U.S.: More People Giving Their Pets Marijuana For Medical Reasons

By Steve Elliott
Hemp News
More and more people are using medical marijuana to treat their pets for all sorts of medical conditions, from separation anxiety and noise phobia to cancer, reports the Journal of the American Veterinary Association (JAVMA News). As more states are legalizing cannabis for humans, veterinarians and pet owners are calling for more studies into the use and safety of the drug in pets, reports Fox News.
From time to time, alarmist articles appear in the mainstream media which describe cannabis as supposedly "poisonous" to dogs or cats; this is patent nonsense, and any veterinarian who says so doesn't know what he or she is talking about. Cannabis is fundamentally non-toxic to all mammals. Rover and Fluffy have endocannabinoid systems just as humans do, and can similarly benefit from phytocannabinoid (plant-produced cannabinoid) supplementation.
After using medical marijuana to treat his own back pain, Ernest Misko, 77, of Chatsworth, California, decided to treat his pet cat, Borzo, who was having trouble walking. Misko gave the cat some glycerin cannabis tincture made specifically for pets, and within a few days, the cat appeared to be pain-free. (Similar tinctures can be found in medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles and elsewhere.)
"I don't get high from (marijuana), but the pain goes away," Misko told the JAVMA News. "So I tried it on my cat, my 24-year-old cat, who's feeling better."
Veterinarians say they've noticed an increase in people who say they use medical marijuana on their pets, with some vets following suit.
Dr. Douglas Kramer, a veterinarian in Los Angeles, runs a mobile office focused on pain management and palliative care for pets and said since 2011, about 300 people told him they've given their pets medical marijuana.
Kramer became intrigued by the potential of medicinal cannabis when his Siberian husky, Nikita, was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
"Nikita was wasting away, and she'd stopped eating," he told JAVMA News. "I'd exhausted every available pharmaceutical pain option, even steroids. At that point, it was a quality of life issue, and I felt like I'd try anything to ease her suffering."
After Kramer began feeding Nikita small amounts of cannabis, her appetite returned, and she rested more comfortably during her final days.
"I do think there are therapeutic benefits to it," Kramer told Mother Jones magazine.
Kramer said that marijuana may be suitable for use in veterinary medicine, and that it deserves more research. His guide to making home remedies for pets in the form of herbal glycerin tinctures is available for purchase on his website Vet Guru.
"I don't want to come across as being overly in favor of giving marijuana to pets," he said. "My position is the same as the AMA's position. We need to investigate marijuana further to determine whether the case reports I'm hearing are true or whether there's a placebo effect at work."
"Our position is that anything that can help animals -- if it's truly, properly administered in the right amound [and] can relieve a dog's pain -- then they should be given the same consideration that humans in pain are given," Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), told ABC News.