Yes, People Are Giving Their Pets Medical Marijuana

Photoillustration based on a photo by <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&search_source=search_form&search_tracking_id=&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&searchterm=cat+white+background&search_group=&orient=&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&commercial_ok=&color=&show_color_wheel=1#id=70935322&src=KbPOim336AjFgZBPrpMttQ-1-23">Pashin Georgy</a>/Shutterstock.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Is it ever a good idea to get your dog or cat stoned? California veterinarian Doug Kramer says the answer depends on whether your pet could be classified as a medical marijuana patient.

“I do think there are therapeutic benefits to it,” says Kramer, who some years ago found that his homemade pot tinctures helped his own dog, a husky named Nikita, fight pain and regain her appetite after she came down with cancer.

Despite the spread of medical pot laws around the country, marijuana still remains taboo within the veterinary establishment; its medical journals won’t publish anything about it, and Kramer is one of the few veterinarians even willing to discuss using medical marijuana for pets. He points out that a slew of medical studies on the effects of pot have relied on rats and dogs as substitutes for humans, suggesting that “mammals have the same cannabinoid receptors as humans do” and “would benefit in the same ways.”

Perhaps the nation’s only overtly 420-friendly vet, Kramer has crowdsourced a slew of research on pot for pets. Through submissions to his website, VetGuru.com, and surveys distributed at pot dispensaries, he has amassed more than 500 case studies, the vast majority of them positive, he says. Most people use cannabis to treat their dogs and cats for pain, seizures, and inflammation stemming from arthritis. About 20 percent of phone calls to Kramer’s office now come from other cannabis-curious vets.

Photoillustration by Michael Mechanic based on a Flickr photo by Eva101.
“Anything people find effective on themselves, they are going to transfer to their pets,” explains pot-friendly vet Doug Kramer.

Cannabis may have a bad name among vets because they tend only to see the animals that have overdosed—either by tearing into their owner’s stash of pot brownies, or by getting treated with a tad too many kibbles and hits. “Obviously the dose for a Great Dane will be much different than what you’d give a Chihuahua,” says Kim Baker, a holistic pet care provider based in Denver. An over-baked dog, she says, is typically lethargic, suffers from a loss of balance, and may be at risk of choking on its vomit.

“Anything people find effective on themselves, they are going to transfer to their pets,” Kramer argues. He believes that lifting the veterinary taboo on pot would help pet owners make sure they’re using cannabis safely. (He has published his own guide on the website.) Ultimately, Kramer wants California and other states to allow the family dog to get its own pot card.

But why stop there? He tells me of a woman who fed her horse cannabis-infused butter to treat it for laminitis, a foot disease that causes painful swelling. “She said it was like a new horse afterwards,” he told me.

This is not how to give marijuana to your horse. Photoillustration based on photo by TheirHistory.

 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate