Here’s a cite that summarizes the results of 21 double-blind studies published in peer-reviewed journals. 12 found beneficial effects, 7 found no clear benefit or harm, and 2 were negative. So that’s roughly 60% for a benefit and 40% for no benefit or harm. I wouldn’t be impressed.
Looking at it more closely, the abstracts cover a variety of ailments and even an instance of capsaicin-induced pain. The most common usage was to treat spastic multiple sclerosis. Looking at just this single disease: 7 beneficial, 2 neutral and 2 negative. Again, that is not very impressive.
I took the first article listed on that site and threw it into pubmed. The related results found this meta-analysis as well: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20558502. It showed an overall improvement of this problem in MS patients.
The real missing information here is what do these studies represent to doctors on the drugs’ way to being accepted medical practice. These studies look small and there are differences in dosage and delivery among them all.
My opinion is what Martin Hyde said in his last post. There are better ways to derive these benefits, but growing it in your home is probably the cheapest.
I think you missed the point of what I was saying, Martin.
You acknowledge that we don’t have particularly developed knowledge of how medical marijuana works. We agree that the subject merits much more research.
I’m comparing this condition of our marijuana knowledge to our understanding of food and nutrition, which of course has received vastly (!) more research. We still can’t make synthetic foods that are even close to the value of “plants…in their natural form.”
Until we can synthesize food that meets our needs better than the natural stuff, it is assuredly “best for humans” to stick with the natural stuff. And until we can synthesize medicines that meet our needs better than the respective natural forms, limiting patients to approximations in pill form is not desirable.
I’m not saying that some theoretical marijuana-based synthetic medicine of the future can’t be better than raw herb. I’m saying we don’t have that, and in the meantime we should use, and study, the plant.
Yeah; I say legalize it just because it’s silly for it to be illegal. I don’t think it has any medical value except maybe for terminal patients’ relief, and that’s not so much medical as just compassionate. The medical thing is just a way of trying to get the camel’s nose under the tent…I don’t really care, but that’s not why it should be legal, IMHO.
The thing that gets me riled up on this subject is when I see snobby nosed b*tches who’ve never toked a gram in their life say this:
[insert most obnoxious female voice ever] “We hold ouselves to a higher standard here in the US than people in Amsterdam. Legalization may have been successfull there, but they have a smaller demographic and they don’t care as much about things. We just do things differently over here than they do, so it’s not a good comparison.”
I have literally heard this stated in many ways and styles, while the person who basically just called people in Amsterdam stupid…looked and talked like a total brick for brains :smack:. I think it was even said on the History channel during a show on MJ, however, on a close look at History’s view, they basically stated that any country that does not make it legal has declared themselves stupid automatically. They of course didn’t say it in so many words, but gave overwhelming support to its legalization in a round about way, and the dumb broad who was against its legalization put the last nail in her own coffin.
One more thing, if you think I’m just some stoner who wants to see it legal…think again, I used to smoke, but no longer (mainly because it is illegal, and also very expensive, so I quit a long time ago and switched to alcohol (I know, I know, alcohol’s much worse than MJ, but it’s a lot cheaper and unless you’re driving or meandering in public, no one cares that you’re drunk)
Apologies for self-quoting, but I thought I should expand on this a bit.
There is a form of synthetic THC, the single pure isomer dronabinol, but by anecdotal evidence it is therapeutically inferior to marijuana.
THC is only one of the active compounds in marijuana; it seems to be the primary one for getting recreational users high, but it’s not the only one of medical value. Cannabidiol (CBD) and cannabichromene (CBC) are a couple of others that have promise. We don’t know much about how these work and what kind of synergistic potentiation may exist in various ratios between the compounds.
In short, we need much more science before we can hope to say that we have gone from the “willow bark” to the “Bayer” stage of marijuana-based medicine.
The DEA is NOT an objective authority in this matter. Any successful attempt to legalize marijuana means a loss of money and authority to them and their largely unsuccessful War on Drugs.
I live in Florida and would be very happy if marijuana was legalized for medical use. I live in chronic pain due to a severe back injury that required 3 surgeries. Unfortunately the surgeons have done all they can and it looks like there will never be a non-drug solution to the pain. I can’t say if the use of pot would help me, but everything I read tells me that it would work very well as a pain killer.
It does amaze me that there is even an issue when it comes to the medical use of this drug. Currently I take a high dose of morphine every day and percocets on top of that for breakthru pain. Prior to this combinatin I was on Fentynal and before that Demerol. Each of these drugs I mentioned are incredibly addictive and possibly fatal in certain circumstances. How these drugs can be legal and pot not is beyond me.
But I have another theroy, although it might make me part of the tin foil hat crowd. Currently my monthly cost for $200. If pot was made legal for medical use and could be grown in my backyard for that use that would end the need for my insurance company and I to put out hundreds of dollars to the drug companies every month. While I have no citable proof, is it possible the ones really lobbying to keep pot from being legal for medical use is the drug companies? Yes, they could manufacture it and sell it, but they really wouldn’t be neccassary. Just a thought.
Sorry, but you can not consider any of the current studies because of how small and limited they are, because the government will pretty much NOT ALLOW studies to be done without an amazing amount of bullshit to go through to get even the most minor of studies authorized. Until we can do studies involving a hundred thousand participants in a specific controlled manner, the results will remain picayune. We need to get studies actually authorized by a lab group that has no agenda one way or the other. We need someone with 10 or 15 mil in cash willing to pay for the study for say 3 or 4 specifics [I know one gent claims that weed oil can reduce and cure several types of cancer, cover the muscle spasm use, the nausea and lack of appetite use and a general pain control, or insomnia control use] for a reasonable amount of time [say 1 year] and method of use [there is topical and ingested for the cancer, and ingested or smoked/vaporized for the others] and we need to produce the weed in a single facility and test it to make sure the strength is consistant in whichever delivery is used [probably ingested in liquigels as oil seems to be fairly able to be made consistant and they can make the years batch in a single run, and you can easily fabricate the placebo version to look the same] I would think a year of 14 appointments [intake, 12 monthly followups and final appraisal] should work. I have very little doubt that you could find 25000 people on chemo, 25000 people with chronic pain or insomnia, 25000 people with some form of muscle spasms and 25000 people with the same form of cancer [or different forms of cancer?] that have not yet been treated with some other method [chemo or radiation]that is a slower form of cancer that would normally just be watched for a few months prior to surgery.
[or someone else can design the testing program, I just know what to do from the guinea pig point of view]
Sorry, but to me it is not recreational, I have no objection to recreational because as far as I care, it is as dangerous as a shot and a few cigarettes. I do know it makes a big difference in my functional quality of life.
And the DEA can put the amount they were spending on weed control to meth and other harder drugs. Then they don’t have to ask for more funding, just redirect what they get to dangerous drugs and leave us alone.
There is zero doubt that marijuana has medicinal uses, and that is particularly useful in combating the nausea caused by chemo drugs and giving patients’ appetites. The DEA is a law enforcement agency, not a scientific or medical one. the DEA is, and always has been, completely full of shit about marijuana.
There is no reason for the DEA to exist at all. I’d sooner give my tax dollars to NAMBLA than to the DEA.
There’s no one thing keeping marijuana illegal, and if a majority of people strongly supported legalization, it would probably happen. (A lot of people do favor legalizing it but for most of them it’s not the most pressing issue.) The biggest reason it’s illegal isn’t lobbying by any company or industry, it’s the perception that it’s a dangerous drug that leads to abuse of other drugs. It’s dumb and not supported by facts, but enough people believe that and demand tough enforcement from politicians that that continues to be the state of affairs. If it’s legal, drug companies will be happy to sell it and stores will be happy to stock it. It’s true that people won’t have to buy it from drug companies, but most people probably would - you can grow your own vegetables if you have a yard, but supermarkets still do plenty of business because growing something on your own takes a good deal of time and effort and money.
I don’t have any hard data on this topic, but I do think marijuana has medicinal uses. I’ve known people who say it helped their nerve pain and I’ve seen it work on chemotherapy nausea.
[Afroman] I was gonna go vote on that measure, but I got high…I was gonna vote to legalize it, but I got high…Yeah, I was gonna go down and vote, but I got high…but I got high, but I got high, but I got high… [/Afroman]
One of the things that to me is nice about say, vicodin, is you know exactly the potency of each pill you take.
I smoked pot in my youth and it always had a different potency depending on various factors. That’s one of the problems with just using random plants bought from a dealer who may get them from a wide variety of sources. Without rigorous control of various factors plants from the same species can come out very, very different. That is why fruit can be very different from one orchard to another even if it’s the same fruit, or why different types of tea can taste very different and even have different caffeine content.
That’s not a big issue with a recreational drug, that’s not a great “feature” for a pain relief medication. Again, I’m not saying not to use it for that, I’m just saying I see a lot of things about smoking pot that are kind of ghetto when compared to normal pain killers and I think if the serious pharmaceutical industry approached it with an attempt to get a genuine product out of it instead of just the minor amounts of testing being done now by mostly advocacy groups we’d see real results that were a lot more impressive than random strains of the plant being smoked in bongs and joints.
Marijuana, i.e. the smokeable plant, is not medicine. A medicine is a known quantity of a given chemical, dispensed for the purpose of producing a certain result in the body. A plant in its raw state contains an unknown quantity of an unknown number of chemicals, and as such cannot be guaranteed to produce any specific effect in the user, notwithstanding the fact that smoking or cooking are both woefully inefficient ways of consuming medicine since the process of preparation will inevitably destroy much of the desired chemicals anyway.
The plant may contain medicinal chemicals, and there should certainly be done more research and development into actualizing those chemicals so that they can be dispensed in a consistent quantity to produce a specific result.
THC-based prescription drugs like Marinol are a step in the right direction here, but it’s my understanding that there are other cannabinoids in marijuana that have a pharmacological effect beyond that of just THC.
If you legalize marijuana, anyone can grow it, which means fewer profits for the drug companies. Since they are in business solely to make a profit, which means selling more drugs, they don’t like that. They would rather outlaw marijuana and sell pills, often with side effects that sell more pills, which have side effects that can sell even more pills.
I don’t see how anyone can disallow marijuana’s munchies effect on people wasting away from cancer treatments or AIDS. It it just plain cruel.
I don’t know how much you can control that with medical marijuana from a dispensary- I’m sure it can be controlled somewhat through careful breeding of plants. If other pill forms are developed this won’t be an issue.
How? If it’s legal, they can sell it and make a profit. If it’s illegal, they can’t. Marinol and dronabinol are not big sellers and something more similar to actual marijuana might do much better. It’s true that if marijuana were approved as a medicine, sales of some other drug might go down. But that’s something that happens over time anyway - one drug gets replaced by another and they need new products. If anything that would seem like a reason they’d favor medical marijuana.
I’ve already mentioned titration, which is the patient’s ability to regulate dosage. Smoked marijuana is actually superior in this characteristic to standardized pills because even if a smoker doesn’t know the potency of a given joint, he can pay attention to how he feels as he smokes it, and choose to set it down after any number of tokes. His exact dosage on that occasion is more flexible and responsive than if he had to take a multiple of a standard pill. The faster onset time of smoking can be an advantage in this regard as well. Again, some people using medical marijuana are specifically trying to avoid getting high in the process, and puff-by-puff titration makes that easier; they smoke just enough to achieve medical efficacy.
In jurisdictions where it is presently semi-tolerated, medical marijuana is already somewhat past the stage of “random plants…from a wide variety of sources.” There are identified strains from known sources, cultivated under reasonably fixed conditions, each yielding roughly reliable profiles of cannabinoids. It’s still a matter of experimentation to find how any particular strain works for somebody, but doctors and patients have to make guesses and experiment with laboratory pharmaceuticals, too. Just because you have capsules with a known milligram content of something doesn’t mean you know in advance how it’s going to work for a particular patient.
Naturally, with full legalization the standardization of strains and the knowledge of each could be considerably advanced.
In the other thread, I didn’t think we were discussing whether marijuana was effective, I thought that was a given.
What I said (or meant) was that I thought marinol threw the baby out with the bath water - it doesn’t give the high of marijuana, but it also doesn’t do nearly as well medically. I posted that because Shodan said that since the person talking to Romney was aware of marinol, his belief that he needed marijuana must have been psychosomatic.
I googled ‘marinol efficacy versus THC’ and got links to a bunch of sites that are filtered here at work, but some of which look promising.
Also, hash brownies from the Melk Weg in Amsterdam are every bit as effective as smoking marijuana (anecdotal), so it does not need to be smoked. I agree without debate that smoking anything is not good for one’s lungs.
Actually, I’ve been told that one of the problems with Marinol/dronabinol is that patients can get too high–or at least, too severely perceptually affected, if not necessarily high in the same enjoyable way–because of the “blunt force” dosage and the absence of the other (non-THC) cannabinoids.
If it’s legal, you don’t have to get random plants from a shady dealer. You get a name brand, from the pharmacy. I’m sure they can test the drug for potency and incorporate that somehow into the labeling, rather than just have it be a free for all.
There are aspects to legality that go beyond not getting arrested for the activity. It’s not just that your local dealer and his source are now legit. Now ADMand Monsanto are hip deep in developing specialized hybrids for professional growers. They’re not growing in some dude’s basement, or in a remote forest, but on a 500 acre farm in Iowa. Rolled mechanically into an exactly sized joint, made up of the “proper” mix of different sources to meet the desired specifications. You’re buying a full fledged product, not chopped up leaves from some shady mope.
My literature review indicates it’s only proved useful in adjunctive treatment of severe neuropathic pain or spasticity in multiple sclerosis patients, and in adjunctive treatment of moderate-to-severe pain in advanced cancer. It’s not been found superior to other modalities on any consistent basis. Its delivery system (by smoking it) is dangerous in itself, and eating the stuff gives wildly varying and unpredictable levels in the body.
It maybe of benefit for intractable nausea from chemo, but frankly newer anti-nausea agents are being shown to be just as effective.
Most of the uses to which “medical marijuana” is put are not medically indicated or proven. I have zero respect for the “marijuana doctors” who dispense the stuff for headaches, backaches, insomnia, anxiety, glaucoma, or other complaints to anyone who walks in and pays a fee. I wish we’d just legalize the stuff and stop co-opting medical people into coming up with a rationalization for dispensing a plant to be smoked.