Medical Cannabis Overview

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Like an inquisition, parents of sick or dying child must go underground to seek relief for their ailing child. The relief is flower tops from a plant, who's known medical utility is thousands of years old. The plant however is illegal.

Around forty percent of the medicines in your medicine cabinet contain chemicals that are derived from plants (1 ). Speaking on nature based substances Michael Boyd, M.D., Ph.D. said "Natural products drug discovery research is nothing new," he added "In cancer chemotherapy, some of the best drugs we have today are natural products. The same is true for almost any class of medicinal agent." (2 ). Around three quarter of the earths population rely mainly on plants and plant extracts for health care. Nearly a third of prescription drugs in the US contain plant components. More than 120 important drugs are derived from plants. 30 percent of the world plants have been used for medical purposes. Of the 250,000 higher plant species on earth more than 80,000 are medicinal(3 ).

The first step in making cannabis illegal was the "Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 ". The Act was passed under false claims, and despite the disagreeing testimonies of the AMA representative (4). The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 required anyone who used cannabis for medical or industrial purposes to register and pay $1.00 per ounce tax. Anyone who wanted to use it for any other purpose had to $100.00 per ounce tax (5 ).

Soon very soon the AMA would fall in line with the drug warriors. This would last decades.

In 2009 a drastic shift came from the American Medical Association, it urged the federal government to reclassify marijuana from "no medical use" to allow medical experimentation for medical use (6 ).

No one in Congress opposed the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. It passed both houses of Congress on June 14 and July 22, 1937 without a roll call vote. Anyone who handled the drug at any stage had to register with Bureau of Internal Revenue (7 ). When Congress was voting the Marijuana Tax act, there where approximately 30 cannabis preparations listed in the US pharmacopeia (8 ).