Pubdate: Wed, 19 Sep 2012
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1
Website: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Victoria Colliver

Q&A with Dr. Donald Abrams

CANNABIS STIGMA HAMPERS EFFORTS, RESEARCHER SAYS

The therapeutic uses of cannabis have long been a focus of research 
for Dr. Donald Abrams, UCSF professor and chief of the 
hematologyoncology division at San Francisco General Hospital. Abrams 
wrote a study last year on the combination of cannabinoids - the main 
ingredient in cannabis or medical marijuana - and pain drugs. Abrams 
talks about the preclinical work by the California Pacific Medical 
Center Research Institute and other research on cancer and cannabis, 
16 years after California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.

Q: Is it difficult, due to stigma or the political climate, to do 
research on the therapeutic benefits of cannabis?

A: The only way you can get cannabis to do research in this county is 
through the National Institute on Drug Abuse, or NIDA, and it's clear 
the congressional mandate is to study the substance for abuse rather 
than for treatment. It started in 1997 in HIV research when we 
studied whether it was safe to inhale cannabis while on protease 
inhibitors. The next study was through the UC Center for Medicinal 
Cannabis Research in 1999, when the state budget surplus allowed the 
state to devote $3 million for three years of studies to demonstrate 
whether cannabis had medical use. The funding enabled a number of 
studies and NIDA supplied the cannabis, but that money ran out.

If this plant were discovered in the Amazon today, scientists would 
be falling all over each other to be the first to bring it to market. 
But it has a stigma, and it's being attacked by our government as 
part of the war on drugs.

Q: What kind of research are you doing now?

A: We did a study in patients with HIV who had damage to their 
nerves. We showed inhaling cannabis was better than inhaling a 
cannabis placebo for relieving those symptoms and that vaporization 
of cannabis was equivalent to smoking. The last study we did, which 
was again funded by NIDA, was looking to see if it was safe to 
combine cannabis with opiates - sustained-release morphine and 
sustained-release oxycodone. It was a small study ... but we did note 
patients had increased relief of pain when cannabinoids were added to 
the opiates.

Q: What do you think of the research being done on triple-negative 
breast cancer cells at the California Pacific Medical Center Research 
Institute?

A: The data is promising and it's elegant, but the true test is now 
really going to be to do some clinical trials in the patient 
population that (the researchers) think is correct to study at this 
time, which is patients with triple negative breast cancer. But at 
this time I would not tell my triple negative patients to go out and 
look at taking high cannabidiol-containing cannabis products. We need 
to do the research. What happens in the test tube or even in animal 
models does not necessarily predict what happens in people. People 
are much more complex.

Q: What do you think about the University of Southern California 
study released last week that found a link between the recreational 
use of marijuana among young men and testicular cancer?

A: Young men use cannabis and get cancer. If they looked at video 
games and riding bicycles, that might also be associated. Is there an 
epidemic of testicular cancer in Jamaica where Rastafarians use 
cannabis religiously? I think that's all a trick of numbers, personally.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom