For thousands of years humans have looked to nature for medicines to treat life’s illness, injury, and discord. My own field, biological chemistry, has it’s origins in the ancient herbology of the Greeks and the plant pharmacists of China. While science and medicine have advanced enormously, the principle remains that nature, with her plants, flowers, and herbs, provides us with our most essential medicines, including cannabis. A corresponding principle follows that patients have a basic right to receive such medicines and the assistance of the health professionals who have sworn to be of service.

Most of nature’s drugs are so common that we rarely think about them. Aspirin from the bark of willows, penicillin from mold, morphine from poppies, and digitalis from flowers, all are essential tools in medicine. Three thousand years ago a lively and essential trade flourished in Asia and the Middle East taking medicines like opium and cannabis throughout the known world to help the sick. Cannabis was an essential medicine 3,000 years ago and remains essential today.

Just 70 years ago, cannabis was the primary medicine used to treat a host of disorders from headache to menstrual cramps. Physicians and pharmacists provided cannabis knowing it was both effective and safe. In all of the decades since the prohibition of cannabis on cultural grounds, science has not developed better or safer medicines for the dozens of illnesses that cannabis effectively treats. From chronic pain to wasting diseases to multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, we have no drug in the present formularies that are safer than cannabis and few that can match its broad actions as analgesic, anti-inflammatory, and neuroprotectant. Cannabis does not replace our modern "magic bullets" but it sure does compliment them and sure is safer.

Cannabis was wrongfully banned at the dawn of the drug paranoia that first gripped this nation in the 1930’s. Lurid tales of cannabis (now called "marijuana") causing African American men to rape white women and forcing teenagers into homicidal fits were more than enough for Congress to make cannabis illegal, even for medical use. Cannabis was made illegal without evidence, without debate, and generally in secret (the AMA was not informed). The ban on cannabis was made even more severe following the turmoil of the 1960’s and the passage of the Controlled Substances Act in the early 70’s. The Nixon White House feared cannabis as a plot of the "Jews" and had cannabis placed alongside heroin and LSD in the banned Schedule I of the CSA.

Despite 70 years of propaganda and the worst efforts of the government to suppress the use of cannabis, it re-emerged during the 1970’s and 80’s as an effective treatment for AIDS wasting disease, glaucoma, and the uncontrollable nausea from cancer chemotherapy. The spectacular success of cannabis as a medicine simply couldn’t be kept away from the sick or dying or their families. The medical cannabis movement has simply grown and grown as more and more people find that cannabis provides relief from their arthritis, neuropathy, insomnia, depression, and so many other chronic disorders. Hundreds of thousands of patients and their families and caregivers, are just rediscovering what medical science has known for well over 100 years: cannabis is safe and effective medicine.

Certainly, most physicians and pharmacists would prefer to see cannabis standardized and characterized. This is easily accomplished if only medical cannabis were legal. Instead we have to wait decades for synthetic derivatives to be cooked up by the big pharmaceutical companies and sold at enormous profit to those lucky patients who both live long enough to see these new cannabis drugs introduced and have the money to afford what they could otherwise grow in their backyard for the price of tomatoes.

Will legalizing medical cannabis increase the nation’s rate of drug abuse? Not one bit. The "gateway" theory of cannabis users moving to hard drugs makes no more sense than the "domino" theory of the Vietnam War. In fact, one of the primary reasons for making medical cannabis legal is that patients and doctors alike have documented the "opiate sparring" effect of cannabis. Chronically ill patients maintain a decent quality of life with cannabis while markedly reducing the amounts of narcotics and other sedative drugs they would normally require. Even better, patients and professionals have seen alcoholics replace the lethal use of alcohol with cannabis. Such harm reduction may offend some but is most certainly life saving. Do we want to reduce the rate of addiction to narcotics and alcohol? Legalize medical cannabis.

Will legalizing medical cannabis send the wrong message to our children? To the contrary, telling the truth to our children, for a change, instead of treating them like melon headed idiots with programs like DARE, will help re-establish credibility with the young. Maybe then they’ll truly listen to our very serious and legitimate concerns about hard drugs like alcohol, cocaine, speed, and heroin. In any event, children know that sick people need medicine. Isn’t it time that we taught our kids the difference between medicine and drugs?

In addition to the thousands of people who knowingly use medical cannabis, there are millions of folks who self medicate with cannabis and don’t even know it. Hundreds of thousands of these people are rotting in our jails and prisons. They suffer from post traumatic stress syndrome, bipolar disorder, attention deficit disorder, and other illnesses for which cannabis shows real promise. Aren’t we all better off having these nonviolent people provided with cannabis under a physician’s supervision instead of paying billions every year to incarcerate them?

Most of all, medical cannabis must be legal because of what laws represent. Laws are a reflection of our collective values, spirituality, and morality. How can a nation based on the Judeo-Christian principles of individual liberty, personal responsibility, and care of the sick, old, and disabled, possibly ban a medicine whose use harms no one while relieving suffering? The Bible contains no prohibition against cannabis nor does the Constitution of the United States. In fact, the Declaration of Independence says just the opposite in that we are granted the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Where is life when you can’t keep your AIDS medications down? Where is liberty when you lose your home and go to prison for growing your own doctor approved medicine? Where is happiness when you’re forced to use mind destroying "legal" drugs instead of safe nontoxic medical cannabis?

Medical cannabis must be legal for the sake of the sick and dying and for the sake of our compassionate principles and our wonderful democracy. We were wrong to ban cannabis 70 years ago and now is the time to make medical cannabis legal once again. The big drug companies won’t like it. The miseducated drug warriors won’t like it. But millions of Americans who suffer from both disease and persecution for treating their illness, will love it. So will their families and all that love them.