Don’t you wish we had politicians like this in the United States?

This plan did not sit well with fellow MP and speaker Ewa Kopacz, who immediately informed the prosecutor of Palikot’s plan.

That sounds a little more like what we’re used to over here.

The prosecutor’s reaction was also pretty familiar to those who have experienced the workings of marijuana prohibition. Even though the joint that Palikot ended up lighting was not even marijuana but some sort of cannabis incense (hopefully not the synthetic cannabinoids like K2 or Spice we’ve all been hearing so much about), he could be charged simply for talking about smoking real marijuana. Apparently in Poland, it is illegal to advertise or promote the substance, which the prosecutor alleges is what Palikot did today. He could face up to a year in prison for this act of political theater.

This sort of reaction definitely sounds familiar, and it came as no surprise to Palikot:

“I want to condemn the hypocrisy concerning marijuana consumption,” Palikot told reporters. “Someone said they would smoke a joint in parliament and the reaction was tantamount to someone announcing a coup d’etat.”

Poland is one of several European countries that are reviewing their drug laws and taking steps to soften their marijuana policies. Most recently, lawmakers in Copenhagen, Denmark introduced a bill that would allow for possession and sales of marijuana within certain areas of the city

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How much has prohibition against cannabis stymied research? The world may never know. International treaties have made the plant illegal everywhere, but attitudes vary across nations. The U.S. has been at the forefront of scientific research in many areas, but not always with cannabis. In fact, federal obstruction of research has made the U.S. lag far behind many countries in the field of cannabinoid medicine. The THC molecule and the cannabinoid receptor were first identified in Israel. Links between cannabinoids and Alzheimer’s were established in Spain. Work on THC’s inhibition of atherosclerosis appeared in Switzerland. We certainly do interesting work on this topic in the U.S., too, but I think we’ve fallen down dreadfully in the study of medical marijuana in real live people. What’s the best strain for headache? Nausea? Insomnia? We don’t know.  Despite American ingenuity and a huge underground market with thousands of strains, anyone who wants to give cannabis to people in a U.S. laboratory is essentially stuck with the one type available through the National Institute of Drug Abuse. We’re only now learning the import of cannabidiol and the host of cannabinoids other than THC, in part because of the quick jump to the study of a synthetic version that developed out of fear of stems and leaves.

International research has revealed that cannabinoids are key to an astounding number of bodily functions. They show promise for battling cancer and preserving our hearts and minds. An end to prohibition could free up so much work. The potential for discoveries is truly staggering. But time waits for none of us. The sickest of the sick need this work done as quickly as possible. We can’t let old laws developed in another era impair the research of today.

No one should go to jail for owning a green weed. No one should suffer from illness because a government fears a plant.

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One classic cry is that marijuana might cause cancer. Recent work out of Brown University actually reveals quite the opposite. Researchers gathered hundreds of people from Massachusetts who had head or neck cancers and compared them to similar people from the same neighborhoods who had no cancer. Despite the reefer-madness rants, those who had used marijuana for a decade or two were significantly less likely to develop these cancers than those who did not use marijuana.  In fact, their rates of cancer were less than half the rate among non-users. Anything else that cut the rates of cancer in half would be hailed as the newest wonder drug for tumor prevention.

As Dr. Bob Melamede explained almost five years ago in a delightful article from Harm Reduction Journal, cannabinoids inhibit tumor growth, so marijuana can’t cause cancer. Cannabinoids show promise for battling cancer, not creating it.

So the next time you meet another misinformed prohibitionist squealing about marijuana causing cancer, feel free to spread the word.

Dr. Mitch Earleywine is Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University at Albany, State University of New York, where he teaches drugs and human behavior, substance abuse treatment and clinical research methods. He is the author of more than 100 publications on drug use and abuse, including “Understanding Marijuana” and “The Parents’ Guide to Marijuana.” He is the only person to publish with both Oxford University and High Times.

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In the new study, rats were taught to self-administer heroin and conditioned to associate that behavior with a light that flashed on above the lever that dispensed the heroin. At various stages in the procedure, some of the rats were treated with cannabidiol (CBD), a cannabinoid that doesn’t make you high, but which has a number of really interesting properties.

CBD didn’t have any effect when given to the rats who were actively dosing themselves with heroin, but it had a marked effect on rats who had been abstinent from heroin for two weeks. These rats-in-recovery were again shown the cue light, and those who hadn’t been given CBD immediately resumed pushing the heroin lever, seeking a dose of the drug. But in the CBD rats, this heroin-seeking behavior was markedly reduced – and the effect continued for a full two weeks after the last CBD treatment.

The researchers conclude, “CBD may be a potential treatment for heroin craving and relapse.” It might also imply that high-CBD strains of marijuana could be preferable for those who are trying to stay off of other drugs.

Ah, but how do you know if the marijuana you’re buying is high in CBD (which is probably not the case most of the time)? Well, if it were a legal, regulated product, marijuana could be labeled for cannabinoid content – just like that bottle of wine now tells you, “alcohol 13.8%” or whatever. What a concept.

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That alcohol causes cancer isn’t really news, but how it does so hasn’t been fully understood. A new study, published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, adds an important new piece of information. Alcohol, it turns out, stimulates a type of cell transformation that turns cancer cells more aggressive and thus more likely to spread throughout the body.

As we’ve noted before, research shows that cannabinoids (marijuana’s unique, active components) interfere with tumor growth and may actually prevent cancer.

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

The article devotes a lot of space to cannabidiol (CBD), the most studied of these compounds, noting that “CBD exerts several positive pharmacological effects that make it a highly attractive therapeutic entity in inflammation, diabetes, cancer and affective or neurodegenerative diseases.” Notably, CBD has antipsychotic actions, but fewer side effects than “typical antipsychotics.” Lots of other cannabinoids have potentially useful properties as well. For example, cannabichromene has antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory activity, plus “modest” analgesic effect.

The article tends to be a bit dismissive of THC because of its psychoactivity, and focuses mainly on cannabinoids as individual chemicals rather than as components of an herbal medicine that has proven extraordinarily useful in its natural form (biases that are pretty much typical in the medical literature), but even with these limitations, it’s an important read.

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Okay, let me say right up front that a) I know that headline is provocative, and b) neither I nor anyone can answer the question with any certainty given what we know and don’t know so far about Michael Jackson’s death. But the question needs to be asked.

It needs to be asked because suspicions that prescription painkillers may have been involved in Jackson’s death are strong enough that the federal Drug Enforcement Administration has been brought into the investigation. And we know that he had a documented history of battling pain and at least some acknowledged problems with prescription painkillers.

We don’t know yet what pain drugs Jackson was on or what they were prescribed for. But if he was addicted to prescription painkillers, that addiction almost certainly started with legitimate and needed treatment for real pain. And that’s where medical marijuana might have helped.

We know — repeat, we know — that marijuana can be effective against certain types of pain. As The Lancet Neurology put it a few years ago, “cannabinoids inhibit pain in virtually every experimental pain paradigm.” We know that human clinical trials such as this one have found marijuana to be effective, particularly for neuropathic pain.

And there is considerable evidence that marijuana and cannabinoids can act synergistically with opioid painkillers, providing better pain relief at lower doses than either class of drugs by itself. For example animal studies such as this one have reported that such combination therapy avoids the development of tolerance and allows effective relief with lowered opioid doses — avoiding the pattern of escalating doses that can lead to addiction and overdose risk.

And there is evidence that this same effect occurs in people. For example, in a series of cases reported in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management (which, alas, you can only access by paying for it — sorry!), patients on morphine and other narcotics were able to cut their doses roughly in half when smoked marijuana was added to their regimen.

At MPP, we hear similar stories from patients all the time: Again and again, patients tell us that use of medical marijuana allows them to cut back or eliminate the heavy doses of narcotic painkillers they’d been taking, while obtaining equal or better relief. There is enough science corroborating these accounts that they deserve to be taken seriously.

We can’t yet say that medical marijuana could have saved Michael Jackson, and we may never know that for sure. But there is simply no reasonable doubt that marijuana can help some chronic pain patients reduce both their suffering and their consumption of addictive and potentially deadly narcotics. If the U.S. government acknowledged that reality instead of denying it, lives could be saved — maybe lots of them.

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The surprising finding that THC might help at least a small percentage of schizophrenia patients for whom conventional treatments have failed was reported in the June issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology. 

This is surprising because, as the British government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs reported last year, “there is clear evidence that the use of cannabis may worsen the symptoms of schizophrenia and lead to relapse.” The ACMD — a far more objective body than any U.S. government outfit remotely connected to drug policy — did not consider marijuana to be a significant cause of psychosis in otherwise healthy people; its report reflects a broad consensus that marijuana (and specifically THC) can worsen the prognosis of schizophrenics or those with a genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia.

But doctors at the Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg, New York, reviewing the records of one severely ill patient — a man who was “grossly psychotic, assaultive, disorganized” and not responding to conventional treatment — noticed that he had a history of “calm behavior when he was using marijuana.” So as an experiment, they prescribed THC capsules (dronabinol, brand name Marinol). “Remarkably,” they write, “he became calm, logical, nonviolent, and cooperative within days and was discharged within weeks.” 

They then tried the same thing with five other patients with a similar history — unresponsive to conventional treatments but showing some signs of improvement when they smoked marijuana. Three of these “improved to a clinically significant extent,” one showed no significant change, and one got somewhat worse. That’s a remarkable level of success in chronically ill patients for whom conventional antipsychotic drugs had failed, “in which success with any intervention might be unlikely.”

The article goes on to lay out some possible explanations, but at this point no one knows for sure why this small group of psychotic patients had an anomalous and positive reaction to THC. What is clear is that the relationship of cannabinoids to schizophrenia is more complex and variable than even many experts — much less anti-marijuana propagandists – have acknowledged.

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The good news is that this study got a decent amount of media attention. The bad news is that much of the coverage lacked context or presented information in a confusing or misleading way. Case in point: the April 1 story from the Reuters wire service.

Reuters reporter Michael Kahn presents the finding as if it were something brand new, failing to note the extensive evidence accumulated since the 1970s that cannabinoids fight various types of tumors. It reports that “studies have suggested” that marijuana may cause cancer, omitting the fact that the largest, most well-controlled studies have found precisely the opposite.

And finally, in a warning of possible risks of cannabinoid drugs, the article hopelessly jumbles cannabinoids — drugs like THC and its plant and synthetic cousins — with drugs designed to block the CB1 receptor through which these substances operate, mistakenly referring to these CB1-blocking drugs as cannabinoids. In fact, they’re more like anti-cannabinoids, and if anything the harmful effects of these CB1 blockers (increased rates of depression and anxiety, for example) reaffirm that cannabinoids often have good and helpful effects.

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