A New Era In Medical Marijuana Research?

[zachw]

 

Marijuana is widely recognized as an often-effective treatment for a variety of common conditions. Even though it remains illegal at the federal level, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized its use for chronic pain, nausea, glaucoma, migraine and more. But researchers like Patel and Cao believe cannabis has even greater potential in the treatment of major disorders including Alzheimer’s, cancer, epilepsy, post-traumatic stress disorder and autoimmune diseases. They have committed their careers to it and, despite the onerous restrictions and endless hassles—Patel once waited six months for a DEA green-light—they have made real progress and routinely published their findings. A decision by the DEA to reschedule, although it will not completely remove the onus of illegality or the burden on scientists, could launch a new era in marijuana research.

 

“It’s not that we don’t have a lot of information,” says Lester Grinspoon, who has been researching and writing about marijuana since the 1960s and would prefer the DEA to delist it altogether. “If you go to PubMed you’ll find that there are 23,000 papers published on cannabis. But [with rescheduling] we can open it up to large, double-blind clinical studies.” Grinspoon, 87, an associate professor emeritus of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, sees similarities to the history of another drug. “We didn’t have any large double-blind studies of penicillin until the mid-60s,” he says, “so it was all anecdotal evidence. But it came across as a wonder drug. And it was.”

 

Easing DEA restrictions could accelerate the pace and amount of research going on, including the fundamental in vitro work that people like Cao do. (In a 2014 paper published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, for example, he reported that extremely low concentrations of THC could reduce the production of amyloid beta in a cellular model of Alzheimer’s.) It could also draw more scientists into the field, open up more avenues of research and make it less difficult to attract funding. And, as Patel points out, whereas rigorous, placebo-controlled clinical trials might confirm popular notions about marijuana’s effectiveness for things like pain and nausea, they could possibly disprove them if the anecdotal evidence is trumped by science. Without such testing, he says, “We don’t really know.” A more likely outcome, Grinspoon adds, is that a new wave of research unencumbered by Schedule I status will prove that marijuana is the versatile, nontoxic, inexpensive medication he has found it to be.

 

Of course, the DEA is not the only obstacle. Research must also follow federal regulations that are separate from the DEA’s controlled substance schedules and require the marijuana used in studies where human subjects ingest it to come from a single source: the National Center for Natural Products Research at the University of Mississippi. And a 2015 analysis done at Arizona State University found that between 2008 and 2014, of the $1.4 billion the National Institutes of Health spent on marijuana research, just $297 million was spent on potential medical uses; the rest, $1.1 billion, went for abuse and addiction studies.

 

Still, Grinspoon thinks DEA rescheduling could go a long way toward changing the way the medical establishment views marijuana and the value of studying it. “Miseducation about cannabis over the last 50 years has been so thorough that it’s going to take time,” he says. “But this will knock down one of those obstacles.” One possible result:  “Medical schools will start to recognize that they have to teach about cannabis as an important new medicine. Of course, it’s been around for 10,000 years, but new in the sense of coming to Western medicine.”

 

Here's the article from Scientific American.

Edited April 16, 2016 by zachw

[Kingdiamond]

We are years behind in research compared to other countries all because of the failed war on drugs.

[zachw]

We are years behind in research compared to other countries all because of the failed war on drugs.

 

And that goes for EVERY schedule 1 drug (except perhaps for bath salts!) The psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, etc), khat and MDMA hold great promise for understanding the workings of the brain, treatment of mental illness, etc. Hell, we know that even heroin is medically preferable to morphine in some instances (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11476257) but the stigma is just too much for those who have this overriding fear of (currently) illicit drugs.

Edited April 16, 2016 by zachw