U.S. Policy Responses to Calls for the Medical Use of Cannabis

In the19th century, the medical profession used cannabis preparations to treat pain, convulsions, spasm, and nausea, and induce sleep [1-3]. Medical use of cannabis declined in the early 20th century with the ad-vent of analgesics that could be delivered in better stan-dardized doses than oral cannabis preparations [3]. This decline was accelerated by the signing of international drug control treaties in the 20th century that classed cannabis as a drug with no medical use. There was renewed interest in the medical use of cannabis in the 1970s in the United States. This occurred in the midst of rising recreational cannabis use among young people, ensuring that the debate about the medical use of cannabis would become entangled in the debate about whether its recreational use should be permitted [4]. This entanglement has made it difficult to allow pa-tients to use cannabis preparations, polarized expert and lay opinions on whether cannabis has any medical uses, and made it difficult to conduct clinical trials of the ef-fectiveness and safety of cannabinoids and cannabis. The purpose of this paper is to briefly describe U.S. policy responses to calls for patients to be allowed to use the prohibited drug cannabis for medical purposes. The U.S. medical cannabis debate has produced a variety of different medical cannabis schemes that have been imple-mented in around half of the states over the past 40 years. These schemes also have been internationally influential i