How Marijuana Legalization Will Benefit Medical Marijuana Patients

This November, California citizens will once again have the opportunity to legalize medical marijuana by voting for Proposition 19. While Prop 19 will have a positive financial impact on the state, as well as cannabis growers and dispensaries, the real winners will be actual medical marijuana patients.

Marijuana legalization will allow current and future medical marijuana patients who are 21 and over to smoke weed without feeling like criminals in their own homes. While much of America maintains a 1950's-era opinion of marijuana, patients who have been using marijuana know its benefits far outweigh those of narcotics, such as Vicodin or Percocect, when it comes to pain control; it's a concept that most healthy citizens will never fully understand. While patients are already using marijuana under Proposition 215, most feel like they aren't fully protected under this law.

It blows my mind how a marijuana high is looked down upon, yet tens of thousands of Americans are addicted to prescribed narcotics and alcohol, which leave them incapacitated for most of the day, incoherent at times, and just plain sick during or afterward. Here's what a marijuana patient experiences when smoking cannabis for pain control.

The pain relief is almost immediate. Depending of the specific strain of marijuana, the patient will feel something different each time. On average, after a couple of "hits", pain will literally turn from pain into a painless, almost soothing vibration. This effect hits in less than a minute, so the relief is almost instant compared to pain pills that start working within a half-hour to fourty-five minutes - a lifetime for someone in excruciating pain.

Along with pain relief comes the side-effects most people are familiar with. Depending on whether the user smoked an indica or sativa strain, the patient will either become sleepy or energetic and social. (Sativa strains are great for people suffering from general or social anxiety, while both indica and sativa strains help ease pain.) These are the effects that make it not okay to drive. Real medical marijuana patients will not drive while medicating. It's just common sense.

The high experienced from medical marijuana is short-lived. If you want, you could go from high as a kite, to completely normal in three hours. Some patients choose to re-medicate at this time, while others find that those few hours of relieve was all that was needed to combat pain or muscle strain.

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits of medical marijuana, is how marijuana doesn't cause intractable nausea like many prescription narcotic pain relievers currently on the market. Many pain patients would rather be in pain than experience extreme nausea, so they avoid pain killers all together.

Other marijuana facts:

- HIV Patients who smoke cannabis can reverse wasting syndrome and relieve nerve pain.

- The cannabinoids in marijuana have been shown to slow down the progression of breast and brain cancers. Cannabinoids kill off cancerous cells and leaves healthy cells intact.

- THC and cannabinoids help relieve muscle spasms in MS patients.

- In lab rats addicted to heroin and morphine, THC helps reduce, if not eliminate opiate addiction.

- Non-tobacco users who smoke medicinal marijuana do not have an increased risk of lung cancer and other typical tobacco-related conditions. Not only that, the THC in marijuana has been shown to reduce the size of cancerous lung tumors up to 50%, and keeps the cancer from metastasizing.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_cannabis