Marijuana may stave off Alzheimer’s – U.S. study WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Good news for ageing hippies: smoking pot may stave off Alzheimer's disease.
New research shows that the active ingredient in marijuana may prevent the progression of the disease by preserving levels of an important neurotransmitter that allows the brain to function.[URL="http://javascript%3Cb%3E%3C/b%3E:commonPopup%28%27/news/newsPhotoPresentation.aspx?type=oddlyEnoughNews&imageID=2006-10-05T212814Z_01_NOOTR_RTRIDSP_0_OUKOE-UK-MARIJUANA.XML%27,%20560,%20535,%201%29"]
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Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in California found that marijuana's active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, can prevent the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from breaking down more effectively than commercially marketed drugs.
THC is also more effective at blocking clumps of protein that can inhibit memory and cognition in Alzheimer's patients, the researchers reported in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics.
The researchers said their discovery could lead to more effective drug treatment for Alzheimer's, the leading cause of dementia among the elderly.
Those afflicted with Alzheimer's suffer from memory loss, impaired decision-making, and diminished language and movement skills. The ultimate cause of the disease is unknown, though it is believed to be hereditary.
Marijuana is used to relieve glaucoma and can help reduce side effects from cancer and AIDS treatment.
Possessing marijuana for recreational use is illegal in many parts of the world, including the United States, though some states allow possession for medical purposes.
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?storyid=2006-10-05T212531Z_01_N05247208_RTRIDST_0_OUKOE-UK-MARIJUANA.XML&type=oddlyEnoughNews&WTmodLoc=Oddly+Enough-C3-More-4
MM documentary sparks bigger debate… Medical Marijuana Documentary Sparks Bigger Debate
Posted by CN Staff on November 14, 2007 at 17:10:23 PT
By Deborah J. Siegelbaum
Source: Medill Reports
medical Illinois -- Grass, pot, weed, bud, dope, cannabis - it’s a drug with many names. In some cultures it is considered a portal to another realm of consciousness, and vilified in others as a gateway drug to a life of addiction. But treatment for symptoms of diseases like AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis and other neurological disorders? Can it be that this illegal party drug is…a cure?
The Film
These are questions the documentary “Waiting to Inhale” explores. From a brief history of marijuana through its current status as an illegal substance by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the film looks at benefits the drug may have that have long been overlooked.
The documentary, currently screening across North America, met with cheers from the audience at Roosevelt University last Thursday evening. With interviews of doctors, patients, marijuana growers, advocates, opponents, and government officials, the documentary goes beyond a pro-drug propaganda piece. It becomes a convincing argument for how pot can help those in pain who have explored every pharmaceutical drug available.
The Cycle
An overarching theme of the documentary is the current catch-22 for medical marijuana. It is classified as a schedule 1 substance under the Controlled Substances Act, labeled as having a high potential for abuse and no current accepted medical use in treatment in the U.S.
As a schedule 1 substance, cannabis can be researched only with federal approval and using a supply provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. This government monopoly on access to marijuana for medical testing has made clinical trials next to impossible to get off the ground. Because clinical trials are not undertaken, it is difficult to prove that marijuana could have beneficial properties. And so the cycle continues.
The Panel
A panel of experts and patients led by the film’s director, Jed Riffe, convened after the screening to discuss medical marijuana’s status in limbo.
The Patient
The non-profit marijuana advocacy group Americans for Safe Access, estimates that 300,000 Americans use medical marijuana. Marijuana has become a treatment for those suffering pain from MS, nausea and loss of appetite from AIDS, spasms from neurological disorders and many other ailments that have no set cure. Medical marijuana users report fewer side effects than those associated with legal prescription medications.
Panelist Julie Falco, a patient suffering from MS, described years of pain and frustration trying every pharmaceutical treatment available, most of which made her worse.
“Every time I took a medication, it was just so severe and depressing and discouraging that nothing was working.” Falco started using cannabis in 2004, ingesting it three times daily, and it alleviated the symptoms of her illness to such an extent that she is no longer on any other medication.
“This is the drug that works for me,” she said, even though her treatment of choice is currently illegal.
The Doctor
Dr. Bruce Doblin, an internist and medical ethicist in Chicago, described the difficulty physicians face when patients could be helped by marijuana, but doctors are unable to prescribe it.
“The frustrating thing about being a physician is that you take an oath dedicated to help people. There’s something right out there and it’s not available. What is available are a lot of pain medications that have all sorts of complications – those are very available, but complicated to take and complicated to prescribe.”
A U.S. Department of Justice-appointed judge ruled in May that the DEA end its forty-year government monopoly on the supply of research-grade marijuana available for Food and Drug Administration-approved studies. With the monopoly broken, new medical studies could lead to accepted medical proof that marijuana has benefits in treatment.
This is good news for physicians, but may not be the lynchpin needed to legalize medical marijuana across the U.S. For Doblin, the current status of medical marijuana as a banned substance is not based on its unproven effectiveness in medicine. “There’s decades of good experience showing that medical cannabis works. There’s really no debate about whether it works or not.”
The Law
James Gierach is a former Cook County prosecutor and current member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a non-profit organization of criminal justice professionals advocating the end of drug prohibition.
Gierach described his former viewpoint that drug use was akin to violence, and he prosecuted offenders to the full extent of the law. But, over the years, after “seeing what the drug was has done for us,” he changed his mind.
“The war on drugs not only doesn’t accomplish what it is designed to do - to keep drugs away from young people and save them - it is the heart of nearly any crisis that you can name in America.” Gierach listed issues such as guns, gangs, crime, health care and funding for terrorism as such problems enhanced by prohibition, and stated that “the good guys are on the same side as the drug dealers, and the reason is economics.”
Gierach argued that the underground market for drugs drastically increases their value, to the point that marijuana has more value than gold. Legalizing the drug would remove the economic benefit and make it easier to regulate.
“We must as a nation start discussing the harm that’s being done by the war on drugs, even though it was intended as an altruistic program to save our kids,” Gierach said.
The Politics
Lobbyist John Walker echoed this sentiment, and asked the audience if they were angry in the wake of the documentary screening. He requested that they channel that anger into action, and that they petition Congress to pass legislation legalizing the use of medical marijuana. “We’re at a tipping point…we are going to pass a medical marijuana bill here in Illinois this year. We’ve got to.”
Medical Marijuana in Illinois
House Bill 0407, the Medical Cannabis Act, was introduced in the Illinois House by Rep. Larry McKeon, a former Los Angeles police officer, on January 26, 2005. The act “provides that a person who has been diagnosed by a physician as having a debilitating medical condition and the person’s primary caregiver may be issued a registry identification card by the Department of Human Services that permits the person or the person’s primary caregiver to legally possess no more than 12 cannabis plants and two and one-half ounces of usable cannabis.”
Those in possession of a registry identification card are not subject to arrest, prosecution or penalty.
McKeon, himself a patient living with AIDS, has witnessed first-hand the beneficial effects marijuana can have. “I’ve seen medical marijuana help others and know that many physicians recommend it. I don’t know if I will ever need medical marijuana, but no one battling a life-threatening illness should face arrest and jail for simply trying to stay alive,” McKeon said in an interview posted on MedicalMJ.org.
HB0407 is currently under review by the House Human Services Committee.
The use of marijuana for medical purposes is currently legal in twelve states: California, Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
Last screening of “Waiting to Inhale” in Illinois:
Thursday, Nov. 15, 2007
7 pm – 9:30 pm
Southern Illinois University,
Student Center Auditorium
Carbondale, Illinois
Source: Medill Reports (IL)
Author: Deborah J. Siegelbaum
Published: November 14, 2007
Copyright: 2007 Medill Reports - Chicago, Northwestern University
Contact: k-nugent-1@northwestern.edu
Website: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/
Related Article & Web Site:
Waiting To Inhale
http://www.waitingtoinhale.org/
Documentary To Educate About Medical Marijuana
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread23467.shtml
US upholds medical marijuana ban.. :you_crazy:you_crazy
Quote:
A US federal appeals court has ruled that a California woman who uses marijuana to ease a number of ailments can be prosecuted on federal charges.
Angel Raich pre-emptively sued the government for the right to use cannabis when legal drugs had failed.
Her doctor testified that she could die if she stopped taking marijuana. She has an inoperable brain tumour.
The Supreme Court ruled two years ago that federal drug laws override those in 11 states allowing medical cannabis.
Eleven states, including California, allow the drug's use if doctors recommend it.
'Pain relief'
"Today I found out I'm basically a dead man walking," said Ms Raich, a 41-year-old mother of two in Oakland, California.
As well as the brain tumour, she has scoliosis, chronic nausea and other medical problems.
She said she takes marijuana every two hours to ease her pain and boost her appetite and said she would continue to do so.
"Today the court said I don't have the constitutional right to basically stay alive," she said.
The three-judge appeals panel acknowledged that although support for the medical use of marijuana was growing, the US was not yet at the point where "the right to use medical marijuana is 'fundamental' and 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty'."
Ms Raich said she would lobby Congress to change the 1970 Controlled Substances Act that bans marijuana.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6453239.stm
The Case for Legal Pot Use David Lazarus of The San Francisco Chronicle makes a succinct case for the taxation and regulation of non-medical marijuana.
The column relies heavily on a report issued earlier this year (pdf) by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron. Among that report's core findings:
Legalizing marijuana would save $7.7 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition. $5.3 billion of this savings would accrue to state and local governments, while $2.4 billion would accrue to the federal government.Marijuana legalization would yield tax revenue of $2.4 billion annually if marijuana were taxed like all other goods and $6.2 billion annually if marijuana were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco.
Using the national figures, marijuana decriminalization would yield a net economic benefit of almost $14 billion per year.
To be sure, $14 billion isn't very much when one considers the two and half trillion dollars the federal government expends annually.
What persistently goes unmentioned in the larger decriminalization debate is impact on individuals caught in prohibition's dragnet. Marijuana arrests reached an all-time high last year -- 770,000 and counting. So that's over three quarters of a million persons who are brought into the criminal justice system each year who might not otherwise have been there.
Ordinarily, it would be wise to point out the sordid waste of law enforcement resources and court resources, but for many elected officials, even those who consider themselves "conservative," it is almost axiomatic for them that "fiscal largesse in pursuit of 'law and order'is no vice!"
This especially rings true when the law itself is so fundamentally flawed: the commitment of public resources to enforcement becomes the raison d'etre for prohibition. Individual liberty, science, and reason be damned...
Posted by Nikos Leverenz.
Michigan Cities OK Medical Marijuana Residents of Traverse City and Ferndale, Michigan, cast their votes in support of medical marijuana access last week by approving two ballot initiatives.
The Traverse City initiative makes marijuana use or growth by a patient with a doctor's recommendation the lowest law enforcement priority. Ferndale's initiative removes the threat of arrest for people who grow or use marijuana with a doctor's recommendation.
The city ordinances may not have an immediate practical effect on patients and their advocates since state law still prohibits medical marijuana, but these wins add to the momentum of similar victories in Detroit and Ann Arbor last year.
More On Santa Cruz’s Department of Compassion Several articles in today's papers detail the effort in Santa Cruz to distribute medical marijuana.
Here're two.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-pot27oct27,1,4502335.story
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/27/BAG7VFEO8D1.DTL&hw=Santa+Cruz&sn=001&sc=1000
San Francisco Seeks Patient Protection in State Medical Marijuana ID Program The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution Wednesday urging the city to delay its implementation of the statewide medical marijuana ID card program. Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi introduced the resolution in response to vocal concerns around confidentiality from medical marijuana activists.
Implementing the statewide program would mean the end of the local ID card program San Francisco has run for several years. Stakeholders are gravely troubled by the failure of the statewide program to protect the anonymity of patients, caregivers and physicians. The Statewide regulations require the San Francisco Department of Public Health to maintain paper records of applications and medical documentation; currently the local program returns all documentation once the application is verified. The mandate to maintain records imposes an unacceptable risk of subpoena or seizure by federal officials.
San Francisco was slated to join the statewide program in early November; however, following the Board’s resolution the Department of Public Health delayed implementation until January. Delaying implementation provides medical marijuana advocates time to petition the state to modify the protocols of its program to better protect patients and caregivers.
The Drug Policy Alliance played a critical role in this important local victory through working with officials at the San Francisco Department of Public Health to organize a community forum informing the public of the confidentiality issues at stake in the implementation of the statewide program. The Alliance helped recruit local stakeholders to attend the forum and followed up with a letter to the Board of Supervisors summarizing the disturbing flaws with the State ID program and urging the Board to take action to protect and promote physician, patient and caregiver rights. In response to the community forum and Alliance's communications, the Board unanimously passed a resolution directing the county health department to refrain from implementing the State ID program pending further hearings. The Alliance is now using this momentum to create a coalition of counties and advocacy organizations, including the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project, to pressure on State officials to modify their ID program rules and procedures.
California Medical Marijuana Regulatory Wrangling California Medical Marijuana Regulatory Wrangling
The intense and necessary debate over how to regulate the distribution of medical marijuana in California continues. In Santa Cruz, long at the vanguard of medical marijuana cultivation, use, and activism, the city council has voted to create the Office of Compassionate Use, a city department that would be charged with dispensing medical marijuana.
This is a major landmark in the struggle to establish a regulatory structure for medical marijuana distribution. Polling shows that over 70% of Americans now support allowing the use of medical marijuana. Those forward-thinking states and localities that have voted to allowed their sick and dying citizens access to medical marijuana are now going through some growing pains with their distribution systems. Undoubtedly there will be good and bad models, but they will all be better than the black market. It is analogous to the development of the Dutch coffee shop system after The Netherlands decriminalized marijuana in the '70s. Will Santa Cruz's model be the best? We'll see.
Posted by Clovis Thorn.
Medical Marijuana Supreme Court Decision: A Chat with Angel Raich Following Monday’s Supreme Court decision to allow federal prosecution of medical marijuana patients, Angel Raich joined Alliance Executive Director Ethan Nadelmann and Alliance Legal Affairs Director Dan Abrahamson for a live audio web chat last night to discuss her reaction to the ruling and what it means for the thousands of medical marijuana patients across the country. You can listen to the web chat here if you missed it.
Pinned
Medical MARIJUANA in the Netherlands – June 2001 Medical marijuana
By RNW.nl - June 2001
Copyright: RNW.nl
Paul's last visit to Amsterdam was to say his "farewell to marijuana". He's 43, a musician and a producer, and lives with his wife in Minnesota, in the USA. He's been smoking marijuana for 27 years. "Like many of my peers in the 1970's, I began smoking marijuana socially. I found that I enjoyed the effects of marijuana over those of alcohol".
But Paul's story is very different to most of the other tourists you'll meet in Amsterdam's coffeeshops. Paul is going blind. "I am losing my eyesight to a combination of retinitis pigmentosa and cataracts. I also suffer from nystagmus, a condition which causes the eyes to tremble rapidly. This causes a stroboscopic effect in my vision". He's been told that people who have this disorder typically lose their reading vision somewhere between the ages of 25 and 30, and that within another 10 years, somewhere between 35 and 40, the vision is reduced further and you are left only being able to see light. But Paul appears to have defied these predictions, and he's convinced it has something to do with the fact that he smokes marijuana. "There appears to be a strong correlation between the fact that I have been a steady, but moderate cannabis user, and the fact that I retained my reading vision until about 6 months ago". In his opinion, "Marijuana use may have added between 5 and 15 additional years of usable vision to me".
Easing Discomfort:
In addition to apparently slowing down his loss of vision, Paul says the use of cannabis helps ease the discomfort caused by the condition. "Rather than treating the tremors of the eyes with diazepam or a muscle relaxant, I choose to self-medicate with marijuana". Some people might say it was just a coincidence, and that the marijuana doesn't have anything to do with it? But Paul says "five different doctors have agreed, at least in principle, that marijuana may have contributed to the preservation of my eyesight.
The effectiveness of marijuana in treating my eye disorders may be a matter of faith, or of pharmacology. Sadly, in the U.S. I may never really get to find out which".
The U.S. government only rarely allows medical research into the uses of marijuana, and of course, in the USA anyone caught using or in possession of cannabis faces prosecution.
Forced to Choose:
So why is Paul turning his back on the very thing he thinks is helping him? "In the USA, I am forced to choose between breaking the law, endangering our livelihood and placing my wife's career in jeopardy, or to abstain from marijuana, thus avoiding prosecution, but losing the benefits of cannabis for my eyes and health. In light of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, [a ruling that "medical necessity" is no defence for marijuana use], and the current political situation here, and considering the cost and difficulty in obtaining cannabis, I have decided to cease using weed. It's a difficult decision; I believe I should have the right to treat my health with whatever I choose". Paul's decision is made, but his eyesight continues to deteriorate, and his search for treatment goes on. "I would invite any eye doctors, neuropharmacologists or other experts to contact me. I will gladly come back to Holland for a consultation with scientists".
http://www.rnw.nl/
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