Marijuana helps to manage chronic pain

The argument

While marijuana isn't strong enough for severe pain — post-surgical pain, say, or a broken bone — proponents argue that it is quite effective for the chronic pain that plagues millions of Americans, especially as they age. The distinction matters to the case being made. Chronic pain is not a single acute episode to be got through but a condition managed over years, which means the relevant question is not only whether a drug works but what taking it continuously does to the person taking it. That is where the comparison with existing options does most of the work. Part of marijuana's allure is that it is safer than opiates: it is impossible to overdose on and far less addictive, and it has no known lethal dose. For pain that will be treated indefinitely, a drug whose risks do not accumulate into dependency or fatal overdose is a materially different proposition from one whose risks do. It can also take the place of Advil or Aleve products, and further research supports the safety and efficiency of medicinal cannabis for chronic pain. The method of use need not introduce new harms either, since it is easily taken via oral ingestion, vaporization, or topical absorption — so with these varied routes available, medical use avoids the potential risks associated with smoking. There is also pain for which the established alternative simply does not work. In a placebo-controlled study published in the journal Neurology, scholars found that marijuana is effective at lowering neuropathic pain caused by damaged nerves, while opiates such as morphine are not effective in treating that kind of pain. For those patients the choice is not between two treatments of differing safety but between a treatment and none.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There is no scientific evidence that long-term use of medicinal marijuana is either effective or safe for the treatment of chronic pain. There are other medications available to patients and physicians that have been proven and established in the practice of medicine to be more effective and clinically safer for the treatment of chronic pain than medical marijuana.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] There is no conclusive proof of this.