Widely accepted for medicinal uses
As someone who has smoked dagga for 40 years and is informed on the subject, I cannot allow John Preller’s letter (“Dagga smoking dangerous”, November 2) to go unchallenged.
Not only is it blatantly clear Preller has never smoked dagga, but it’s also clear he hasn’t done much research and is simply parroting the sort of fear-mongering prevalent in certain right-wing circles since the US Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 was signed into law.
Dagga was placed in the schedule I category, assumed to have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use – thereby prohibiting its use for any purpose.
This placement was intended only as a temporary measure, however, pending the results of a commission to study the dangers of dagga.
The Shafer commission determined in its 1972 report to the president and Congress that the societal harms caused by dagga were limited, and recommended removal of criminal penalties for possession and distribution of small amounts of the drug.
Then president Richard Nixon rejected the findings of the commission and no action was taken to move dagga into a less restrictive category than truly dangerous drugs like heroin.
I have a memory like an elephant, my health is pretty good, I sleep like a baby, have good vision, am never depressed and my personality has remained unchanged over the 40 years I have been smoking dagga.
I can say the same for the majority of my friends and acquaintances who smoke dagga regularly.
What I really take umbrage with in Preller’s letter is where he says “the medical use of cannabis is not acknowledged in any country in the world”.
I read this passage to my brother, Cape Town anaesthetist Dr Anthony Aubin.
His reply: “It’s used all over the world, that’s a fact.”
The medical use of dagga was popularised in Western medicine by Irish physician William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, who documented a number of medical applications for dagga from his experiments, noting in particular its analgesic and anticonvulsant effects.
Dagga was entered into the US Pharmacopeia in 1850, as a treatment for neuralgia, tetanus, typhus, cholera, rabies, dysentery, alcoholism, opiate addiction, anthrax, leprosy, incontinence, snakebite, gout, convulsive disorders, tonsillitis, insanity, excessive menstrual bleeding and uterine bleeding.
It was widely available in pharmacies and even grocery stores with no requirement for a doctor’s prescription.
In the US, the use of cannabis for medical purposes is now legal in 31 states, plus the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands and the District of Columbia, as of September 2018.
There are now 30 countries who have legalised medical cannabis in, at the very least, some capacity.
The Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Norway, Germany, Italy, Greece and so on have all legalised access for medical patients.
Two recent research papers published in JAMA Internal Medicine, analysing more than five years of Medicare part D and Medicaid prescription data, found that after US states legalised dagga, the number of opioid prescriptions and the daily dose of deadly opioids went way down.
At both the retirement village where my longtime partner’s 93-old-old mother lives and the old age home where an 86-year-old friend stays, many of the residents have managed to kick dependenceinducing prescription sleeping tablet and are now successfully using cannabis oil to help them sleep at night.
The sooner cannabis is legalised for both medical and recreational use in SA the better. I believe recreational dagga use should be restricted to adults.