Pros And Cons Of Medical Marijuana

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Today, in the United States alone there are over: 400,000 cases of Multiple Sclerosis, 4 million cases of glaucoma, and between 1.3 and 2.8 million cases of epilepsy. That is at least 5.7 million people that suffer every single day. For many of those people, the situation seems hopeless, but there is an option that may help. Medical marijuana has been proven to be very helpful in all of those cases including other things such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and just pain in general. Not only has it been known to help reduce pain and other symptoms from those diseases but it has also becoming apparent that marijuana may also be able to potentially slow down cancer as a connection has been made between the plant turning off a gene …show more content…

Another argument you commonly hear from prohibitionists is that it is a “gateway drug”, meaning that using marijuana is the cause of and leads to harder and more harmful drugs. While this sounds like it makes sense in theory, it simply is not true. In fact, most cannabis users do not go on to use harder substances and while most hard drug users started with marijuana, it is more likely that those individuals are just more prone to drug use and started with easier more readily available substances such as tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis. The only sound arguments from prohibitionists is that “Prenatal or adolescent exposure can lead to altered brain development, including changes in the connections between the neurons, or circuits, in certain brain regions. Youthful exposure can lead to earlier onset and more severe psychoses, including schizophrenia, for that part of the population with a genetic predisposition to certain mental illnesses.” (Bruce Barcott and Michael Scherer, The Great Pot Experiment, 2015) and while those are good arguments, nothing is really certain about marijuana and it will continue to be uncertain until restrictions on research is loosened up and people can actually confirm these things and see if there is any way to avoid these

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