[21.06.2006]
Brain and "grass"
Don't you know this? You're not alone.
Despite the significance of these studies, both in terms of treating life-threatening diseases and in terms of headline-grabbing news, the latest one, conducted at Madrid's Complutense University, has gone largely unnoticed by the American media. It showed that marijuana restricts blood flow to multiple glioblastoma brain tumors, an aggressive tumor that kills about 7,000 people in the United States each year.
Why was the work largely unpublicized? First, all medical marijuana research was conducted abroad. Second, the American government did not recognize any of it.
This was not always the case. In fact, the first experiment documenting the anti-tumor effects of "weed" was conducted in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at the behest of the U.S. government. The results of this study were reported in the Washington Post on August 18, 1974. It was reported that marijuana's psychoactive component, THC, "slowed the development of lung cancer, breast cancer and viral leukemia in laboratory mice and extended their lives by 36 percent."
Despite these favorable preliminary results, the US government dismissed the study and refused to fund further work until they conducted a similar, albeit secret, clinical trial in the mid-1990s. The study, conducted by the US Toxicology Program and costing about $2 million, showed that mice and rats given high doses of THC over a long period were better protected against malignant tumors than a control group.
But instead of publishing their findings, government researchers kept the results under wraps, and they only became publicly known in 1997, when a draft of the experiment's conclusions was leaked to a medical journal, which in turn brought the story to the attention of the national media.
But eight years after the trials ended, the U.S. government has yet to fund additional research into the drug's anti-cancer properties. Are federal bureaucrats putting politics above the health and safety of patients? Judge for yourself.
Fortunately, scientists overseas picked up where the American researchers left off. In 1998, scientists at the University of Madrid’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology discovered that THC could selectively kill brain tumor cells without harming surrounding healthy cells. Then, in 2000, they reported in the journal Nature Medicine that injections of synthetic THC killed malignant brain tumors in one-third of rats and extended the lives of another third by six weeks.
Last year, researchers from the University of Milan reported in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapy that non-psychoactive components of marijuana, in a dose-dependent manner, slowed the growth of malignant cells in the brain and selectively killed those cells.
Finally, in September, scientists reported that marijuana components slowed the growth of cancer cells in patients who had failed standard treatments.
Yet federal officials in this country have shown no interest in funding or even recognizing this clinical trial. In doing so, they are doing a disservice not only to scientists, but also to the health and well-being of ordinary Americans.
Neither patients nor scientists deserve to be held hostage in America's war on drugs, and it's time for the federal government to stop torturing both.
Comments:
07/07/2006
Rouli
It's so boring, I didn't even finish reading it.
22.07.2006
Kent
everything is written correctly...
millions of people are treated with marijuana and these bitches ban it
I personally used herbs to cure a disease that can't be cured at all
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