How Medical Cannabis Is Breaking Down Weed's Stigma

How medical cannabis is chipping away at weed's stigma

Medical cannabis is helping strip the stigma off weed: as more countries and states legalize it for patients (and often for adults, too), people see it used for pain, sleep or nausea instead of the "criminal stoner" image they grew up with. Some non-users still see cannabis as all bad, but a growing share now treat it as a personal choice, whether the reason is medical or just recreational, same as alcohol.

Cannabis use is often traced back to around 4000 BC in ancient China, where it was valued as a painkiller, a mood lifter and a sedative. Long before the Christian era, it was reportedly used for its anticonvulsant, sleep-inducing and antibacterial properties. Today, scientific research keeps digging into what the plant can and can't do medically. It wasn't always that way, though. It was only in the early '90s that a lot more knowledge about the plant became available, and curiosity about new potential medical uses took off.

Around the early 20th century, marijuana reached the United States, and with it came an early stigma rooted in racism and prejudice against the people who used it. Because of its psychoactive effects, propaganda zeroed in on cannabis's supposed health dangers. Recreational users were typically painted as criminals who'd go on to steal, rape and murder.

As a result of criminalization, anyone linked to weed got slapped with a social label: "potheads" or "stoners."

With better research and scientific knowledge, it's clear cannabis has real potential benefits. Alcohol, society's other drug of choice, comes with far more adverse health effects, yet carries much less stigma. Pinning down why that disconnect exists is tough. Look back just two decades or so, and cannabis users were seen as dangerous members of society and demonized by the media.

Cannabis company Weedmaps put together an analysis of how cannabis users and non-users behave, showing what each group thinks about the plant's negative reputation.

According to the study, of the 41% of surveyed non-consumers who have cannabis consumers in their social circle, more than twice as many treat cannabis products with active or passive encouragement (13%) as with outright disapproval or discouragement (6%). Most of this group sees cannabis neutrally, with 58% saying they neither mind nor encourage cannabis use.

Still, misconceptions about cannabis among non-users can be stubbornly persistent, shaped by decades of misinformation and plain lack of knowledge. The same analysis shows that 77% of non-consumers describe themselves as beginners or novices when it comes to cannabis knowledge. That's mostly down to a lack of credible sources of information about the plant.

Thanks to research into the medical and therapeutic potential of cannabis and its cannabinoids, like THC and CBD, the stigma around the plant is fading worldwide. THC is being studied, and is often used by patients, for conditions like anxiety, depression, glaucoma, inflammation, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, multiple sclerosis, muscle spasticity, nausea, pain, poor appetite, PTSD, seizures and symptoms linked to HIV/AIDS. CBD, for its part, is being researched for seizures (where the evidence is strongest), inflammation, pain, psychosis and other mental health conditions, nausea, migraine, depression and anxiety.

As the stigma around cannabis keeps shrinking, both users and non-users are getting more comfortable with cannabis products and cannabis culture.

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