A Preliminary Look at The Benefits of Legalized Medical Marijuana in a Current Zero-Tolerance State

Introduction

The state of Indiana’s policies concerning the legalities of medical marijuana are in need of updating. Twenty states already have medical marijuana policies in place, complete with functioning systems for prescribing, dispensing, and administering the controlled substance. From a public healthcare standpoint, countless studies and research trials have been performed clearly documenting the medicinal value of marijuana and more specifically, cannabinoids: the chemical components of marijuana that activate specific receptors throughout the body to produce pharmacological effects. With concerns of public policy and law enforcement, it is important to establish a clear protocol to make sure doctors, patients, and dispensaries can operate and conduct business safely and effectively without adding to the responsibilities of public safety agencies. The benefit of additional revenue for the state will be provided by the tax collected from legal medical marijuana sales, legal production facilities, and the business taxes collected from the dispensaries. Revisiting this issue with a concentration on the medical benefits and overall impact on statewide healthcare will help to advance us towards greater public health, increased revenues for the state, and a lower crime rate.

Background

Marijuana usage has been recorded as early as the third millennium BCE. More recently, our acceptance of it as a prescription medicine has seen benefits. Patients with chronic diseases such as cancer or HIV/AIDS use medical marijuana to ease their physical pain and help increase their appetite. It is also effective at decreasing ocular pressure in glaucoma patients and some other general pain-relieving uses. Since the early 1990s, many medical marijuana researchers have pushed beyond these few yet effective uses and discovered numerous additional health benefits from using marijuana.

Alzheimer’s Disease afflicts more than 4.5 million people in the United States and with no known preventive or disease-halting therapies the numbers continue to grow. The few pharmaceuticals used to treat Alzheimer’s are unreliable, leaving many patients untreated as they continue to throw money away on treatments that do not work. Recent international studies done by Universities and government research teams have found that marijuana effectively slows the progression of Alzheimer’s and alleviates its symptoms. Medical marijuana can provide the most effective therapy we have and do it at a cost-effective rate (Israel NationalNews, 2010).

Multiple Sclerosis, the degenerative disease of the central nervous system, strikes nearly 200 20-40 year-olds each week. The symptoms of pain and spasticity along with incontinence, fatigue, and depression have long been known to respond to marijuana. Recent clinical and preclinical trials conclude that medical marijuana also halts the progression of MS, once again simultaneously treating the symptoms of a disease while halting its progression (Zubair Ahmed, 2003).

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is a bacterium resistant to conventional antibiotics including penicillin. It is estimated by the Journal of the American Medical Association that more than 20,000 hospital patients per year die of MRSA complications. The use of medical marijuana has shown to have antibacterial properties strong enough to halt the spread of MRSA (Giovanni Appendino, 2008).

Rheumatoid Arthritis afflicts approximately 1% of the population, mostly women. Until now expensive treatments and therapies involving narcotic pain killers and surgeries have forced many to live with the debilitating disease. Preliminary tests have shown the new pharmaceutical use of marijuana can greatly reduce the joint damage of Rheumatoid Arthritis and halt the progression of the disease. Researches from Tokyo’s National Institute for Neuroscience also corroborated such findings (Department of Immunology, 2005).

Tourette’s Syndrome is extremely complex and has an unknown etiology making effective treatment difficult. The 100, 000 Americans with Tourette’s Syndrome suffer the embarrassing and frustrating symptoms of uncontrollable vocal tics and the often accompanying Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior. Several studies have proven that marijuana therapy effectively reduced the severity of tics and OCB caused by Tourette’s Syndrome (Kirsten R. Muller-Vahl M.D., 1999).

Sleep Apnea affects about 4% of men and 2% of women contributing to fatigue, stroke, and heart disease. Research using medical marijuana to treat sleep apnea is in its infancy, yet preliminary studies show promising results. Stabilizing respiration while sleeping, controlling serotonin-induced exacerbation of sleep, and muscle relaxation are effective properties of marijuana. Future clinical studies will delve deeper into these findings.

Gliomas are a type of aggressive, malignant brain tumor that is untreatable and usually results in death within 2-3 years of diagnosis. In 1998 Madrid's Complutense University, School of Biology first discovered that properties in marijuana actually killed gliomas cell in culture. The flood of studies to tackle this topic is staggering and opening up a completely new field in cancer research. This demonstrates that medical marijuana can also inhibit the proliferation of other cancers including breast carcinoma, prostate carcinoma, colorectal carcinoma, gastric adenocarcinoma, skin carcinoma, leukemia cells, neuroblastoma, lung carcinoma, uterus carcinoma, thyroid epithelioma, pancreatic adenocarcinoma, cervical carcinoma, oral cancer, biliary tract cancer (cholangiocarcinoma), and lymphoma (Ismael Galve-Roperh, 2000).

Internal Players

State law enforcement, district attorneys, and judges will need to be re-educated about the laws concerning medical marijuana to ensure that innocent law-abiding persons and businesses are not unjustly prosecuted or incarcerated. Public policy in the workplace and government-subsidized programs will also need to be updated to protect medical marijuana recipients from the consequences of testing positive on a drug screening and to protect their privacy as a medical marijuana patient.

Additional Stakeholders

The private sector would see the opening of a new line of business opportunities centered on medical marijuana and medical marijuana-based products. Legalizing medical marijuana would provide the opportunity for more small locally owned businesses and employment to stimulate local economic growth. The growing and processing of the actual plants as well as the production of medicinal tinctures, extracts, and edible formats will provide an influx of opportunities for small business startups and boost employment in general. The prospect of pharmaceutical companies being involved in the production of marijuana and marijuana-derived medication would have an impact on the state and would require restructuring some portions of the tax and controlled substance laws if the state chose to go in that direction.

Option I

Adopt a medical marijuana program that will strictly control and monitor by taking several measures:

Licensing doctors that prescribe medical marijuana

Licensing the patience

Licensing and taxing growers of medical marijuana

Licensing and taxing producers of a product derived from medical marijuana

Licensing and taxing the medical marijuana dispensaries

State-supported shelter from arrest or prosecution on the federal level

The result would be increased tax revenue and full disclosure of the location of these operations and businesses.

Option II

Adopt a highly restrictive and fee-laden program model that contribute to marginalizing people who would benefit from medical marijuana with limited access and acceptance if not discourage all together:

Exorbitant fees for a limited number of licenses for physicians who would be prescribing medical marijuana

Exorbitant fees for a limited number of licenses for patient’s medical marijuana cards

Exorbitant fees for a limited number of licenses for producers and dispensaries

No state-supported shelter from federal prosecution

The result would be an almost hidden medical marijuana program that would contribute to the marginalization of patience and healthcare providers. In addition, this management style would not lower illegal drug sales or the amount of money spent to prosecute and incarcerate drug offenders.

Option III

Continue with the zero-tolerance policy towards marijuana and continue to spend state funds on arresting and prosecuting nonviolent marijuana law violators.

Recommendation

Moving forward with legislation allowing for medical marijuana use will benefit the state of Indiana and its residents in several ways.

Patients would have access to clean, natural, high-quality medicines under state supervision. These same patients would be under a physician’s care, free of the stigma and legalities of prescribing medical marijuana or medication made from marijuana.

The state would see increased revenue from the taxation and fees from each component of the new market.

The state could own and operate some aspects of the process of producing medical marijuana thereby collecting profits as part of the business cycle.

Patients that would benefit from medical marijuana would no longer have to rely on the illegal black market to supply them with marijuana, therefore, reducing the number of illegal transaction and reducing the income of illegal drug dealers or putting them out of business altogether.

The reduction in marijuana-related crime would have a positive impact on the judicial system by significantly lowering the number of marijuana possession case hearings, thus saving tax expenditures.

In a related event, fewer prosecutions mean fewer incarcerations, which would alleviate some of the stress on an already overstressed, overcrowded prison system, freeing up resources for dangerous violent offenders.

The carefully regulated and monitored program would provide funding for drug abuse education and awareness, contributing to an informed and healthy public.

The closely monitored program would bring medical marijuana out of the shadows and into the daylight, eliminating the taboo and largely erasing the illegal marijuana market.

The further investigation and research into the various aspects of this issue are encouraged as well as the education of the lawmakers of the state of Indiana. There is a viable acceptable path to increased wellness and improving the state’s economy by passing the necessary laws to enact a statewide policy for the legal prescription, production, and use of medical marijuana with multiple benefits.

References

Ahmed, Zubair, Deborah J. R. Hankey, and Gareth Pryce. “Cannabinoids Inhibit Neurodegeneration in Models of Multiple Sclerosis.” Brain an Oxford Journal 126, no. 10 (October 2003): 2191-202.

Appendino, Giovanni, Simon Gibbons, Anna Giana, Alberto Pagani, Gianpaolo Grassi, Michael Stavri, Eileen Smith, and M. Mukhlesur Rahman. “Antibacterial Cannabinoids from Cannabis sativa: A Structure−Activity Study” Journal of Natural Products 71 no. 8 (2008): 1427-1430.

Department of Immunology, National Institute of Neuroscience, NCNP, 4-1-1 Ogawahigashi, Kodaira, Tokyo 187-8502, Japan. Journal of Neuroimmunology 166 (1-2) (September 2005): 3-18.

Galve-Roperh, Ismael, Cristina Sánchez, María Luisa Cortés, Teresa Gómez del Pulgar, Marta Izquierdo, and Manuel Guzmán. “Anti-tumoral Action of Cannabinoids: Involvement of Sustained Ceramide Accumulation and Extracellular Signal-regulated Kinase Activation.” Nature Medicine 6, (2000): 313–319.

Israel National News. "Israeli Research Shows Cannabidiol May Slow Alzheimer's Disease." December 16, 2010.

Muller-Vahl, Kirsten R., Udo Schneider, A. Koblenz, M. Jobges, Hans Kolbe, T. Daldrup, and H. M. Emrich. “Treatment of Tourette’s Syndrome with Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol.” American Journal of Psychiatry 156:3 (March 1999).