An ever-growing list of scientific, peer-reviewed studies has found that the cannabis plant possesses significant medical qualities.

The cannabis plant has been found to successfully treat a number of conditions, from chronic pain to multiple sclerosis.

Scientific studies are backed up by an enormous amount of personal experiences of patients who have successfully treated their conditions with cannabis.

In every measurable way the cannabis plant is medicine.

Unfortunately, not every country allows medical cannabis to be used legally by patients.

One of those countries is Ukraine.

Ukraine is not necessarily on the verge of legalizing cannabis for medical use, however, voters still get a chance to make their opinions about the issue known.

Questions For Voters

Local elections are scheduled to be held in Ukraine on October 25.

Piggybacking off of the local elections, Ukraine leaders are posing various questions to voters in order to gain insight into voters’ attitudes towards certain policy issues.

One of the questions that voters will see when they go to vote is whether or not they support legalizing cannabis for medical use.

“Here are three final questions from the survey. Should the number of parliament members in the Verkhovna Rada be reduced to 300? Do you support the legalization of medical cannabis in Ukraine to reduce pain for seriously ill patients? Should Ukraine raise the issue of using the security guarantees defined by the Budapest memorandum at the international level?” President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky posted on social media.

There appears to be no polling to provide insight into how the question will be answered by a majority of voters in Ukraine.

The question is non-binding, and will simply be included to give lawmakers in Ukraine a better idea of the level of support for medical cannabis legalization.

What Happens If The Support Is Significant?

Obviously, voters will be able to weigh in on medical cannabis reform and state whether they support it or not.

If support is low, then clearly prohibition will remain.

However, what happens if support is strong? Especially if it is really strong?

Polling for medical cannabis legalization, which is essentially what this is, can be tricky in that while people may support medical cannabis reform in general, there may be provisions that they do not like.

With that in mind, even if the vote is extremely favorable later this month in Ukraine it still won’t shed light on what type of medical cannabis reform will be pursued.

The only likely thing to happen if the vote is favorable is that lawmakers in Ukraine will start to look harder at what policies seem best to them. 

If/when that happens, hopefully the lawmakers will pursue a medical cannabis policy that helps as many patients as possible versus pursuing a policy change that will only help a limited amount of patients.