Forgive me
if the headline above sounds slightly exploitive. My intention
is not to piggyback on a personal
tragedy, but I did want to get your attention.
In the fourteen
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 Feds’ 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 Senator 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 – with the disease killing 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 in tact? 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
2004 essay for Alternet.org,
entitled “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 ten 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 US 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.
