I completely agree, but I want to add one thing. I think it's really great that many people have found relief in smoking cannabis, but we are not talking about that. Really, one thing from today would be that smoking is not a medicinal route of administration.
As well, as a lot of my colleagues have indicated, the committee needs to know that the cannabis plant is very complex. You have over 500 chemicals in the cannabis plant, and more than 140 of them are cannabinoids with biologically active properties. We used to take the bark of a tree and that alleviated pain. We then isolated the active ingredient in that bark and realized it was aspirin. It's 2019. We should be developing medication by extracting or knowing which components of the cannabis plant are helping which particular symptoms for veterans and the general public. We owe it to our society to not use 10 grams or three grams.... It's crazy that someone could be ingesting 10 grams a day and saying that this is alleviating anything, because at that amount, the intoxication, the toxicity....
If we continue with smoking, we'll cause health risks in our veterans. We need to develop medications to help people, not to continue to contribute to just masking something in the short term and producing huge problems in the future. We can all develop together, very fast, which cannabinoids and which routes of administration are for which symptoms. It's not impossible.