Medicinal Marijuana Has Its Benefits

There are two 20 year olds dying of Lympho, or what falls under the "cancer" umbrella. One of the guys comes out of chemo and heads directly to the bathroom.

Let me take this oportunity to explain to you what chemo is for those of you who don't know. Most people see chemo as a medical thing that cancer people go through. In reality, it is a process where they pump radioactive elements into your blood stream to kill off the cancer cells. Radiocativity causes a number of symptoms: throwing up (too put it lightly. It's more like trying to shove the entire contents of your stomach out of your mouth as fast and as hard as possible), pain, constant aching, your hair falls out in chunks, and a tiredness that jumps on you like a starving wild cat looking for it's next meal.

So Back to our 20year olds. The bathroom gentleman spends the next 30 minutes puking, crying, and screaming because of how bad the puking truly is. In the end he will have a lasting memory of this time with a feeling of nausea that won't leave for the next 2 days, and if he's lucky he'll only pop one blood vessel in his eye this time.. He comes out like he just went 10 rounds in a boxing match and crawls into bed, wanting only to sleep and forget the pain for a while; hoping this is all worth it. He also won't eat for the next day to 2 days; seeing that food, the smell of food, the feel of food, the look of food all is just distasteful. The second 20 year old, walks out of chemo, strectches, and sits on the side of his bed and fills out his hospital meal order form. He takes some pain pills for the annoying dull pain, and then eagerly eats an energy bar that sits next to him. He sits back in his bed, draws, watches Tv, and eagerly awaits the dinner cart. What 20 year old, or 80 year old for that matter, would you want to be? That's right the second guy. What's the difference?

Twenty year old number 2 is on a steady regiment of medical marijuanna. He is allowed 3-8 marijuanna cigarettes a day. Could this really be that effective of a medicine? Kate Scannell, MD, Co-Director of the Kaiser-Permanente Northern California Ethics Department, said that she "repeatedly saw how marijuana could ameliorate a patient's debilitating fatigue, restore appetite, diminish pain, remedy nausea, cure vomiting and curtail down-to-the-bone weight loss." ( San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 16, 2003) That's great for the vomiting and the weight loss, but what about the pain associated with all of these horrible radiation therapies? There are many people who would be more than happy to loose weight, as long as there was no pain. Donald Abramns, In a medical study held in Cambridge, came to the conclusion that, "smoked cannabis was well tolerated and effectively relieved chronic neuropathic pain from HIV-associated sensory neuropathy. The findings are comparable to oral drugs used for chronic neuropathic pain." (Feb. 13, 2007 - Donald Abrams, MD).

There you have it, the pain and the nausea, two of the largest problems of radiation therapy such as Chemo, solved and virtually illiminated by the natural substance found in mother earth that we have deemed as the "evil gateway drug" Marijuanna. Keep in mind, chemo is not the only raidiation therapy we have in the medical world. In addition to that, marijuana has been shown to cause grand benefits in multiple diseases: AIDS, glaucoma, cancer, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, chronic pain, and certian cases of Asthma or COPD. This is a conclusion that was come to through a study of the effectiveness of marijuan by the Institute of Medicine. With so many good uses, why are people so against it?

The answewr is fear of change and stepping on their own dogma. The political people, the relegious sect, the law enfocememtn world, and the list goes on and on, have for so often touted the evils of "pot" that to go back on it now would be to say they were or are wrong. This would, in their opinion, create a snowball effect where "marijuanna would be legalized, then all the drugs that are out there would be legalized as well. If all drugs were legal, there would be mass anarchy, and every person would be in fear of their own life because the entire human race had gone bannanas." (Officcer Levy, Sherif's Department, 2008) This is the true belief and utter understanding of a sworn to lie and a strict disregard to what could be right and coorect, in order to save their own face. Therefore, they get heads of pharmecutical companies (people already being pain by the government), directors of Medicine Boards (also paid goivernemtn employees), and drug coucelors (reading from an apporoved script) to explain how bad marijunna is and to point out that all of the medical experiments, scientific research, is merely spun to say what they want it to say.

In the end, the politician spin doctors say that hard facts and the scientific method are a form of spin, which is the best and oldest debating technique in the book - If you're lying, say that the other person is lying by pointing out the things you're already doing. It's a debaters tool that has been used for centuries. Then they stand on their fount of ancient material, and we fight for what mother nature already provides for us rather than chemicals and radiation. In the end it all comes down to those 20 year olds. No matter the right and wrong, the good or the bad, I want to eagerly await the dinner delivery, rather than feeling like death is a better option than the spanish inquisition like torture of cancer treatment.