Medical marijuana jumps hurdle on way to being legalized in GA

Sammie Eskew, Staff writer|Feb 27, 2014

2014 MCT

This morning the house committee on health and human services passed on a bill to legalize medical marijuana unanimously.

Currently 17 states have legalized marijuana for medical use: Alaska, California, Colorado (where is it legal for recreational use as well), Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Washington (legal for recreational use as well). Although Mississippi and North Carolina have decriminalized laws for marijuana, no “Bible belt state” has legalized the drug for medical use.

The bill proposed the state house would allow UGA, Mercer, Morehouse, Georgia Regents, and Emory the option to do research on medical marijuana. An important argument for the bill is the use of oil from the cannabis called CBD plant that helps to stop seizures in highly epileptic children.

In the MHS trail’s last print edition, opinion articles on the legalization of marijuana were highlighted. Tyler wrote,

Cancer.org says that medicinal marijuana relieves pain, controls nausea and vomiting and stimulates appetite in patients with cancer and AIDS. In many documented cases, hemp oil has been the main ingredient in decreasing and eliminating cancerous tumors, such as the fatal tumor that Michelle Aldrich had in January 2012. According to San Fransisco Weekly, Aldrich went to doctors to find out why her flu was getting worse only to discover that her chest pains were stage 3 lung cancer. Although doctors said that she was supposed to die, Aldrich began consuming pure hemp oil and smoking cannabis. By April 2012, her tumor’s size decreased by 50 percent. In another case, Montana toddler Cash Hyde was diagnosed with a brain tumor at 20 months and was put on a hemp oil treatment, which decreased the tumor’s size and relieved the toddler’s pain. After a few months of being forced off the treatment by state law, he died. Other countries, such as Spain and Germany promote the use of medicinal cannabis to treat cancer in patients.

Eventually this bill may lead to decriminalization or even legalization of recreation use marijuana, but first medical marijuana needs to pass the house.