My mother died of an agressive blastoma multiforme last spring. I tried to get her cannabis but she declined in spite of the evidence I presented (at the time the principal papers were written in Spain). Marijuana use has been greatly stigmatized in my country and that played a big role in her rejection. I am both glad and angry at the same time.
Sorry to hear about your mother. I have talked my father into investigating therapeutic use of cannabis for his Parkinson's. He indulged as a young man but the war on drugs and raising a family put a kibosh on recreational use for him years ago. The drug war propaganda has been so effective that he was reluctant to try it despite recent legalization in our home state. In a very unscientific experiment this summer, I watched his symptoms disappear after imbibing a small amount. If only we can get the word out to more people.
My father is in the same situation, except MJ is not even available medicinally. Could you tell me what form your father ingested? Was it high-CBD edibles, or what?
Will there be a time when a majority look at how we have stigmatized and prevented marijuana use so vocally and with such dire criminal consequences when it could have been used to help in the proper channels?
I strongly believe a lot of science is not done on marijuana because of the vocal critics or the fear of vocal critics. Just in the US, certain people can be pretty vindictive when it comes to their causes.
>I strongly believe a lot of science is not done on marijuana because of the vocal critics or the fear of vocal critics.
That appears to be changing for the better. The most important thing is to somehow make sure that non-physicians and non-scientists such as the DEA are removed from the decision making process (of what gets studied, and of drug scheduling).
>Just in the US, certain people can be pretty vindictive when it comes to their causes.
I hope that it isn't vindictiveness. I've always assumed that it is either an inability to sympathize, or an indifference to other peoples' suffering; also, ignorance.
Terence McKenna smoked marijuana for 35 years heavily. He died of brain cancer.
McKenna was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment. According to Wired magazine, McKenna was worried that his tumor was caused by his 35 years of smoking cannabis, although his doctors assured him there was no causal relation. -Wikipedia
"smoking" is an important factor here, smoking anything is bad for you. I imagine any other sort of ingesting it (marijuana) would be much less harmful
Putting aside the anecdotal nature of your comment, it raises the question of whether, because McKenna was "worried" about a causal relation between his brain cancer and prior cannabis use, he ceased smoking post-diagnosis.
If so, that would certainly complicate what I'm assuming you're implying, that McKenna's case runs counter to the [edit: findings communicated in the] HuffPo article...
Edit: Also, it's significant that the treatment in the study was a "combination of radiation and two different marijuana compounds", not simply a correlation to historical cannabis use.
I'm confused as to the relevance of this post - I'm not sure that the study indicates that smoking marijuana would, you know, prevent death via all glioma type cancers.
The variables are different from top to bottom. Is this post meant to dispute the validity of pure form THC-BDS + irradiation as a effective treatment for brain tumors? If so, yeesh.
They aren't smoking it but ingesting it in a highly concentrated form. And in 1:1 ratios of THC and CBDs. There are an endless variety of strains and a lot is unknown.
I recently got cancer and smoking marijuana was indispensable for dealing with treatment. And now I am using hash oil as my doctors say there is nothing I can do, no diet to eat, no exercise nor anything else I can do to reduce my chance of having the cancer come back.
> my doctors say there is nothing I can do, no diet to eat, no exercise nor anything else I can do to reduce my chance of having the cancer come back.
I'm sure there will be a difference between eating McDonalds and drinking carbonated sugar water every day, and not, to how your body will respond to new cancer cells forming and spreading.
From what I've gathered, and my own experience, digestion, and healing, are on the opposite ends of the spectrum (contradictory to what common sense and common knowledge say - that you should eat more when sick).
When your body is digesting food, it's a very taxing process, and the majority of your immune system is in your intestines.
Animals and humans loose their appetite when sick for a reason, and gain it back quite well after the healing process takes hold.
Periodic sea salt flushes, and water fasting, was known to be the best course of action for many ailments before the age of medicine, and is still used today.
The biochemical changes during fasts will aid your body with taking out bad cells and damaged tissue.
That's probably not true. If you don't have the time, expertise, or space to legitimately cook something in it with whichever components of marijuana are utilized in the cessation of nausea or pain, and you can't afford/don't have the time to go get/are not near a place where they sell a vaporizer then smoking is your best option. And recent research has suggested a litany of positive effects for those suffering from a variety of ailments.
In this case, smoking would be quite sensical not only because it will make you feel better. Stress is a known killer, symptoms such as nausea (and it's side effect known as 'not being able to eat') or pain increase stress. Ergo, it can be quite easily seen that there are many instances where a person would be quite sensical in choosing to smoke marijuana instead of continuing to suffer, negative side effects of smoking marijuana included.
This of course does not go into the debate of marijuana versus addictive opiates or more "traditional" forms of medication which opens up an additional set of conversation topics, many of which conclude that marijuana is more than likely to be preferred over traditional forms of Western medication.
Obviously if given no other choice, smoking cannabis might be a viable option. It's important to keep this discussion in the context of the parent comment, which was pointing our (rather anecdotally) that some guy who smoked cannabis for 35 years died of cancer (implying that the assertion made in the parent article was incorrect or flawed).
Smoking cannabis for medical reasons is nonsensical.
A lot of research has been done which leans heavily against this point of view. If you want to ignore that research or pretend that it doesn't exist (or can't easily be found), that's fine, of course.
McKenna is more famous for his excessive use of psychedelics.
Terence McKenna: "There are only about 1,000 of these GBMs a year, so it's a rare disease. I never won anything before - why now?" Like everybody else, he suspected a lifetime of exotic drug use may have been to blame. [0]
Two parts of the Huffington post submission here clarify the issue:
"In a paper published Friday in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapies, a team of researchers from St. George's University of London outlined the "dramatic reductions" they observed in high-grade glioma masses, a deadly form of brain cancer, when treated with a combination of radiation and two different marijuana compounds, also known as cannabinoids. In many cases, those tumors shrunk to as low as one-tenth the sizes of those in the control group."
So the tumors are being treated with radiation in the current study, as well as with cannabinoids.
"Liu and his colleagues examined mice that had been infected with glioma and subsequently treated with radiation alone or in combination with varying levels of two cannabis compounds: THC, the psychoactive compound associated with the "high" sensation, and CBD, which doesn't produce psychoactive side effects."
So far this is a study in a mouse model organism, which may or may not generalize to human patients. This is worth looking at further, but the trade-offs of safety and effectiveness for drug treatments of all kinds can often differ between human beings and mice.
Nearly all cancer studies use combination treatments. Among other reasons, the cancer cells will adapt to single treatments rapidly (for example, the treatment will kill all but a small population, which is immune to the treatment, and that population will expand).
Exactly. Patients will still have to undergo radiation therapy - aka misery. While there are definitely improvements to all of that (laser knife, etc), it still sucks.
This struck me as the most important part of the article:
Liu pointed out that while research surrounding marijuana's cancer-fighting properties is nothing new, his team is the first to document its effect on the disease when used alongside radiation. "The results showed that the final effect was superior to the sum of the parts," he said. "Hopefully, these results will support calls for formal trials in humans to test these combinations."
OK. But it isn't marijuana "itself" that does this. It is one or more chemical components that we can isolate, right? We've done so many times before and created more potent medicines.
But just because these components are present in marijuana I can almost bet that it will be reduced to an argument in the fight for legalization of smoking weed.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be legalized (perhaps it should, perhaps it shouldn't), but that it's an entirely different question.
the plant should be legalized, what you do with it its up to you, personally I dislike any sort of smoking so am planning to drink a lot of teas if the day ever comes.
The Fine Article? English is not my spoken or native tongue, so I'm not sure what you mean. The article itself? If so, it further strengthens my premonition.
In one paragraph they talk about treatment using of purified cannabinoids, in the next about THC isolated alone, while in the paragraph after they start talking about marijuana being classified as a Schedule I drug and then shortly after about the legalization of marijuana.
RTFA is a common internet acronym that generally means "Read the fucking article", jerf was just making it more polite by replacing "fucking" with "fine".
"English is not my spoken or native tongue, so I'm not sure what you mean."
Ah. In that case, this research was already done with extracted compounds. The mice were not smoking. I'm sure that medically, if this were ever to be a treatment, it would be done through refined compounds as in the study, not by simply smoking. Medically it would be crazy to leave dosage to such an unreliable method.
As for this being used to argue in favor of smoking, well, it's a grave mistake to hold back science because somebody, somewhere, might use it to poorly argue for something. There's always some way something could be misinterpreted. Besides, per my previous point, if you want to take advantage of this smoking just isn't the way to go, and it's especially not the way to go if you're just smoking "something" with no idea how much of the relevant compounds is in it, or at least not enough of an idea. On the cost/benefit analysis, with "better brain cancer treatment" on the benefit side, potentially, I need to see some costs a great deal more significant than "somebody may use this to argue in favor of smoking pot", which "potheads" do at every available opportunity and more anyhow, before I start to worry.
>>Medically it would be crazy to leave dosage to such an unreliable method.
Unless we finally redefine what "medically" means. "One-size-fits-all" is not necessarily the most effective way to treat medical issues, either. When it's in the context of pain relief, smoking/vaping is the easiest way for patients to manage their pain without getting "too much" or "too little" from other methods available. Medicine is starting to enter the age when solutions tailored to specific bio-chemistries are available.
I wasn't suggesting "one size fits all". Vaping a known chemistry "at will" is still far more reliable than just grabbing some pot, smoking it, and hoping. That is still not a medical solution, it's a "pothead" looking for an excuse.
Most do turn into that, though for more or less legitimate reasons. After it was schedule 1'd most medical research stopped because it was extremely difficult to impossible to get approval and access to the government approved supply of marijuana (which hadn't gone through any of the selective breeding the illegally produced breeds had experienced). From that alone there's a good argument that schedule 1 was a mistake and an overreaction.
"OK. But it isn't marijuana "itself" that does this. It is one or more chemical components that we can isolate, right?"
Correct. The study tested two cannabinoids isolated from marijuana, not whole-bud marijuana.
"But just because these components are present in marijuana I can almost bet that it will be reduced to an argument in the fight for legalization of smoking weed."
Well, yes, it's going to go there eventually. Pretty much all conversations about the medical efficaciousness of marijuana (or marijuana-derived compounds) bump up against the legalization topic. This is because conducting research on a substance currently deemed illegal by the federal government is very difficult. It's also because the government labels marijuana not just illegal, but a drug "...with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." (This is the 'Schedule I' classification).
Marijuana's classification in Schedule I, a category for "the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence," is ridiculous. For what it's worth, here are some drugs legally considered less dangerous, or psychologically and physically dependence-forming than marijuana: cocaine, opium, methamphetamine, oxycodone, morphine, codeine, fentanyl, Dexedrine, Adderall, Ritalin, Vicodin, Valium, Ambien, ketamine, and anabolic steroids.
"I'm not saying it shouldn't be legalized (perhaps it should, perhaps it shouldn't), but that it's an entirely different question."
Absolutely. Marijuana's legalization as a consumer item has little to no bearing on this finding, or vice versa. That said, its current medical status is in debate, and whenever a potential medical usage comes up, that topic is going to come up with it.
I honestly can't tell if you're being earnest or not. So, apologies if you're being sarcastic.
The DEA, as a government agency, was created with the mission of eradicating drugs. They aren't really in the business of doing scientific evaluation of the drugs themselves, and I would be surprised if there are any scientists on staff, and if there are, even more surprised if they have any pull.
At any rate, the DEA doesn't set drug policy, the federal government does.
The federal governments' track record when it comes to controlling substances has not often been in line with scientific or social needs, as is evidenced by the extreme cost of the current war on drugs and the consequent negative effects on society. For example, cocaine is a refinement of cocoa which was included in things like coca-cola as a mild stimulant. When it became controlled, smuggling economics came to bear, and thus refining it into cocaine allowed for more value-per-unit-shipment in smuggling. Being more addictive, and thus worse for society, was a side effect of this. Worse, with the war on cocaine that occurred an even further refinement was done for the same economic reasons resulting in crack.
I posit that if the wellbeing of society were the primary importance for the federal government there would be no drug war, and thus no drug related violent crimes (or very few) and a lot less addiction.
Thanks. It just seems to me "currently accepted medical use" is pretty unambiguous, there is SOME, that is, other than none, currently accepted medical use so their definition is wrong on its face. I'm surprised that nobody told them "Look, you're using English wrong(ly)" as a way to challenge the law.
English has a simple grammar to figure out, but things like this remind me why it's a difficult language to truly grok.
(I am Italian. Our government does occasionally do things like this, but at least they have to employ four paragraphs of byzantine quasi-latin, not get away with five words of non-language).
I mean, if some words are in a law that causes public expense, arrests, killings, etc. I would say it's pretty important that their meaning is set in stone and universally understood! I suppose there are problems with the US Constitution in that sense, but in this case the language used is current, not 300 years old.
"Thanks. It just seems to me "currently accepted medical use" is pretty unambiguous, there is SOME, that is, other than none, currently accepted medical use so their definition is wrong on its face. I'm surprised that nobody told them "Look, you're using English wrong(ly)" as a way to challenge the law."
Their classification of marijuana as having "no accepted medical use" is silly on its face, and I hope I adequately gave that impression in my comment. I'm not agreeing with it. I'm just pointing it out.
Unfortunately, changing the DEA's opinion is harder than just sending them the medical literature, and pointing out the contradictions in their position. This is a problem that needs to be addressed through the legislative process. (The DEA follows federal policy; it doesn't necessarily establish or alter federal policy). Fortunately, change is happening at the state level. If we reach the point where most states recognize medical uses for marijuana, then eventually, the federal government will have to cave on its hard line. Or so the thinking goes.
English is indeed a complex language, and it's also filled with the sorts of loaded terms with which lawyers have a field day. For instance, consider the word "accepted" in the phrase "accepted medical use." Accepted by whom? Who decides whether to officially "accept" a medical use? Is it the DEA? Is it the medical and scientific community? Is it the legislative branch of the federal government? Is it the judicial branch? Is it someone else? If this issue were ever to come to court, the DEA could argue that there is no "accepted" consensus. It would be a weaselly argument, but English is a fantastic language for weaselly, semantic arguments like that.
The DEA may not directly set drug policy [0] (it's also part of the "federal government" so I don't understand your distinction here) but it most certainly has a large input on which schedule a drug gets classified. The Attorney General can add, change or remove a drug from any of the schedules at will and would do so based on advice from DEA agents. The DEA is part of the DoJ which is headed by the Attorney General.
The study's abstract [1] states that they tested CBD and THC in two forms: as "pure" forms, and as derivatives ("biological drug substance"). "Pure" is open to interpretation, and I had assumed it to mean the raw, unadulterated compounds themselves. You may be right, though. "Pure" could mean raw plant matter. But if that were the case, it wouldn't be a test of the two cannabinoids themselves; it would be a test of every chemical in the raw plant matter, including terpenes and other cannabinoids. (Cannabis contains over 85 cannabinoids, and those are only the ones we currently know of).
Isolating just THC or just CBDs can be problematic in not knowing exactly why it's working. This happened with Marinol/Dronabinol not being as effective as regular marijuana with increasing appetite and reducing nausea.
Obviously they should be researching all angles but a concentrated hash oil perhaps high in CBDs could be the solution instead of just isolating one compound.
So I disagree. It could be the marijuana alone used in oil form and not smoking it.
I do take issue with your point as there are millions of people suffering from cancer. Marijuana is a well tolerated drug used by humans for thousands of years. People are suffering right now, and every day, and most are unable to obtain marijuana to help ease symptoms or for potential cancer fighting abilities.
I don't care about recreational use. I though am upset that I have to break the law to treat my cancer and that a family member with a potential recurrence gets told, oh don't worry you likely have 8 years before your cancer metastasizes. And there's nothing you can do about it except take estrogen. Which I believes increases cellular apotosis but comes with other risks.
But just because these components are present in marijuana I can almost bet that it will be reduced to an argument in the fight for legalization of smoking weed.
Correct -- has no bearing on the issue of recreational use.
Rather, and more importantly: another gentle reminder that we (as a society) need to turn our backs on the unrelenting tide of fear, misinformation, and outright deception that has characterized most discussion on the medicinal (and recreational) use of controlled substances in the public sphere for the past several decades (nearly a full century, actually) -- and back to basic science.
Marijuana should not have been made illegal in the first place (IMO). It's a wrong that many people want righted, which is why any discussion of Marijuana usually turns into a discussion about the corrupt legal system that we live with.
So, the question I ask is: Should it be illegal? And the resounding answer is 'No' because I don't believe in taking away people's freedom to do what they wish with their own bodies.
I'm surprised Huffington Post isn't blocked from HN. It's nothing but blogspam and cranks. How about we list the original content, either the study[1] or the op-ed that most of the content was taken from[2].
I popped open the original study --- I cannot find where they mention how many mice were used in the study. If it was a small number, the results are meaningless.
And as far as testing marijuana on cell lines, that can be problematic too. Just because something kills cancer cells doesn't mean it is a useful therapy. Alcohol would kill cancer cells but that doesn't mean it is the cure to cancer. You also have to show that it leaves healthy cells alone.
As with social overuse of MJ itself: I'd prefer that Huffington Post citations be moderated by the force of social opprobrium (preferably in the form of a consistent lack of upvoting), rather than by coercion (in this context, outright blocking).
> I'm surprised Huffington Post isn't blocked from HN.
It used to be, but somebody pleaded the case that they occasionally have solid articles, so we moved it from banned outright to lightweight, which means the articles get penalized by default but various conditions can override the penalty. A lot of big media sites are in this category. It's not a perfect solution, but it works better than the alternative.
In the case of specialized technical papers that aren't in the local sweet spots such as computing, HN tends to prefer the best popular article on the subject, with the paper linked to in comments. It's not a fixed rule but it works well. For that reason, we wouldn't replace the Huffpo url with [1]. However, [2] is clearly a more original source, so we'll swap Huffpo out. Thanks!
Now maybe we can extract the active ingredients and make a better, more effective therapy with fewer side effects, instead of making people damage their lungs smoking a weed to get this into them, or making them eat fatty foods and damaging the rest of their bodies.
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[ 19.6 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadVaporize then condense the resins. Apply resin to skin cancer spots sparingly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQwwGPiyW9M
I strongly believe a lot of science is not done on marijuana because of the vocal critics or the fear of vocal critics. Just in the US, certain people can be pretty vindictive when it comes to their causes.
That appears to be changing for the better. The most important thing is to somehow make sure that non-physicians and non-scientists such as the DEA are removed from the decision making process (of what gets studied, and of drug scheduling).
>Just in the US, certain people can be pretty vindictive when it comes to their causes.
I hope that it isn't vindictiveness. I've always assumed that it is either an inability to sympathize, or an indifference to other peoples' suffering; also, ignorance.
McKenna was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment. According to Wired magazine, McKenna was worried that his tumor was caused by his 35 years of smoking cannabis, although his doctors assured him there was no causal relation. -Wikipedia
If so, that would certainly complicate what I'm assuming you're implying, that McKenna's case runs counter to the [edit: findings communicated in the] HuffPo article...
Edit: Also, it's significant that the treatment in the study was a "combination of radiation and two different marijuana compounds", not simply a correlation to historical cannabis use.
The variables are different from top to bottom. Is this post meant to dispute the validity of pure form THC-BDS + irradiation as a effective treatment for brain tumors? If so, yeesh.
I recently got cancer and smoking marijuana was indispensable for dealing with treatment. And now I am using hash oil as my doctors say there is nothing I can do, no diet to eat, no exercise nor anything else I can do to reduce my chance of having the cancer come back.
Nothing.
I'm sure there will be a difference between eating McDonalds and drinking carbonated sugar water every day, and not, to how your body will respond to new cancer cells forming and spreading.
From what I've gathered, and my own experience, digestion, and healing, are on the opposite ends of the spectrum (contradictory to what common sense and common knowledge say - that you should eat more when sick).
When your body is digesting food, it's a very taxing process, and the majority of your immune system is in your intestines.
Animals and humans loose their appetite when sick for a reason, and gain it back quite well after the healing process takes hold.
Periodic sea salt flushes, and water fasting, was known to be the best course of action for many ailments before the age of medicine, and is still used today.
The biochemical changes during fasts will aid your body with taking out bad cells and damaged tissue.
In this case, smoking would be quite sensical not only because it will make you feel better. Stress is a known killer, symptoms such as nausea (and it's side effect known as 'not being able to eat') or pain increase stress. Ergo, it can be quite easily seen that there are many instances where a person would be quite sensical in choosing to smoke marijuana instead of continuing to suffer, negative side effects of smoking marijuana included.
This of course does not go into the debate of marijuana versus addictive opiates or more "traditional" forms of medication which opens up an additional set of conversation topics, many of which conclude that marijuana is more than likely to be preferred over traditional forms of Western medication.
A lot of research has been done which leans heavily against this point of view. If you want to ignore that research or pretend that it doesn't exist (or can't easily be found), that's fine, of course.
But rather that it isn't simply, as you state, "nonsensical" as form of medicine.
Terence McKenna: "There are only about 1,000 of these GBMs a year, so it's a rare disease. I never won anything before - why now?" Like everybody else, he suspected a lifetime of exotic drug use may have been to blame. [0]
[0] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.05/mckenna_pr.html
>"Listen," McKenna told them, "if cannabis shrinks tumors, we would not be having this conversation."
That said the reason they are doing these mice trials is because there have already been several cases of it working in humans.
"In a paper published Friday in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapies, a team of researchers from St. George's University of London outlined the "dramatic reductions" they observed in high-grade glioma masses, a deadly form of brain cancer, when treated with a combination of radiation and two different marijuana compounds, also known as cannabinoids. In many cases, those tumors shrunk to as low as one-tenth the sizes of those in the control group."
So the tumors are being treated with radiation in the current study, as well as with cannabinoids.
"Liu and his colleagues examined mice that had been infected with glioma and subsequently treated with radiation alone or in combination with varying levels of two cannabis compounds: THC, the psychoactive compound associated with the "high" sensation, and CBD, which doesn't produce psychoactive side effects."
So far this is a study in a mouse model organism, which may or may not generalize to human patients. This is worth looking at further, but the trade-offs of safety and effectiveness for drug treatments of all kinds can often differ between human beings and mice.
Liu pointed out that while research surrounding marijuana's cancer-fighting properties is nothing new, his team is the first to document its effect on the disease when used alongside radiation. "The results showed that the final effect was superior to the sum of the parts," he said. "Hopefully, these results will support calls for formal trials in humans to test these combinations."
But just because these components are present in marijuana I can almost bet that it will be reduced to an argument in the fight for legalization of smoking weed.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be legalized (perhaps it should, perhaps it shouldn't), but that it's an entirely different question.
but indeed a different discussion ^^
In one paragraph they talk about treatment using of purified cannabinoids, in the next about THC isolated alone, while in the paragraph after they start talking about marijuana being classified as a Schedule I drug and then shortly after about the legalization of marijuana.
Ah. In that case, this research was already done with extracted compounds. The mice were not smoking. I'm sure that medically, if this were ever to be a treatment, it would be done through refined compounds as in the study, not by simply smoking. Medically it would be crazy to leave dosage to such an unreliable method.
As for this being used to argue in favor of smoking, well, it's a grave mistake to hold back science because somebody, somewhere, might use it to poorly argue for something. There's always some way something could be misinterpreted. Besides, per my previous point, if you want to take advantage of this smoking just isn't the way to go, and it's especially not the way to go if you're just smoking "something" with no idea how much of the relevant compounds is in it, or at least not enough of an idea. On the cost/benefit analysis, with "better brain cancer treatment" on the benefit side, potentially, I need to see some costs a great deal more significant than "somebody may use this to argue in favor of smoking pot", which "potheads" do at every available opportunity and more anyhow, before I start to worry.
Unless we finally redefine what "medically" means. "One-size-fits-all" is not necessarily the most effective way to treat medical issues, either. When it's in the context of pain relief, smoking/vaping is the easiest way for patients to manage their pain without getting "too much" or "too little" from other methods available. Medicine is starting to enter the age when solutions tailored to specific bio-chemistries are available.
he meant 'read the fucking article'
Correct. The study tested two cannabinoids isolated from marijuana, not whole-bud marijuana.
"But just because these components are present in marijuana I can almost bet that it will be reduced to an argument in the fight for legalization of smoking weed."
Well, yes, it's going to go there eventually. Pretty much all conversations about the medical efficaciousness of marijuana (or marijuana-derived compounds) bump up against the legalization topic. This is because conducting research on a substance currently deemed illegal by the federal government is very difficult. It's also because the government labels marijuana not just illegal, but a drug "...with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." (This is the 'Schedule I' classification).
Marijuana's classification in Schedule I, a category for "the most dangerous drugs of all the drug schedules with potentially severe psychological or physical dependence," is ridiculous. For what it's worth, here are some drugs legally considered less dangerous, or psychologically and physically dependence-forming than marijuana: cocaine, opium, methamphetamine, oxycodone, morphine, codeine, fentanyl, Dexedrine, Adderall, Ritalin, Vicodin, Valium, Ambien, ketamine, and anabolic steroids.
"I'm not saying it shouldn't be legalized (perhaps it should, perhaps it shouldn't), but that it's an entirely different question."
Absolutely. Marijuana's legalization as a consumer item has little to no bearing on this finding, or vice versa. That said, its current medical status is in debate, and whenever a potential medical usage comes up, that topic is going to come up with it.
Surely the DEA has a mailing address to which it's possible to send relevant research papers?
Surely they read the literature?
The DEA, as a government agency, was created with the mission of eradicating drugs. They aren't really in the business of doing scientific evaluation of the drugs themselves, and I would be surprised if there are any scientists on staff, and if there are, even more surprised if they have any pull.
At any rate, the DEA doesn't set drug policy, the federal government does.
The federal governments' track record when it comes to controlling substances has not often been in line with scientific or social needs, as is evidenced by the extreme cost of the current war on drugs and the consequent negative effects on society. For example, cocaine is a refinement of cocoa which was included in things like coca-cola as a mild stimulant. When it became controlled, smuggling economics came to bear, and thus refining it into cocaine allowed for more value-per-unit-shipment in smuggling. Being more addictive, and thus worse for society, was a side effect of this. Worse, with the war on cocaine that occurred an even further refinement was done for the same economic reasons resulting in crack.
I posit that if the wellbeing of society were the primary importance for the federal government there would be no drug war, and thus no drug related violent crimes (or very few) and a lot less addiction.
English has a simple grammar to figure out, but things like this remind me why it's a difficult language to truly grok.
(I am Italian. Our government does occasionally do things like this, but at least they have to employ four paragraphs of byzantine quasi-latin, not get away with five words of non-language).
I mean, if some words are in a law that causes public expense, arrests, killings, etc. I would say it's pretty important that their meaning is set in stone and universally understood! I suppose there are problems with the US Constitution in that sense, but in this case the language used is current, not 300 years old.
Their classification of marijuana as having "no accepted medical use" is silly on its face, and I hope I adequately gave that impression in my comment. I'm not agreeing with it. I'm just pointing it out.
Unfortunately, changing the DEA's opinion is harder than just sending them the medical literature, and pointing out the contradictions in their position. This is a problem that needs to be addressed through the legislative process. (The DEA follows federal policy; it doesn't necessarily establish or alter federal policy). Fortunately, change is happening at the state level. If we reach the point where most states recognize medical uses for marijuana, then eventually, the federal government will have to cave on its hard line. Or so the thinking goes.
English is indeed a complex language, and it's also filled with the sorts of loaded terms with which lawyers have a field day. For instance, consider the word "accepted" in the phrase "accepted medical use." Accepted by whom? Who decides whether to officially "accept" a medical use? Is it the DEA? Is it the medical and scientific community? Is it the legislative branch of the federal government? Is it the judicial branch? Is it someone else? If this issue were ever to come to court, the DEA could argue that there is no "accepted" consensus. It would be a weaselly argument, but English is a fantastic language for weaselly, semantic arguments like that.
[0] http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/21cfr/21usc/811.htm
[1] http://mct.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2014/11/12/1535-71...
Obviously they should be researching all angles but a concentrated hash oil perhaps high in CBDs could be the solution instead of just isolating one compound.
So I disagree. It could be the marijuana alone used in oil form and not smoking it.
I do take issue with your point as there are millions of people suffering from cancer. Marijuana is a well tolerated drug used by humans for thousands of years. People are suffering right now, and every day, and most are unable to obtain marijuana to help ease symptoms or for potential cancer fighting abilities.
I don't care about recreational use. I though am upset that I have to break the law to treat my cancer and that a family member with a potential recurrence gets told, oh don't worry you likely have 8 years before your cancer metastasizes. And there's nothing you can do about it except take estrogen. Which I believes increases cellular apotosis but comes with other risks.
Correct -- has no bearing on the issue of recreational use.
Rather, and more importantly: another gentle reminder that we (as a society) need to turn our backs on the unrelenting tide of fear, misinformation, and outright deception that has characterized most discussion on the medicinal (and recreational) use of controlled substances in the public sphere for the past several decades (nearly a full century, actually) -- and back to basic science.
So, the question I ask is: Should it be illegal? And the resounding answer is 'No' because I don't believe in taking away people's freedom to do what they wish with their own bodies.
1: http://mct.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2014/11/12/1535-71...
2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/18/h...
And as far as testing marijuana on cell lines, that can be problematic too. Just because something kills cancer cells doesn't mean it is a useful therapy. Alcohol would kill cancer cells but that doesn't mean it is the cure to cancer. You also have to show that it leaves healthy cells alone.
It used to be, but somebody pleaded the case that they occasionally have solid articles, so we moved it from banned outright to lightweight, which means the articles get penalized by default but various conditions can override the penalty. A lot of big media sites are in this category. It's not a perfect solution, but it works better than the alternative.
In the case of specialized technical papers that aren't in the local sweet spots such as computing, HN tends to prefer the best popular article on the subject, with the paper linked to in comments. It's not a fixed rule but it works well. For that reason, we wouldn't replace the Huffpo url with [1]. However, [2] is clearly a more original source, so we'll swap Huffpo out. Thanks!
(Submitted url was http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/18/marijuana-brain-can...)