Despite a long list of positive effects, cannabis use still remains a taboo subject for some. While medical cannabis was legalized over a decade ago in New Mexico, recreational cannabis was only legalized last summer with retail sales having started on Friday, April 1.
Jacob Vigil, associate professor in the University of New Mexico psychology department, and Sarah Stith, associate professor in economics, are married and have done both joint and separate research on cannabis specifically. Through this, they have found that it’s largely more beneficial than a lot of people think and believe it should be normalized in society.
“I’ve probably seen a thousand patients at this point that have demonstrated that cannabis has been so effective for safely treating so many different types of health conditions,” Vigil said.
Stith was first exposed to cannabis research through a study where people joined a medical cannabis program and stopped using their opioids, which shocked her. Since then, she’s looked at substitution impacts, effects on stock market evaluations and more.
Vigil started researching cannabis about five years ago when he discovered how inefficient many typical medical prescriptions are, both in “lack of efficacy” and in causing new, negative side effects, a phenomenon which he called “secondary victimization.”
Cannabis is fast-acting, according to Vigil. In addition, Stith brought up that it can treat an array of symptoms rather than just one, as opposed to most conventional medications.
“That’s why I call cannabis a super medication, because it has such a wide window of therapeutic potentials (for) so many different ailments,” Vigil said.
Another benefit is the light side effects of cannabis in comparison to many other pharmaceutical drugs, according to Vigil. He said that while cannabis may cause things like confusion or dizziness, it’s not damaging organs as many pharmaceutical medications can do. Stith also brought up that people cannot overdose on cannabis.
Cannabis use being beneficial is dependent on the individual, according to Vigil and Stith. The drug also causes impairment. While it’s not as risky as alcohol or other substances, Stith said, it’s still a concern, especially given that there’s no good method to measure impairment with any sort of lab test, which is a challenge for law enforcement.
Stith analyzes cannabis from an economic perspective wherein people will “consume a good as long as the benefits exceed the cost.” With the legalization of cannabis, the cost has been greatly reduced in acquiring it. In addition, she said the market has become safer and more innovative.
Cannabis can also help to create “a state with less bodily stress on it rather than reacting to all the specific things that our body tends to instinctually react to,” according to Vigil, which he said would seem to positively impact college students specifically.
“I talked to different types of folks — leaders, shamans, people like that — and some describe cannabis as so powerful because it allows the individual into these portals of insight and to diverse thinking patterns and so forth while allowing the individual to engage in normal, daily functioning. So it enables a lot of folks to kind of experience a slightly altered perspective throughout their day,” Vigil said.
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The distinction between medical use and recreational use shouldn’t be so separate, according to Stith and Vigil.
“It seems a bit of a false dichotomy, this whole medical versus recreational use. It’s probably sort of more of a continuum between strictly medical use and strictly recreational use,” Stith said.
Stith expects that people may be more open to seeking out cannabis for minor medical ailments after it’s legalized recreationally.
With cannabis shops allowed to open on April 1, Stith brought up a study she worked on regarding recreational cannabis' impact on Colorado’s labor markets where they found that increases in employment outweighed losses, if any, in productivity. Vigil said he heard a lot of people talking about the April 1 date beforehand and anticipates a boom in people trying cannabis, especially older individuals.
Currently dying from bone cancer, Vigil’s father started using cannabis at over 80 years old. Stith largely attributes this to it being less stigmatized; the first time he tried it was after talking about it with his friends, not through the research of his son and daughter-in-law.
“At 80-plus years old, he is using cannabis and he is finding it enjoyable … He’s a classic case of somebody that’s willing to try something new even in the face of all the misinformation that he’s been exposed to over his life,” Vigil said.
Though Vigil feels that society is in a “golden age” of cannabis use and research, there is still much stigma surrounding the drug. He attributes this in part to the potential threat some people feel cannabis poses to the pharmaceutical industry and even went so far as to say that entities are trying to control people through certain means.
There’s a lot more research that needs to be done but there are still barriers in place, according to Vigil. Even at UNM, Vigil said his own department is not particularly friendly toward cannabis research “because they’ve been trained in addiction research and have been trained to think of cannabis as the enemy.” Overall, Vigil said cannabis has been villainized by society.
“We see that the legalization has come from the people. It’s come from the states. It’s not come from the federal government. So there’s definitely been sort of a message from authority that cannabis is dangerous,” Stith said.
Megan Gleason is the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at editorinchief@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @fabflutist2716
