Is marijuana medicinal?

Marijuana as Medicine, Excerpted from Section One, Indoor Marijuana Horticulture, The Indoor Bible

Cannabis has been used as a medicine for thousands of years. Just now has it come to the forefront of the War on Drugs as doctors, activists and the majority of citizens in many states are demanding the reclassification from a Schedule I drug that has no therapeutic value to a therapeutic drug.

Marijuana buyer's co-ops are springing up all over the world. In the US, the famous Proposition 215 in California was the one that led the way to legalization. Now voter referendums in eight more states have called for legalizing marijuana as medicine. Numerous other states are considering changing their laws through parliamentary procedures.

Dr. John McPartland was kind enough to allow publication of the following review of current medical marijuana information. For an extensive list of new and old titles on marijuana as medicine, check out www.amazon.com.

At least ten books about the therapeutic uses of marijuana have appeared recently. Most have been written by drug-war-partisans, either promoters of medical marijuana (such as Cannabis in Medical Practice, edited by Mary Lynn Mathre, and Marihuana, the Forbidden Medicine, by Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar), or prohibitionist partisans (Marihuana and Medicine, by Gabriel Nahas and colleagues).

Two recent books were sponsored by presumably unbiased organizations - the British Medical Association (Therapeutic Uses of Cannabis) and the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the US National Academy of Sciences (Marijuana and Medicine: Assessing the Science Base). The IOM book is more up to date, and supplies an inexhaustible reference section for further reading. The BMA book is more succinct and easier to read. Both books discuss therapeutic uses in detail, including charts, illustrations, and comparisons to conventional pharmaceuticals. Again, the IOM book dives deeper and provides more citations, whereas the BMA book manages to be concise yet cover more ground (e.g., asthma, hypertension), and presents nice table summaries of controlled studies. Law and political considerations are covered better by the IOM book. The BMA book provides a nice glossary for lay readers and physicians with short-term memory loss.

A new book by Cristian Rätcsch, Marijuana Medicine, is absolutely beautiful, illustrated with a plethora of fabulous black-and-white photos and drawings. It contains lots of new information concerning the ethnobotany of cannabis (published by Healing Arts Press, Rochester, Vermont).

Schedule II and III drugs are equal to Marinol®, or synthetic THC produced by Roxane Pharmaceuticals, Columbus, OH.