Cannabis as medicine for real, anyone?

[MorelCabin]

I think pot has both its upsides and its downsides...you're right enjoytheride...it can be terrible for alot of people who don't know when enough is enough, and you shouldn't drive on it, just like you shouldn't drive under the influence of alcohol. I beleive that it could be very good for someone who needs it medicinally, and it does help alot of people sleep. I have family members who have become complete losers on the stuff, but they smoke it three or four times a day...
Myself, I can't stand the stuff. It stinks, it makes my brain mush, and it makes me very paranoid. My brother got me to try it for back pain a few years ago...haha...not sure what it did for the back, the the mind numbing experience was enough to tell me that I didn't want it again:>)
It is very good for different things though, like epilepsy, apperently...but after what it did to me I felt like I was going to have a seizure:>)

 

[FarmerChick]

No way it should be legalized. I agree with ETR---more harm than good will come of it and people being people, they drive and hurt others and themselves.

Labs need to study it and make a tincture or whatever and take the harmful qualities out of it and market it as a medicinal product.
Until that can be done properly, I have to say no way to putting it out on the market legal.

But to say, legalize pot and have it people...heck no!

If it helps you, fine, and you stay home and reap the benefits, then keep it right there! Don't legal it out on the streets for all the weirdos to have a legal right to kill others.

It is the same with alcohol. It is legal, it is out there and it is a killer on the road. DUIs don't mean anything to anyone with a good lawyer nowadays. Pot would be no different.

Next would be legalizing opium.....and all other hallucinagenic drugs. Nope, we have to have some control somewhere.

 

[Homesteadmom]

Smoking pot causes brain cell loss, lung damage, infertility & for men impotence problems(had a boyfriend once who had this side effect). To site a few of the side effects it causes. Ex BF who smoked it for over 20yrs(no problem he said) also ended up having a stroke about 5 yrs after we broke up. Yes the pot was a main reason to break up as i was a single mom working as a nurse & could not risk lossing my license over him if we got pulled over & he had it on him. Here they indict people for just having rolling papers in their vehicle. I know this one because my mom sat on a Grand Jury for a few mos & every tme a charge came up with just rolling papers or even tin foil in the vehicle they were indicted(my mom did not vote that way).
All that said for terminally ill patients who will not be getting behind the wheel of a vehicle let them have it to make them suffer less pain, it won't do any more damamge to their body than already done. But it needs to be used responsibly too. If there are tinctures that can be made from it to help with pain relief then by all means manufacture it & sell it.

Oh yes pot use also leads to theft & moving on to stronger drugs.

 

[shareneh]

I think that any medication abuse is wrong. I have relatives who are addicted to pain pills and will cheat, lie and steal to get them. They have even gone so far as to come and "visit" my sick mother taking all her pain meds with them when they left. She was devastated for their betrayal. Thank God she didn't need the pills anymore. But if she did....let's just say that head would have rolled.

I do believe there are different herbal remedies that can help people. The people that abuse them make it so much worse for the rest of us who don't.

Take cold medicine for instance. We haven't been able to buy good cold medicine for about three years because people use it to make meth around here. I feel so miserable when I have a cold that I don't want to travel to the pharmacy to ask and sign for it so I have been going without.

 

[FarmerChick]

you said it share

everyone and everything gets abuse level.
doesn't matter what it is....we need control of some things in this world. sad isn't it that pain pills etc. are addicting like so much other stuff in this world!

what to do, what to do....

 

[curly_kate]

I think that the problem with the 'war on drugs' is that it doesn't deal with the real problem: why people get addicted to drugs in the first place. It doesn't matter if drugs are made illegal, or somehow the drug itself is eliminated, people who are addicts will find something else to abuse (oxycontin, huffing, drinking mouthwash for alcohol, etc.). As with most things political, our elected officials like to go with the simplest solution to the problem, which is generally not the most effective solution. It boggles my mind how much of our money has been spent trying to keep drugs away from people, and it still hasn't worked.

 

[the simple life]

Strangely I never really hear about any drug arrests for weed around my area, or any chronic problem with that particular drug.
It seems I only hear about the harder drugs so I can either assume its not the drug of choice of the people in my area or law enforcement is more interested in catching the hard drug sellers.
It seems that everytime there is a drug bust in the surrounding towns its usually people in their mid thirties with names I cannot pronounce.

Like I said, I would not have a problem with it being available to the terminally ill, isn't that the least we can do for them?
But again, like I said who would monitor the sales and usage?
Karen has a good point, making it in a tincture may work.
I wonder if there is a way of it being extracted that will help their pain but not give recreational users the high they are looking for.

Around here we can get cold medicine at the regular stores like walmart, grocery stores etc. but you have to be over the age of 18 and they do card the young people.

 

[enjoy the ride]

There are so many people who find so many ways to exercise poor judgement. How can people with so much information about the results of taking "recreational" drugs do it anyway? It's easier to plug in a drug than to fix your life to increase your happiness. Many people expect that they should never be unhappy even if they do the stupidiest things. Chemical adjustment does give an immediate effect and so many people just do not look over that to think that it can't be maintained- that it leads to awful things- that you personally are not special and will not have the strength of character to stop later- that you have to prevent right at the start. Now is better than later.
I could only wish that their poor judgement would ruin only their lives but it degrades everyone else's life all around them. Unfortunately it leads to child neglect, spreading of diseases, drains on all aspects of social supports, deaths to the innocent. Putting something that decreases the ability to think well into people who by definition don't exercise good judgement anyway is a recipe for disaster- all sefl-inflicted. It's not usually til they personally face terminal illness that they get scared into changing- only with the financial support of assistance to be paid by others who didn't do this. When reformed, they all want to become drug counselors. Yeah right- just what the world needs.
No judgement at all....................

 

[sylvie]

I don't have an opinion one way or another on medical marijuana. Too many terminal patients don't get the option of deciding how they want to spend their last days. If they want the medical marijuana, let them have it.

Frankly, I think too much has been done to this plant in labs in order to increase it's potency. I remember reading about some very dangerous chemical used to make it stronger and that the seed needed to planted out over several plant generations to remove enough of the chemical to not poison people. Who knows what else has been done to the existing supply. And then there is genetic engineering. I'm not so sure that it should be legalized for the general public for these reasons.

 

[farmerlor]

Personally, I think we should put farmers to work growing it, put manufacturers to work processing and packaging it and then tax the %$!+ out of it! Take it out of the criminals hands, stop using my tax dollars to incarcerate people who aren't doing anymore harm than the guy drinking at the bar and help people like my dad who lost so much weight from not being able to keep food down that he was a human skeleton. Every year the pharmaceutical companies and alcohol and tobacco lobbyists get more and more and more and more money while they lobby to keep grass illegal. In the meantime the drug companies develop more and more and more harmful drugs for diseases that we didn't even know we had until they advertise them on TV......Okay, I'm sorry but I feel rather strongly about this and no, I don't smoke grass, tried it as a kid and it made me into a cabbage so I haven't tried it since.