Lit Review -- In-Class Lab -- 5/8/14

For years, medical marijuana has been said to provide relief from pain cause by diseases and illnesses such as cancer, glaucoma, and arthritis. Through the course of this project, we will be inquiring if the usage of medicinal marijuana actually does what it’s been said to and supplies pain relief. Additionally, we will find out if marijuana draws its users into a place of dependency, what kind of affects its users experience that respond with their health issue, and what kinds of medical or health problems people go through that use medicinal marijuana.

Several sources speak directly on the dependency medicinal marijuana users feel. I came across a journal written by the International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research in 2012. Researchers took a poll out of nearly 7,000 adults ranging from the ages 18 to 35+. They researched whether or not one can become dependent on medical marijuana and found that after an extended time frame of continuous use, dependency was just about imminent. I will be using this source to show results of a majority outcome. As a way to deal with dependency, Brian Owens’ Nature Medicine writes on marijuana abuse. Owens discusses how drugs (medicine, in this case) are being created from natural hormones to combat the addiction to marijuana. I will use this source to show what actions are being/have been taken to combat dependency on this prescription.

The effects that medicinal marijuana has on a person can vary widely. Joan Bottorff, a writer for Substance Use & Misuse, discusses in her article, Health Effects of Using Cannabis for Therapeutic Purposes: A Gender Analysis of Users’ Perspectives, about the usage of marijuana for pain relief in a poll of 23 people of mixed gender to see what each had to say about the effects that their prescription had on them. I will use this source to show and explain the varying perceptions people can have based upon their personalized prescriptions. In contrast to medicinal marijuana prescriptions are cannabis-based medicines constructed by GW Pharmaceuticals. In 2003, GW Pharmaceuticals planned to take up research in the study of cannabis-based medicines (excluding smoking cannabis) to discover the efficiency of how well these medicines can work, as well as monitoring how often the supplements are being taken by users. They planned on shipping supplies over from Britain to the US in June of 2003, just around the time when Bayer AG & Sativex® decided to endorse the product. I will use this source by comparing the affects patients feel when ingesting cannabis-based medicine as opposed to smoking it.