicinal benefits for a list that continues to grow every single day.  I believe the government should perform more in depth research on cannabis itself but also the effects it has on the human body for sicknesses, diseases, and cancers.  Cannabis is a life changing medicine, and in some circumstances, it is saving people’s lives every day.  The number of medicinal positives it serves every day in comparison to certain man made prescriptions should be obvious to the government and the users of these drugs that they serve no positive purpose for themselves and their bodies.  Marijuana is equally addictive as caffeine according to the NIDA (National Institute of Drug Abuse) and is around a 9% addiction rate.  This is lower than tobacco, opiates, methamphetamines, and other illicit drugs.  Overall cannabis can impact every individual’s life in the country whether it be through personal use or the medicinal use of a family member.  Medical marijuana can change the way we help people with sickness and diseases throughout our country and even throughout the world. 

 