Amazing! How Many Powerful Ways Can Medical Cannabis Benefit You?
If you’re taking prescription pills for pain, anxiety, or sleep, medical marijuana may be a gentler and effective alternative.
First: Happy 4–20!
Second, I am not a loadie from way back. I didn’t use cannabis much when I was young, even though it seemed as if it was everywhere, all the time, just like cocaine and booze. Meth came a little bit later on. We can talk about the wonder benefits of all of those addictive substances.
But one of them isn’t very addictive: cannabis, aka weed, herb, pot, ganja, marijuana.
In more recent years, medical cannabis has been part of my wellness journey, and it has been a very important one. Medical marijuana seems to have cured my complex PTSD.
One of the doctors I saw at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California for PTSD told me I would “never be cured” and that my symptoms could only be managed with medication: prescription pills for anxiety and depression.
In 2012, I got a medical marijuana card in California, but I seldom used it. How was I eligible? I was diagnosed with complex PTSD in June 2006. That’s a long story, but you can read the start of it here. Here’s one of the other precipitating causes.
Now I live in Florida, the only state in the deep U.S. South that allows medical marijuana for conditions that it can benefit.
It’s hard to believe that in 2023, there is still a debate over the benefits of medical cannabis, but yes, it continues, even though calling cannabis the “demon weed” while that very day in the same town, somebody drives drunk and kills an innocent person, or gets into a bar fight and stabs someone to death …
Bruce is the joker in our family, but I used to crack up my college classes by suggesting, “Have you ever heard of somebody driving stoned and speeding?” Then I’d mime holding the steering wheel and creeping down the road at 10 miles per hour.
Medical Marijuana and PTSD
PTSD is a chronic, relapsing condition. In 2015, Bruce and I had taken a trip to Desert Hot Springs. While there, I heard that a young woman who was a resident advisor at my undergraduate college had taken her own life following predation by a faculty member. This bad news set off a full PTSD incident. I began shaking uncontrollably and my heart felt like it was going to come out of my chest. Soon, I heard my baby crying, even though he had been gone for ten years.
When PTSD escalates to this point, it’s almost impossible to reverse it without some type of help.
I told Bruce that I didn’t want a pill or a shot: I wanted to try medical cannabis. My card had expired, so I had to call “Dr. Nugg.” I still get emails from him. Dr. Nugg is one of the pioneering medical cannabis doctors from California.
I got my medical card renewed and we went to a nearby dispensary where I bought a package of Indica marijuana gummies.
I took one 5 mg weed gummy bear and …
I have not had a PTSD symptom since.
I’m not saying that only one medical marijuana gummy “cured it all!” What I am saying is, medical cannabis helped me, and it has helped many others with PTSD, anxiety, depression, and many other similar conditions. This isn’t “made up.” Cannabis benefits for PTSD have been well-documented, including among Veterans.
Beyond Habit to Addiction and Dependency
While cannabis can certainly be habit-forming, it is not addictive and does not develop dependency in the same way as opioid drugs and many psychiatric medications.
Western prescription medication is purposely formulated so that people have to keep taking it to stay well, a phenomenon called dependency. Most recently, I researched the “miracle” diabetes drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy. These drugs must be taken continuously for the rest of a person’s life or all the weight loss and health improvements they produce will disappear.
Pharma drugs are manufactured with the intent that they will be taken every day, forever. The reason? They don’t cure, they just maintain, so pharma companies and their stockholders are guaranteed lifelong customers and profits.
As a natural plant substance, marijuana works differently than small molecule pharmaceutical medications. Many of its beneficial effects, especially physical ones, build up over time. In other words, the longer you use the whole plant for some benefits, the less you need to use: the opposite of most traditional prescription medication.
How Does Medical Marijuana Work?
Before I started using medical cannabis myself and writing for medical cannabis companies like RISE Cannabis and Curaleaf, I received assignments to write books about the opioid epidemic and related issues. I wrote books about fentanyl, painkillers, and the opioid epidemic for high school classrooms and libraries.
Before I wrote these books, I didn’t understand how dependency and addiction worked. I might have been ignorant about these biological facts, but the people who make opioid drugs weren’t and aren’t. It is the heart of their business model and the way they’ve become billionaires.
Tolerance, Dependency, and Addiction
In common terms, “tolerance” means your body gets used to a substance. If you’ve developed tolerance for a medication, you need to take more of it over time to achieve the same effect you got when you started.
Dependency is related to tolerance. When our bodies develop tolerance to a medication (or substance), we can also become dependent on it. Dependency means that you need to use the substance every day to “feel normal.” The biological term for feeling well or normal is “homeostasis.”
Addiction is different. Not everyone who uses any substance or medication becomes addicted. One of the most-evil features of the large businesses that earn profits from these features of human biology (tolerance, dependency, and addiction) is that they directly state and indirectly market and encourage ignorant attitudes that blame their customers for their bodies reacting the way that nature intends.
Addiction is a physical, mental, and emotional response to repeated use of external substances. It’s called a “disease,” but I’m not so sure most addictions to substances are not more like long-term poisoning. Addiction has little to do with willpower and it is not a “moral failing.”
Not everyone who uses opioids becomes addicted. But everyone who has become addicted to opioids is also dependent on them. They need to take an opioid drug or substitute (Medication-Assisted Treatment) to feel normal each day. Opioids quickly develop tolerance in anyone who uses them, so anyone who takes them over time will need to take increasing doses or change medications to continue to obtain pain relief.
If You Know How It Works, You Can Turn The Tables
Here are links to articles I’ve written about the invention of fentanyl, the Narcan scam, and the opioid Sacklers. If you like “true crime,” you’ll probably enjoy these articles.
Five different types of opioid receptors have been identified throughout the brain and the central nervous system. Our bodies naturally make opioid-like substances like endorphins, which relieve pain and help endurance. Opioid drugs, starting with the original one, opium, bind to these receptors and cause a stronger reaction than the natural one produced by our own bodies.
So, opioid makers have targeted the opioid receptors in our bodies, which are part of our natural way to relieve pain and increase endurance.
People often talk about cannabis being a “natural” and historic medicine, with records of its use dating back 10,000 years. Opium has a long history too, but not quite that long.
There are ten to 100 times the number of cannabinoid receptors in the human body as compared to opioid receptors.
Medical cannabis has bioactive (physical) and psychoactive (psychological) effects. Anyone who’s ever smoked a joint knows what the psychoactive effects are, and they seldom lead to bar stabbings and drunk driving incidents.
The bioactive effects of cannabis are still being studied. The famous post-smoking “munchies” primarily result from a lowering of blood sugar after using certain cannabis strains. Not every variety of cannabis causes “munchies,” just like not every type of cannabis leads to “couch lock.”
With anywhere between 450 and 650 different biological compounds found in the marijuana plant, there could be a strain of marijuana that benefits many aspects of physical or mental/emotional health.
One of the first steps I took to improve my health was to improve my sleep. Medical cannabis is a proven sleep aid. I’ve gotten the recommended amount of sleep almost every night since I tried that medical marijuana gummy in 2015. No, I do not take them every night. I get adequate exercise and eat a nutritious diet. I also don’t use electronic devices before I go to bed.
Happy 4–20!
Today is 4–20, a day that all cannabis enthusiasts know well — it’s probably as lucrative for medical and recreational cannabis dispensaries as Christmas is for retail stores and malls.
When we look at pharmaceutical company alternatives to relieve chronic pain, we see opioid medications and over the counter pain relievers like Tylenol. You may have heard about the many lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol. First, no one knows the exact mechanism of how Tylenol works to relieve pain and fever. And second, the company is being sued by many parents of autistic children because studies have shown that their mothers were told to take Tylenol while they were pregnant, and the children were born with autism.
As to opioids, the multi-billion lawsuits of state and local governments against pharmaceutical companies because of the opioid epidemic and nearly 350,000 overdose deaths, are still ongoing.
Medical cannabis does relieve chronic pain. It helps people to sleep better. It can relieve anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Medical cannabis has even been shown to help people recover from opioid, methamphetamine, and alcohol addiction. And, components of cannabis, like CBD (bioactive, not psychoactive) develop negative tolerance. That’s right: the more you use CBD, the greater its benefits.
And the less of it you need to take.
I can easily see why pharmaceutical companies, candy makers, alcohol makers, and tobacco companies would call cannabis “Demon Weed”!
Happy 4–20!
Sources:
Bai, Nina and Dana Smith. “Body’s ‘Natural Opioids’ Affect Brain Cells Much Differently than Morphine,” University of California, San Francisco, 10 May 2018, url: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/05/410376/bodys-natural-opioids-affect-brain-cells-much-differently-morphine
Dhaliwal, Armaan and Mohit Gupta. “Physiology, Opioid Receptor,” StatPearls, National Library of Medicine, 25 July 2022, url: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK546642/
Mathews, Rahel. “How much candy do Americans eat in a whole year?” The Conversation, 10 January 2022, url: https://theconversation.com/how-much-candy-do-americans-eat-in-a-whole-year-173956
Pacheco, Danielle. “Using Cannabis As A Sleep Aid,” Sleep Foundation, 17 March 2023, url: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/sleep-aids/cannabis-and-sleep
Rodolfo, Kelvin. “What is Homeostasis?” Scientific American, 3 January 2000, url: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-homeostasis/
Rodriguez, Jr., Israel. “Federal Study Finds Cannabis Beneficial for PTSD Treatment,” VFW Magazine, 21 September 2021, url: https://www.vfw.org/media-and-events/latest-releases/archives/2021/9/federal-study-finds-cannabis-beneficial-for-ptsd-treatment