[Broken_Hippo]

1. It isn't so difficult. "Pharma" makes drugs from plants all the time. It isn't hard to imagine having strains specifically for treatment, packaged in prepackaged dosages with the right strains with different strengths. Or inhalers and things. "Pharma" also makes things like aspirin, after all. Besides, "Pharma" isn't the only one with an interest here - alcohol and tobacco companies would surely jump in to fill the niche. Not to mention that many countries have taxpayer-funded health care and have a vested interest to provide lower-cost treatments that work.

2. It depends on what is causing your migraines. I have a family member that will smoke occasionally if the migraines get bad enough. But they also have allergies, and sometimes smoking irritates them. That means that she has a small chance of the headache changing forms. One type of pain traded for another.

3. The situation is pretty horrible. I don't have them, but they run in my family. I've had to pick a person up because they got an aura while driving. I've known another that goes literally months with headaches. The pain gets bad enough that folks near "If I overdose, at least the pain stops". It can literally disable folks for hours. Cannabis doesn't always work well enough and doesn't prevent them. Most things that help with the pain still disable folks enough that they can't drive nor do their work.

[merinowool]

1. That's the thing - it is cheap, safe and easy. If there is no monopoly established (like in the UK) there is little money to be made. You cannot do aspirin at home easily, but you could make your migraine (or other) medication from cannabis easily.

2. You don't have to smoke it.

3. It doesn't work for all, but that is not an argument to deny it to those that they find it works for them.

[Broken_Hippo]

1. See, but there is money to be made, just not by the folks you are referring to. Monopoly or not. If anything, saving money in the healthcare system is in the government's interest. Taxes and things as well. And "easy" is ... kinda. Depends on what sorts of things you need it for.

2. Of course not. But that takes away from the ease of above: The person in question gets some irritant effects from the smoke, but also tends to get allergic reactions from random stuff... like corn pollen. The same person will try about anything legal.

3. I'm not argueing that at all. I'm actually very pro-legalisation, both for recreational use and for pharma use (not only with pot, but including drugs I wouldn't personally ingest). I generally push there to be separate categories for the uses, in part so we can specialize (I think this will happen). But I also try to push back at cure-all sorts of language, and this was more to demonstrate that even with it legal, migraines are still horrible and it doesn't prevent them. In a best-case scenario with this new medicine, a person would have the prevention available plus a variety of treatments to treat the ones they still get, including cannibus if it happens to be right for them.