Medical Marijuana: Menace Or Medicine

2 Pages 518 Words

Marijuana: Medical Or Menace?


In this country we put a lot of faith and trust into our doctors. We trust them with our health, our personal information, and most importantly we trust them with our lives. So why is do we not let them make the decision to prescribe marijuana to people who are in most need of it? In this paper I will try to state all the facts from both sides and hopefully convince you that proposition 215, the legalization of medical marijuana is good for California.
Proposition 215 will allow seriously and terminally ill patients to legally use marijuana, if, and only if, they have the approval of a licensed physician. Marijuana is not a cure, but it can help cancer patients. Most have severe reactions to the disease and chemotherapy--commonly, severe nausea and vomiting. One in three patients discontinues treatment despite a 50% chance of improvement. When standard anti-nausea drugs fail, marijuana often eases patients' nausea and permits continued treatment. It can be either smoked or baked into foods. University doctors and researchers have found that marijuana is also effective in: lowering internal eye pressure associated with glaucoma, slowing the onset of blindness; reducing the pain of AIDS patients, and stimulating the appetites of those suffering malnutrition because of AIDS 'wasting syndrome'; and alleviating muscle spasticity and chronic pain due to multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and spinal cord injuries.
When one in five Americans will have cancer, and 20 million may develop glaucoma, shouldn't our government let physicians prescribe any medicine capable of relieving suffering? The federal government stopped supplying marijuana to patients in 1991. Now it tells patients to take Marinol, a synthetic substitute for marijuana that can cost $30,000 a year and is often less reliable and less effective. Marijuana is not magic, but often it is the only way to get relief. A Harvard University survey found...