Let’s embrace marijuana, not fear it

Our aging population will need the pain relief it offers, writes Agnes Cadieux.

A year into the new post-Stephen Harper era, it doesn’t look like much has changed. We’ve done right by some 30,000 Syrian refugees, and ruffled a lot of feathers with the most recent carbon-pricing initiative, but everything else seems to be business as usual.

But one thing that has quickly changed, partly because of the Liberal party’s platform, is the plethora of medicinal marijuana clinics that have cropped up all over the country, including Ottawa, even though they’re not entirely legal — yet.

When one considers the history of illegal drug use, things such as the Opium Wars of the 19th century, the presence of cocaine in household consumables or, more recently, the war on drugs, come to mind. Now cannabis has gained an interesting notoriety in our culture, which is experienced as a certain je ne sais quoi about where to put it. It’s still not legal to sell for now, and these pot shops are also illegal, but is it really that bad?

It must be, since that’s what those drug-war people have been telling us all this time. But if that’s true, why would the government bring in proposed laws to “legalize, regulate, and restrict its access”? Maybe it’s because the drugwar people got it wrong.

Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the compound responsible for the addictive psychotropic effects one gets from marijuana, and it seems to be causing all the flap. Yet there are other critical compounds in the plant, namely the cannabinoids, which latch onto none other than the body’s own cannabinoid receptors within the nervous system and — you guessed it! — relieve pain.

So what, you say: cocaine was also used as an analgesic before we realized how dangerous it was. You’ve got pain? Go grab some Tylenol — as long as you can ignore the fact that acetaminophen causes 26,000 hospitalizations and 450 deaths each year in the United States due to liver toxicity. Prescriptions, then? OxyContin and fentanyl are rampant on Canadian streets and arguably more addictive than marijuana, yet thousands of scripts are written for them each year.

Our pharmacopoeia of painkillers is filled with faulty options and bad ideas — addiction and psychotropic side-effects included — yet for some reason it’s nothing short of a scandal when a medicinal marijuana clinic opens up in a neighbourhood.

So how do we handle this new reality, then? We get over it, that’s how. And we give it a chance.

I am not saying we should all rally around the 4/20 movement, nor am I hopping on the miracle-cure bandwagon, but I am saying that the data are pouring in, and it’s hard to deny that the unbiased and objective results collected by our freshly unmuzzled researchers, along with their international counterparts, point in a direction that we should take under serious consideration.

We should start to care because living with pain is a big deal. Canada is getting older, and for the aging population comprised of our parents, grandparents, spouses and neighbours, chronic illnesses will be more than just something that happens to the guy down the road; it will be a reality we live with until our dying day.

And looking at what we’ve got to help us get through that, I’d say we need some new options. Fast.