Does Marijuana have Medical Value?

Healing smoke has thousands of years of tradition behind it

Certain aboriginal groups in the "new world" have been using smoking as a delivery mechanism for medicinal compounds for a very long time, and have done so effectively. Some medicines that have been smoked are even used specifically to fight ailments of the lungs -- such as mullein to treat heavy, mucus filled coughs (the mullein smoke breaks up the mucus and facilitates its removal from the body). While it is true that irritation in the throat or lungs is not an uncommon side effect among people who smoke, the benefits in many cases far outweigh the harms.

Until recently, the inhalation of smoke was the only effective means of getting active compounds to the lungs; certain technological advances have provided us with other methods of late, such as aerosol sprays, some of which have proven to have their own contraindications and side effects. Strict use of aerosols, in any case, makes users dependent upon an industrial complex to provide them with those products, which of course also requires that they are deemed worthy of receiving them: the fact is that not everybody is equally able to make use of these advances, and their ability to do so is dependent on some external force deeming them worthy of receiving the benefit.

Whether there is, in fact, relative benefit is also important to consider: while many cannabis users prefer vaporization because it results in less throat irritation, others find that the high is different, and less desirable. The same is true to a much greater extent with the pill forms: by and large they just don't have the same effect, and aren't as effective treatments as smoking. If studies are done using aerosols, the control group will be with a placebo, at best an "active placebo," not with smoking, and thus no data will be generated as to whether the new method is, in fact, a better treatment than smoking. It may well not be.

In any case, ingesting smoke IS an effective treatment for a wide variety of conditions , and the extreme anti-smoking positions of "Western" medicine largely have to do with the historical context of the flagrant overuse of low quality tobacco presenting a very skewed perception of the effects of smoking. We found out that chain smoking low quality, chemical treated tobacco over the course of decades is a fundamentally bad idea, and we inferred from this that ingesting any kind of smoke in any amount over any time scale is always incredibly harmful and should be avoided at all costs. This is untrue.

People who have conditions that cannabis is effective at treating (which, by the way, includes "anyone who menstruates" and "anyone who runs or stretches and experiences joint pain") do not have to use expensive, oil -dependent, industrial complex-tied, big government /big pharma approved methods of ingestion: they have a perfectly simple, effective, and relatively safe means of ingestion at their disposal already. It's called smoking, and there are certain ways in which its harms can be mitigated (such as by use of a bong and avoiding sharing if you're sick).