Elliot Mercier

Today, we are talking about the process of a doctor in Massachusetts prescribing medical marijuana to a patient in need of relief. There’s no fancy statistic about the annual amounts of medicinal marijuana prescriptions or physician recommendations yet, but there will certainly be enough evidence by 2020, especially with how quickly weed sales are stacking up here in MA. Right here in the state that looks like an arm trying to flex, it is not currently required to have a prescription to purchase medicinal marijuana but a physician’s approval is still necessary in order to acquire a medical marijuana card. The conditions in which a doctor would recommend treatment via marijuana can be divided into two camps: uncomfortable and unbearable.

Uncomfortable conditions refer to minor mental conditions such as autism and ADHD that make it hard for the individual to focus. Doctor recommendations based on these cases can be rare due to a combination of factors such as the chemical required,CBD, being a little harder to find exclusively in common strains of weed, and learning disabilities such as these are still considered difficult to definitively treat. Just like with any mental condition, it’s easy to generalize but it’s truly challenging to find out how much something is personally hindering a unique human being.

Unbearable unsurprisingly refers to those who suffer from afflictions such as PTSD, cancer, hepatitis C and glaucoma; conditions that are proven to be painful no matter what. These prescriptions can even be given to those that suffer from chronic back pain or simply ache and wince all the time after an extensive range of surgeries. Recommendations for medicinal marijuana by doctors is much easier due to the lack of doubt in misery and the chemical used to alleviate pain and strife being much more common in the main strands of weed being sold on the general green marketplace. This chemical is called THC and is used to create that high feeling that the drug is most commonly associated with, while CBD is a calming agent. There will be much more detail on these differing chemicals in an upcoming article, but the short version is that just like how acetaminophen and ibuprofen treat pain, individually they cure very specific ailments when used correctly.

So to put some minds at ease, it’s not as easy to get the doc’s approval to smoke the green stuff as the sensationalists would have you believe. Since the majority of shops around the state are selling medicinal weed exclusively, it’s fair to assume that some eager folk with no debilitating condition might try to exaggerate how much their head hurts from vestigial headaches or how much their jaw hurts after the dentist pulled out a rotten tooth. This idea was a common joke that I was hearing almost seven years before legalization, and nowadays won’t yield any more laughs as we all become informed on this product that used to be considered as dangerous as cocaine.