David Nutt, removed as chair of the British government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for daring to speak the unwanted truth that marijuana is safer than alcohol, is speaking out again, this time in the pages of The Lancet, one of the world’s top medical journals. Unfortunately, you can read only the first few lines of Nutt’s column unless you pay for full access (correction: you have to register but don’t have to pay — thanks to Just Legalize It for pointing this out), but he makes a critical point that many politicians surely won’t like: “The control of cannabis use through regulation rather than criminalisation has proved safe and effective in the Netherlands, and was indeed suggested in The Lancet as far back as 1963.”

Maybe someday governments will base policy on facts and data. It sure would be nice.

For some time we’ve been pointing out the massive pile of evidence that THC and other cannabinoids have potential as anticancer drugs. A new study out of Thailand demonstrates that THC can fight cholangiocarcinoma – cancer of the bile duct. This is a rare but deadly form of cancer, with only 30 percent of patients still alive after five years, according to the  Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation. Based on these new lab results, the Thai researchers conclude, “THC is potentially used to retard cholangiocarcinoma cell growth and metastasis.”

In its official response to the AMA’s recent call for a review of marijuana’s status as a Schedule I drug (barring any medical use) under federal law, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy stated that it would defer to “the FDA’s judgment that the raw marijuana plant cannot meet the standards for identity, strength, quality, purity, packaging and labeling required of medicine.”

While we’re not used to factual accuracy from ONDCP, in this case they’re wrong not once, but twice.

First, there is absolutely no reason that plant medicines can’t be standardized and controlled for purity and potency. Indeed, the Netherlands has been doing just that for years, with medical marijuana distributed in Dutch pharmacies that is “of pharmaceutical quality and complies with the strictest requirements,” according to the Dutch government.

Second, the FDA has never said that a natural plant product can’t be a medicine. Indeed the agency has a lengthy “Guidance for Industry: Botanical Drug Products,” specifically designed to aid developers of plant medicines. The document not only doesn’t rule out plants as medicines, it even states, “In the initial stage of clinical studies of a botanical drug, it is generally not necessary to identify the active constituents or other biological markers or to have a chemical identification and assay for a particular constituent or marker.” Given that the active components of marijuana are already well-known and extensively researched, marijuana is well ahead of where the FDA says plant products need to be to start the process of seeking FDA licensing.

Yes, the FDA did put out a press release in 2006 saying that “smoked marijuana” had not been shown to be a safe and effective medicine. That statement was utterly unscientific, as we pointed out at the time, but it was absolutely not a declaration that the plant could never be a medicine.

There has long been reason to think that marijuana may be helpful to some patients with bipolar disorder, as certain cannabinoids have been shown in lab and animal studies to have effects that ought to be beneficial. Now, a new study from the University of Oslo finds that marijuana use is associated with better neurocognitive functioning in bipolar patients. In various tests of memory, learning, etc., bipolar patients who used marijuana did better than those who didn’t use it – the exact opposite of what the researchers found in patients with schizophrenia, a condition marijuana can sometimes worsen. “The findings,” the scientists write, “suggest that cannabis use may be related to improved neurocognition in bipolar disorder.”

Yesterday I posted a brief summary of a new study of vaporization of marijuana as an alternative to smoking. Since that original post, I’ve spoken to a couple of researchers about this study, and they raised a few points that seem worth sharing:

First, for reasons that aren’t clear, before performing the tests of smoking and vaporization, the researchers put the marijuana through a drying procedure that ordinary marijuana consumers don’t do. This might have eliminated some plant compounds, such as terpenoids, that are actually of interest.

A second possible flaw is that the researchers considered all “byproducts” – defined as substances other than cannabinoids –  together. They didn’t analyze precisely what they were, lumping bad stuff like the toxic combustion products contained in smoke with potentially beneficial plant compounds like those terpenoids mentioned above. That puts the finding that fewer byproducts were produced at 230 degrees Celsius than were produced at lower temperatures in a somewhat different perspective: We don’t know if the same byproducts were produced at 230 degrees as were produced at lower temperatures – and what’s in that mixture could be just as important as how much of it there is.

Opponents of medical marijuana love to condemn smoking, but a new study adds more data to the growing pile of research confirming that vaporization provides the benefits of inhalation without the unwanted combustion products in smoke.  In a study comparing vaporization to smoking in the journal Inhalation Toxicology, researchers from Leiden University report, “Based on the results, we can conclude that with the use of the vaporizer a much ‘cleaner’ and therefore a more healthy cannabis vapor can be produced for the medicinal use of C. sativa, in comparison to the administration of THC via cigarettes.”

The article also provides some new practical information on vaporization, suggesting that a temperature of 230 degrees Celsius is ideal, and that using smaller amounts of marijuana in the vaporizer produces more vapor, but does not extract THC more efficiently, so there is no apparent gain in using an amount less than about half a gram at a time.

About the same time as I was posting about the Washington Post’s refusal to run  MPP’s response to Charles Lane’s preposterous anti-medical-marijuana diatribe, the Post allowed Lane to strike again, with yet another online column filled with distortions and misstatements. I’m old enough to remember when the Post was a great newspaper. Yesterday I was angry; now I’m just sad.

On Oct. 20, the Washington Post published an inaccurate and arguably libelous anti-medical marijuana diatribe by Charles Lane on its Web site. After a deluge of complaints, the version now posted is cleaned up slightly: shorn of an offensive reference to Supreme Court medical marijuana plaintiff Angel Raich as a hypochondriac and with a feeble “clarification” appended. But it’s still a cascade of distortions and inaccuracies. Since the Post declined to print MPP’s reply, we thought we’d share it with you:

Setting the Record Straight on Medical Marijuana
by
Bruce Mirken and Mike Meno

Charles Lane’s column, “Medical marijuana is an insult to our intelligence,” (Oct. 20) was riddled with inaccuracies. Had Mr. Lane bothered to review the medical literature, he would have found not “hokum” and “snake oil,” as he calls it, but a small mountain of published, peer-reviewed research documenting that medical marijuana is a safe, effective, and sometimes even life-saving medication for many seriously ill Americans. [Read more →]