Marijuana, considered as a medicine instead of a recreational drug. It is useful for treatment of glaucoma, among other ailments. It also helps relieve pain and nausea associated with AIDS medications and cancer chemotherapy.

Medical marijuana has been legalized by referendum in various states, but the Federal Government persists in killing people who need it, like Peter McWilliams.

Medical marijuana has been legalized by ballot initiative in the states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, Maine, Nevada, and Washington. Hawaii was the first state to have medical marijuana legalized by the state legislature.

According to the NORML website, legislatures in Maryland, New Mexico, Texas, Massachusetts, and Vermont are holding hearings or have had bills introduced to legalize medical marijuana.

America's relationship with marijuana has been conspicuosly tumultuous and political. In this century, marijuana, a substance that has enjoyed a rich medical history dating back thousands of years, has been relegated to merely another target in the war on drugs.

Such a war has been responsible for thousands of casualties in individuals suffering from illnesses such as cancer and AIDS, who cannot receive legally a form of treatment which can relieve their pain. Consequently, many otherwise law-abiding citizens have been forced to violate federal law. In many cases, these same individuals face criminal prosecution and possible incarceration. The recent burgeoning of medical marijuana laws in states throughout the country suggests that Americans will no longer tolerate this treatment of the seriously ill.

The federal government can elect the respect to the will of people by rescheduling marijuana or by exercising their prosecutorial discretion in a way that formally ends the prosecution of medical marijuana patients. It also can choose to protect the citizens against themselves. If so, should it be consistent with the notions of fairness, liberty and justice?

The Supreme Court has ruled in a 6-3 decision that Congress has the right to outlaw medicinal marijuana, thus subjecting all patients to federal prosecution even in states where the treatment is legalized. Meaning that doctors can still give medical marijuana in states where it's legal, but the DEA can bust down the door of a person using the drug to fight off a spinal injury and put them in jail. Which makes, well, no sense at all.

You can debate this issue on and on, but the fact of the matter is...medical marijuana works. I will never cease to understand the constant struggle to have it be used to treat ill patients suffering from various debilitating diseases and injuries in which a controlled use of cannabis would greatly benefit their recovery and coping process. And just because a drug is frequently used (and abused) recreationally isn't just cause to make it illegal for those in need who could use its benefits.

After all, Ritalin, sleeping pills, Adderall and many other FDA approved drugs are frequently used and abused recreationally. Shit, even ecstasy was approved by the FDA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in 2001! While the point can be made that you can't just grow these other drugs in your backyard, marijuana is no different from these frequently abused, yet beneficial and legal drugs.

And besides its medical use, I've never understood why the use of recreational marijuana is so harshly penalized in the United States. The negative effects over chronic marijuana use aren't nearly as severe as those suffered by chronic alcohol abuse and chain smoking cigarettes. Yet beer and cigarettes continue to be a-ok while marijuana is not. Legalizing marijuana in all forms would have similar perks that the fall of the Prohibition Era had in 1933. Violence caused by cartels selling drugs would drop significantly and our ever fluctuating economy would have a brand new business enterprise on it's hands. The latter sounds insane, but who knew 80 years ago that you would be greeted at every turn with advertisements selling you various brews of alcohol.

Myself and many other young Americans have used marijuana recreationally, I can admit to that. While many have just found it to "chill" or whatever, whenever I feel positive effects from the drug, I can't help but wonder what good it could bring to the world if the government would allow it to be studied to the point where we could discover how to tinker with the chemicals it contained to possibly grow something that could have various uses. Don't get me wrong, despite any possible modifications that could be made, like any substance that can be used to modify a chemical process in ones body, marijuana must be used with great caution and great control in able to enjoy its effects, whether recreational or medical. The bottom line is that the fact that marijuana still remains such a terrible thing in the eyes of the United States Government after all these years is absurd.

a straightforward argument for medical marijuana

My name is Kyle Hamilton, and I am 28 years old. I write this, knowing that I have committed a crime, knowing that the statute of limitations has not expired for that crime. But the story I have to tell is important enough that I will risk my freedom to tell it.

---

Last August, my boyfriend got a phone call... and received some really bad news. His father, he learned, had been diagnosed with stomach cancer, stage 3 (metastasized) -- meaning, it had already invaded his bloodstream, and caused malignancy to take root through the rest of his body.

It took us a while to get there to see him. Erik had shown me photographs of his father, who looked like a Harley-Davidson motorcycle rider... as we moved from Chicago to Tucson in a beat-up 1985 Volkswagen Vanagon. Once we arrived in Tucson, and got settled in, his parents sent us two plane tickets to fly back and see them.

And he looked different from the photos. He looked more frail, and more like a bag of skin loosely covering his withered muscles and bones. He had quit his job, because he could no longer do the work, and he was bald because the chemotherapy had caused all of his hair to fall out... and he looked as though he was dying, and it hurt me, and it hurt Erik, and we both cried later that night when he couldn't see it, when he couldn't see us.

Over the next few days, I learned what medications he was on. There's a 72-hour patch full of extremely dangerous narcotics that he was wearing. There were anti-nausea drugs. There were things designed to stimulate his appetite... and none of them worked very well. He was in pain all the time, and he had no energy, and he had no appetite, and all he could seem to do was sit and watch TV. He got worse, and worse, and worse as the days went by.

Finally, he couldn't bear it anymore... and his wife, Erik's mom, called up his sister, who brought him over some marijuana. He smoked about 1/3 of a joint, that night -- he offered me a hit off of it, but I'm not going to take medicine away from someone who needs it -- and then went to bed. I stayed up for a little while longer, and went to bed as well.

The next morning, he was a changed man. He was walking, he was doing things, he was cheerful, he had an appetite, and it was as though he wasn't suffering. He'd finally gotten a good night's sleep, he said -- the first good night of sleep that he'd had in months. That, plus the appetite stimulation, helped him a lot.

---

I had already been a medical marijuana supporter before. I knew, intellectually, what it could do, and how it did it. But it was then that it hit me, on that visceral level, just what it could mean... not only to those who suffer from cancer and other chronicly debilitating illnesses, but for their families and friends, their support networks, each of whom has to rely on each other for support.

It is not just for the cancer patients themselves, who actually need the marijuana for their chronic, debilitating conditions, but also for the sanity and well-being of their caretakers, that I believe that medical marijuana should be legalized.

And even though I'm not a doctor, even though I'm not a nurse, even though I'm very, very limited in what I can do... if someone has cancer, I will recommend to them, very seriously, that they look into marijuana as a means of controlling their secondary symptoms. It is, truly, a miracle drug.

Reverend Kyle A Hamilton
of the Church of Universal Life
07Aug2005, 0407PDT