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health advisory Hospital Mental Health 2007-11-15 19:00:57

Answer:

I think it's stupid that marijuana is illegal and alcohol and cigarettes are not. It's even stupider that it's not available for medical use with a prescription. It's definitely safer than alcohol or nicotine, and it has significiant and well-documented medical applications.

But self-medicating psychiatric disorders with psychoactive compounds tends to result in a pattern of drug would be considered typical of substance abuse or dependence rather than therapeutic drug use. Even if it seems fine at first, over time, people want it to work better, so they take increasing doses at increasing frequencies, and it ends up taking over their life. While marijuana has a low potential for addiction, it dose have some, and self-medicating a psychatric disorder significantly increases its addictive potential. Although many prescription medications have at least as much potential for abuse as marijuana dose, that potential is significantly reduced when their use is supervised by a medical professional who can control the dose that's available to the patient.

Also, marijuana has fairly significant effects beyond relieving anxiety and depression, and probably interferes with your day-to-day function while you're on it. If you were in a coma you'd experience no depression or anxiety at all, but inducing a coma is clearly not an acceptable treatment for depression or anxiety. So where do you draw the line? In order to use marijuana as a long-term treatment, you'd end up being stoned basically 24/7. How much social and occupational function are you willing to sacrifice here?

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It is bad because when prohibitionists went out of fashion, they needed a new enemy to keep their businesses open.