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posted by mrpg on Sunday April 08 2018, @11:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the king-of-pain dept.

Medical Marijuana's 'Catch-22': Limits On Research Hinders Patient Relief

By the time Ann Marie Owen, 61, turned to marijuana to treat her pain, she was struggling to walk and talk. She was also hallucinating. For four years, her doctor prescribed a wide range of opioids for transverse myelitis, a debilitating disease that caused pain, muscle weakness and paralysis. The drugs not only failed to ease her symptoms, they hooked her.

When her home state of New York legalized marijuana for the treatment of select medical ailments, Owens decided it was time to swap pills for pot. But her doctors refused to help. "Even though medical marijuana is legal, none of my doctors were willing to talk to me about it," she says. "They just kept telling me to take opioids."

Although 29 states have legalized marijuana to treat pain and other ailments, the growing number of Americans like Owen who use marijuana and the doctors who treat them are caught in the middle of a conflict in federal and state laws — a predicament that is only worsened by thin scientific data.

Because the federal government considers marijuana a Schedule 1 drug, research on marijuana or its active ingredients is highly restricted and even discouraged in some cases. Underscoring the federal government's position, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar recently pronounced that there was "no such thing as medical marijuana."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 08 2018, @07:43PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 08 2018, @07:43PM (#664046)

    You don't have to fuck up your lungs, get burn spots on your stuff, and support violent dealers. You can get a prescription for normal pills:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dronabinol [wikipedia.org]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabilone [wikipedia.org]

    If that won't do, then "medical" is a lie.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 08 2018, @08:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 08 2018, @08:58PM (#664060)

    There are hundreds of different chemicals in pot, and oral administration metabolizes differently than smoking, which goes quickly into the bloodstream. This is an apples and oranges comparison. The purified, standardized drugs may have their place; but we have a lot to learn about the synergies that take place with the whole plant. If it hadn't been illegal all this time, we'd probably know a lot more.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @03:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 09 2018, @03:39AM (#664176)

    Why would there be burn spots on my stuff and violent dealers? The budtender at the dispensary I go to is really friendly and helpful. There's not much in my garage besides the structure itself, so furniture has never been a problem. I don't allow smoke of any kind (tobacco/cannabis/herbal) inside my house.