Marijuana and its derivatives can be effective medicines for treating pain, nausea, vomiting, muscle spasms and other conditions, but cannabis is not harmless, and more research is needed, the nation's top scientists concluded in a landmark review of research released Thursday. The nonprofit National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued their report, "The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids," summarizing the current state of evidence for the efficacy of medical marijuana and recommending new studies. The 395-page report will stand as the most official medical review of the botanical drug, which an estimated 8 percent of Americans used in the last month. [continues 1174 words]
I can't imagine the state of California being more hypocritical as I read Thursday morning about Gov. Jerry Brown signing sweeping anti-smoking bills, while at the same time reading about the latest attempt to legalize adult recreational use of marijuana. I was amused by the comment of Rep. Dan Rohrabacher who says he "can't think of a bigger waste of government money than to try to use it to control the private lives of adults." Dr. Donald Abrams asserts the war on drugs is "much more" detrimental to the health of our country and our people than cannabis. Perhaps most hypocritical is the pot initiative placing a 15 percent tax on pot sales, then dedicating most of that money to youth drug prevention and treatment. Here's a simple thought. If you don't like the idea of youth drug use, then don't make drug use legal for the adults whom the youth look up to as their leaders and role models. Dave Kress Saratoga [end]
The big names and deep pockets behind California's effort to legalize marijuana have paid off with a voter initiative that's almost certain to qualify for the November ballot. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, joined by leaders in law enforcement, public health and social justice, said Wednesday in San Francisco that enough signatures had been collected to put recreational pot up for a vote in this year's presidential election. The broad array of marijuana proponents, marking the official launch of their statewide campaign, overcame the hurdles of competing priorities and scant funding, on top of general unease about the drug. They coalesced support behind the Adult Use of Marijuana Act - a consensus that past efforts to legalize cannibas have not enjoyed. [continues 628 words]
Nov. 8 Initiative Would Authorize 15 % Tax on Retail Sales Ofmarijuana in California SAN FRANCISCO - California voters will decide again this November whether to decriminalize the recreational use of marijuana by adults, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday, calling the looming vote a "pivotal moment" in the national debate around pot legalization and the 45-year-old war on drugs. Newsom and other leaders of a coalition behind the Adult Use of Marijuana Act announced they have collected enough signatures to place on the Nov. 8 ballot a measure that would make it legal for adults 21 and older to possess, sell or transport up to an ounce of pot. California voters rejected a similar measure in 2010. [continues 782 words]
Vice Media Creates a Buzz With "Weediquette" Show Krishna Andavolu tackles a controversial issue in the first episode of his new show Weediquette: Parents who turn to concentrated cannabis oil to fight cancer. Weediquette, which airs weekly on the Vice Media's new channel Viceland, launched a TV segment where Andavolu called his mom to share some good news. "I got the new show," Andavolu told her. "It is about weed." "Oh no," she replied. "Don't smoke it on camera." [continues 473 words]
Doctors, advocates at conference say cannabis is a safe, effective drug that should be widely available. WEST PALM BEACH - Pro-pot activists and physicians offer a simple prescription for cannabis: Make it an easy-to-buy, over-the-counter drug. "Marijuana should be available like aspirin," weed activist Jon Gettman said Friday during an event at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. "It is safe, it is effective.Cannabis needs to be cheap and widely available." Gettman, a professor of criminal justice at Shenandoah University in Virginia, was one of the pot researchers who traveled to West Palm Beach for a medical marijuana conference hosted by the nonprofit Patients Out of Time. [continues 295 words]
Voters Decide Tuesday If Medical Marijuana Will Be Legal in Florida. In study after study, scientists have scrutinized medical marijuana and found promising - if inconclusive - results. Smoking pot helped patients with AIDS and Parkinson's disease, according to studies in California and Israel. In a separate experiment nearly a decade ago, Scripps Research Institute scientists found THC might halt the progress of Alzheimer's disease. Those are among the studies by reputable researchers that have played up pot's potential. But because cannabis is an illegal drug, the research has yet to reach the level of rigor required for many doctors to fully endorse weed as a pharmaceutical-grade therapy. [continues 991 words]
Painkiller Overdoses Fell in States With Legal Marijuana, Study Finds Could medical marijuana be an antidote for the nation's scourge of fatal overdoses caused by prescription pain medication? A new study suggests the answer is yes, and it's set off a flurry of medical debate over the risks and benefits of making cannabis more widely available to patients. The new research, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, finds that deaths associated with the use of opiate drugs fell in 13 states after they legalized medical marijuana. Compared to states with no formal access to marijuana, those that allowed certain patients legal access to cannabis saw a steady drop in opiate-related overdoses that reached 33 percent, on average, six years after the states' medical marijuana laws took effect. [continues 901 words]
Prescription Drug Deaths Drop in States That Allow Medical Cannabis, Study Finds. Could medical marijuana be an antidote for the nation's scourge of fatal overdoses caused by prescription pain medication? A new study suggests the answer is yes, and it's set off a flurry of medical debate over the risks and benefits of making cannabis more widely available to patients. The new research, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, finds that deaths associated with the use of opiate drugs fell in 13 states after they legalized medical marijuana. Compared with states with no formal access to marijuana, those that allowed certain patients legal access to cannabis saw a steady drop in opiate-related overdoses that reached 33%, on average, six years after the states' medical marijuana laws took effect. [continues 891 words]
A new study suggests medical marijuana could be an antidote for the nation's scourge of painkiller overdose deaths and it has set off a flurry of medical debate over the risks and benefits of making cannabis more widely available to patients. The new research, published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, finds that deaths associated with the use of opiate drugs fell in 13 states after they legalized medical marijuana. Compared to states with no formal access to marijuana, those that allowed certain patients legal access to cannabis saw a steady drop in opiate-related overdoses that reached 33 percent, on average, six years after the states' medical marijuana laws took effect. [continues 373 words]
The health condition isn't specified in Minnesota's new law, but it could be added in the future. A group of University of Minnesota researchers is testing to see if medical marijuana can help treat chronic pain caused by sickle cell disease, but state law is putting a hitch in their study. As researchers continue with the study's next step - conducting human trials - they're heading to California, as Minnesota doesn't allow testing cannabis on people. The state's recently passed medical marijuana law also doesn't include sickle cell disease as a qualifying medical condition, but the University's current research could play a role in how that law changes in the future. [continues 660 words]
Readers ask questions about skeptical moms with cancer, no-high arthritis remedies, and summer travel. My mom is a doctor who has colon cancer. I know cannabis can help with nausea caused by chemo, and it can help her regain her appetite, relieve her pain, and help her sleep. There's also evidence it has anti-tumor properties. I recommended she look into it, but she's older and says that "pot is for stupid people." What can I say to her to make her reconsider? [continues 854 words]
MINNEAPOLIS A year ago, University of Minnesota researchers received a $9.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study pain in patients with sickle cell disease. Normally, such an award would quickly launch a study, but lead researcher Kalpna Gupta is still waiting on a critical part of the research and moved the work to California to speed the process. Gupta wants to see whether medical marijuana can treat pain. Completing such a study involves so much red tape that Gupta has decided to collaborate with researchers in San Francisco who have experience threading the bureaucratic needle. [continues 1038 words]
California medical cannabis patients are increasingly being forced to hide behind closed doors as bans on dispensaries and home cultivation sweep through the East Bay. The pain started for Randy Barrett when he was thirteen years old. He was whipping a three-wheeled motorcycle around the hills of Martinez. Back then, riding ATVs was "just part of life," he said. "This was the Seventies and Eighties. We had dirt bikes; we had three-wheelers - - the ones with a big old front rubber tire. I was driving around in the dirt and hit a patch of concrete in the road that caught the front tire and shot me forward." [continues 4451 words]
A Federal Court Hears a Case That Could Lead to Marijuana Being Classified As Having Medical Value The lawyers are at it again, shoving legal briefs and filings and arguments down each other's throats and generally trying to rip new assholes in each other for the benefit of all mankind. This time, I am referring to a federal case brought by Americans for Safe Access, a medical-marijuana-advocacy group that has been fighting for more than 10 years to get cannabis removed from Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act. The lawyers at ASA think the Drug Enforcement Administration made a mistake last year when it rejected a bid to reschedule cannabis. [continues 528 words]
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. [continues 491 words]
University of California medical researchers slipped an ingredient in chili peppers beneath the skin of marijuana smokers to see if pot could relieve acute pain. It could at certain doses. They monitored patients with AIDS and HIV as they toked on joints or placebos to determine whether marijuana could quell agonizing pain from nerve damage. It provided relief. They tested a "Volcano Vaporizer" to see whether inhaling smokeless pot delivered healthier, low-tar cannabis. It did. Over a dozen years, California's historic experiment in medical marijuana research brought new science to the debate on marijuana's place in medicine. State-funded studies costing $8.7 million found pot may offer broad benefits for pain from nerve damage from injuries, HIV, strokes and other conditions. [continues 1345 words]
Combination of Opiates, Marijuana Provides Effective Pain Relief A University of California, San Francisco study has concluded that the combination of opiates and marijuana is a more effective means of pain relief than opiates alone. Despite a small sample size of 21 chronic pain patients, the study's participants reported more pain relief when they introduced vaporized cannabis in addition to their regular doses of oxycodone or morphine, according to a UCSF press release. The study, which was published earlier this month in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, is the first of its kind to examine the interaction between cannabinoids and opiates in humans. While the original goal was to determine whether marijuana would alter opiate levels in the bloodstream, researchers were surprised with the results. [continues 51 words]
State Governors Unite and the Closing of Big Daddy's Punishes Patients Newt Gingrich is flying high in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination. So what does the erstwhile speaker of the House have to say about marijuana? As Gingrich seems to have an opinion about everything, it's not hard to find his pontifications on pot. Just a few weeks ago, he said that medical marijuana is a "joke" and that government should pursue the War on Drugs more aggressively. He also supports the death penalty for "high level" dealers. [continues 1123 words]
Inhaled marijuana appears to be a safe and effective treatment for chronic pain when used in addition to narcotics like morphine and oxycodone, according to a small UCSF study that is the first to look at the combined effects of the two classes of drugs in humans. The study, published in this month's edition of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, was designed primarily to look at whether taking marijuana with narcotics is safe, and researchers reported that there were no negative side effects from combining the drugs. [continues 729 words]
