Medical Use of Marijuana for Chronic Illness: Negative Impact on Mental Health

Running Head: DEBATE TRANSCRIPT
DEBATE TRANSCRIPT
Name of the student:
Name of the student:
Author’s note:

DEBATE TRANSCRIPT
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Good day everyone, this is X. The topic for today’s debate is “Medical use of Marijuana
for the management of chronic illness in Australia”. I would be speaking against the topic as
according to me, it possesses long term negative impact on the mental health of the patient. In
the words of Compton (2016) and I “Instead of having a lot of controversy associated with the
use of marijuana, it is one of the most commonly used for the management of chronic illness”. In
the debate, I would be talking about the frequent use of marijuana is drugs and its adverse impact
in mental and physical. I will also discuss about the reasons for which the medical use of
Marijuana should be banned.
We know that Marijuana is widely used for the treatment of chronic illness especially in
older adults in Australia and is also known as the wonder drug. There is a controversy associated
to it regarding its pros and cons. As the medical use of marijuana is becoming more prevalent
day by day, researchers are conducting research in order to evaluate the benefits and the risk
factor associated with the medical use of marijuana.
According to the research conducted by Yuan, Tello, Hultman, Barker, Arron et al.
(2017), it is highly addictive and should be banned. Due to the medical use of marijuana for the
management of chronic illness in the individual below age 25, addiction and abuse is observed in
about 10% of the total patient (Keyes, Wall, Cerdá, Schulenberg, O'Malley et al., 2016). Some
teenagers and young adults are also observed to be misusing the drugs and are using it for their
personal pleasure apart from their medical use. It possess positive impact on the physical health
and provides a shot term relief from chronic pain and illness, but possess a long term negative
impact on the mental health, which reduces the quality of life of the patient. rendering to the
findings of Caulkins, Kilmer and Kleiman (2016), long term or frequent use of marijuana can
seriously impact the brain and its cognitive function and can lead to short term memory loss and

DEBATE TRANSCRIPT
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also hinders the concentration of the patient. It is also observed to be responsible for the
cognitive disability of the patient who frequently consumes the marijuana drugs. The use of
medical marijuana is correlated with the extensive use of cigarette, alcohol and other illicit drugs
(Papazisis, Tsakiridis, Koulas, Siafis, Dagklis et al., 2017) Not only this, the long term use of
medical marijuana also gives rise to several symptoms of psychosis.
As mentioned above, marijuana is known to increase the risk of the psychosis and give
rise to the mental illness in the patient who are using it to treat chronic illness. It is analyzed from
the study of Murray et al. (2016) that it is a psychoactive drug which is known to interfere with
the signal transmission in the brain. Thus it has the potential to cause to hallucination, anxiety
and depression in the person. The finding is also supported by Vadhan et al. (2017) and
identified two chemical components known as tetrahydrocannabinol and endocannabinoids are
the potent agent for inducing psychoactive agents. In a study conducted by Milano, Tecce and
Capasso, (2017), older patient suffering from mental illness such as, multiple sclerosis,
Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson disease and chronic illness are interviewed. By analyzing
their response, it is observed that though the marijuana tends to reduce the negative impacts of
the psychiatric, neurological and physiological disorders, it may also lead to cognitive
impairments in the adults.
By critically analyzing the different components of medical marijuana, it is evaluated that
it contains certain which can cause cancer, hence long term use of marijuana is also supposed to
cause cancer or lung tissue damage (Adhauliya, Kalappanavar, Ali, & Annigeri, 2016)
A study has highlighted that medical marijuana assert that it increase the risk for
development of cancer like lung cancer and testicular cancer. The major reason for being