Have You Tried Your Cancer Baked?

While there are certainly those that would characterize medical marijuana as another brand of snake oil, there are a few good(ish, maybe) reasons, I think, to take it more seriously than hydrogen peroxide, vitamin B17, orgone accumulators and the like.

First, the arguments in support of medical marijuana come with much higher production values. The YouTube videos attesting to the curative values of most natural products are, quite frankly, crap. I’ve skimmed through forty-five minutes of a poorly recorded radio show running behind an unchanging photo of a vegetable basket, and seen more out of focus selfies created by self-identified experts than I care to remember. But check out this video arguing for the cancer curing powers of marijuana (assuming you have an hour to burn, that is):

Interesting editing, nice use of archival footage, reasonable-seeming talking heads -- now doesn’t that seem persuasive? And while he’s no Morgan Freeman, doesn’t Peter Coyote (the guy who played the man with the keys in E.T. thirty years ago) makes for an awfully convincing narrator? The medical marijuana folks have clearly learned the lessons of Marshall McLuhan and Mad Men: PR and packaging matter.

Second, unlike most of the snake oil salespeople, most of the medical marijuana advocates (at least that I’ve seen) are smart enough not to argue weed as an all or nothing deal. While Suzanne Sommers wants you to turn your back on Western medicine and embrace the power of her natural juices (or whatever the hell it was she was hawking), the weed folks seem willing to entertain the idea that their product might work in conjunction with, rather than competition with, with standard therapies. And while it may just be me, I’m far more inclined to try something that doesn’t require me to leap of the top of the building in the hope that the napkin I’ve just been handed will, in fact, magically turn into a parachute.

Third, you can’t really deny the impact of medical marijuana’s rather large, and unexpectedly effective, political moment. Here in Washington, medical marijuana’s been legal for a few years, and the drug was legalized for recreational use in our last election. (Legal sales officially started two weeks ago.) And while the Feds continue to hold to their crazed belief that the impact of weed is commensurate with meth, heroin, and the rest of the Schedule I drugs, eventually they’ll have to realize that when politicians start talking publicly about their own histories of using and people are seeing DEA agents confronting little old (Caucasian) ladies in wheelchairs demanding access to marijuana, that particular front in the drug war is pretty much a lost cause.

Fourth, the doctors I talked to, at least, were open to the idea that marijuana might be useful. Now granted, they figured that the various anti-nausea drugs and what not that they could offer would be far more effective than weed, but at the same time they were willing to acknowledge that you couldn’t overdose on weed, it couldn’t really do any harm, and significant portions of their patients were using.

Can’t hurt? Might help? Good enough for me.

But then I tried to get the stuff. Kafka would've had a field day. I, on the other hand, would rather give myself root canal than deal with any of those people again.