States around the country — more than 20 in total — have legalized medical marijuana.
Experts have been changing their minds too — recently, many medical experts have reversed their opinion on medical marijuana law in surround areas.
While recreational pot usage is controversial, many people agree with this new stance, and believe that the drug should be legal for medical uses.
And even though the benefits of smoking pot may be overstated by advocates of marijuana legalization, new laws will help researchers study the drug’s medicinal uses and better understand how it impacts the body.
Currently only 6% of studies on Medical Marijuanas analyze its medicinal properties.
Keep in mind, though, that there are negative effects of smoking too much pot or using it for non-medicinal purposes. When overused or abused, pot can lead to dependency and mess with your memory and emotions.
There are at least two active chemicals in marijuana that researchers think have medicinal applications. Those are cannabidiol (CBD) — which seems to impact the brain without a high— and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) — which has pain relieving (and other) properties.
Also keep in mind that some of these health benefits can potentially be gained by taking THC pills like Dronabinol, a synthetic form of THC, which in some ways might be more effective than smoked marijuana.
It can be used to treat Glaucoma
Marijuana decreases the pressure inside the eye, according to the National Eye Institute: “Studies in the early 1970s showed that marijuana, when smoked, lowered intraocular pressure (IOP) in people with normal pressure and those with glaucoma.”
These effects of the drug may slow the progression of the disease, preventing blindness.
According to content published on many medical marijuana doctors websites, marijuana does not impair lung function and can even increase lung capacity.
Researchers looking for risk factors of heart disease tested the lung function of many 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 maybe due to taking a deep breaths while inhaling the drug and not from a therapeutic chemical in the drug.
It can help control epileptic seizures
Marijuana use can prevent epileptic seizures, a study showed.
Patient given 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.
After November 8, 20% of Americans now live in states that have voted to allow recreational marijuana use.
Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, and California have now joined Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and the District of Columbia in voting for initiatives that make it legal for adults to consume cannabis authorized by marijuana doctors. Votes are still being counted, but it looks like Maine will most likely join that group. And several states joined the 25 that already allow for medical use of marijuana — the most notable addition being Florida, with a broad medical marijuana law that will allow doctors to recommend cannabis for a wide variety of conditions.
Critics of legalization claim that legalization is bad for public health. “When states legalize recreational marijuana, fatalities increase and the lives of children and teenagers are put at stake, president and CEO of Spectrum Health Systems, a substance abuse and mental health treatment provider, recently wrote in an opinion piece for Stat News.
But the data on how both recreational and medical legalization of marijuana tells a different story.
It’s still early — marijuana hasn’t been legal for long, even in these states — but so far, legalization hasn’t had a negative impact on public health, according to a report recently published by the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). That report and other recent studies help show how marijuana legalization for medical or recreational purposes in these states has changed things.
Nationally, the number of students who used marijuana in the past 30 days leveled out in 2010 after rising for several years, according to the DPA report and one expert marijuana doctor. State surveys of kids in other states show that after legalization, the number of students who used or who had ever tried marijuana stayed stable (depending on the state, surveys looked at kids in grades 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12) or decreased slightly.
In his opinion piece, rep says that Colorado youth use marijuana at higher rates than any other kids in the country. But as other notes at The Washington Post, experts say that trend existed before legalization, too.
A 2015 article in the New England Journal of Medicine states that legalizing marijuana in Florida doesn’t seem to have increased the prevalence of youth usage. While the percentage of kids who described marijuana as “highly risky” decreased after legalization, the percentage of students who reported ever trying decreased slightly as well.
There’s some debate about the effect that cannabis legalization has had on traffic deaths. Rep says that data from Washington and Colorado shows that an increased percentage of the people involved in traffic fatalities have had marijuana in their systems since legalization.
However, traffic death rates since legalization have not increased in Colorado or Washington and are lower than the national average, according to National Highway Transportation Safety Administration data analyzed in the DPA report. At the same time, DUI rates seem to have decreased since legalization, potentially an overall benefit, since the risks of driving under the influence of alcohol are much more obvious than the risks of driving under the influence of cannabis (people who combine the substances perform the worst on driving tests, however).
The DPA report says that more people may test positive for cannabis now since officials are now more likely to test for it in the first place. Also, since people can test positive for cannabis long after they’ve stopped feeling the effects, the report says the “data only illuminate that tested drivers consumed hours, days, or weeks prior to the test” — not that cannabis was involved.
As Stat News pointed out in another story, there are several studies that show that states that allow medical marijuana have fewer opioid deaths. This effect seems to stack over time, with states who pass these laws seeing a “20 percent lower rate of opioid deaths in the laws’ first year, 24 percent in the third, and 33 percent in the sixth.”
If people are substituting marijuana for opioids for medical purposes, that seems to have a strong positive effect.
Isaacson says that doctors at Denver’s Children’s Hospital have reported treating an increased number of children who have accidentally ingested marijuana edibles since legalization. The overall numbers are small — in the JAMA Pediatrics study documenting these cases, doctors say that the rate of these visits has gone from 1.2 per 100,000 population 2 years prior to legalization to 2.3 per 100,000 population 2 years after legalization. As Ingraham has pointed out in the Post previously, parents are far more likely to call poison control centers because of kids ingesting diaper cream, toothpaste, tobacco, or crayons.
Adults tourists who have overdone it have also increased the number of marijuana-related ER visits slightly.
If you’ve ever seen someone who has been surprised by the strength of a marijuana edible, you know these moments aren’t fun (just ask Maureen Dowd), but luckily, people recover from these events and no one has ever died from a marijuana overdose.
The DPA report notes that “[b]y no longer arresting and prosecuting possession and other low-level marijuana offenses, states are saving hundreds of millions of dollars,” based on the fact that Washington spent $200 million enforcing marijuana laws between 2000 and 2010. Arrest rates in these states for marijuana offenses have plummeted (you can still be arrested for certain offenses), though the report notes that people of color are still twice as likely to be arrested despite using marijuana at similar rates to white people.
Financially, the DPA report says taxing and selling marijuana in Colorado and Washington has been “overwhelmingly successful in generating revenue,” with revenues exceeding projections in both states. Colorado brought in $129 million in the second year of legalization and Washington $220 million — significant amounts of money, though as Ingraham notes, still only a tiny fraction of the overall state budgets.
There are still plenty of questions about how legalized marijuana will affect states in the future. Some people have expressed concerns that powerful THC-loaded varieties available today could potentially have more of an impact than we know, especially if used by young people with developing brains. On the other hand, if people are using marijuana instead of more dangerous substances like alcohol, there could be some benefit to public health there, though so far, it’s hard to say whether legalization makes people drink more or less.
Now, we’ll be able to see the effects in several additional states. Hopefully, that will encourage study into marijuana’s effects, something that scientists say is still incredibly difficult to research because of federal regulations. In the meantime, the DPA report argues that the lessons from states across the US indicate that the public health effects are “so far, so good.”
Where there is smoke, there tends to be fire, say medical researchers who found frequent marijuana users have about 20 percent more sex than those who abstain. University School of Medicine researchers unveiled the link between marijuana and the frequency of sexual intercourse in a study published on Friday in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Researchers reached their conclusions after a retrospective analysis of data on 50,000 Americans ages 25 to 45, compiled from 2002 to 2015 by the National Survey of Family Growth. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sponsors the survey. Respondents were asked how many times they have had heterosexual intercourse in the past four weeks and how frequently they have smoked marijuana over the past 12 months, researchers said in a press release. 
Women who were daily pot users had sex an average of 7.1 times during the previous four weeks, compared with 6.0 times reported by those who denied using marijuana in the past year. For men, daily users reported 6.9 times compared with 5.6 for non-users. “In other words, pot users are having about 20 percent more sex than pot abstainers. Given that the average couple has sex about once a week, Doctors said, the bottom line for partaking in a bong or blunt could add up to 20 more instances of sexual intercourse each year. “I think if you asked a man or a woman, 20 more times to have sex over a year, that would seem like a lot,” he said. It used to be thought that couples mostly smoked after sex, but said his findings show the opposite is true for “all races, ages, education levels, income groups and religions, every health status, whether they were married or single and whether or not they had kids.” Marijuana is legal for medical or recreational adult use in 33 states. A record percentage of Americans – 64 percent – now believe adult use of the drug should be legal, according to a Gallup poll published this week. Many cautioned the study should not be misinterpreted as having proven a causal link. “It doesn’t say if you smoke more marijuana, you’ll have more sex,” he said. Still, for many, research in the name of science may never be so fun.
A new study suggests that anyone who smokes marijuana faces a threefold risk of dying from high blood pressure than people who have never used the drug. Those findings sound alarming, but it’s important to keep in mind that, like any study, this one has limitations, including that it defines marijuana “users” as anyone who’s ever tried the drug and that it doesn’t differentiate among strains of a highly unregulated product. However, the study highlights some key areas for future study including how using cannabis might affect the heart. Here’s what you need to know. “We found that marijuana users had a greater than three-fold risk of death from hypertension and the risk increased with each additional year of use,” The lead author of the study and a doctoral student of epidemiology and biostatistics at GUS, said in a statement. For her paper, published Wednesday in the where they looked at more than 1,800 people age 21 or older who had been recruited previously as part of a large and ongoing national health survey. In 2008, researchers asked them whether they had ever used marijuana or hashish. People who answered “yes” were classified as marijuana users; those who answered “no” were classified as nonusers. The researchers then merged that data with statistics on death from all causes, pulled from the US National Center for Health Statistics, and adjusted it to rule out any factors that could muddle the results, like gender, race, and a history of smoking tobacco. Overall, those classified as marijuana users were found to be 3.42 times as likely to die from hypertension, or high blood pressure, than those who said they had never used. That risk also appeared to rise by a factor of 1.04 with what the researchers labeled “each year of use.” Here’s the problem: The study’s authors defined anyone who said they had ever tried marijuana as a “regular user.” Other research suggests this is a poor assumption. According to a recent survey, about 52% of Americans have tried cannabis at some point, yet only 14% said they used the drug “regularly,” defined as “at least once a month.” Also, the study was observational, meaning it followed a group of people over time and reported what happened to them, so the researchers cannot conclude a cause and effect — they can’t say that smoking marijuana causes high blood pressure, only that the two things appear to be linked. The authors wrote, “From our results, marijuana use may increase the risk for hypertension mortality.” Another issue is the unregulated nature of the existing, and largely illegal, cannabis market. People are using a wide variety of strains whose concentrations of compounds — there are up to 400 in marijuana, including THC and CBD — can differ drastically. While the study is far from conclusive, it sheds light on an important potential health risk linked with marijuana use. Scientists and some doctors know that cannabis affects the heart, but because of the limited research available on the drug, it has been hard to suss out how it affects things like high blood pressure. For example, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, ingesting marijuana increases heart rate by between 20 and 50 beats a minute for anywhere from 20 minutes to three hours. But a large, recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found “insufficient evidence” to support or refute the idea that cannabis might increase the overall risk of a heart attack, though it also found some limited evidence that using the drug could be a trigger for the phenomenon. When it comes to cannabis’ effect on blood pressure, the results are also inconclusive. One very small study, for example, found a sharp increase in blood pressure immediately after regular pot users stopped using the drug. “Abrupt cessation of heavy cannabis use may cause clinically significant increases in blood pressure in a subset of users,” that study’s researchers wrote. And according to the Mayo Clinic, using cannabis could result in decreased, not increased blood pressure. Contact us today to get started on your medical marijuana doctors recommendation and ID card.