What is marijuana? Marijuana is a plant that people use for various things, including medicinal uses, but also recreational uses, personal uses, social uses, religious uses, even industrial uses, and nutritional uses. All of these things are things that marijuana can be used for.
The medicinal marijuana is specifically marijuana that has been targeted or we could say earmarked for use in medical systems. So that could be, for example, in the United States we have 17 or so states that have laws that allow patients and doctors to use marijuana as part of their medical treatment systems. So we call that type of marijuana medicinal marijuana.
Now what makes that type of marijuana different from regular marijuana or non-medicinal marijuana? Well, at the 2000 feet level it’s the same. But when you hone into it, you see that it’s medicinal marijuana may be more oriented towards different types of patients, different types of conditions. It may be more care could have been placed into the way it’s produced, into the way it’s tested, into the way it’s packaged and delivered to, you know, in a health or medicinal framework. So, medicinal marijuana has more of an extra, goes the extra mile.
Now, marijuana has been around for a very long time. And a variety of strains have been developed through the 20th century, essentially the latter part of the 20th century. As people have done genetic breeding and cross breeding. And this allows a huge variety of different types of strains of marijuana. And those strains can potentially be useful for different types of conditions, when more research hopefully will help us elucidate that or study that.
So at the bottom line though, the part of marijuana that we’re talking about is the flowers. The resinous exudates of the flowers of the female plant. That resin contains compounds that have health efficacious properties. So that’s what people are trying to extract, isolate, or deliver to themselves into their bodies when they’re using medicinal marijuana.