Perhaps you’ve heard folks speculate that this medical marijuana thing is a sham, a way for healthy people to smoke pot with impunity. Or maybe it’s a strategy to legalize pot for everybody. Well, they could be partly right. Integrating medical marijuana into society makes pot more palatable to voters generally (it can’t be simultaneously destructive and therapeutic, right?). Also possible: A shithead doctor could authorize pot for someone who isn’t particularly ill.
Of the roughly dozen ailments that qualify a patient to use marijuana in Washington State, the biggest umbrella is “intractable pain.” Skeptics fear that the aforementioned shithead docs could use this catchall for people who suffer garden-variety discomfort, which could be assuaged with over-the-counter
medicine. So when folks say they use marijuana because their “back hurts,” there are doubters.
But I’ll tell you what. I worked for a few years at the ACLU of Washington, where part of my job was taking calls from people who had been arrested after using marijuana as medicine. By far, the most agonizing, inspiring stories were from people who suffered from chronic pain. Many had been in car or motorcycle accidents. Doctors helped them manage the constant pain of crunched bones and permanently disfigured muscles with massive doses of opiates, such as OxyContin.
But those drugs, taken in large doses for months on end, render humans drugged-out blobs. They can’t eat right, can’t shit properly—can’t do anything. Many living like this become reclusive, even suicidal.
The people I spoke to then discovered that marijuana could be used in synergy with painkillers. By smoking a little bit of pot, they could take a fraction of the
opiate medications prescribed by doctors and still subdue the pain while maintaining vigor. They wanted to go back to work, to see their friends, to fuck the living shit out of their wives again. Medical marijuana saved their lives. I spoke to about a dozen people like this. (This is to say nothing of pot’s nearly magical properties to help cure nausea with the munchies, a benefit for countless people living with HIV/AIDS and wasting away on chemo, or the terminal patients trying to eke out whatever relief they can find in hospice.) So, yeah, some people may take advantage of medical marijuana—to the detriment of… nobody—while other people’s lives and livelihoods and families depend on medical marijuana.
So, skeptics: Those are the sort of people who say they smoke pot because their “back hurts.” And if you see a medical marijuana patient who “doesn’t look that sick,” just remember: That’s what the best medications do. 
Good point with the fact that phony scrips harm NO ONE. Most people I tell about my mmj assume its phony at first. I’m a healthy lookin guy. I have IBS & other prescription drugs to treat it. The problem is that those drugs only treat the symptoms, don’t always work, and have shitty side effects, while MJ prevents the IBS from flaring up in the first place by releiving anxiety / stress & soothing the intestinal lining. If anyone thinks I don’t deserve the MMJ I challenge them to take laxatives for 2 weeks straight & see how it feels to pee out your butt 15 times a day. Its not fun and MMJ legitmately helps prevent it.
As a skeptic and a supporter of medical maijuana, I’m torn here. The skeptic in me wants to see some reliable evidence being put forth to the general public about how MM works, and some good studies to show its efficacy, especially when treating pain. Anecdote does not equal data.
But, the MM (and recreational use) supporter in me says, fuck it, anecdotes are enough, let’s just legalize it already. Damn…
I’m pretty healthy for a 41 year old fat man. But I am 41, I am fat, so it’s a relative thing. I screwed up my back a several years ago and it’s slowed me down, contributing to my weight problem, but it’s not bad enough to justify surgery. I have Asperger’s and occasionally suffer bouts of paralyzing anxiety. Pot helps a lot with both. Here in South Carolina, that makes me a junkie and a criminal. Can’t wait ’til I can afford to move to one of those states where I can tell a biddable doc, “My back hurts. I’m afraid to go out. Can I get some pot, please?”
For thousands of years cannabis has been in the pharmacopeia of every society and culture in which it was available including the US pharmacopeia until 1942. It’s been helping humans with pain for thousands of years. Not only is it good medicine, it’s great medicine with an extremely low toxicity and multiple benefits other than just pain. And there’s substantial peer reviewed evidence to boot.
If we don’t cherry pick studies and examine the full scope of the literature, there is a continuous recurrence of analgesic action since the very inception of the studies on cannabis. It is my opinion that any claims on a lack of scientific evidence for medical cannabis are simply not founded in a proper understanding of the scope of the literature.