Marijuana is medicine. That’s something I have typed many, many times while running this blog. It’s a fact that the federal government denies, despite the fact that the federal government owns patents related to marijuana’s medicinal value. The federal government has also been supplying federal medical marijuana to patients for decades. There needs to be more marijuana research conducted, but research is limited due to federal prohibition of marijuana. One area where research is moving forward is at Harvard. The program at Harvard just received a large donation. Per Harvard Magazine:
MCLEAN HOSPITAL, THE LARGEST psychiatric affiliate of Harvard Medical School, has received a $500,000 gift that funds their new Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) Program. The donation, announced on October 6, comes from best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell.
Most studies on medical marijuana to date have focused on its efficacy, or on patients’ symptoms. MIND head researcher Staci A. Gruber, director of the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Core at McLean and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, hopes that the new initiative, the first of its kind, will begin to answer questions about whether medical marijuana affects cognitive function, positively or negatively—and why—by gathering empirical data about change over time within patients.
I encourage more marijuana research, because I’m confident that the truth will be on the side of marijuana supporters. The same cannot be said about marijuana opponents, who claim they want more marijuana research to be conducted, but it’s a delay tactic, proven by the fact that they try to thwart marijuana research any chance they get. Hopefully this Harvard study comes back favorable, and marijuana opponents will be forced to try to explain why their opinion is better than the facts presented by researchers at one of the most prestigious universities on the planet.
