What is wrong with using marijuana? Nothing.
It is a person’s freedom to choose to smoke tobacco, drink alcohol or eat sugar. These highly-addictive items cause a myriad of expensive health and social problems, but are legal. Two are heavily taxed by the government.
Marijuana, while safer, remains illegal in Canada. In 1972, the national commission of Marijuana and Drug Abuse found that marijuana isn’t entirely safe, but its dangers have been overstated. Twenty-three U.S. states and D.C. have enacted laws to legalize medical marijuana.
In 2014, the Canadian government changed the law, no longer allowing medicinal users to grow their own (almost free), forcing the purchase from a pricier Health Canada-approved grower ($5-12 per gram). People living with disabilities/illness are less able to afford this more expensive (market price?) medical marijuana.
The Phoenix Pain Management Society offers medical marijuana by donation, with a prescription.
Marijuana has been credited as effective treatment for many ailments, such as: cancer effects (pain, anorexia, nausea, etc.), MS, Crohn’s disease, glaucoma, hypertension, chronic pain and epilepsy. Studies show many other health benefits, limited here by space.
Marijuana is known as a recreational drug, but it has many positive uses in health care. In 2010, 925 million people were hungry, struggling to get food let alone health care. Marijuana is a fast-growing plant able to provide all these health benefits — why not use it? Keep it in the hands of the people and out of the pharmaceutical realm. It is an affordable treatment that without free access many of those in need can not afford.
Legalize it. Allow folks to use it as necessary. I stand beside Phoenix strongly, as it is life or death for some.
Haley SudlowParksville