Are Medical Cannabis Users Defined by Their Medications?
What defines who you are? What is it about you that tells people who you are, what you believe, what you do, etc.? If you are like most people, the most defining factor in your life is that thing that consumes most of your time or demands most of your attention. That realization leads to a curious question for medical cannabis users: are they defined by their medications?
Deseret Wellness is a Provo dispensary selling medical marijuana in Utah. They have a sister location in Park City. If you were to visit either location as a medical cannabis user, you would find a helpful and enthusiastic staff just waiting to do what they can for you. Some of them pretty much eat, sleep, and breathe medical cannabis.
There is obviously nothing wrong with being enthusiastic about your job. There’s nothing wrong with being evangelists for your particular industry. But it becomes troubling when a person is so obsessed with cannabis that it actually defines them.
The Sum of Many Parts
Some would say that individuals are not defined by just one thing. Rather, each person is a sum of their many parts. That sounds reasonable. But what happens when a person allows just one aspect of life to define them? That particular thing could easily become an unhealthy obsession.
To demonstrate the point, consider someone with a disabling medical condition. Though that person works full-time, they qualify as being legally disabled. They choose to continue working for as long as they can so that their disability doesn’t take over their life.
That person is more than the condition that affects their daily routine. Likewise, their life involves a lot more than taking prescription medication. Their health concerns are just a few of the many more that cumulatively make up who they are.
We Make Unity Harder
The danger of allowing ourselves to be defined by one or two things is that we make unity harder. Let’s face it, almost all of us would like more unity and less fighting. But aren’t we encouraging the fighting by dividing ourselves along specific lines?
What makes each of us tick generally influences who we choose as friends, the activities we participate in, and so forth. If we desire genuine unity, we need to blur the lines between what makes us tick. We should not be working so hard to define them more clearly.
It is understandable that the medical cannabis community would be so passionate about cannabis legalization. After all, the nearly nationwide acceptance of cannabis as a medical product has been a long time coming. It is still new enough that patients and business owners alike are still excited and passionate. But how far should it be taken?
Moving Beyond It
At some point, creating unity in a country divided over the legitimacy of medical cannabis will require moving beyond it. It will require general acceptance of the fact that medical cannabis is legal in most states, followed by a search for common ground rather than continual emphasis on ‘for’ and ‘against’ opinions.
In the meantime, is it possible that some medical cannabis patients allow themselves to be defined by their medications? Absolutely. Just have some conversations with the most vocal proponents and you will see it firsthand.
There are also those patients who are as nonchalant about their medical cannabis products as their neighbors are about prescription antibiotics. It is just medicine. That is ideally where we need to be with all medications if we ever expect medical cannabis to stop being a hot button topic.