Word: marijuana
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...A.M.A. concludes that the lack of "high-quality clinical research ...continues to hamper development of rational public policy" on medical marijuana. Which raises the question, Why, after five millenniums, doesn't such research exist? Two possible answers: First, the government may have rejected cannabis studies to avoid any challenge to its view that pot is dangerous and medically useless. Second, pot may just be dangerous and medically useless...
...didn't drop pot until its 1942 edition, the first published after cannabis was outlawed in 1937. Eventually most physicians began to view the drug as little more than a crude intoxicant. They tended to favor new-fashioned drugs that were refined by pharmaceutical firms into pure chemicals. Raw marijuana contains some 400 compounds...
...Federal Government, which by then controlled the only legal supply of marijuana, had just passed the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. That law placed marijuana in Schedule I, the designation for drugs without valid medical use. State health officials found it difficult to persuade their federal counterparts to give them cannabis for research, as doing so would undermine the law, at least in spirit, by suggesting there were medical uses. (Only seven states got pot. One was Tennessee, which is why Al Gore's sister was able to try the drug before losing her battle with lung cancer...
...benefits of the plant without the impurities. By the mid-'80s, the availability of Marinol and the escalating drug war had killed the state research programs. But Marinol turned out to have shortcomings. Because it enters the blood through the stomach, it doesn't work as fast as smoked marijuana. Because it is essentially pure THC, its users can get too high. "Marinol does tend to knock people out," says Abrams, the San Francisco doctor who has conducted trials with both Marinol and pot. "Our patients [taking Marinol] spent a lot of time in bed, and that wasn...
...clinical trials," says Dr. Hjalmar Lagast, a vice president for Solvay Pharmaceuticals, which makes Marinol. He notes that the drug comes in three strengths, allowing doctors to pick the right dose. By the early '90s, at the height of the U.S. aids epidemic, many patients so preferred marijuana to Marinol that they would use the street drug regardless of legality or safety. Abrams and a few others began pushing the government to permit new studies of marijuana to find out what these patients were doing to themselves...