Category — Research

Monday’s Gallup poll showing that a record 44% of Americans favor making marijuana legal has brought increased attention to the need for an open, national debate on marijuana policy.

The fact that 44% percent of people favor taxing and regulating marijuana is even more impressive because—in stark contrast to many other public policy issues—for once, a substantial number of Americans actually view an issue favorably.

After all, Americans are a finicky bunch. We don’t like much these days, and in 2009 it’s impressive for anything to get 44% approval ratings. In fact, according to the latest numbers from a variety of polling sources, the idea of taxing and regulating marijuana enjoys higher support among the American public than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the top Democrat and top Republican in the House of Representatives, and—perhaps not surprisingly—Congress itself.

Take a look at these figures:

Based on these numbers, as well as the growing mainstream media coverage of marijuana issues, there is no longer any doubt that Americans see marijuana policy reform as a legitimate mainstream issue worthy of national debate. Let’s keep talking!

One thing that drives me crazy is the tendency of the media and others to refer to THC as “the active ingredient” in marijuana. While THC is indeed responsible for marijuana’s “high,” it is one of about 80 unique compounds, called cannabinoids, that are not seen in any other plant. Many of these have interesting, potentially significant, medical applications, and are not psychoactive.

Anyone who wants to learn about these other cannabinoids should check out this recent review published in the journal Trends in Pharmacological Sciences. [Read more →]

The International Association for Cannabis as Medicine just concluded its 5^th Conference on Cannabinoids in Medicine in Cologne, Germany. The conference included significant new evidence that marijuana is a safe, effective medicine for certain conditions, some of which can be found in the conference abstracts, now available online.

Canadian researcher Mark Ware presented results of a yearlong safety study known as the COMPASS study, which compared 215 patients who used marijuana to manage chronic pain with comparable control patients who did not use marijuana. Ware and colleagues report “no difference in serious adverse events” between the two groups, concluding, “Cannabis use for chronic pain over one year is not associated with major changes in lung, endocrine, cognitive function or serious adverse events.” [Read more →]

The number of fatal poisonings involving opioid painkillers more than tripled from 1999 to 2006, from 4,000 to 13,800 in one year, according to a new report from the CDC. These drugs – Vicodin, OxyContin, fentanyl, and their relatives – now account for 37 percent of poisoning deaths, up from 21 percent in 1999. And the Associated Press reports that drug deaths now exceed auto accident fatalities in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

The drugs that killed nearly 14,000 people in 2006 are, of course, legal medicines. They have been approved for sale by the same federal government that bars medical use of marijuana – for which the count of medically confirmed overdose fatalities remains zero.

This gets even crazier when you consider that – as we’ve pointed out before – there is evidence that use of medical marijuana can help some pain patients reduce their doses of these dangerous and addictive narcotics.

The new National Survey on Drug Use and Health is out, and it puts the final nail in the coffin of the war on marijuana conducted by George W. Bush’s drug czar, John Walters.

Walters’ fanaticism about marijuana is epitomized by a November 2002 letter sent to the nation’s prosecutors by his deputy, Scott Burns, claiming that “no drug matches the threat posed by marijuana.” Walters carpet-bombed the nation with anti-marijuana propaganda – TV, radio and print ads, reports, press conferences, news releases, etc. – and quickly began to follow up with exaggerated claims of success.

That game is now over. [Read more →]

At least some in the international news media have belatedly discovered a study casting doubt on the purported link between marijuana use and schizophrenia. I say “belatedly” because the study was published online back in June, although the print version came out this month.

A group of British researchers examined a rather basic notion: If marijuana use  causes schizophrenia, then a major increase in marijuana use should lead to an increase in schizophrenia diagnoses in the following years. In an enormous sample of some 600,000 Britons, no such thing occurred – indeed, a spike in marijuana use beginning in the mid-1970s was followed by rates of schizophrenia that either remained stable or declined.

Of course this is not the first time that a lack of connection between marijuana use rates and schizophrenia incidence has been noted in the scientific literature. For example, a 2006 review in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry noted that “the treated incidence of schizophrenia did not obviously increase during the 1970s and 1980s when there were substantial increases in cannabis use among young adults in Australia and North America.” (Alas, that rather important discussion isn’t mentioned in the summary linked above, which is all you can get for free).

Overall, the evidence strongly suggests that marijuana may worsen or trigger schizophrenia in a few individuals with a pre-existing vulnerability, but that it is not a significant cause of mental illness in healthy people. That rather nuanced reality tends to be a bit too complicated for many in the media.

A study just published online by the journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology suggests that marijuana may protect the brain from some of the damage caused by binge drinking.

The study, by researchers at the University of California San Diego, used a type of high-tech scan called diffusion tensor imaging to compare microscopic changes in brain white matter. The subjects were students aged 16-to-19, divided into three groups: binge drinkers (defined as having five or more drinks at one sitting for boys or four or more for girls), binge drinkers who also smoked marijuana, and a control group who had very little or no experience with either alcohol or drugs.

As expected, the binge-drinking-only group showed evidence of white matter damage in eight regions examined, as demonstrated by lower fractional anisotropy (FA) scores. But in a finding the researchers described as “unexpected,” the binge-drinking/marijuana group had lower FA scores than the controls in only three of the eight regions, and in seven regions the binge-drinking/marijuana group had higher scores – indicating less damage – than the binge drinkers who didn’t use marijuana (unfortunately, not all of these stats are in the summary linked above; access to the full article requires payment). [Read more →]

Among the more interesting pieces of news that came out while I was on vacation the first half of August was a new study in the journal Cancer Prevention Research, which found that marijuana smokers have a lower risk of head and neck cancers than people who don’t smoke marijuana. Alas, this important research has been largely ignored by the news media.

While this type of study cannot conclusively prove cause and effect, the combination of this new study and existing research — which for decades has shown that cannabinoids are fairly potent anticancer drugs — raises a significant possibility that marijuana use is in fact protective against certain types of cancer. [Read more →]