With the atrociously expensive state of health care, doctors should provide more than a signature when patients come seeking a medical marijuana recommendation, and should at the very least have an honest conversation about the effects of cannabis and the potential draw backs and results of its use, as any doctor prescribing any pharmaceutical medicine should.

This type of winking, as you put it, is common with opioid pain killers. Doctors don't just advertise that they accomodate those seeking pain killers, but word gets out, and it happens. The real winner there is the pharmaceutical company.

The 96% of Colorado Medical Marijuana Patients who have had MMJ recommended for 'chronic pain' are not fraudulent as many sources would have you believe.

Pain is common, be it due to surgery or trauma, and from my personal experiences as a budtender I can tell you that while many will say that pain isn't sufficient reason to use medical marijuana, I see it work wonders where pharmaceuticals didn't work and were accompanied by nausea and potentially more lethal side-effects.

How severe does pain have to be to justify using a narcotic but not medical marijuana?