Federal restrictions on cannabis are preventing many from leading longer, healthier lives
John McCain was an officer in the U.S. Navy before moving into politics, serving as a Senator from Arizona and a member of the House of Representatives. On August 25 of last year, he passed away after losing a fight with cancer, but his death could have been avoided – at least for a little while. If he had been able to legally consume cannabis, he may have still been here today.
McCain’s daughter, The View co-host Meghan McCain, asserts that medical cannabis could have given her father a longer life. She told Ricki Lake, “I have to tell you, going through what I went through last year, I am so angry that there is such a stigma attached to cannabis, to marijuana, to anything having to do with the medical benefits of cannabis oil and marijuana anyway.”
McCain was referring to a recent study that was able to identify cannabis compounds as helping to treat glioblastoma. When used in conjunction with a chemotherapy drug, temozolomide, cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) have been shown to help glioblastoma patients live almost a year longer than those who only received temozolomide.
McCain has been supporting medical marijuana since 2012. She believes legalization makes sense from both a common sense and an economic perspective and wants the current negative stigma associated with cannabis to go away.
A study underway by scientists in Australia hope to reveal the positive benefits of cannabis on brain cancer, specifically glioblastoma. It’s unfortunate that the research wasn’t allowed ten or twenty years ago, when it could have helped hundreds of thousands of sufferers.
