Medical cannabis or DIY medicine?

Tobacco can enter a joint without being named. The word “medicine” sometimes does the reverse: it arrives first, before anybody has clearly identified the product that follows.

It helps me sleep. It is medical.

The first sentence may be true. The second needs more documentation.

Many people found relief when the official response was slow or prejudiced. It would be indecent to call every experience an excuse, and unserious to turn every experience of relief into clinical evidence. Experience matters, but it does not automatically include a list of interactions or a date for checking whether the product still helps.

In the 1990s, we did not talk about ratios or bioavailability. We said “it relaxes me”, “it takes the pain away” or “this helps me sleep”. Sometimes that described a real function; sometimes it was a respectable explanation for something we liked doing. Both could happen on the same sofa. Our pharmacopoeia was Iberian: a muscle spray for the ankle, chamomile for the stomach and a joint for sleep. Nobody called it integrative medicine. It was Tuesday.

In 1992, while Barcelona hosted the Games and we argued about whether the cannabis had dried in the sun or by a radiator, anandamide was isolated. The body had its own cannabinoid conversation. Interesting. It did not turn every joint into medicine or every sofa into a clinic.

In my case, having an explanation for smoking helped me put the question off until another day. I could recognise relief and still avoid looking at how much room cannabis was taking up.

Knowledge did not begin in the laboratory

Long before the CB1 receptor and the amber bottle, different communities had learned to relate to psychoactive plants within systems of care, territory and responsibility. Traditional knowledge is not a list of plants.

“Ancestral” is not a sepia filter or a color palette. It does not turn every claim into clinical evidence or make that knowledge freely available to a Western brand with a beige label.

The word that fixes everything

Cannabis can have therapeutic effects. Authorized medicines exist, and Spain has a framework for standardized compounded formulations. The important part is not only “cannabis”, but the product, composition, dose and somebody checking what happens next.

That is why “it helps me” and “it is an effective treatment” are not enemy statements. They are not the same statement either. One describes an experience; the other needs to specify what helps, whom it helps and who checks what happens next.

A defined oral preparation has a known composition, indications and monitoring. Its evidence cannot be transferred to any flower, joint with tobacco or wellness product simply because they share the word cannabis.

When cannabis enters medicine, it does not receive a halo. It receives contraindications.

When the patient and prescriber are the same person

DIY medicine emerged because, for a long time, there was no prescription and admitting cannabis use could end the conversation. Patients and associations provided care for work nobody had budgeted. There were also uncertain products and hope sold by weight. It is worth taking those things out of the same bottle.

Self-treatment has a human logic. If something gives sleep back, you do not always wait for a trial before calling it helpful. The problem begins when the word “medicine” closes the case.

Use can begin in one particular part of the day and spread to others. In my case, “only at night” could give way to smoking in the morning. The explanation stayed the same even though the timetable had changed.

A perceived function does not remove the THC or tobacco from a joint. Looking at what it contains and what happens afterwards allows you to review the relief without denying it.

The same joint may contain tobacco, make another one more likely or leave a heavy morning. It may have helped and charged a price. Memory files the relief and loses some receipts. Both columns can be true.

A break does not prove that cannabis never helped. It provides a contrast for seeing what still helps and what you stopped monitoring. If you have a prescription, do not stop it on your own; speak to the clinician supervising it.

Outside a prescribed treatment, before calling tonight’s joint “medicine”, we can set the label aside for a moment without either condemning or canonising it.

Cannabis can be medicine, pleasure, rest, habit or several things before dinner. The plant does not choose one biography. We need to distinguish them.

The word “medical” is not a patient information leaflet. Sometimes it opens a conversation. Sometimes it is the most elegant way to end one.