As a medical doctor, I take issue with several points in Lawrence Harmon’s Oct. 12 op-ed column “Reefer madness,” about the medical marijuana ballot initiative. Medical marijuana has been studied extensively, and has been clinically proven to be safe and effective for treating nausea, inflammation, muscle spasticity, and pain.

I am not only a doctor, but a breast cancer survivor. To treat my disease, I was given the most aggressive chemotherapy regimen available. For four months, I lay in bed suffering from nausea a thousand times worse than any flu, feeling literally hundreds of times a day like I was going to vomit. Taking a Marinol pill when I was that nauseated didn’t make sense. I didn’t want to take a pill that could be vomited as soon as it was swallowed.