Why the FDA will have a hard time properly regulating cannabis

First of all, I'm not at all against medical (or recreational for that matter) marijuana. It helps people, and those people should have access to medications that help them, and I'd rather have the current system than no access to medical marijuana at all. I feel like I need to start off with this because otherwise I feel like parts of this comment may come off as anti-marijuana, and that's not my intention at all.

But it's always been kind of wild to me how the programs we have are handling medical marijuana, I'm pretty sure if a doctor tried to handle any other medication like we usually handle medical marijuana, he'd lose his license.

Marijuana isn't one drug, it's several, THC, CBD, Terpenes, various other cannabinoids and other active ingredients, all with different interactions with your body and with each other that can produce a variety of effects on their own or in combination with the others.

And often you're given little to no medical guidance on which ones will actually help with which issues, how much or how often you should take them, and in what way.

It's kind of like being given a bucket of assorted pills that may or may not help your condition and being told to mix and match them and try taking them in various ways until you feel better.

And don't even get me started on smoking it. Yes, it can be an effective delivery method, and you can go back and forth on how marijuana smoke is more or less harmful in various ways than tobacco, but at the end of the day putting smoke in your lungs is bad for you, and I don't think there's a doctor in the world who would disagree with that. If nicotine was some sort of wonder drug that could help with various conditions and you could get a prescription for it, I guarantee you it wouldn't come in the form of tobacco, you'd get pills, patches, maybe some kind of inhaler, vape or nebulizer, injections, suppositories, etc. some sort of purified product with a known dosage.

It's practically impossible to really do medical grade QA on a plant, there's going to be variation from one plant to another, or even from different parts of the same plant depending on weather, light, water, fertilizer, and other variables in the growing conditions, not to mention just the genetic variations in the plants, and knowing exactly how much of which active ingredients are in the product is kind of key to being able to dial in what is an effective dose.

Yes, a lot of that has to do with all of the shitty laws and regulations we have around marijuana and our broken medical system in general, I'm not going to go into that too much because this comment is already going to be long enough that a lot of people won't read it, but I'll leave it it's hard to study marijuana to figure what works and how, and it's hard to build up the kind of industry needed to make actual pure and consistent medical grade marijuana products.

Now of course, if we handled medical marijuana the way it probably should be for the best results, it would probably turn out to be a hugely expensive undertaking under our current healthcare system. There'd probably be a lot of doctor-patient interaction to help you dial in your dosages, with more guidance on how and when to take it, we'd probably be getting into territory where you'd need some sort of a compounding pharmacist who could provide you with a custom blend of the right active ingredients in precise ratios in the delivery method that's most effective for your condition and needs, there'd be a huge pharmaceutical industry (and probably all of the corporate greed that goes with it) that would need to be built to provide these medications, etc.

And unless we have some major overhaul to our healthcare system, that would all probably price a lot of patients out of being able to afford these treatments.

And yes, the current system works well enough for a lot of people, but it's possible that it could work even better for them and for even more people if we treated marijuana more like other medications.

I don't exactly have a grand plan on how to fix things. I don't want to make marijuana more expensive or inaccessible for the people who need it. I don't want to feed into the pockets of big pharma. But I do want to make sure that our treatments are as effective as possible, that we're treating marijuana seriously as a medication and that people view it as such, and that we're not just settling for our treatment options being "good enough" when we can do even better. We didn't stop at willow bark, we built on it to develop modern aspirin and other NSAIDs, and someday we will probably do the same for marijuana, there will probably come a day when almost no one will turn to plant-derived marijuana products for medical reasons because we will have long since isolated, synthesized, and developed entirely new classes of drugs based on what we learn from studying marijuana that do the same things more effectively, more safely, and with even less side-effects.