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.
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