I was a live in caretaker for both my parents for the last 10 and 6 years of their lives respectively. And I can say with 100% assurity that both would have benefitted from MJ medical or otherwise for pain management. My father broke his body decades ago. He had been officially "disabled" since 1989. He died of inoperable lung cancer in 2015. My mother, she had cancer which she beat. But the radiation treatment basically destroyed her body. Last 10 years of life she was in constant severe arthritis pain in her joints and back. No muscle. She looked like a skeleton with a sheet pulled over her.
I offered to source them marijuana on the street level. Both of them. Because they both needed it badly. But neither could do that because of how they were treated by pain clinics. One test with an unauthorized substance in their blood and thats a wrap. No more pain meds of any kind. They'd have been forced to use harder street drugs. And we all know precisely what a slippery slope that is.
Marijuana should be 50 state legal no questions asked. Wanna overregulate something dangerous? Tobacco and Alcohol are both orders of magnitude more harmful and dangerous. Yet they're regulated about as hard as Soda is, if that. For that matter, go after Sugar. That shit is literally poison and its in everything.