Editorial: Cannabis as a medicine hard to swallow

Cannabis, in my humble view and experience, is not good stuff.
And anyone who thinks it is, in my view, has not stopped smoking it long enough to be able to sober up and subjectively observe its negatives.
I don't mean to sound like a 1940s prohibitionist, but I think it's awful. There was a time when I didn't have this view.
I gave it a go back in the 1990s. Quite a good go, actually.
But I realised it was not for me.
Aside from being illegal, my view is it's potentially a gateway drug, anyone who builds immunity to it is at real risk of being lost to it, and from what I saw, it's a depressant and can have a real impact on a person's personality. Socially, it can limit users to a circle of people who also smoke the drug.
I say can, because there always exceptions where people use cannabis and operate relatively normally. But that's the exception.
It scares me that cannabis is so prevalent in our community and accessible to our children.
So why we would want it legalised, even for medicinal reasons, I do not know.
What makes me wary about the medicinal argument is, if the properties within cannabis are so beneficial, why is a synthetic version not readily available.
Is it because there is an equivalent existing pain relief available, but without the associated THC "brain stone"?
Is there evidence out there that cannabis provides pain relief that pharmaceutical drugs cannot?
And why haven't the pharmacies leapt on THC or whatever cannabis component it is that provides pain relief.
I realise I might be posing more questions than answers, but there's something out of order here.
If cannabis has some form of pain relief quality, extract it, regulate it and make it available via prescription. But don't normalise something that potentially is so dangerous.
editor@northernadvocate.co.nz