Over 4,000 Americans every day are diagnosed with some form of cancer. Meanwhile the government in these situations recommends you heed the advice of your friendly neighborhood big pharma corporation, and heal yourself in a way that makes powerful interest groups millions upon millions of dollars. Otherwise, you might as well just die.
This is about giving people in need a second chance at life, at a price they can afford. In 2012, the only reason you would be against legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes is if you're ignorant, or profiting from it somehow.
Edit: Don't know why this is being downvoted. Medicinal and recreational use are separate issues, with separate arguments for and against each.
To call cannabis prohibition "an attack on science and medicine" is also rather disingenuous. Cannabis may have valid clinical applications, but there are still dangers associated with its use, especially increased risk of psychotic symptoms [1]
Painting the issue as black and white, and conflating arguments for medicinal and recreational use, is not conducive to rational debate.
The line between clinical and recreational is arbitrary and subjective. Even in a recreational setting, people are, in fact, often using drugs to self-medicate. If someone feels perfectly balanced then they will not crave anything. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with self-medicating - personally, I believe that people should be responsible for their own health instead of deferring it to a third party in the first place if they are so capable.
Anyway, nobody should be downvoted for their opinion. This kind of behaviour is endemic in social media sites where there is a voting mechanism. Give people an inch of power and they will take a mile, responsibility be damned.
Many in the pro-legalization camp have been using medicinal cannabis as a kind of trojan horse for full-scale legalization. This is a dangerous, disingenuous strategy, and makes them no better than those on the other side of the fence pushing 'reefer madness' type arguments.
As with all things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Other way around actually. Indica strains grow faster and are easier to grow. Most street cannabis strains are hybrid, where they are trying to get the high THC of sativa but with the favorable growing characteristics of indica.
I think the idea more generally (can't remember where I heard this, think it was one of the many documentaries focussing on dispensaries) was just that those growing 'street' weed aim for high THC and don't care all that much about CBD, while those growing it for legitimate medicinal purposes aim for high CBD with as little THC as possible.
People growing weed illegally for commercial purposes usually care more about weight and grow time than anything else. Of the actual breeders and geneticists who create the different strains, there are a variety of different factors that are optimized for. E.g. check out the webpage for apothecary genetics:
http://apothecary-genetics.spruz.com/
Most of the good breeders are in the Netherlands, but they are probably the top ones in the US.
"those growing it for legitimate medicinal purposes aim for high CBD with as little THC as possible."
That's definitely not true. The vast majority of medical marijuana is high THC. While many dispensaries are starting to carry high CBD weed and extracts, they'll usually only have one or at most two strains out of the 20+ they offer. In terms of actual medical use, different cannabinoids have different medical properties. So THC also has many medical uses, it's just not the only cannabinoid with medical uses.
Please do not generalize like this because it's actually harmful to active patients.
no problem, just smoke Kush which seems to be very popular nowadays.
I'm not disputing cannabis has no dangers associated with it, but similar studies that reached that conclusion that I know of always mention that the increased psychosis risks are almost exclusively apparent in people who started using at very young age (up to 16). Similar effects are observed in alcohol use at young age, which is exactly why we have age limits on buying alcohol.
Lot's of other factors can contribute to the development of psychotic symptoms that are not prohibited by law by the way. I know this sounds like the 'broken window' fallacy, but of all the things with possible negative health effects, I think cannabis is really one of the least important ones to worry about.
AFAIK all studies on psychosis and marijuana have been cohort studies, which are essentially useless at determining the direction of causation. While the study you linked attempts to address the possibility of "reverse causality", it only addresses one specific hypothesis (self medication).
Let us repeat this to ourselves until we all remember: You cannot establish direction of causation with a cohort study.
The really interesting part of the history of marijuana prohibition is that it was specifically designed as an attack on industrial hemp, funded in large part by Dow chemical so they could sell their shitty synthetic replacements for hemp products. The word marijuana itself was brought into the English lexicon for the lobbying effort in order to leverage anti-Mexican racism in painting cannabis as a dangerous drug.
I am proud of my state (Colorado) today, which I am sad to say houses an outsized share of this country's huge prison population, for leading the way on this issue.
Some folks scoff when they hear a statement like that, but it really is true. Not because it makes it (slightly) harder for me to buy weed in San Francisco, but because of the very real and devastating effects that it has on people outside the US. People who are rarely, if ever, covered by the mainstream media.