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For the past 24 hours, I’ve been in deep thought after watching almost the entire BBC Drugs Map of Britain series. I was hooked after watching ‘Dying For Weed‘.
Dying for Weed follows Journalist Poppy Begum who explores the underground world of medicinal cannabis in the UK, meeting seriously ill people who use cannabis to treat themselves.
The film features Jeff Ditchfield who supplies medicinal cannabis oil, and other medical users, and contains a lot of information about cannabis, along with some harrowing scenes (one poor chap is using what looks like soap bar to medicate.)
The 30-minute-documentary seems to be set from a balanced perspective, and although you can see watching in some scenes that Poppy isn’t entirely convinced herself, she does a good job of presenting a balanced look at the currently unregulated medicinal cannabis scene here in the UK, showing us the dangers of cannabis oil scammers (in one scene a woman has been giving her dad cannabis oil to treat cancer, and lab tests show it has only 1% THC and no other cannabinoid content).
The documentary also features parents who treat their sick children with cannabis in the UK, and the moral dilemma that can present, which is of course overshadowed by the need to help your child in a life-or-death situation. It’s heartbreaking to see these people forced to become criminals to supply medicinal cannabis to their loved-ones, and highlights the ridiculousness of our current laws surrounding cannabis.
Comparing Dying for Weed to the other documentaries in the BBC Three Drugs Map of Britain Series you can see that cannabis is on a different level to all of the other drugs featured. While the documentary only looks at medicinal cannabis use in the UK, the reality is that even heavy recreational cannabis users do not exhibit the sort of behaviours associated with addicts of other drugs, including valium, and the horrible ex-legal highs.
We need more features like this on mainstream media. There will be a lot of people who watch it who are in need of medicinal cannabis, and hopefully it will inspire them to take that extra step and begin treatment.
While Dying for Weed concludes that we need more medical research/clinical trials to determine how much of a benefit cannabis is, there actually is a lot of research out there already that our Government / policy makers can read for reference. There are plenty of studies, with more done all the time, and it is annoying to see the wool pulled over people’s eyes with the ‘More research is needed’ card. While on one hand, this is true to an extent, as we can always discover more about cannabis and its beneficial effects for the whole range of conditions it seems to treat well, there is a lot of existing research on most of the conditions featured in this film.
Dying for Weed is well worth a watch! You can watch the full feature below.
What did you think of Dying For Weed? Tell us in the comments!
