Marijuana laws are changing rapidly, but as of now, adults can use it recreationally in just 10 states.
That wide variety greater than triples when it comes to clinical marijuana, that’s a felony in 33 states.
So that is it: A pleasure drug or a pharmaceutical one? And what distinction does that make with regards to regulating cannabis?
These are inquiries to bear in mind as states like Illinois explore moving from clinical software to a greater open-ended recreational one.
Chicago-based totally Cresco Labs grows some 30 traces of marijuana at its most important cultivation middle, in a production area in suburban Joliet.
While the marijuana leaf may be the unofficial, international image for weed – that’s no longer in which the plant’s electricity is living.
“So if you look closely at this flower part, you can see that it has a dusting or a frosting of trichomes. Those are little oil glands that do incorporate the cannabinoids,” explains Jason Nelson, Cresco’s VP for manufacturing.
Those cannabinoids comprise the electricity that Cresco seeks to harness and sell to patients in Illinois who’re seeking to marijuana to alleviate their symptoms.
Patients like Adrienne Aaronson, a seventy eight-12 months-vintage grandmother, and artist from Highland Park who suffers from fibromyalgia.
“Fibromyalgia is consistent pain in the course of your body. And there’s no manner of preventing it, it’s simply – it’s there,” she said. “Pain in my joints. Swollen arms. Achiness. Sometimes down in my leg. It simply hurts.”
Aaronson had never smoked weed. Until two years ago.
She tried acupuncture but says, “I notion it was silly.”
When those didn’t do the trick, she followed her physician’s recommendation to go to every other health practitioner – an expert in integrative medication who truly unwittingly has to turn out to be a global expert in scientific marijuana after Illinois’ regulation surpassed in 2013.
“I knew not anything about this as a doctor and I examine in addition into it and I noticed that the qualifying conditions described my medical exercise,” stated Dr. Leslie Mendoza Temple. “Fibromyalgia, human beings with cancer, more than one sclerosis, seizures – and those are the kinds of patients who are trying to find out integrative therapies. And I notion, I higher learn loads approximately this in order that I recognize extra whilst the sufferers question me, ‘motive I knew they could ask me.”
And they did, in increasing numbers. Temple, who went directly to become the primary chair of Illinois’ Medical Cannabis Advisory Board, says her waiting list has ballooned when you consider that she became one of the medical doctors willing to certify that a patient has a qualifying circumstance. The division of medicine into traditional/conventional and alternative/complementary did not occur by accident. Mankind as a whole needed to experience both of them before it was ready for a system of medicine whose purpose would be of a higher nature than is currently available. The new medicine, although it is so unlike the conventional and alternative models, is being birthed by both of them
Other than the Lemurian and Atlantean approaches to healing, it is clear that the ‘medicine of nature’ has been the most influential in recorded history. Nobody created this form of medicine; it was simply there to be recognized or discovered by those who had direct access to the language of nature called Veda, which means knowledge or science. The first written records of nature’s medicine appeared about 6,000 years ago. They have channeled messages written down by Vedic sages in direct response to the first occurrences of illness on the planet. This system, which kept illness and suffering at bay for hundreds of years, became known as Ayurveda, or the ‘Science of Life’.
Although Ayurveda only survived the passage of time in India and some in areas of Brazil and China, it remains a universal form of medicine. Today it stands revived to some of its original forms. It greatly contrasts with the western approach to modern medicine in that it seeks to address the underlying imbalance responsible for the symptoms of illness rather than trying to alleviate or remove the effects of the imbalance.
