A Cure for Alzheimer's Disease?

"The active ingredient of marijuana could be considerably better at suppressing the abnormal clumping of malformed proteins that is a hallmark of Alzheimer's than any currently approved drugs prescribed for the treatment of the disease" is the first sentence from this article over at LiveScience. Scientists know that THC doesn't allow for the formation of the plaques which is the hallmark of Alzheimer's. THC is "significantly" better at disrupting the formation of these plaques than donepezil and tacrine which are the two drugs currently approved for treatment of the disease.

So, why aren't we using THC or even just good old marijuana to combat this devastating disease? Because we don't want people getting high. Yes, it is as simple as that. We, as a society, have decided that it is better that people fade away into the twilight of not knowing loved ones, not knowing what day it is or what type of clothes to wear rather than give them synthetic THC which would give them a high or allow them to use medicinal marijuana, again giving them a high, but it would allow them to retain their minds. For as the LiveScience article states: heavy marijuana use may "... impair memory, decision making, and the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at a time." Somehow, I don't think these side effects are worse than the effects of Alzheimer's itself. These abilities are stolen by the disease whereas marijuana may impair them temporarily. That is a very large difference and one would think scientists would grasp that concept.

Allow me to provide more scientific data to back up my initial statement that marijuana may provide a cure for Alzheimer's disease.

Scientific evidence:
Study in Spain on Rats from 2005
Science Daily 2006 Report on Effectiveness of THC on Symptoms and Progression of Alzheimer's

I think it is far past time to stop the nonsense surrounding marijuana. There are plenty of health benefits to the weed. Caffeine, alcohol and tobacco are all legal and none of these substances have any medicinal benefits to them. Marijuana is illegal and has medicinal value. There is definitely something wrong here in this country and it needs to be fixed. Just because Big Pharma cannot make a ton of money off of a weed does not mean the American people should be denied the right to use it, whether it be for recreation or for medicinal uses.

Feedback is very welcome.