M.S. and Marijuana
...er. For the most part through, it simply makes you weak. MS also affects your thinking and emotions (Common 11). It is hard to explain really. It affects your memory; people with MS tend to forget things. There is a chance that the person with MS could need a wheel chair. Multiple Sclerosis is kind of a day to day illness. Some days everything is alright and other days all kinds of things go wrong. It is very unpredictable. Many of these symptoms will come and go in the early stages of the disease the so called relapse and remissions they are called, but as the illness grows those symptoms may become part of the person’s everyday life (Education 7). MS is not to be feared by everyone though; it is more common among women. It is also mostly white people who tend to get it more then Hispanics or African Americans, and it is relatively rare among Asians and other racial groups. Currently there are about 350,000 to half a million people in the United States who have been diagnosed. And around 90% of those diagnosed are between the ages of 16 and 60 years old (MSF 3). It has been made clear at this time that the illness is not curable. And further more, most of all the medicines offered for MS are very costly and ineffective (National 5). They just don’t do as much to help the patient as far as pain goes, but, back to my proposal, marijuana is very inexpensive next to some of the meds offered to MS patients. Regulated marijuana, not necessarily smoked, is considered effective in alleviating the sometimes painful symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis (Baker 4). It would not hurt anyone; in fact, it could make the government money. “Big brother” could quite simply tax it. The government could even make you get licensed in order to get it, that’s more money going to the government. Everyone wins! To make matters even better, with the government making all this extra money from taxing the marijuana and the other related stuff, those tax dollars, the extra funds can go to research on MS. That would ultimately lead to finding a cure of some type, and at a faster pace then how the research is going now. If there was a cure for MS, then the people who have it wouldn’t have to use the medical marijuana in the first place. So by doing what I have purposed, the problem would become erased all together. By simply allowing a sick person some relief, the disease may be cured with the newly acquired funds. Then no more controversy, the MS victims won’t need to suppress a disease that they no longer have. It would be a long process, but worth it for sure. It’s not like we’ll have a bunch of doctors handing out marijuana to who ever says they have MS. It would be a very well organized system, with lots of checks and balances, but really not that different then any other prescription a sick person may get. People diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis would have to go through a number of doctors to make sure that they truly need the marijuana for the pain, and how much they in fact need. It would be just like any other form of medicine. People with MS have claimed that smoking marijuana has reduced the painful symptom known as spasticity. Spasticity is the tendency to, or capability of suffering a muscle spasm from MS(McMarten 6). These people have obviously been smoking marijuana illegally, because we all know that marijuana usage for any reason is illegal for any reason in the United States. So what are those in the medical marijuana community doing? They are asking the government to give them a legal “dealer” so that they do not have to break the law. These people are not criminals, although that is exactly how they are treated and looked upon. None of the MS marijuana smokers want to break the law, but they also don’t want to live in pain either(Ott 3). Even I would rather break a minor law that doesn’t hurt anyone, then live a life in pain that can not be avoided. It has been medically proven that marijuana is a healer when applied correctly for MS by relieving pain that will not leave otherwise. In Brit...