Marijuana for meeee??

I thought it was a joke when I saw a comedy movie where the guy tells that his marijuana is glaucoma treatment. I heard about medical marijuana, but I thought the guy was just rambling random disease to come up with, which happened to be, glaucoma.
But, you know what? That guy knew what he was talking about.
California didn't pass medical marijuana just because they wanted to be high all the time legally; marijuana IS an effective glaucoma treatment, as well as painkiller for body aches or cancer patients.
Yet, this could seem like an hardly-practical evidence that potheads digged up just so they can make an excuse of smoking pot. There are already pain killers and glaucoma treatments that are legal and that don't get you high, why try so hard to make marijuana as a medical treatment while we already have other options that are working?

My curiosity led me to dig deeper into this issue, and I was surprised to find out that numerous ophthalmologists are trying hard to make marijuana as an alternative glaucoma treatments for people who are in need.
Now, you would think, who NEEDS marijuana if not for entertainment?

Here is an excerpt from the article by Dr. Porcella which will enlightened you:
Most drugs for glaucoma are applied topically and are well tolerated…severe systemic side effects can occur, up to the point where the side effects should always be considered when a patient, undergoing local ocular therapy, presents with new systemic problems. 
Smoking marijuana cigarettes could lower IOP by up to 45%. The active ingredient of Marijuana, Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (D9-THC), is found to lower IOP pressure, and this can be taken through many different ways such as smoking marijuana cigarettes, baking marijuana cookies, dissolving marijuana and making eye drops, or even chewing on marijuana leaves.

According to Dr. Porcella, Glaucoma patients are usually in 60's or later, who are very likely to have multiple health problems other than just glaucoma. As the excerpt of the article above suggests, the side effects could be a big deal when you are dealing with old aged group of people; side effects could actually kill them! Say an old lady had a bad heart and liver and had glaucoma. They wouldn't be able to get any treatments that had side effects on heart or liver. 
In fact, I found an another article where professor Dr. Gui-Lin Zhan at University of Nebraska Medical Center ran a clinical trial on a lady who did have multiple illness so there wasn't any other option except marijuana for glaucoma treatment. Here are his words:

..the IOP of the patient who is in her sixties was intolerant of medications that lower IOP, such as pilocarpine, epinephrine, and acetazolamide. The patient could not be controlled by the available conventional medical therapies. Only marijuana and THC given orally in the form of Marinol had a dramatic effect on her IOP. She was given a surgery when her right eye showed a sudden increase in IOP level, but the operation in turn caused her to loose her vision in the right eye due to suprachoroidal hemorrhage. For her remaining eye, she was enrolled in the compassionate use federal government program for use of marijuana cigarettes. 

This program was very successful in lowering her IOP (intra ocular pressure=eye pressure). Without marijuana, she could have lost both eyes.



So, what are you guys' thought on this? I have to say, I changed my opinion on marijuana completely. It is a kind of "drug". It could be used so efficiently for those who are in need if regulated, but with the current illegality of marijuana is somehow giving people the sense that marijuana is such a bad thing. People go "Oh my god marijuana is illegal, but I wanna get high, and I need to be so secret about this.", instead of even considering it as a medical treatment such as morphine- when you hear about morphine, do you think about college people shooting morphine up, or morphine dosed for people under extreme pain in hospital? What do you, then, think about marijuana? College people smoking and getting high, or glaucoma patients getting treatments and lowering their IOP level?