Yeah, but here's the thing. Marijuana laws vary widely by state. You could just live somewhere where it's legal for recreational use or where you could grow a few plants for yourself.

Illinois has a Medical Marijuana (MM) card, but the problems plaguing our system have mostly been (roughly in this order):

1. Doctors are worried about prescribing it to anyone because they could get into hot water with the DEA (federal government) for prescribing something that is legal in the state. The state fixed that problem. Now, when you apply for your card, the state just asks your doctor to verify that you have a condition on the list that the state approves MM for, so the doctor isn't prescribing you anything.

2. The program has a limited list of conditions. Even though MM could well be useful for other conditions, if it's not on the list, you can't get a card. The committee in charge of voting to add new conditions appears to be quite conservative, and so new conditions have had to be added by changing the law or by filing a lawsuit against the committee.

3. If you can get past the first two, you have to buy it from a state dispensary, and they have limited hours, are not allowed to help you find a doctor who will cooperate with the process, and they charge like 3 times as much as the street price. Since marijuana possession in Illinois is a civil infraction with a fine not to exceed $200 with automatic deletion of the record every 6 months, I could see some getting frustrated with the system and going another way.

4. It's a "pilot" program, so it has to be renewed every few years. If it doesn't, then it sunsets and the only way to keep your medicine would be to buy it elsewhere.

I've been struggling with the idea of going back to smoking it. When I was in the two year waiting period for Medicare, I used it to keep my bipolar disorder under control, and it helped an incredible amount with the depression and didn't seem to have any side effects. The antipsychotic meds that doctors push on you make it impossible to wake up in the morning, you start gaining weight and could become diabetic. They have to take blood all the time and make sure it isn't causing your organs to fail. I got my Medicare Part D statement from the insurance company last year and it said that I went through $16,000 of prescription drugs trying to keep a lid on this horrible disease.

By the time you add the labwork and everything else, that's almost $18,000 of taxpayer money spent every year just to keep me on meds. That's kind of a lot to avoid letting me use a plant that grows in the ground, but attitudes against it (which can pretty much all be traced back to the drug companies) mean that we'll probably be fighting this battle for years.

And it's sad, because with all this bluster about how Medicare is "going broke", they are legally barred from negotiating better drug prices *and* they take the very unfortunate prevailing attitude towards marijuana.

That is, treating people who smoke it as chiselers instead of acknowledging it as medicine. :P

So, as soon as I got my Medicare card, I started seeing a psychiatrist and taking the "official medicine", and I can tell you that it makes me worse in so many ways, but you literally cannot describe that to anyone. For example, one thing it did was cause me to gain 60 pounds. I was always about 160-170 pounds before this crap, and I'm currently hovering around 230. Yuck.