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[SOURCE: NORML News of the Week 8/21/2008 @ Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 4:19 PM]

Sacramento, CA:

According to recent media reports, Attorney General Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown is currently privately circulating to top state and law enforcement officials the “final draft” of his long-awaited rules for ensuring “the security and non-diversion of marijuana grown for medical use.” These, when finalized, will be the first definitive guidelines provided by the state of California in the decade plus since Prop. 215 was approved by the voters.

According to the attorney general, these guidelines are intended to accomplish three objectives: to avoid diversion of marijuana grown for authorized patients; to help law enforcement understand and apply the law consistently throughout the state; and to “help patients and caregivers …cultivate, transport, possess, and use marijuana under California law.”

Brown, who earlier announced his intension to appeal the recent Kelly decision (People v. Kelly), holding SB 420, the act passed by the legislature that placed limits on the amount of medical marijuana a patient could legally possess, to be an unconstitutional infringement on the power of voters to adopt state policy via initiative. Brown has consistently indicated his opposition to private dispensaries, and his draft guidelines reportedly reflect that position, and may present a new challenge to dispensaries.

Brown’s draft guidelines reportedly have this to say about dispensaries: “Although medical marijuana ‘dispensaries’ have been operating in California for years, dispensaries, as such, are not recognized under the law.” Individuals who operate dispensary establishments “that do substantially comply with [the] guidelines… may be subject to arrest and prosecution under California law.”

For patients who may possess more than the authorized amount, the guidelines also reportedly present a problem. “If a person has what appears to be valid medical marijuana documentation, but exceeds the applicable possession guidelines identified above, all marijuana may be seized. “

On the positive side, patients would reportedly be entitled to the return of their authorized medical marijuana from law enforcement, once their authorization was verified, and state officers would be protected from liability for following this guideline.

For more information, contact NORML Legal Counsel Keith Stroup or California NORML director Dale Gieringer or call 415-563-5858

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By Paul Armentano, NORML
Posted on May 23, 2008, Printed on May 23, 2008

In the 14 years I’ve worked in marijuana law reform, few events have struck me as so needlessly tragic as the federal government’s consistent and deliberate stifling of medical cannabis research. Nowhere is the Fed’s refusal to allow this science more overt and inhumane than as it pertains to the investigation of cannabinoids as anti-cancer agents, particularly in the treatment of gliomas.

As noted in today’s wire stories regarding Sen. Edward Kennedy’s diagnosis, glioma is an aggressive form of cancer that affects an estimated 10,000 Americans annually. Standard treatments for the cancer include radiation and chemotherapy, though neither procedure has proven particularly effective — the disease kills approximately half its victims within one year and all within three years.

But what if there was an alternative treatment for gliomas that could selectively target the cancer while leaving healthy cells intact? And what if federal bureaucrats were aware of this treatment, but deliberately withheld this information from the public?

Sadly, the above questions are not hypothetical. As I originally wrote in a 2004 essay for Alternet.org, titled “Pot Shows Promise as a Cancer Cure”:

In fact, the first experiment documenting pot’s anti-tumor effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at the behest of the U.S. government. The results of that study, reported in an Aug. 18, 1974, Washington Post newspaper feature, were that marijuana’s psychoactive component, THC, “slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent.”

Despite these favorable preliminary findings, U.S. government officials banished the study and refused to fund any follow-up research until conducting a similar — though secret — clinical trial in the mid-1990s. That study, conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program to the tune of $2 million, concluded that mice and rats administered high doses of THC over long periods had greater protection against malignant tumors than untreated controls.

However, rather than publicize their findings, government researchers shelved the results, which only became public after a draft copy of its findings were leaked in 1997 to a medical journal which in turn forwarded the story to the national media.

In the years since the completion of the National Toxicology trial, the U.S. government has yet to fund a single additional study examining the drug’s potential anti-cancer properties. Is this a case of federal bureaucrats putting politics over the health and safety of patients? You be the judge.

Fortunately, in the past 10 years scientists overseas have generously picked up where U.S. researchers so abruptly left off, reporting that cannabinoids can halt the spread of numerous cancer cells — including prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and in one human clinical trial, brain cancer.

Writing earlier this year in the journal Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics, Italian researchers reiterated, “(C)annabinoids have displayed a great potency in reducing glioma tumor growth either in vitro or in animal experimental models. (They) appear to be selective antitumoral agents as they kill glioma cells without affecting the viability of nontransformed counterparts.” Not one mainstream media outlet reported their findings. Perhaps now they’ll pay better attention.

What possible advancements in the treatment of cancer may have been achieved over the past 34 years had U.S. government officials chosen to advance — rather than suppress — clinical research into the anti-cancer effects of cannabis? It’s a shame we have to speculate; it’s even more tragic that the families of Senator Kennedy and thousands of others must suffer while we do.

Watch a video of Paul Armentano explaining the relationship between cannabinoids and glioma.

Paul Armentano is the deputy director for the NORML Foundation in Washington, D.C.

© 2008 NORML All rights reserved.

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[SOURCE: NORML via Alternet]

By Paul Armentano, NORML
Posted on May 13, 2008, Printed on May 13, 2008

Editor’s note: NORML deputy directoy Paul Armentano catches the latest insanity from the drug czar.

Feds: Teen use of pot can lead to mental illness
via The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Depression, teens and marijuana are a dangerous mix that can lead to dependency, mental illness or suicidal thoughts, according to a White House report released Friday.A teen who has been depressed at some point in the past year is more than twice as likely to have used marijuana as teens who have not reported being depressed — 25 percent compared with 12 percent, said the report by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

“Marijuana is a more consequential substance of abuse than our culture has treated it in the last 20 years,” said John Walters, director of the office. “This is not just youthful experimentation that they’ll get over as we used to think in the past.”

…

“It’s not something you look the other way about when your teen starts appearing careless about their grooming, withdrawing from the family, losing interest in daily activities,” Walters said. “Find out what’s wrong.”

Gotta love Walters’ remark about hygiene — which he appears to have taken almost verbatim from Above The Influence’s hateful propaganda film, Stoners In The Mist.

Seriously though, it goes without saying that this so-called White House ‘report‘ (I use the term euphemistically here, given that said ‘report’ is under five pages and consists mostly of bar charts rather than text) is much ado about nothing. In fact, the only newsworthy aspect of this supposed ’study’ is that the lapdog mainstream media gave it any coverage at all.

In short, there’s nothing to the Drug Czar’s marijuana and mental health claims that NORML Advisory Board member Dr. Mitch Earleywine and I haven’t previously addressed in our essay here:

Pot Smoking Won’t Make You Crazy, But Dealing With The Lies About It Will
via Alternet

Perhaps the most impressive evidence against the cause-and-effect relationship concerns the unvarying rate of psychoses across different eras and different countries. People are no more likely to be psychotic in Canada or the United States (two nations where large percentages of citizens use cannabis) than they are in Sweden or Japan (where self-reported marijuana use is extremely low). Even after the enormous popularity of cannabis in the 1960s and 1970s, rates of psychotic disorders haven’t increased.

Ironically, just two days prior to the Drug Czar’s much ballyhooed press conference, Britain’s Advisory Panel on the Misuse of Drugs refuted the notion that pot use causes mental illness, stating, “The evidence for the existence of an association between frequency of cannabis use and the development of psychosis is, on the available evidence, weak.”

A 2006 review by the same commission previously concluded, “The current evidence suggests, at worst, that using cannabis increases lifetime risk of developing schizophrenia by one percent.” And more recently, a highly touted meta-analysis in the British medical journal, The Lancet, reported that there is a dearth of scientific evidence indicating that cannabis use causes psychotic behavior, noting, “Projected trends for schizophrenia incidence have not paralleled trends in cannabis use over time.”

Of course, none of this dismisses the possibility that pot use may exacerbate certain mental health problems in a handful of individuals. As NORML notes in a recent white paper, “Cannabis, Mental Health and Context:”

There is limited data suggesting an association, albiet a minor one, between chronic cannabis (primarily among adolescents and/or those predisposed to mental illness) and increased symptoms of depression, psychotic symptoms, and/or schizophrenia. However, interpretation of this data is troublesome and, to date, this observation association is not well understood. Identified as well as unidentified confounding factors (such as poverty, family history, polydrug use, etc.) make it difficult, if not impossible, for researchers to adequately determine whether any cause-and-effect relationship exists between cannabis use and mental illness. Also, many experts point out that this association may be due to patients’ self-medicating with cannabis, as survey data and anecdotal reports of individuals finding therapeutic relief from both clinical depression and schizotypal behavior are common within medical lore, and clinical testing on the use of cannabinoids to treat certain symptoms of mental illness has been recommended.

That said, however, the most practical public policy to address these concerns is not criminal prohibition, but regulation.

If there does exist a minority population of citizens who may be genetically prone to potential harms from cannabis (such as, possibly, those predisposed to schizophrenia), then a regulated system would best identify and educate this sub-population to pot’s potential risks so that they may refrain from its use, if they so choose.

To draw a real world comparison, millions of Americans safely use ibuprofen as an effective pain reliever. However, among a minority of the population who suffer from liver and kidney problems, ibuprofen presents a legitimate and substantial health risk. However, this fact no more calls for the criminalization of ibuprofen among adults than do these latest allegations, even if true, call for the current prohibition of cannabis.

You can read the full report here.

Paul Armentano is the senior policy analyst for the NORML Foundation in Washington, DC.

© 2008 NORML All rights reserved.

Popularity: 2% [?]

[SOURCE: NORML News of the Week 5/8/08]

Davis, CA:

Cannabis significantly reduces neuropathic pain compared to placebo and is well tolerated by patients with chronic pain conditions, according to clinical trial data to be published in The Journal of Pain.

Investigators at the University of California at Davis, in conjunction with the University of California Center for Medical Cannabis Research (CMCR), assessed the efficacy of inhaled cannabis on pain intensity among 38 patients with central and/or peripheral neuropathic pain in a randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover trial. Researchers reported that smoking low-grade (3.5 percent THC) and mid-grade (7 percent THC) cannabis equally reduced patients’ perception of spontaneous pain.

“[A] significant … reduction in [a 100-point visual analog scale of] pain intensity per minute was noted from both 3.5 percent and 7 percent cannabis compared to placebo,” authors wrote. “Separate appraisals using the patient global score and multidimensional [eleven-point neuropathic pain scale also] revealed that both active agents alleviated pain compared with placebo.”

Investigators added: “[N]o participant withdrew because of tolerability issues. Subjects receiving active agent endorsed a ‘good drug effect’ more than a ‘bad drug effect.’”

They concluded: “In the present experiment, cannabis reduced pain intensity and unpleasantness equally. Thus, as with opioids, cannabis does not rely on a relaxing or tranquilizing effect, but rather reduces both the core component of nociception (nerve pain) and the emotional aspect of the pain experience to an equal degree.”

The study is the second clinical trial conducted by CMCR investigators to conclude that inhaled cannabis significantly reduces chronic neuropathy, a condition that is typically unresponsive to both opioids and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen.

Commenting on the study’s the findings, NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said: “With the results of each published study it becomes increasingly apparent why the US government has tried consistently to stonewall clinical research on the therapeutic effects of inhaled cannabis. Each new trial the Feds approve provides additional evidence undermining the government’s ‘flat Earth’ position that cannabis is without medical value.”

For more information, please contact Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director, at: paul@norml.org. Full text of the study, “A randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover trial of cannabis cigarettes in neuropathic pain,” will appear in the Journal of Pain.

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From NORML.ORG:

Action Alert: California Assembly Considers Bill to End Employment Discrimination of Medi-Pot Patients

NORML is pleased to announce that Assembly Bill 2279, which would declare it “unlawful for an employer to discriminate against” persons who use medical cannabis, has been approved by the Assembly Committee on Judiciary and the Assembly Committee on Labor & Employment and will now be heading to an Assembly floor vote.

Under a recent California Supreme Court ruling, state-authorized medical marijuana patients may be fired for their off-the-job marijuana use.  Passage of AB 2279 would correct this injustice.  Employees who possess a physician’s approval to use medicinal cannabis should possess similar workplace protections as do those workers prescribed other prescription drugs — many of which are far more impairing than marijuana.

Please take a moment and write your California Assemblyperson today and urge him or her to support AB 2279.  Since a vote on the Assembly floor is imminent, now is the time that your Assemblyperson must hear from you.   For your convenience, a prewritten letter will be sent to your state Assemblyperson when you enter your zip code into our online advocacy system.

NORML and the NORML Foundation: 1600 K Street NW, Suite 501, Washington DC, 20006-2832
Tel: (202) 483-5500 • Fax: (202) 483-0057 • Email: norml@norml.org

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