Word: marijuana
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Claims of marijuana's usefulness in a medical setting are not new. In the last century, doctors prescribed extracts from the hemp plant for a variety of disorders. In the 1851 edition of the U.S. Dispensatory the following hints appeared...
...until the 1920s and 1930s that this country, under intense pressure from the newly-created Federal Bureau of Narcotics--an agency in search of a mission--witnessed the crusade to banish the killer weed from American society, a society in which recreational use of marijuana was steadily becoming more popular. Contemporary newspapers frequently ran articles of purported instances where one marijuana cigarette had led previously respectable citizens to commit crimes of violence or had sent them into fits of insanity. The stories, of course, were told in lurid detail and did much to boost sales. These imaginative stories, combined with...
...when the Controlled Substances Act was up for consideration, there was little recent evidence on which claims of the medical usefulness of marijuana could be made--both research and prescription had been inhibited by federal laws. Combined with a new onslaught of "scare" studies, this persuaded the Congress to list THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) as a "Schedule I" drug. This meant that, even under medical supervision, the drug was too dangerous to be used. As a sop to those who protested, Congress set up the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse to study the problem and make...
While prescription of the drug is illegal, researchers can, under strict controls, use marijuana experimentally, and recent evidence has confirmed what doctors thought over a century ago--that marijuana holds great promise for medical use. It has been found that THC can cause up to a 40 per cent reduction in interocular pressure, a cause of glaucoma and blindness. It is more effective than most drugs currently used for this purpose, and avoids the serious side effects that accompany use of conventional drugs...
...marijuana's medicinal uses are not limited to glaucoma. One of the most promising uses of the weed is the role it can play in soothing the often-severe side effects of chemotherapy for cancer patients. These side effects--vomiting, nausea, and loss of appetite--are sometimes so unbearable as to drive patients to less effective methods of treatment. Marijuana is very effective in controlling vomiting and nausea and in stimulating appetite, and it is thought that if doctors were allowed to prescribe the drug, it would be far more reliable than drugs currently available...