Despite the fact that the Drug Enforcement Agency categorizes marijuana as a schedule I drug, one that has no accepted medical use, a majority of Americans have thought medical pot should be legal since the late 1990s — and a majority now support recreational legalization as well.
Washington D.C. and 23 states have legalized medical marijuana (that number is 35 states if we count laws with very limited access).
Even the NIH's National Institute on Drug Abuse lists medical uses for cannabis.
But even though researchers have identified some fascinating potential benefits of medical marijuana so far, it's something that's still hard to study, making conclusive results tough to come by. The schedule I classification means it's hard for researchers to get their hands on pot grown to the exacting standards that are necessary for medical research, even in states where it's legal. Plus, no researcher can even try to make an FDA-approved cannabis product while it has that DEA classification, which removes some motivation to study the plant.
More research would identify health benefits more clearly and would also help clarify potential dangers — like with any psychoactive substance, there are risks associated with abuse, including dependency and emotional issues. And many doctors want to understand marijuana's effects better before deciding whether to recommend it or not.
With that caveat about research in mind, here are 21 of the medical benefits — or potential benefits — of marijuana.
Weed can be used to treat Glaucoma.
Marijuana use can be used to treat and prevent the eye disease glaucoma, which increases pressure in the eyeball, damaging the optic nerve and causing loss of vision.
Marijuana decreases the pressure inside the eye, according to the National Eye Institute: "Studies in the early 1970s showed that marijuana, when smoked, lowered intraocular pressure (IOP) in people with normal pressure and those with glaucoma."
These effects of the drug may slow the progression of the disease, preventing blindness.
It may help reverse the carcinogenic effects of tobacco and improve lung health.
There's a fair amount of evidence that marijuana does no harm to the lungs, unless you also smoke tobacco, and one study published in Journal of the American Medical Association found that marijuana not only doesn't impair lung function, it may even increase lung capacity.
Researchers looking for risk factors of heart disease tested the lung function of 5,115 young adults over the course of 20 years. Tobacco smokers lost lung function over time, but pot users actually showed an increase in lung capacity.
It's possible that the increased lung capacity may be due to taking a deep breaths while inhaling the drug and not from a therapeutic chemical in the drug.
Those smokers only toked up a few times a month, but a more recent survey of people who smoked pot daily for up to 20 years found no evidence that smoking pot harmed their lungs.
It can help control epileptic seizures.
Marijuana use can prevent epileptic seizures in rats, a 2003 study showed.
Robert J. DeLorenzo, of Virginia Commonwealth University, gave marijuana extract and synthetic marijuana to epileptic rats. The drugs rid the rats of the seizures for about 10 hours. Cannabinoids like the active ingredients in marijuana, tetrahydrocannabinol (also known as THC), control seizures by binding to the brain cells responsible for controlling excitability and regulating relaxation.
The findings were published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics.
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