Marijuana and its profound health benefits

Antonio Harden
Prof. Secunda
5 May 2014
EN 131 A
Essay 4
Marijuana and its profound benefits’

Controversy has arisen on how marijuana can aid in the health field. Marijuana should be legalized in all states due to the medical benefits which herb possess. According to the Institute of Medicine studies have actually shown the patients with long term illness should be treated immediately. A safe alternative besides regular smoking would be an inhalation device connected to the terminally ill patients.
Despite U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration refusal to identify any valid medical use of marijuana, counties in California remain responsible to the state government for execution of medical marijuana laws. Most county governments have known the permissible privileges of eligible patients to use marijuana in a selection of settings. Several studies have connected cannabis to phobia, schizophrenia, nervousness, downheartedness and other hostile physical, psychological, and communal conclusions. Marijuana’s positive beneficial effects have been documented by the U.S. Institute of Medicine, the American College of Physicians, and other sources in relation to neurosis, bipolar disorder, apprehension, discomfort, anorexia, motion sickness, and muscle spasticity.
In contrast many people believe herb is a gateway drug; believing that this plant transcends over to cocaine, heroin, mushrooms, and other well-known drugs which in fact are actually the true definition of a drug since in order for the effects to begin, chemically there are steps before injecting oneself with the element. However this issue of cannabis and gateway drugs is still a hypothesis; there are different paths or ways to harder drug uses. For example there’s social interaction, when users hear by word of mouth about other hardcore drugs from their peers, another is through evidence and credibility, or trustworthiness if you might ask. Two recent test of the hypothesis report that the gateway effect of cannabis is greatly reduced after taking unobserved heterogeneity into description, even to the point of not being substantial (Beenstock and Rahav 2002; Pudney 2003). Other readings claim that while the gateway effect is condensed when unobserved disparateness is taken account of, there is still a significant association. Therefore, the main question of whether the experiential progressive outline of drug initiation is due to connection or causality remains unresolved.
To identify a possible casual effect of cannabis on subsequent use of hard drugs one needs to account for self-selection into a group of cannabis users and into a group of hard drug users. Ideally, to single out the effect of cannabis use, one would like to know the counterfactual outcome for cannabis users: what the probability of hard drug use would have been if they had not started to use cannabis in the first place. In practice this counterfactual cannot be observed and, in the absence of randomized experiments, attention must focus on alternative estimation strategies for handling the potential change of the gateway variable.

Work Citied/Consulted

Ault, Alicia. "Institute Of Medicine Says Marijuana Has Benefits." Lancet 353.9158 (1999): 1077. Business Source Complete.

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Melberg, Hans Olav, Andrew M. Jones, and Anne Bretteville-Jensen. “Is Cannabis a Gateway to Hard Drugs? “Empirical Economics 38.3 (2010): 583-603. Business Source Complete.

Swartz, Ronald. “Medical Marijuana Users in Substance Abuse Treatment. “Harm Reduction Journal 7. (2010): 1-9. Academic Search Complete.

Shrier, Lydia A. “The Context of Desire to Use Marijuana: Momentary Assessment of Young People Who Frequently Use Marijuana. “Psychology of Addictive Behaviors 26.4 (2012): 821-829. PsycARTICLES.