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- Recreational marijuana should be legal
Currently, medicinal cannabis is only prescribed through the NHS is a child or adult has a rare form of epilepsy, or if an individual experiences vomiting or nausea as a result of chemotherapy. However, there are many other instances in which the use of cannabis is beneficial in alleviating certain side effects, such is the case for Lyme disease.
The argument
The case begins from what medical legalisation actually delivers. The legalisation of medical marijuana applies only in certain situations set out by the government, for the medical purposes they dictate, which means access is determined not by whether a patient would benefit but by whether their condition appears on an approved list. That matters because the medicinal properties of marijuana are far reaching. It can be used for pain relief, to relieve nausea, and to stimulate appetite, among other things — a set of effects that cuts across many conditions rather than tracking any single diagnosis. A regime that authorises use diagnosis by diagnosis will therefore always be narrower than the range of people the substance could help, and the mismatch is structural rather than an oversight to be fixed by lengthening the list. The cost falls on patients. As the government dictates who can and cannot access marijuana, many people who would gain health benefits are unable to do so at all, while others are made to jump through hoops — approvals, referrals, eligibility criteria — and suffer needlessly in the interval before access is granted. That interval is the point: the suffering in it is produced by the administration of the scheme rather than by the illness. Recreational legalisation removes the gatekeeping altogether. By legalising marijuana, people could elect to medicate with marijuana and suffer far less, deciding for themselves whether it helps rather than waiting for permission to find out. The medical framework would remain available to anyone wanting supervision, but nobody would be kept from relief by failing to fit a category. On this argument, then, the restriction of medicinal access is itself a reason for recreational legalisation — it is the most direct way to end the harm that the restriction causes.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The very purpose of medical, rather than recreational, marijuana legalisation is so that people do not self-medicate. People should not be self-managing their medical conditions through drugs, which is what legalisation of recreational marijuana would encourage.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The medicinal claims vary considerably in how well supported they are. Evidence is comparatively strong for chemotherapy-induced nausea, some forms of chronic pain and certain seizure disorders, and much thinner for the open-ended list implied by 'far reaching'. [Rejecting P2] Restriction by prescription is what medical regulation consists in, and it applies to every controlled medicine. The premise treats gatekeeping as an obstacle rather than as the mechanism by which diagnosis, dosage and interaction with other drugs are managed; where a scheme is genuinely too narrow, the remedy is to widen the scheme. [Rejecting P3] Recreational legalisation removes the clinician from the process altogether. That is not improved access to treatment but the substitution of self-diagnosis for it, which is the outcome medical schemes are designed to prevent. [Rejecting C] The argument is for reforming medical access and concludes something about recreational use. Nothing in the premises bears on non-medical consumption, which is what the position actually asserts.