Medical marijuana use and national drug policy implications

Medical Marijuana Use and the National Drug Policy

It is clear that the marijuana plant covers numerous elements that may prove prized when it comes to treating a variety of symptoms illnesses or, leading numerous individuals to argue that it should be made legally obtainable for medical determinations. The states of Colorado and Washington in the United Sates have legalized marijuana for fun use. However, there is a quantity of other states which have legalized basic marijuana for "medical" utilization. Research shows that even more states are passing laws that permitting individuals to start practicing medical marijuana. Therefore, if an individual lives in a state where medical marijuana is permitted and their physician trusts that it would benefit, they will get what is called a "marijuana card." With that said, this paper will discuss medical marijuana use and the national drug policy.

When it comes to national policy, twenty-three states and the District of Columbia have passed medical marijuana laws permitting the production and use of medical marijuana for patients that qualify under state law. However, the medical use of marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and patients in the remaining states are without any legal access at all. Even in states where medical marijuana laws exist, providers and patients are vulnerable to being arrested and interference from federal law execution. Marijuana exclusion has also frustrated research inside the United States in order to expose the best and most real uses for marijuana as a medicine, making efforts to improve medical marijuana laws mainly difficult.

Even as Legislature has been able to make something happen on medical marijuana, those that are lawmakers are able to stay troubled in regards to full authorization. However, a separate adjustment to the expenditure package, attached on at the request of anti-marijuana crusader Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), will risk the justification of leisure pot in Washington, D.C., which electorates accepted last month (Marijuana Resource Center: State Laws Related to Marijuana, 2013).

However, what is recognized as the Drug Policy Alliance is dedicated to increasing the amount of states with medical marijuana laws, improving and supporting existing state medical marijuana programs, guarding medical marijuana patients, and finishing the federal prohibition on medical marijuana so that all patients inside the United States have safe admission to quality medicine and research into marijuana's medicinal benefits can move onward.

When it comes to the pros and cons of the laws, according to Jeffrey A. Miron, PhD, a visiting Professor of Economics at Harvard University, made the point in a June 6, 2003 editorial in the San Francisco Journal: "Medical marijuana legalization laws have the prospective of crippling general marijuana implementation (Drug Policy: Marijuana, 2014). The argument is that these laws have an enormous impact for the reason that there are so many circumstances for which a person can utilize marijuana as medicine. Furthermore, the feds recognize that (permitting medical marijuana) would cause problems."

When it comes to the cons according to the American Journal of Public Health, quoting a May 2004 investigation by Craig Reinarman, PhD, et al., which made a comparison among the cannabis (hashish and marijuana) habits of those that are users in San Francisco and Amsterdam "in order to test the premise that punishment for cannabis use deters use and thus benefits public health," specified: We discovered no evidence to support assertions that criminalization decreases use or that decriminalization increases use." (State Medical Marijuana Laws, 2014) A bringing more support to the argument, a June 1997 lawmaking/policy examination by the RAND Company titled "Drug Warriors and Policy Reformers: The Debate Over Medical Marijuana," printed in the RAND Drug Policy Research Center Newsletter, made the point: "The medical use of marijuana provokes piercing difference outside the technical community. Research shows in this case that if marijuana is made medically obtainable, however, the quantities given are probable to be tiny compared to what is sold on the black market. With that being said, the medical use of marijuana poses no threat to drug control." (Marijuana, 2015)

According to Lynn Zimmer, PhD, Lecturer Emeritus at Queens School at the City College of New York, and John Morgan, MD, Professor at the City University of New York Medical School, stated in their 1997 book Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Truths: "For beyond twenty years, Dutch citizens that are all over the age eighteen were allowed to just buy and the utilize cannabis (hashish and marijuana) in government-controlled coffee stores. However, this policy has not ensued in intensely mounting cannabis utilization. For most age groups, rates of marijuana use in the Netherlands are similar to those in the United States."

However, approval of the pot measure comes after the Obama administration focused federal DAs last year to halt when it comes to the implementing of drug laws that oppose state marijuana policies. After that time, is appears that federal raids of marijuana wholesalers and growers who are working legally in their states have been restricted to those that are accused of other abuses, for example money laundering.