Catherine developed breast cancer in 2002. She was in her 40’s. No one in her family had ever dealt with the disease. It was a difficult time for her and her loved ones. She underwent surgery and considerable chemotherapy and radiation treatments. “Physically, it took quite a toll on me…I was very sick.”

She had heard that cannabis could help with those battling cancer. A member of her extended family had dealt with brain cancer. He used cannabis and attributed his prolonged life to his use of cannabis.

With the chemo, Catherine didn’t want to eat. She just didn’t have an appetite. She was a nervous wreck. “I would smoke and I could eat. I would smoke and I could sleep. With the radiation, it was the same thing.”

Todd has a spinal cord injury at T3, that’s complete paralysis from about the mid-chest down. Because of the traumatic nature of his injury, he suffers from neurological pain.

It’s tough for Todd to describe the experience. “…strangest type of pain you can describe. You can’t understand what it’s like unless you have it.”

There can be different degrees. Todd’s is moderate to severe. “It’s like being burned or stabbed, or, anything like that…twenty-four hours a day.”

For Todd, it’s worse at night. “It’s not as bad during the day as long as I take my pharmaceutical medication.”

The pain is particularly bad when storms are coming in and when he forgets to take his medicine.

“Nothing really seems to help.” Todd is prescribed a number of anti-seizure medications. “Some, I take for the baseline pain, but they don’t help with the flare-ups.” Opiates are reserved for the flare-ups. “That doesn’t seem to do much either.”

Jacqueline used to live in Kansas City, Missouri. Jacqueline, who suffers from Cerebral Palsy and a moderate stutter, doses with Cannabis to ease her symptoms. When she is able to use cannabis, the pain associated with her disability lessens and her stutter becomes all but negligible.

While living in Kansas City, she was under the constant threat of losing her children since the state of Missouri and it’s law enforcement refuse to recognize her holistic choice for medicine. To them, Jacqueline, in spite of her condition, is nothing more than an addict and a danger to her children.

She had to flee to California or face having her children removed from her and placed in foster care.

Jacqueline became known nationally when she appeared in Showtime’s documentary “In Pot We Trust”. During the film, she demonstrates for the camera the transformation that occurs when she medicates.

Marena is from Clinton, Missouri. She suffers from arthritis. She’s no longer able to take anti-inflammatories. The only pharmaceutical that she is currently taking, she may have to stop, since her stomach and liver are already compromised by the prescriptions she has taken in the past. The only medicine that she can be certain that her body will not eventually reject is cannabis.

She discovered that the stiffness in her joints rendered her almost completely incapacitated.

Joe lives in Whitier, a very rural part of North Carolina. He began using cannabis in 1999, following the accelerated progression of his congenital disease, Charcot-Marie-Tooth.

Charcot-Marie-Tooth, or CMT, is the most commonly inherited neurological disorder. It affects an estimated 2.6 million people.

Joe’s condition is slowly robbing him of the use of his limbs. He is already confined to a power wheelchair.

He has chronic pain that accompanies the spasms. Joe has found that cannabis relaxes his muscles when he has these episodes, much better than with the Flexoril that his physician has prescribed him; better than the Vicodin or Hydrocodone. The opioid narcotics made his skin crawl and itch.

Joe has seen a slow but steady decline in his physical strength and balance. At times, he is depressed. But he’s not tempted to seek refuge in alcohol or other drugs. To him, those would just be escapism.

  Linda has been active in the movement for legalization for many years; since the 70’s. “It just doesn’t make since for it to be illegal – for something that is essentially harmless.”

Linda has Scoliosis. She was treated for it with a Milwaukee Brace when she was a teenager. That experience alone brought on depression.

She had her hip replaced when she was sixteen following a car accident. She also has degenerative problems in both wrists that make it difficult to work with a cane when her “bad hip” is aggravating her. She also has degenerative disc disease.

Hydrocodone, Darvon, Darvocet, Vicodin, she has run the gamete of pain killers. Such has also been the case with anti-depressants. She began taking Zoloft following the passing of her father. She has also been on Xanax.

There came a point in her life when she realized that the doctors were just “shoving more and more opiates at me – whatever they could prescribe, and it wasn’t helping – and cannabis did”.

How Does Marijuana Affect You? 
In our previous two posts, we discussed what makes Cannabis a medicine and how to effectively administer it. In this post we discuss any possible detrimental health effects of cannabis.

Cancer.
No link has been found between smoking marijuana and cancers in the lung, head, or the neck. Limited evidence suggests that heavy marijuana use may lead to one type of testicular cancer. Researchers don’t have enough information whether cannabis affects other cancers, including prostate, cervical, and bladder cancers and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Lungs.
Regular marijuana use can give you constant coughs and phlegm. They may go away when you stop smoking. It’s unclear if marijuana can lead to asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Cannabis actually helps open the airways at first. But evidence shows that regular marijuana use will make your lungs not work as well.

 People with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders may be more likely to use marijuana heavily, about twice a month. Researchers have also found links between cannabis use and bipolar disorder, major depression, and childhood anxiety. What’s hard to untangle is if marijuana use leads to mental illness, or if it’s the other way around.

How Does Marijuana Affect You?  

In our last posting, we started a discussion of the active treatment ingredients in Cannabis medicine. Then we started to discuss ways to administer the drug treatment, starting with smoking. We now resume....

Ways you can smoke cannabis include:

This slows marijuana’s effects because the THC has to go through your digestive system. It may take 30 minutes to 2 hours for you to get high. But it will last longer -- up to 8 hours -- than if you smoked or vaped pot. You can mix cannabis into brownies, cookies, candy, and other foods, or brew it into a tea.

How Does Marijuana Affect You?  

IN THIS ARTICLE

Medical marijuana is now legal in a majority of states. A small but growing number of states and cities have legalized recreational pot as well. Marijuana still is the most commonly used illegal drug in the U.S. 

Marijuana has some well-proven benefits, including relief for long-term pain. But smoking marijuana can have some bad effects on your health, including making breathing problems worse.

The federal ban on marijuana makes it hard to study its effects on humans. For example, very little research exists on edible marijuana.

Key Chemicals

Marijuana comes from the dried flowers of cannabis plants.It has more than 500 chemicals. Cannabis can have a psychoactive -- or mind-altering -- effect on you.

According to the National Institutes of Health, people have used marijuana, or cannabis, to treat their ailments for at least 3,000 years. However, the Food and Drug Administration have not deemed marijuana safe or effective in the treatment of any medical condition, although cannabidiol, a substance that is present in marijuana, received approval in June 2018 as a treatment for some types of epilepsy.

Marijuana is being increasingly legalized in the U.S., but is it safe?

This tension, between a widespread belief that marijuana is an effective treatment for a wide assortment of ailments and a lack of scientific knowledge on its effects, has been somewhat exacerbated in recent times by a drive toward legalization.

Thirty Three states plus the District of Columbia have now made marijuana available for medical — and, in some states, recreational — purposes.