The medical marijuana market soars in Colombia
The effectiveness of cannabis to treat hundreds of health problems has been proven through medical studies and personal experiences
After seeing few improvements with traditional medicines such as Levetiracetam or valproic acid, Fernando Segura, father of a child with epilepsy, heard on a radio program about avant-garde cannabis research or medical marijuana. "Why not try?" He asked. Hoping to find relief for his son's illness, he decided to start cannabis treatment. He began little by little, offering only a few drops of the remedy to his son.
The results were amazing. The epileptic episodes, which occurred almost daily, began to occur every four days and today, after almost three years of treatment, they do not appear about a year and a half ago. This "miracle" has made Segura begin a program of gradual reduction of all medications, with the hope of getting rid of them completely from the life of his son.
However, following this road map was not easy. Like many other people suffering from chronic pain or facing the turbulence of cancer, they have developed their own cannabis-based medicines to relieve themselves. For years he sought the right remedy for his son and marijuana was one of the options explored, since cannabis plants contain hundreds of substances, known as cannabinoids, many of them medicinal. However, their properties change depending on the amounts used and the strains of the plant. In other words, that remedy useful for treating epilepsy, is not necessarily the same to treat, for example, anorexia.
And is that global research, despite the limitations imposed by prohibitionist legislation, prove the effectiveness of marijuana, especially to treat diseases that other drugs fail to alleviate or cure. It is known to reduce chronic pain and muscle spasms, so it is useful to treat patients with epilepsy or glaucoma; in cancer patients, cannabis reduces nausea and vomiting after chemotherapy and; It also improves appetite in people with HIV.
During the first Medical Symposium of Medical Cannabis held in February in Bogotá, doctors and researchers in the field of cannabinoid medicine presented their experiences with the medicine. Vincent Maida, a US doctor who is an expert in serious injuries, shared his advances in dealing with severe cases of skin cancer and injuries that had not been cured for years. The results were incredible: with the topical application of cannabis oil, an elderly woman managed to heal a wound that had been open for years and a man with advanced skin cancer managed to reduce the size of his tumor, a result that no other medicine reached. . Treatments with topical marijuana for skin conditions show, according to Maida, that they may be more useful than the drugs usually administered (opioids, corticosteroids or steroids).
The history of the law
When, a few years ago, Senator Juan Manuel Galán proposed the regulation of medicinal cannabis in front of the Congress of the Republic, he did so thinking of the benefit of hundreds of patients and, especially, in the case of his uncle's last days. Even before the debate on its regulation, marijuana, used ancestrally as medicine, was at the bedside of many people. What the project was looking for, in the senator's words, was "to guarantee safe access to good quality medicines derived from cannabis".