In 1999, upon being asked by the Office of National Drug Control Policy to review the evidence for marijuana as a medicine, the Institute of Medicine found that, “except for the harms associated with smoking, the adverse effects of marijuana use are within the range of effects tolerated for other medications.”

 
From the 124,000-member American College of Physicians: “Given marijuana’s proven efficacy at treating certain symptoms and its relatively low toxicity, reclassification [out of Schedule I of the federal Controlled Substances Act] would reduce barriers to research and increase availability of cannabinoid drugs to patients who have failed to respond to other treatments… Evidence not only supports the use of medical marijuana in certain conditions but also suggests numerous indications for cannabinoids.”

From the American Nurses Association: “There is a growing body of evidence that marijuana has a significant margin of safety when used under a practitioner’s supervision when all of the patient’s medications can be considered in the therapeutic regimen…. There is significant research that demonstrates a connection between therapeutic use of marijuana/cannabis and symptom relief. The American Nurses Association actively supports patients’ rights to legally and safely access marijuana/cannabis for symptom management and to promote quality of life for patients needing such an alternative to conventional therapy.”

From the Lymphoma Foundation of America, HIV Medicine Association of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and others (in a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court): “For certain persons the medical use of marijuana can literally mean the difference between life and death. At a minimum, marijuana provides some seriously ill patients the gift of relative health and the ability to function as productive members of society.”

And finally, from a study of smoked marijuana as a treatment for HIV-related nerve pain, published in the February 13, 2007, issue of the journal Neurology: “The first cannabis cigarette reduced chronic pain by a median of 72% vs. 15% with placebo … No serious adverse events were reported. Conclusion: Smoked cannabis was well tolerated and effectively relieved chronic neuropathic pain from HIV-associated sensory neuropathy.”

GOVERNMENT MARIJUANA ARTICLE

www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/05/18/government.marijuana.garden

FROM JACK HERER’S MY SPACE PAGE:

It was recently reported on CNN and newspapers throughout the world that using marijuana is the best treatment for Alzheimer’s. If you use marijuana morning, noon and night it won’t progress. You may even get better. If you start using it when you’re 20 or 30 or 40, your chances are high you will not get Alzheimer’s. Cannabis has been proven to be many times more effective than the drugs currently being used to treat it. But marijuana is illegal in most places.

Thirty percent of all medicines used 100 to 200 years ago were made out of compounds of natural marijuana. In 1964, researchers discovered the main ingredient is THC. No one has ever died from using marijuana.

In 1974, Virginia Medical College in Richmond, Virginia did research on tumors of the lung, brain, liver and kidney using mice and rats. Incredible things were done. The cancer stopped growing and in most cases even reversed itself 100 percent. Some of the mice who were given cancer and treated with cannabis actually lived longer than some of the control mice who were not even given cancer! It was found that marijuana is the best thing to treat cancer of the lungs, brain, etc. After that they were stopped from doing anymore research at all by first Nixon and then Ford. No research with positive results could be done, only research with negative results. That’s the way it’s been since 1975 until now, even though a 1999 marijuana study turned out to be positive also.

You live almost two years longer if you smoke marijuana morning, noon and night. This was the result of the most extensive research ever done (from 1968 to 1974). It was a $6,000,000 study done by Dr. Vera Ruben in Jamaica and Costa Rica. Today that same research would cost $150,000,000. If you smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol, you will lose approximately 8-24 years off your life. If you don’t smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol you will live (in the U.S.) until about 76 for a man and 78 for a woman. But if you smoke marijuana and don’t smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol, you live about two years longer than that.

When this study came out in 1974, Nixon and then Ford dropped the most expensive research ever done on anything whatsoever. No more research of any type could be done on marijuana to prove the positive effects, only negative effects. From 1974 until now.

THE SACRAMENTO BEE ARTICLE

www.sacbee.com/livinghere/story/1861861.html

Dr. Donald Tashkin (UCLA) “I’d be in favor of legalization”

UCLA’s Tashkin studied heavy marijuana smokers to determine whether the use led to increased risk of lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. He had hypothesized that there would be a definitive link between cancer and marijuana smoking, yet the results proved otherwise.

“What we found instead was no association and even a suggestion of some protective effect,” says Tashkin, whose research was the largest case-control study ever conducted. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Tobacco smokers in the study had as much as a 21-fold increase in lung cancer risk. Cigarette smokers, too, developed COPD more often in the study, and researchers found that marijuana did not impair lung function. Tashkin, supported by other research, concluded that the active ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, has an “anti- tumoral effect” in which “cells die earlier before they age enough to develop mutations that might lead to lung cancer.”

However, the smoke from marijuana did swell the airways and lead to a greater risk of chronic bronchitis.

“Early on, when our research appeared as if there would be a negative impact on lung health, I was opposed to legalization because I thought it would lead to increased use and that would lead to increased health effects,” Tashkin says.

“But at this point, I’d be in favor of legalization. I wouldn’t encourage anybody to smoke any substances, because of the potential for harm. But I don’t think it should be stigmatized as an illegal substance.

“Tobacco smoking causes far more harm. And in terms of an intoxicant, alcohol causes far more harm.”