Medical Mythology

My recent highly surreal conversations with Steve Schwartz (aka SeattleJew) about the reality of medical marijuana have really driven home how difficult the subject of medical marijuana can be, even for people with medical degrees. I see a lot of the same issues coming up in this response from Southern California THCF nurse Lanny Swerdlow to a previous column in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin:

Falsely claiming the 1999 study by the National Institute of Health opposes smoked marijuana, Sabet ignores the report's executive summary which concluded, "We acknowledge that there is no clear alternative for people suffering from chronic conditions that might be relieved by smoking marijuana, such as pain or AIDS wasting."

The Mayo Clinic does caution against smoking marijuana in an August 2006, but Sabet fails to report that the same article recognizes that marijuana provides effective relief for nausea, glaucoma, pain and multiple sclerosis.

Although it is true that the American Medical Association supports retaining marijuana in Schedule 1, the AMA recognizes the effectiveness of marijuana by calling for "the development of a smoke-free inhaled delivery system for marijuana."

Sabet's objection, like the Mayo Clinic's and the AMA's, seems to be not so much about marijuana as to smoking as the delivery system.

Marijuana can be applied as a balm and absorbed through the skin as is done by people with arthritis. The marijuana brownie is the classic example of ingestion through the digestive system. Available at every corner drugstore, marijuana tinctures were taken sublingually under the tongue as the preferred method of ingestion by your great-grandmother for insomnia, pain and a host of other ailments until marijuana became illegal in the 1930s.

Most notably, Sabet is silent on the use of a vaporizer delivery system.

Vaporizers heat marijuana to a temperature hot enough to cause marijuana's cannabinoid oils to evaporate, but not hot enough to cause the vegetative matter to ignite and burn, thereby providing a patient with all the therapeutic benefits of marijuana and none of the smoke.

The underlying fear that medical marijuana is the camel's nose under the tent of marijuana legalization permeates every word of Sabet's article. This is graphically demonstrated by his red herring that some people might abuse the medical access of marijuana. There is no demand for the prohibition of prescription pharmaceuticals even though people die from their abuse.

For reasons that I can't understand, the side-effects that could potentially occur from the act of smoking one's medicine are treated differently than other types of medicinal side-effects. If a 60-year-old person is dying of cancer, I don't understand why it's a concern that smoking marijuana could give them respiratory issues in 25 years. Taking whatever is necessary to survive the cancer should outweigh all other priorities and side effects should be judged upon their actual seriousness, not upon social stigmas or false associations with tobacco.

And of course, as the article mentions, tinctures, food-based consumptions, and vaporizers have made ingestion of the cannabinoids from the marijuana plant significantly safer. We're long past the time where medical marijuana should be written off because of the belief that something that is often smoked for enjoyment can't really be medicine.