My logic works like this:
1. Cannabis has a number of plausibly pharmacologically active chemicals.
2. The effects these pharmacologically active chemicals have may help some things, and make other things worse. Both are almost certainly true, depending on which things we are talking about.
3. Many of the sources of information on this topic are biased, either by the anti-drug movement, which cannot abide any positive findings, and the pro-drug movement driven both by the counter-culture and more recently commercial interests.
4. In the face of both of these biases, US federal regulations has made study of therapeutic use next to impossible. Studies of those using voluntarily in the community, however, is still possible.
5. Of the studies that have been done, most focus on the negative impacts. Not all of these studies are good, but many of them are. In fact, a good number of them are excellent. I'm not saying it's a fair fight, but that is the state of the science in 2015.
6. Perhaps, in time, as the playing field is leveled and good randomized controlled trials with strong blinding can be conducted, high-quality evidence for cannabis as a legitimate therapy can happen. That has not yet happened.
7. Despite the absence of evidence, many people are making lots of money off of cannabis, and have a strong incentive to promote this message regardless of the evidence (or lack thereof).
8. As the benefits are mostly unknown, and the risks are quite well known (based on lots of poor research but also quite a bit of high quality research), I cannot recommend medical marijuana at this time.
9. This is a moving target. I will need to continue to follow research trends, and my recommendations will change based on available data.
I hope that is more explicit.
Also, I know it's ad hominem, but I would be remiss not to point out that linking to reddit and wikipedia is not nearly as strong as pointing to well-conducted primary literature sources. Also, take a look at the reddit link you posted. The ratio of negative outcomes of use to positive is very high.
