If you haven't read it yet, check out Dr. Golob's excellent post that asks if pot is medicine. Not a lot of scientific data exist. But of the few reliable studies that Golob cites, some show that pot manages pain associated with HIV, while others indicate pot provides little or no relief of neuropathic pain. Moreover, he argues that an emerging generation of pharmaceuticals that contain cannabis's core medicinal constituents will earn the favor of physicians over authorizing the whole plant.

But in conclusion, Golob says that an aspect of medical marijuana is a "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" because the "secondary gain here—a plurality of us would be fine with recreational pot being legal, taxed and regulated—roils just below the surface of the medical marijuana 'debate'."

Now Dr. Golob is Dr. Golob, while I'm more like a... carnival barker screaming via my keyboard, and I don't claim a doctor's command of the scientific data. That grain of salt offered in earnest, I gotta say, part of Golob's post seems pretty off key.*

I take umbrage with the notion that this "debate" exists in quotation marks or that it's a wink-and-nudge issue because some of the people advocating for medical marijuana also want it legalized for recreational luxury. Any person who can see the injustice and absurdity of pot prohibition overall can plainly see that there is no more glaring example of prohibition's impractical cruelty than when it criminalizes—to say nothing of arrests, prosecutes, and incarcerates—the sick and dying.

We haven't yet arrived in an era that a full menu of THC-based pharmaceuticals are readily available to treat a spectrum of ailments, but we are in an era when patients are using pot and finding relief under a doctor's supervision. We're also in an era when patients and their care providers are still getting busted. As for me, I want pot to be legal for everyone. It's true. But there's no winking or nudging or secondary agenda about why I think my friend Ric, who was told he had only months to live before he found medical marijuana in the late 1990s (and he's still alive today), deserves medical marijuana. Millions of people like him are not political pawns in a bigger game but the primary reason this issue exists at all. If the people like me who think pot should be legal for everyone don't stand up for folks like him, well then, it appears few other people will. And, if exposing the cruelty of making Ric a criminal simultaneously exposes the overall fraud of prohibition, then so be it.

* For sure, Golob's spot-on that pharmaceuticals are likely to outperform whole plants in the long haul—especially when the whole plants are set on fire and inhaled—but he left out what may be the most important medicinal value of pot: the munchies. This well documented effect of marijuana's active compounds—those responsible for the growth of Ben and Jerry's, no doubt—will likely be further ratified by the rigors of scientific study. Already, as reported a few months ago in Annals of Oncology, a study found that the "active ingredient in marijuana, called delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), increases the appetites of advanced cancer patients and improves their sense of taste." (That study was based on pills, not the whole pot plant.) When considering the question whether pot is medicine, the effect on appetite can't be ignored.