Medical Cannabis: What Helps, What Harms, What's Unknown w/ Dr. Peter Grinspoon

So the thing kind of in the air with cannabis right now, pun intended, is they're about to reschedule it supposedly from schedule one to schedule three.

And I've sort of been hearing this sort of talk since high school.

You know, oh, we should legalize it.

Kids giving speeches in their classes.

And now here I am all these years later, it almost seems too good to be true.

Is it? I mean, is this even going to have any impact on regular people?

Well, yes and no. It's certainly a step in the right direction that we're rescheduling cannabis from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3, assuming it happens.

There's a lot of bureaucratic complexity these days in trying to do anything in the government.

Cannabis right now is in Schedule 1, which is no medical utility and high abuse liability, neither of which is true.

It has plenty of medical benefits.

utility.

Tens of millions of people are using it with good effect medically, and it has like low to moderate misuse potential.

So schedule three is better.

You know, it's like Tylenol with codeine, ketamine, anabolic steroids.

So it at least is a manifestation of the government admitting finally after all these years that yes, cannabis is a medicine and yes, cannabis has medical potential.

And yes, cannabis isn't like schedule one, like the satanic weed that they were portraying it as during the war on drugs.

So it is progress and it will make it easier to do research and sort of destigmatizes it for people and helps legitimize it.

At the same time, like alcohol kill, there were 178,000 deaths in 2024 related to alcohol.

You know, they're half a million deaths a year from tobacco.

And cannabis doesn't kill anybody.

Why those two are descheduled and we're having this big fight about rescheduling cannabis is a little bit silly.

Going back to what you said at the beginning, of course, cannabis should be legal.

90% of Americans are in favor of medical, of legal access to medical marijuana.

I mean- Name anything else that 90% of Americans agree upon.

They don't even agree that the sky is blue.