Anne Has Answers: What is 'medical' marijuana, and how it different?
Got a question about marijuana legalization in Ohio? Anne Saker, The Enquirer’s lead reporter on the 2015 campaign, can find the answers.
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What is “medical” marijuana and how is it different from “regular” marijuana?
This question comes in from several readers. It's particularly consequential now that Ohio voters are considering legalizing marijuana. ResponsibleOhio, the private investor group that wrote and now is campaigning for Issue 3, is buying television advertising and sending direct mail to your house to push hard on the medical benefits of marijuana.
For much of the last century, marijuana’s medical effectiveness has been overwhelmed by the widespread social fear that marijuana was the devil’s weed that triggered madness. Even today, the federal government classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug, so little federal money exists to study what impact marijuana can have on human health, good and bad.
But in 1990, working for the National Institute of Mental Health, a researcher named Miles Herkenham and his team mapped the locations of a receptor system in several mammalian species, including human beings. This system worked on cannabinoids, which are among the active ingredients in marijuana.
When someone uses marijuana, the body network that gets affected is called the endocannabinoid system. Marijuana can thus make someone feel lethargic, can interfere with judgment and motivation, and can cut down on response times.
But deeper research into medical uses found that the cannabinoids in marijuana could ease pain, stimulate appetite, cut back on nausea, reduce spasticity in muscles and improve memory in certain cases. Among the leaders in this study is Dr. Lester Grinspoon of Harvard University, who wrote the seminal work “Marijuana Reconsidered.”
In a later essay, Grinspoon wrote of a 1988 ruling from an administrative law judge for the DEA, who after two years of hearings concluded that marijuana “in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. ... One must reasonably conclude that there is accepted safety for use of marihuana under medical supervision. To conclude otherwise, on the record, would be unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious."
An activist named Granny Storm Crow maintains a huge list of medical research papers on marijuana.
On Tuesday this week, a group called the International Cannabinoid Institute announced that if voters pass Issue 3, it would set up shop on the Licking County grow site. Its sole purpose will be to study marijuana as a medical aid and then produce genetically modified version to address different illnesses and disabilities such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
On Monday, I’ll tell you about a local mom who earlier this year was deeply skeptical about ResponsibleOhio and Issue 3. She has new thoughts to share.