For the last five years, marijuana activists in South Africa have been preparing for the Trial of the Cannabis Plant. Laws in the country restricting marijuana cultivation and usage are outdated and unlawful, as they are in many other countries throughout the world. The trial in South Africa is significant because if the Constitutional Court in South Africa declares the laws redundant, these same activists intend to take the case all the way to the International Court of Human Rights – taking every government in the world to task on the issue of illegal use of the marijuana plant so that this plant never has to be put on trial again, anywhere in the world.

What do experts have to say about marijuana?

Experts in the fields of toxicology, sociology, neurophsychopharmacology and other fields of science and research have been invited to come out to South Africa from the USA and Europe in March 2016 in order to testify in court as to the Marijuana plant’s medical benefits and to debunk the long-held view that marijuana is a dangerous drug. One such expert is Donald Abrams, MD, who is the chief of the Hematology-Oncology Division at San Francisco General Hospital and a Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of California San Francisco. Dr. Abrams has an Integrative Oncology consultation practice at the USCF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine.

According to Dr. Abrams, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has a mandate from Congress to only study substances of abuse as substances of abuse. This means that if cannabis is seen as a substance of abuse, they will not fund studies that are going to try to demonstrate that it has medicinal benefits. In the realm of science, anecdotal evidence is irrelevant.

Hopefully, activists who are actively trying to end the war on the illegality of marijuana usage will succeed in debunking the marijuana myths, and lawyers fighting the case will use the evidence of experts such as Dr. Abrams and others to accomplish this. If the outcome is successful, this may mean that lives can at last be saved through legal use of marijuana. It will also mean better quality of life for patients suffering with diverse diseases such as AIDS, certain cancers glaucoma, epilepsy etc., and who may presently be living in a great deal of pain and discomfort.

Sources:

Indiegogo.com

Civilliberty.about.com

NaturalNews.com