Should Michigan Make Medical Marijuana Legal?

Recommend (4) Comments (1)

There is abundant scientific evidence that marijuana is a safe, effective medicine for some seriously ill Michigan residents suffering from debilitating diseases and conditions.

In 1999, the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine reported, “Nausea, appetite loss, pain, and anxiety are all afflictions of wasting, and all can be mitigated by marijuana.”

This year, the 124,000-member American College of Physicians urged reconsideration of medical marijuana's legal status, "given marijuana's proven efficacy at treating certain symptoms and its relatively low toxicity ... Evidence not only supports the use of medical marijuana in certain conditions, but also suggests numerous indications for cannabinoids."

In a review published in May 2003, the prestigious journal The Lancet Neurology stated that marijuana’s active components, called cannabinoids, "inhibit pain in virtually every experimental pain paradigm ... some people suggest that cannabis [marijuana] could be the ‘aspirin of the 21st century.’”

And in the past two years alone, three studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals demonstrating that marijuana is remarkably effective in treating neuropathic pain (pain caused by nerve damage) caused by many different conditions, including HIV/AIDS neuropathy, an excruciating condition for which there is no FDA-approved medication.

No fatal marijuana overdose has ever been documented in all of recorded history. The same cannot be said for the most routinely prescribed (or even over-the-counter) medications. For example, acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, causes approximately 480 overdose deaths per year due to acute liver failure.

The jury is not out on medical marijuana. To the contrary, the evidence keeps growing. Seriously ill Michiganders who use it on the recommendation of their doctors should be protected from arrest and jail. To do otherwise would not only be cruel; it would fly in the face of the medical evidence.