Cannabis connoisseur and -izzle originator Snoop Dogg calls it the sticky icky. Fear-mongering anti-chronic crusaders of the 1930s called it reefer. My mom calls it pot. Regardless of what you call it, there is a puzzling lack of consensus around how marijuana affects us.
Scientific studies touting the drug’s benefits, or warning of its dangers, invoke the same level of scrutiny and skepticism as studies on climate change. But while climate change deniers are considerably outnumbered and increasingly discredited — most statistics show that over 95% of the world’s scientists agree humans are responsible for climate change — marijuana studies continue to contradict. I’m not sure how this is possible. Climate change is a recent concept, emerging out of no where like the iceberg that hit the Titanic (the same murderous ice berg that is now at risk of perishing under warmer temperatures). Marijuana has been around for thousands of years.
So even though we’ve been smoking the green for a long time, our understanding of its effects somehow remains grey.
There is a common process that drugs follow between the moment they are invented and the moment they make it to market. In the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, this process typically takes between 10 to 15 years. However, this time includes years of pre-clinical testing before a drug is deemed safe to test on humans. It also includes a lot of time spent in the application process, awaiting approval to advance to the next stage. If this is enough time to determine that Xanax and Prozac are safe for human consumption, you would think we’d have figured out Mary Jane by now.
Recent developments show that medical professionals are having a hard time keeping up with the courts. In Canada, the medical marijuana industry was privatized (but remains heavily regulated) in 2013. Health Canada, for its part, does not believe the drug meshes well with its stated goal to have Canada be “among the countries with the healthiest people in the world”. The government body makes sure to state in bold letters at the top of regulatory and industry correspondence that “The government of Canada does not endorse the use of marijuana, but the courts have required reasonable access to a legal source of marijuana when authorized by a physician.”
The College of Family Physicians of Canada recently released new guidelines for physicians to follow when prescribing medical marijuana. It advocates a cautious approach, given the need for further study, advising that physicians prescribe the drug only when all else has failed, and only to those 25 or over.
Meanwhile, the chair of the Arthritis Society’s scientific advisory committee, Dr. McDougall, recently said of marijuana: “I think it’s high time that we found something to help the 4.6-million Canadians living with arthritis and trying to do something to help,” apparently deciding it an opportune moment to drop a pun.
Given the widespread demand for the drug, it’s high time we conducted authoritative studies and started to come to a consensus on its effects. Once we have some clarity on the subject we can leave the confusion and paranoid skepticism to the stoners.
Assorted Timbits 