Benefits of Legalizing Marijuana

Two states in the US, Colorado and Washington recently passed a vote to legalize the recreational use of marijuana so that people there now have legal access to as much recreational marijuana as they can grow, sell or smoke.

The news has been greeted with criticism from so many. This could be because many of us see marijuana as nothing more than a weed – a dangerous weed that gets people high, inhibits their ability to think clearly, messes up with their psychomotor functions, and generally gets them to do the wrong things. Before now, marijuana had only been legalized in certain states for medical uses only, in treating certain ailments.

Health Benefits 

One of the advantages of medical marijuana is the fact that it can help manage pain felt by trauma patients, cancer patients and patients experiencing nerve damage. Marijuana has an active chemical component called tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, which can act as an analgesic that helps patients relax and deal with the pain.

Another benefit that scientists have found in medical marijuana is that it can help prevent the worsening of Alzheimer’s disease among the elderly. According to studies, THC in marijuana has the ability to arrest the formation of plaques in the brain.

HIV/AIDS patients as well as cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy also benefit from the use of medical marijuana. These patients are known to have difficulty in stimulating appetites and in throwing up what they eat. Studies have shown that marijuana helps them eat by inducing their appetite. The plant also helps them keep their food down.

Among brain cancer patients, it is revealed that THC in marijuana causes cancerous cells to undergo a process called autophagy. It means that the cancerous cells feed upon themselves and thus disappear, leaving healthy brain tissue alone.

These are just some of the many advantages that scientists claim medical marijuana to have. THC in marijuana has also shown positive development when it comes to treating asthma, glaucoma, lung cancer and breast cancer.

Research Benefits

One thing that is still lacking however is a long term study of the effects of the recreational use of marijuana. This is where the legalization will have a great impact. No country has ever completely legalized marijuana. Portugal has decriminalized it and other drugs, but not legalized them. In the Netherlands, possession of small amounts of cannabis is decriminalized but producing and selling the drug remains illegal. To understand the effect of cannabis on health, researchers need to measure individuals' exposures to the drug over time and relate that to their health problems. Doing such long-term studies in large groups of people is very difficult when use is illegal. It is difficult to convince people to reveal information needed for large-scale health studies, but under full legalization this will be possible.

Legalization should also give researchers insight into how cannabis affects psychological problems, including settling the debate on whether it causes psychosis. Another big question is its impact on alcohol and tobacco use. People who use marijuana are more likely to drink alcohol than non-users, but researchers are not sure whether the two forms of intoxication reinforce one another or substitute for one another. If they serve as substitute, then legalizing marijuana might be the best thing to do because it is believed that alcohol generates a lot more social harm.

Recreational use of marijuana is still illegal under US federal law, but if the states are left alone, the legalization could launch a living experiment into how people behave when drug laws are relaxed, and into the public-health implications as well as the effect on the drug cartels.