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Comment by dumbneurologist | Hacker News Reader

You are exactly right.

As a doctor who sees patients with a legitimate use for compounds that come from the cannabis plant, the people who want recreational access just bog down the health system.

I am strongly in favor of federal recreational legalization, if for no other reason than to get it out of my office.

Prohibition has failed, and legalization is a far superior public policy option.

Recreational use should be available through places like Meadow, and medical use should come through conventional pharmaceutical manufacturing methods (like you would want for any other medication you take).

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> Prohibition has failed

In a sad way, it's been very successful in the context it was enacted: as a tool to oppress "minorities". It was never about actual dangers from cannabis itself.

You're correct. John Erlichman, convicted Nixon aide, said as much:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

1994, talking to journalist Dan Baum, Legalize It All: How to win the war on drugs, Harper's Magazine, April 2016

Such revelation should cause heads to roll, people being released, pardoned and being paid compensation beside the end of prohibition. But there is not much happening. Why people are in such apathy?

In California (pre-recreational use) I got the impression that it was entirely outside of the health system. To get your recommendation you saw a doctor that only handles cannabis recommendations, and often that's via video conferencing. There's a cursory health check (blood pressure, pulse, etc.), but nothing too in-depth and it was done by a technician. Insurance doesn't cover it, so you pay out of pocket and you're done.

Doctors either only did cannabis recommendations, or they didn't do them at all, so conventional doctors weren't bogged down by this.

I think you should also direct some of that angst towards the "non-patients" to also the doctors that advertise on websites listing weed-friendly docs. I don't partake, but even I know how easy it is to find a friendly doc to write a script.

Out of curiosity, does medical ethics as governed by official medical bodies say anything about whether it's ethical for doctors to prescribe drugs for recreational, rather than medical, use?

I would argue it from the other direction: it's unethical for a doctor NOT to recommend cannabis to a patient seeking it. Based on the evidence we have available today, incarceration causes more health problems than cannabis use.

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