While I'm all for legalization on all fronts, from what I have seen there has been very little level-headed recognition of the cons insofar as health is concerned, and more research should be levied in that direction and awareness of it spread. I understand that the priority of pro-marijuana advocates is emphasizing the pros, but it's bad for the national conversation if they brush aside the cons. Marijuana almost ruined my life, but at the time I thought marijuana was helping me with it. It took doctors 8 months to figure it out.

I'll try to keep this as short as possible. When I left the military, I got my medical marijuana card in California. It was amazing. There were 3 stores within 2 miles of where I lived. I smoked a lot, more than I should have. And I know, "everything in moderation". I didn't care, I was having a rough time.

I started feeling nauseous pretty frequently. I didn't know why, I thought maybe it had to do with my diet. I had been a vegetarian for nearly 2 years at this time (started as a one week challenge to myself) and doubled down on counting grams of this and that to make sure everything was kosher. I was very glad I had my marijuana card to ameliorate my nausea.

My nausea started getting worse, so I kept smoking more. Then I started vomiting after nearly every meal I ate. I smoked more. Several weeks of vomiting went by, until one night I couldn't stop. I went to the ER.

Six months of nausea, vomiting, doctors appointments, medical procedures, and ER visits went by. It was not getting better. I was prescribed very powerful anti-nausea medications that didn't work. In the ER they gave me the same anti-nausea medications they gave to chemo patients, and it didn't help. They just gave me IVs so I wouldn't become too dehydrated while it passed.

By this point I had found a weird trick, which was hot showers. If I was feeling nauseous, I would just sit in the shower for 20-30 minutes until it eased up. So I took about 6 showers a day.

I started eating meat again because I was losing a lot of weight. I started out 6' ~180 lbs. I had lost 40 lbs in 6 months. Doctors still had no clue.

It wasn't until my last ER visit that it was determined that it was marijuana causing this all along. I didn't think to connect the dots, because "marijuana helps cancer patients with their nausea and eating soooo much!!!11" but in actuality, the more marijuana I smoked the worse my symptoms got. The doctor I had in the ER figured it out because of my habit of taking hot showers to help it (some House shit right there). It had been noted as a relief symptom in a paper she had recently read, describing cyclical vomiting syndrome as a result of lots of marijuana use. I guess it also has its own medical term as well.

Anyway, I quit and after 2 months of nausea slowing disappearing, everything was good again. During all this time, I also developed a psychosis that led to extreme paranoia, hearing voices, thinking neighbors could read my mind/see through my walls, sleeping in my closet, thinking there were cameras in my wall and that my computer was trojan'd, etc. Everything lovely that comes along with paranoid schizophrenia. That also disappeared after I quit smoking, but psychosis is a relatively well known side effect of marijuana use.

TL;DR: Marijuana made me experience chemotherapy and paranoid schizophrenia for about 6 months. The nausea/vomiting probably could have been figured out much earlier if marijuana was more studied and its negative effects more well known.