Despite the fact that the Drug Enforcement Agency categorizes marijuana as a schedule I drug, one that has no accepted medical use, a majority of Americans have thought medical pot should be legal since the late 1990s — and a majority now support recreational legalization as well.

29 states have legalized medical marijuana – that number is 43 states if we count laws with very limited access.

Even the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse lists medical uses for cannabis.

But even though researchers have identified some fascinating potential benefits of medical marijuana so far, it’s something that’s still hard to study, making conclusive results tough to come by. The schedule I classification means it’s hard for researchers to get their hands on pot grown to the exacting standards that are necessary for Florida marijuana doctors and medical research, even in states where it’s legal. Plus, no researcher can even try to make an FDA-approved cannabis product while it has that DEA classification, which removes some motivation to study the plant.

More research would identify health benefits more clearly and would also help clarify potential dangers such as with any psychoactive substance, there are risks associated with abuse, including dependency and emotional issues. And many doctors want to understand marijuana’s effects better before deciding whether to recommend it or not.

There’s a fair amount of evidence that marijuana does no harm to the lungs, unless you also smoke tobacco, and one study published in Journal of the American Medical Association found that marijuana not only doesn’t impair lung function, it may even increase lung capacity.

Researchers and marijuana doctors in Florida looking for risk factors of heart disease tested the lung function of 5,115 young adults over the course of 20 years. Tobacco smokers lost lung function over time, but pot users actually showed an increase in lung capacity.

It’s possible that the increased lung capacity may be due to taking a deep breaths while inhaling the drug and not from a therapeutic chemical in the drug.

Those smokers only toked up a few times a month, but a more recent survey of people who smoked pot daily for up to 20 years found no evidence that smoking pot harmed their lungs.

With that caveat about research in mind, here are the medical benefits of marijuana.

Marijuana use can prevent epileptic seizures in rats, a 2003 study showed.

A professor gave marijuana extract and synthetic marijuana to epileptic rats. The drugs rid the rats of the seizures for about 10 hours. Cannabinoids like the active ingredients in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (also known as THC), control seizures by binding to the brain cells responsible for controlling excitability and regulating relaxation.

The findings were published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.

During the research for his documentary interviewed the Figi family, who treats their daughter using a medical marijuana strain high in cannabidiol and low in THC.

There are at least two major active chemicals in marijuana that researchers think have medicinal applications (there are up to 79 known active compounds). Those two are cannabidiol (CBD) — which seems to impact the brain mostly without a high— and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) — which has pain relieving (and other) properties.

The Figi family’s daughter, Charlotte, has Dravet Syndrome, which causes seizures and severe developmental delays.

According to the film, the drug has decreased her seizures from 300 a week to just one every seven days. Forty other children in the state are using the same strain of marijuana (which is high in CBD and low in THC) to treat their seizures — and it seems to be working.

The doctors who recommended this treatment say that the cannabidiol in the plant interacts with the brain cells to quiet the excessive activity in the brain that causes these seizures.

As Gutpa notes, a Florida hospital that specializes in the disorder, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Drug Enforcement agency don’t endorse marijuana as a treatment for Dravet or other seizure disorders.

CBD may also help prevent cancer from spreading, researchers at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco reported in 2007.

Cannabidiol stops cancer by turning off a gene called Id-1, the study, published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, found. Cancer cells make more copies of this gene than non-cancerous cells, and it helps them spread through the body.

The researchers studied breast cancer cells in the lab that had high expression levels of Id-1 and treated them with cannabidiol. After treatment the cells had decreased Id-1 expression and were less aggressive spreaders. But beware: these are studies on cancer cells in the lab, not on cancer patients. 

Other very preliminary studies on aggressive brain tumors in mice or cell cultures have shown that florida medical marijauna THC and CBD can slow or shrink tumors at the right dose, which is a great reason to do more research into figuring out that dose.

One 2014 study found that marijuana can significantly show the growth of the type of brain tumor associated with 80% of malignant brain cancer in people.

Medical marijuana users claim the drug helps relieve pain and suppress nausea — the two main reasons it’s often used to relieve the side effects of chemotherapy.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School suggested that that some of the drug’s benefits may actually be from reduced anxiety, which would improve the smoker’s mood and act as a sedative in low doses.

Published in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics, found that THC, the active chemical in marijuana, slows the formation of amyloid plaques by blocking the enzyme in the brain that makes them. These plaques seem to be what kill brain cells and potentially cause Alzheimer’s.

A synthetic mixture of CBD and THC seem to preserve memory in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. Another study suggested that in population-based studies, a THC-based prescription drug called dronabinol was able to reduce behavioral disturbances in dementia patients. Get Started.

Medical Marijuana and relaxation have always had a bit of a funny relationship.

On the one hand, nearly half of cannabis users say that their goal is to relax. Yet many people are also familiar with the marijuana freak-out, or have seen a paranoid friend disappear from a party because they “just can’t handle it, it’s too much, man.”

So what gives? The simple answer is that feelings of panic probably mean someone has had too much — especially if they pulled and ate an edible without knowing what they were getting into.

Knowing how much is too much can be hard said one medical marijuana doctor in florida, and a new study published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence shows just how easy it is to overshoot the target. The study investigates the amount of cannabis that can push someone from relaxed to anxious, and suggests that the quantity that helps people relax is actually pretty small. 

Marijuana is dose dependent — the more someone uses, the stronger the effects. To figure out the ideal quantity for promoting relaxation, the researchers selected 42 volunteers between the ages of 18 and 40, all of whom were familiar with cannabis but not daily users. They split them into three groups, giving either a low dose (7.5 milligrams of THC, the cannabinoid in marijuana that’s mostly responsible for the high), high dose (12.5 mg), or placebo dose.

We found that THC at low doses reduced stress, while higher doses had the opposite effect, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University and an author of the study, said in a press release.

People on the low dose reported being more relaxed than those on the placebo, and their stress levels dissipated more quickly after the tasks. But people on the high doses paused more in the job interview and reported the tasks to be stressful, challenging, and threatening.

Those differences, however, were just in how people perceived the events. Physical stress markers like heart rate, blood pressure, and hormone levels were equal for all groups.

“The doses used in the study produce effects that are equivalent to only a few puffs of a cannabis cigarette. In other words, a few hits of a joint or bowl is enough to hit the low dose. And just a few more hits could easily bring THC levels in line with the “high” dose.

As a writer of the Post notes, The Cannabist has calculated the amount of THC people get from an average joint. According to Florida medical marijuana doctors and a study cited in their analysis, an average joint weighs about .32 grams. They say that smoking half of that would give users 9 to 11 mg of THC, assuming that about the same amount of THC would just burn off. That’s right in between the “low” and “high” doses used in the study.

The Cannabist’s formula multiples the weight of the joint by the THC potency of marijuana to tell you how much THC you’d ingest. So in a .32 g joint with a 13% potency, you’ve got about 42 mg of THC. The low 7.5 mg dose from the study would therefore be 18% of that joint, and the high 12.5 mg dose would be about 30% of it. (It’s worth noting, however, that exact calculations are hard since some will always burn off. Plus, some joints are a lot bigger, with another commonly cited average being about .75 grams.)

There’s a long list of caveats to the results of this study, however.

First, the sample size was relatively small and therefore not representative of how everyone might react. People with more experience are more likely to tolerate a higher dose without getting nervous, and we also know that the mode of marijuana ingestion affects the high. (An edible high isn’t the same as a smoked or vaporized high.)

Differences between marijuana plants further complicate things, since samples can vary dramatically and the stuff sold legally in state stores is usually far stronger than anything used in research studies.

Additionally, the tasks that the study participants were doing may have been particularly anxiety-provoking — so using cannabis in an easier setting may mean a stronger dose would be associated with less anxiety. 

And finally, the study evaluated the effects of pure THC, but this may not give a full picture of how marijuana affects users. Other cannabinoids in florida medical marijuana, particularly cannabidiol (CBD), may have soothing effects that reduce anxiety and may assuage some of effects of pure THC.

Lingering questions aside, this research does demonstrate a couple of things. For one, it’s easy to cross the line from the relaxing amount of marijuana to too much. And two, a lot more research on marijuana’s anxiety-reducing effects is needed (something that scientists who study marijuana frequently point out).

“Studies like these — examining the effects of cannabis and its pharmacological constituents under controlled conditions — are extremely important, considering the widespread use of cannabis for both medical and non-medical purposes. Unfortunately, significant regulatory obstacles make it extremely difficult to conduct this type of research.”