This kind of touches on something that has always rubbed me the wrong way about medical marijuana

And don't get me wrong, if it helps you, or if you just enjoy it I'm all for your right to use it however you want

But you've got a headache or heart condition or whatever, your doctor wouldn't just say "yeah, you should go find some willow trees and chew on the bark of a couple different ones until you find one that works for you"

No, they'd tell you to go take X milligrams of aspirin, Y times a day, with or without food.

Because we know what chemicals in the willow bark are actually helping with your problem, we've isolated it (and improved upon it) and worked out specific dosage guidelines based on things like age and weight to treat certain issues.

But with medical marijuana, it's more of a "go ahead and figure out what works for you" situation. There's a lot of different strains of different potencies with different amounts of different active ingredients.

And sure, your doctor might be able to make some recommendations that you want a strain that's high in one cannabinoid but low in another to deal with your issue, and the people at the dispensary can help you through that as well.

But really, if we're going to treat it like the medicine it is, we should probably be dosing measured amounts of specific cannabinoids in purified forms in pills, tinctures, inhalers, vapes, etc.

And you probably shouldn't be smoking it. You can quibble over whether or not marijuana smoke is worse, less bad, or about the same as tobacco smoke health-wise, but I think we can all agree that inhaling smoke of any kind is probably bad for your lungs and you're better off not doing it. If nicotine could be used to treat some disease, I'm pretty sure your doctor wouldn't say to go smoke X cigarettes a day, they'd tell you to get some gum or a patch, or at least vape instead.

And with the state of marijuana laws, healthcare, and general affordability, it can be hard to even do the research needed to make that happen, let alone set up the kinds of infrastructure needed to make those more personalized cannabinoid medications, and of course all of the ways pharmaceutical companies would overcharge us for those meds, so again, I'm glad that what we have now is at least available to those who need it

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking at how to do it better and treat these chemicals more like other medications are.