Marijuana is a safe and effective medication and nurses should support legal access to it, asserts a commentary in the April issue of the American Journal of Nursing, the official journal of the American Nursing Association (ANA).
“Patients need professional guidance about the safe administration of cannabis, and they need access to a legal and unadulterated supply,” concludes the article, entitled “Therapeutic Cannabis: A patient advocacy issue.” An estimated 2.5 million nurses nationwide receive the publication.
“If you were to listen to patients’ reports of the benefits of cannabis or observe patients’ responses to it, you would see its therapeutic value,” author and registered nurse Mary Lynn Mathre writes. “If you were to review the drug’s history, you’d see that it is widely used therapeutically throughout the world and that it has been banned in the United States for political, not medical, reasons. If you were to review the current literature about its safety and potential health benefits, you’d see that there’s no basis for the continued prohibition of this treatment.”
In recent years, the nursing community has become more outspoken in its support for medical marijuana-law reform. Since 1994, the state nursing associations of Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin have all passed resolutions in support of legalizing patient access to medical marijuana.
For more information, please contact R. Keith Stroup, NORML Executive Director, at (202) 483-5500.
