Tag: medicinal marijuana

It’s been shown in numerous studies that marijuana or cannabis can be useful as a therapeutic treatment for patients who live with HIV/AIDS. One study that they did at Columbia, they had AIDS patients in a hospital, inpatient hospital, and they found out that if they used marijuana, that they got from a government source, they were able to eat more calories and gain more weight at the end of the study, compared to people who were using a placebo marijuana. And that’s very important for people who have AIDS. They often suffer from wasting syndromes.

Secondly, AIDS patients have to take varied medicines that upset the stomach quite a bit, and highly active antiretrovirals, or heart medicines. There was a study at Stanford, by Dr. Israelsky’s group, that showed that if you used cannabis or marijuana, you had a much higher adherence rate to those antiretroviral drugs. Two to four times higher rate to keep taking those drugs on a routine basis. Which is very important if you are trying to suppress a virus which is really prone to become resistant and adapt. So you have to keep the regiment on. So that’s very useful.

Dr. Donald Abrams in U.C. San Francisco has shown that AIDS patients, HIV/AIDS patients developed this painful nerve, burning sensation in their legs, called HIV Sensory Neuropathy. It’s like a burning sensation. And we don’t have any good drugs to treat it. It turns out the drug that we have the best evidence for in medicine to treat it with is marijuana, hands down. And it’s a growing problem as more and more people are living with longer lives. Because the drugs are becoming more available and HIV/AIDS turns into a chronic disease.

So treatment of burning pain sensations, boosting your appetite, and helping gain weight, helping maintain your adherence to your antiretroviral drugs are all benefits that marijuana can afford to the HIV/AIDS patient. And Dr. Abrams, the cancer and AIDS specialist at San Francisco, says that it also helps with their mood. Living with a terminal in some cases or chronic illness can be something that causes quite a bit of adjustment and depression problems. And marijuana has been shown to be helpful with boosting moods.

So that’s the story behind marijuana and AIDS. Without AIDS activists medical marijuana wouldn’t have really been a reality. Because they really pushed in California in the 1990’s to help get laws passed that allowed patients with conditions like AIDS to use it for compassionate purposes. And the federal government actually stopped their program supplying marijuana to patients on a case by case basis when they were flooded with AIDS applications. So that’s why part of why we have medical marijuana today.

There’s a lot of excitement in the world of cancer research about the compounds that naturally occur in marijuana as a treatment for various tumors. There’s a research group out of Spain, led by a Dr. Guzman. And his group actually did one of the first human studies that documented in a group of really severe, late stage brain tumor patients that if you injected their brain tumors directly with a solution that contains THC, one of the compounds in cannabis, that you can actually observe through scans a reduction in the size of those brain tumors. That was in a group of less than 15 patients. But it was a pilot study and it was a very exciting result, that in the majority of those patients tumors shrunk. But they kind of expected that as their hypothesis because they had seen so much data from their petri dishes and their animal studies that these tumors can shrink. Especially these tumors of the brain called glioblastomas, a very debilitating tumor in the brain, that has a very low survival rate.

So the more we study, we find out that breast cancers, prostate cancers, lung cancers, a whole range of tumors in the body have been shown in animal studies and petri dish studies to be reduced and attacked by chemicals in marijuana. Usually the chemicals in marijuana do this by making those cancer cells kill themselves, reducing the blood supply to those cancers, and reducing the amount of, how those cancers spread in other parts of the body. So there are cancer groups calling for the inclusion of the chemicals of marijuana in chemotherapy regimens as a treatment for cancer. That’s very interesting and exciting future there.

And I think there are a lot of natural compounds that have anticancer properties. And I think cannabis is going to go right in there as one of those ones that can potentially be useful for a lot of different cancers.

More research needs to be done. But the research that has done is extremely promising. And even the National Cancer Institute, which is an NIH branch, has information on their website for doctors documenting all of these anticancer properties that I’ve described.

The oldest book that we have of pharmacopeia, which is a collection of drugs and their uses, is from China. In that book, they have shown, they’ve discuss the use of marijuana for the treatment of rheumatism, menstrual cramps, even forgetfulness. And there’s even like another book called the Ebers Papyrus from Egypt. And some people say that’s even older. And that also mentions marijuana. But if you go back, if you go to the modern times, like western medicine that we have today, it really wasn’t until the 1830s, 1840s that marijuana or cannabis, as it was called at the time, made its entrance.

There was a western doctor named O’Shaughnessy, Dr. O’Shaughnessy who was an Irish physician who actually as a medical student discovered the treatment for cholera by giving people intravenous fluids, hydration, which saved a lot of lives. And then he went to India and laid down telegraph lines across the country and was knighted. But in the meantime and in the midst of all that he learned from local healers about this cannabis medicine and was able to show that it could be used for tetanus and epilepsy, even rabies he was experimenting with. And he published his results and brought cannabis back with him to England and to the United Kingdom. And really it picked up like wildfire. A lot of doctors were using it in their medicines. Even Queen Victoria’s doctor, Dr. Reynolds, prescribed it to Queen Victoria for her menstrual cramps.

In the United States from the 1830s to the 1940s, for 100 years, it was in our pharmacopeia, our official United States book of approved drugs. Lots of companies like Merck and Eli Lilly that you’ve heard of today and companies that don’t exist today had cannabis or marijuana based medicines that they produced and they put on pharmacy shelves. So at that time they used it for the treatment of cramps and pain, some of the things that we still use are things are know marijuana is useful for today. But, because of the politics and reefer madness and all of the issues around, and also other newer drugs coming on the scene, marijuana kind of fell out of favor and is really now experiencing a resurgence.

Marijuana can’t kill you no matter how much humans have consumed. And people have tried to consume large quantities, either through inhaling the smoke of lots and lots of collected flowers, which is where the active ingredients are found, or they’ve tried to extract the active ingredients from the flowers into solvents like butter or alcohol. Well, too much alcohol can kill you, certainly, but the, it’s the compounds in marijuana even if you ingest a high concentrated variety of it, can’t stop your breathing, can’t cause you to have a seizure, as far as we know, possibly in some cases for people who are predisposed, these things can happen. But generally speaking, there’s been no recorded deaths just related to the use of the drug itself in no matter what quantity you’ve consumed.

Now, you can use too much of something if you were expecting a certain effect. Now, if you wanted to have a stress relieving affect with marijuana but still wanted to be functional and, you know, active you could use so much to the point where you become sedated and maybe a little bit agitated and that phenomenon can cause problems for people. And that’s what we’ve called an overdose, in quotes. It’s not an overdose to the point where you have now, you need to go to the emergency room and you need to be pumped, out of your stomach, or the substance, that kind of phenomenon is not what I’m describing.

Also, you might end up having a paranoid or psychotic reaction with a high use of something that has psychologically activating properties. People call that an acute cannabis psychosis, and that’s been described. Often times that does not lead to any chronic, long term change in your psychological status, like where you’re permanently this way, it clears over the course of a day or less. We’re talking extremely large doses, some of these affects.

Everyone has a different pharmacology, different chemistry, different reaction to drugs so the important thing is that people, when they’re using a psychologically activating substance is that they pace themselves, that they know how much they’re using, and wait before taking more. And that very commonly happens when you take marijuana orally, like in foods or dissolved things, there’s a large delay in the onset, sometimes can be up to an hour, hour and a half. And by that time, if you are waiting for an effect and have used more and more, you can have a kind of, an unpleasant surprise, a high amount sedation or, as I was mentioning, agitation.

With smoking or inhalation and vaporization, the onset is more immediate so you’re really able to just gauge in within a minute or two whether this is the right amount, whether you’re trying to relieve a symptoms or you’re trying to achieve a certain psychological state. And that’s important when you’re in a social setting and using marijuana or you’re sharing with other people, people will have different set points and that’s, I think, the key thing to remember.