Word: pots
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wasn't until the '70s that modern methods were applied to test the medicinal effects of cannabis. As Earleywine recounts, a UCLA study designed to confirm police reports that pot dilates pupils found instead a slight constriction. That's how doctors discovered the drug could help glaucoma sufferers by reducing intraocular pressure. In the years after that discovery, 26 states opened therapeutic research programs...
GLAUCOMA Marijuana does reduce pressure on the eyeball, about 25%, but the drug isn't always practical as a glaucoma treatment. Many who have the disease are elderly and can't tolerate pot's tendency to raise heart rates...
PAIN In patients with postoperative pain, THC is more effective than a placebo, and some reports suggest smoking pot may reduce the need for highly addictive opioids. But the A.M.A. says better-designed studies are needed to properly evaluate pot as a painkiller. Several are under way. In California, five teams of researchers are conducting studies of marijuana as an analgesic, particularly for cancer and nerve pain...
...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...
...drug wasn't always so controversial in the scientific establishment. The U.S. Pharmacopeia, a doctors' listing of remedies begun in 1820, first included cannabis in 1870. The Pharmacopeia 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...