What’s Wrong With “Medical Marijuana”?

This is the first post of a 3-part series on the science of medical marijuana.  Check out Part 2: Making Medicine From Marijuana, and Part 3: Medicines or Poisons?—Why Cannabinoids Can Both Help and Hurt You. Before modern medical science, most medicines were raw herbs or herbal concoctions of one sort or another. They sometimes helped patients, but those benefits weren’t very powerful by today’s standards, and they often had a lot of unpredictable or even dangerous side effects. That’s because all plants contain hundreds or thousands of different chemicals. If you eat or smoke the leaves of any plant, you are putting all those chemicals in your body, and the results can be unpredictable. Marijuana is no different. Still, there is growing public support for “medical marijuana,” based on anecdotal evidence (that is, from individual people’s personal experience) that the drug might be useful in treating various diseases, including PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), pain, and epilepsy.  Voters in 23 states have now passed laws allowing marijuana to be dispensed to patients, as long as they receive permission from a doctor. Why Doesn’t the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Approve “Medical Marijuana”? Turns out, there’s very little scientific evidence that smoking or eating marijuana is effective and safe for treating any medical issues. Scientific evidence would have to come from carefully controlled research studies. Since there’s no science to b...
Source: NIDA Drugs and Health Blog - Category: Addiction Authors: Source Type: blogs