MARIJUANA TODAY

Marijuana has been shown to be an effective for pain management. There are pain receptors in the brain that permit the uptake of cannabinoids (like THC). There have been many studies that have shown that cannabinoids help reduce pain. For those afflicted with diseases such as AIDS, the use of medical marihuana reduces neuropathic pain and muscle spasms. Arthritis, a disease of the joints where there is severe pain, stiffness, inflammation, and swelling, medical marijuana helps alleviate the pain and inflammation. For diseases and conditions where people suffer from chronic pain that is described as aching, burning, and shooting, marijuana relieves the pain and reduces swelling thereby promoting more comfort and improved sleep. Colitis, a condition affecting the tissue that lines the gastrointestinal system where there is intense pain, inflammation, and loss of appetite, the symptoms can be alleviated by using medical marijuana. Fibromyalgia, a medical syndrome characterized by chronic widespread pain and sensitive painful response to pressure, the symptoms can be alleviated by using medical marijuana as the pain and fatigue is reduced.

Marijuana is also effective at reducing nausea and studies have proven that medical marijuana makes for an effective Antiemetic (antinausea) medication. For people suffering from nauseas from chemotherapy, radiation treatment, smoking marijuana relieves the nausea symptoms quickly. People are able to eat and keep the food down which helps combat weight loss and muscle wasting. As well, the reduced nausea will reduce vomiting and reduce stress allowing for improved sleep patterns. Medical marijuana has also been shown to be effective in helping people with anorexia increase their appetite and improve their mood. Chronic nausea, a constant sensation where one feels there is a need to vomit, can be alleviated by marijuana as it reduces the nausea feeling, increases appetite, and helps keep the food down.

Asthma can be alleviated by using medical marijuana. It helps to reduce asthma symptoms by opening up bronchial tubes. Alzheimer's disease is another disease that can be helped by using medical marijuana. Alzheimer's disease is a common form of dementia, Smoking marijuana can help prevent the formation of Alzheimer's plaques in the brain thereby slowing the degenerative process. Marijuana can alleviate symptoms of epilepsy by reducing seizures and muscle spasms and preventing loss of consciousness. Other conditions that can be alleviated by taking marijuana include: hypertension, glaucoma, migraines, seizure disorders, and multiple sclerosis.

Medical marijuana has been used by people all over the world for centuries to treat a wide variety of ailments. As more states realize the benefits of medical marijuana, more will legalize this natural plant as an effective medicine to treat a variety of health conditions.

Because of the growth and expansion of the pharmaceutical industry, many medical professionals in the United States have forgotten about the helpful medicinal properties found in marijuana. Marijuana is now widely known for such therapeutic properties as: analgesic, appetite stimulant, gastrointestinal sedative, anti-epileptic, anti-spasmodic, sedative, prevent and treat migraines, anti-asthmatic, and an anti-convulsant. This natural plant is also known to provide relief for people suffering from such conditions as: AIDS, Glaucoma, Fibromyalgia, Arthritis, Cancer, and much more. Because more research studies are now revealing the usefulness of medical marijuana in treating a wide variety of health conditions, more people are choosing marijuana to alleviate their ailments.

There are many reasons why people are choosing to grow their own marijuana instead of buying it from another party. Ounce-per-ounce, marijuana is much cheaper to grow than constantly buying it from another person. Those who grow their own marijuana will know the exact quality of the plant. For instance, they will know exactly what is in the marijuana and the amount of ingredients, such as the percentage of THC. As well, they do not have to be concerned that the marijuana has been altered by someone else. Also, growing marijuana can be a very rewarding and relaxing experience. Growing your own marijuana plants can be compared to how gardeners feel when they grow their own vegetables for their own consumption.

When people grow their own marijuana, they do not have to engage in the stress and anxiety of buying it from someone else. Because the illegal drug trade can be dangerous, marijuana growers will be able to avoid unsafe situations. Also, they do not have to worry about being busted by the police when buying it from someone else. Out of the hundreds of thousands of people who grow marijuana only a small percentage of growers are caught and arrested for growing the plant.

There are currently 14 states in the US that have legalized marijuana for medical use. There are also a number of states that have a legalizing marijuana proposition on the November 2nd, 2010 ballot. Until every state realizes the benefits of legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes and establishes more sensible laws and regulations, people will continue to use marijuana to help treat and alleviate their illnesses, even if it is illegal, and many will continue to grow this natural medicinal plant in the privacy of their own homes.

You must understand that today's marijuana strains are quite different from the hemp growers of early America, when rope, cloth, paper, and other fine products were manufactured out of hemp. There are hybrids and hybrids of hybrids - also "cuttings-only" for cloning those types of marijuana that especially please the medical industry. As you can imagine, since 1930, thousands of marijuana strains have been brought into the illegal marketplace, where it is used for medical purposes as well as for recreational smokers.

To a great extent, marijuana strains must be produced by anyone that wants to grow marijuana.

You should know that all types of marijuana are part of the Cannabis family of only three members: Ruderalis, Sativas, and Indica. The one that descends from the growing of hemp in early America is called Cannabis Ruderalis. It has gone wild over the years and is hardly noticeable as Cannabis anymore. It has been known for many years that some ailments are better helped with one strain more than another. This has inspired the development of even more strains just for medical benefits.

As you already discovered, all hemp products are imported into America since 1930; most are imported by the government, because they need tough long wearing products to run the military and other special needs. But let's face it. It's next to impossible for common people to buy hemp products because they are all imported and only the government can deal in imports - common people like you and me have no contacts and no money for dealing. If we ever needed a product in America, it is real canvas. We have no material for protecting things from the weather, like the real canvas used once on covered wagons. We are forced to buy petrochemical tarps that leak the first time they are exposed to weather. In contrast, real canvas, named after cannabis, does not leak - the pioneers would have never made it to the west if they had had to rely on the flimsy tarps of today. They wouldn't have had water bags either, which kept their water cool. Yes, people used to use water bags all over America before 1950, but when the old ones wore out, there was no more.

The truth is that the outlawing of hemp crops had nothing to do with smoking marijuana - no, and nothing to do with the so-called "drugs". It rightfully should be called "railroading hundreds of fine products off the market in order to be replaced by dozens of very harmful, inferior products" - most of which have been directly responsible for our contaminated world that the government is trying so hard to call "global warming". Global warming? Just more propaganda - with the media in their pocket, they have twisted lies into "truth" that most people will believe without thinking, as the true background is generally not known.

Although the government has outlawed all marijuana strains – President Obama has relaxed the arrests, and the people are getting overconfident - could the next president have a different outlook on the various types of marijuana? Only when the federal government lifts their ban on all marijuana strains, will the people be free to develop this industry as they should. Until then, doctors, patients, caregivers and growers of every kind had better realize, marijuana is against the law and the government can condemn the use of any marijuana strains, any medical marijuana doctor, any marijuana user regardless of their being a patient of any other description.

The bottom line is this. The power behind the curtain may or may not allow one or more types of marijuana to be used - it is questionable if the Federal Government will ever make legal the use of marijuana. And while over a thousand different marijuana strains exist today with more being developed every year, only a few of these are being grown widely by home growers for medical purposes - now you can find out for yourself how to select the best strain for your specific situation.

The idea for the cannabis club originated from Dennis Peron, a San Francisco marijuana dealer who took up the cause of medical use of cannabis when his lover who contacted AIDS, found relief when he used marijuana. There are now marijuana clubs being created in 14 states in the United States that provide an assortment of strains of cannabis, as well as other cannabis products such as baked goods, capsules, oils, sprays, and more.

Marijuana clubs vary in the services and products they offer. Some of these clubs operate as a business while others are not-for-profit societies. The managers of these clubs are educated in medicinal cannabis and its uses. As well, the clubs generally require membership which involves completing a form where the potential member and his or her doctor sign the form confirming the condition that requires the use of medical marijuana.

The purpose of marijuana clubs is not only to provide an environment to take medical marijuana, but also to create a place where ill people can relax in a friendly and accepting environment. It is not just 14 states that have marijuana clubs, but there are a similar number that have pending ballot measures and legislation to make marijuana for medical use legal.The use of medical marijuana has taking place for over 4,500 years. The most humane argument for allowing the use of medical marijuana is to help the terminally ill and severely sick. There has been much research into the effects of medical marijuana and it has been shown to help with such conditions as: insomnia, spasticity, nausea, seizures, pain, vomiting, arthritis, dystonia, and Tourettes syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis, appetite loss, and glaucoma. There has been no connection made between marijuana use and lung cancer or emphysema. Patients who have used medical marijuana have reported positive results and believe it is an important tool to alleviating and helping their condition.

If you live in the state that permits the use of medical Marijuana Treatment, you must be aware of several facts regarding the laws about this matter. If you want to legally use marijuana as a medicine, you must find a physician, who will supply you with a medical marijuana card. Many people simply don't know the way they should get their medical marijuana card, and this is the reason for this writing. When someone is in a bad medical condition – for example, cancer – someone's got to help them, and the help is supplied at medical marijuana clinics throughout the fourteen USA states, which have allowed marijuana for medicinal uses.

When you look for a company or a physician that supplies Medical Marijuana Card evaluations and the cards, you must first make sure that they have the needed license and certificate. Otherwise, you might get into serious controversy with the law and get fined or even arrested. You must be sure that the card you've received is lawful and not fake. There are certain companies that supply fake recommendations and patients get involved into serious troubles due to those facilities. Therefore, ensuring that you employ appropriate services is vitally important. In case you meet a service that supplies telephonic recommendations, you must know that this is a swindle and it's a bad idea to trust those services. Good, professional, certified, and qualified physicians will appoint a meeting to review your medical record and condition to see if you really should use medical marijuana for treatment. You will have to supply your ID card or driver's license as well. This can take some time, but at least this way you will make sure that you deal with a proper Medical Marijuana Card and that you may utilize medical marijuana for your treatment on an absolute legal basis.

After receiving the medical marijuana card you may visit a medical marijuana clinic and acquire your medicine, or hire a caregiver, who will provide and deliver the medicine to you. There are certain other issues regarding the use and growing of medical cannabis, but we won't review them in this article. For now, you know what you should be searching for, and the World Wide Web will provide you all of its help, because all of the proper services, unfortunately alongside with the fake ones, have online portals with the data regarding their services. Make sure to check the licenses and qualifications for medical marijuana of the services you're dealing with.

To some people, the use of medical marijuana is something that remains controversial, while to others it is an established and proven method of pain reduction.

Reasons for the controversy

When looking at the whole of human history, it's not easy to identify too many substances that have generated the amount of debate and confusion as has been the case with marijuana. But there is clear and irrefutable evidence that marijuana has been used for medical purposes for centuries. There are documented uses of it in the ancient Chinese, Indian and Persian cultures going back thousands of years. In Europe it was used in the classical period, then appears to have disappeared for a long period, only to surface again in the 19th century as a treatment for various forms of pain. For much of that time, it was relatively unknown in the western world as a ‘recreational' substance. When it was used in a medical capacity, it seems to have generally been little publicized and it remained largely uncontroversial. This, rather relaxed, position changed radically from the earlier 20th century onwards. Many western countries began passing laws to control or prohibit the use of medical marijuana. The reasons for that varied from country to country and even today, trying to objectively analyze the progression towards restrictions and banning is not easy task as it's a veritable mire of politics, economics, racism and outright speculation. There are numerous and sometimes mutually exclusive theories as to the processes involved, but some points are perhaps generally accepted.

Confusion between medical marijuana and recreational use

The use of various substances and chemicals for recreational purposes has an almost equally long history. In the late 18th and 19th centuries the use of things such as opium and its derivatives had become popular amongst some of the educated western-world classes that could afford it. Marijuana seems to have been relatively rarely used in this category (in Europe and the USA), but medical marijuana was more widely used in conventional medicine as well as what we would call today, alternative or complementary medicine. Towards the end of this period and into the 20th century, in some countries there was a growing concern about the addictive qualities of many of these recreational substances and their possible effects on wider society. Quite unscientifically, medical marijuana became conflated with these substances almost by default. Some of the growing anti-marijuana sentiment also seems to have been of racist origin, as the use of such substances was often associated (frequently incorrectly) with immigrant communities of Chinese and South American origin, and sections of the African-American population in the case of the USA. Marijuana's use in alternative medicine also didn't do it any favours, as from the mid-late 19th century onwards there was a mass movement in western circles against natural remedies (often described as ‘quackery') towards synthetics developed by the scientific process. Many traditional remedies were lost in this period without serious scientific evaluation of their efficacy – and only now are some of them being subject to serious re-evaluation by medical science medical marijuana amongst them. What is clear is that by the earlier 20th century, the United States had started to pass laws against the use of many substances, including marijuana, but with little empirical evidence to support the expressed concerns relating to the presumed dangers of its use.

Confusion and inconsistencies

Paradoxically, medical treatments based upon far more addictive opiates and derivatives became accepted, if tightly regulated, while for reasons that remain complicated and confused, marijuana continued to be regarded as a substance that had no medicinal purposes. Around the 1920s, the position and perceptions of Europeans and the USA begin to differ. For example, in the British parliament, a debate on marijuana was greeted by apathy and was so poorly attended that the session almost had to be cancelled. The UK and many other European countries drifted into the 1925 international treaty controlling many substances, in a state of mild indifference as far as medical marijuana was concerned. Today, The Netherlands allows its use in small quantities for personal and medicinal purposes and several other European countries do not enforce their own laws against it. By contrast, in the USA marijuana was one of a number of substances that had become a major moral as well as legal and health issue. More rigid laws were enforced and in spite of numerous test cases and appeals, the position was increasingly adopted that medical marijuana had no benefits. Today, the position in the USA is perhaps best described as even more confused with some state laws supporting the controlled use of medical marijuana while federal law bans it -though this may or may not currently be subject to rigid enforcement in those states that permit its use for medical purposes. The position remains in a state of flux and you should consult your own state government to ascertain the law.

The underlying reality

In the end, each individual must make up his or her own mind about the efficacy of medical marijuana. There are medical studies and personal testimonials that appear to indicate that very significant benefits may be obtained for sufferers of certain types of pain and medical conditions. Other studies appear to be unwilling or unable to support those claims. Yet further studies appear to show benefits but also cite potential undesirable side effects. Perhaps what is being increasingly asked is why the debate continues to have such a strong moral dimension when such discussions rarely, if ever, arise when other forms of medication become available. It would seem as if 21st century medical science should be able to objectively answer the question once and for all as to whether or not medical marijuana has legitimate benefits.