Thankfully in my state, medicinal cannabis is legal. Medicinal marijuana is not the same as the crushed up bag of stems and seeds some of us tried as kids.
There are thousands of strains, each with its own benificial and sometimes negative effects (Dry mouth and sleepiness), but all of them are safer than the aspirin you take for a headache. Aside from my own experiences (cannabis helps to calm my anxiety better than clonozepam, and to help with my chronic depression, without all of the nasty side effects of those medications) I have literally seen hundreds of people who are suffering from everything to insomnia to cerebral palsy, even cancer who are actually able to live functional lives that weren't as possible with just pharmaceuticals.
It's time for people to understand that people who smoke cannabis aren't just stoner losers. Some of them are doing it to be able to actually function in their daily lives without taking a bunch of medicine that quite frankly is usually less tested than cannabis. How many times have you seen medications pulled from shelves because they can cause death, stroke, heart attack, liver failure etc? As I said before, aspirin kills more people than almost every other drug. Nobody ever, period, amen, 0%, has ever died from a cannabis overdose. How many people that you know of died from drinking? What about things like getting their medications mixed up?
Cannabis is only illegal (and only in certain states) because it's hard to regulate, difficult to tax all transactions, and because it takes money away from big pharma. It's less harmful than alcohol and even cigarettes as the evidence suggests it helps fight cancer rather than cause it.