Medical marijuana health, safety still highly debated

Medical marijuana has become prevalent in Colorado with hundreds of dispensaries popping up all over the state. But it even as the industry continues to grow, not everyone in the state approves of it.

Dave Schwaab, a co-owner of Abundant Healing in Fort Collins believes his dispensary offers services that are important to residents.

“There’s nothing bad about it. It’s provided by Mother Nature,” he said. “Mother Nature gives us toxins and Mother Nature gives us antidotes and we believe medical marijuana is an antidote.”

His shop on Linden Street offers many different strains of medical marijuana that can have different effects. From marijuana that produces a “potent, relaxing effect” to another kind that promotes a “strong and uplifting high,” many different types are available to patients who are registered with the State of Colorado.

According to Health Wise WebMD, “occasional marijuana use is rarely seriously harmful, but smoking pot has important medical effects.” These effects include an increase in heart and breathing rate, slowed reaction times, and a distorted sense of time, among other effects. It also lists short-term memory loss, anxiety and depression as some psychological effects.
Some in the Fort Collins community believe those psychological effects could make marijuana users more likely to use it as an unhealthy coping mechanism.

“The major objection the church would have for it is just recreational use and it does become a matter of habitual use or some kind of a crutch type way of dealing with relationships or dealing with some kind of stress,” Father Don Willet, pastor of Blessed John 23 Catholic Parish said.
He also questions the legitimacy of medical marijuana prescriptions.

“I’m sure there’s a place for it just like any other medication. There rest of it is if it’s for recreational use,” he said. “It’s easy to develop fictional pain. I understand prescriptions are easy to get – for medical purposes but it may well be it’s all for recreational use.”

But Schwaab emphasizes the medicinal benefits of marijuana for those who suffer from chronic pain. Instead of using prescription pills, many of which he says are highly addictive, he recommends marijuana for its lack of a physical addiction.

Schwaab also doesn’t believe it’s fair for critics to call it immoral.

“Oh my. Immoral?” he said. “I don’t believe the use of marijuana is immoral because it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Certainly the legal use of marijuana does not hurt anybody else. If we are going to close access to medical marijuana that would be immoral because people who need this natural product would then have to pursue it in illegal channels.”

It’s the legal channel of Colorado’s voter-approved medical marijuana regulations that he believes keeps his patients safer from harm than ever.

“So I think medical marijuana actually promotes safe access, safe use, a reduction in crime because then at least the patients that are legal can legally access marijuana and don’t have to any longer go to the streets to get it,” he said.

Still, Willet thinks there is still danger in chronic marijuana use.

“[There] are not necessarily any physical consequence maybe or physiological consequence but [there may be] psychological or emotional maybe,” he said. “It compromises true freedom. What does it take to be free?”