Medical Frontiers

UC San Diego’s cannabis researchers wrap up 13 years of study

In 1999, the published medical literature supporting the medical benefits of cannabis was thin, so California’s state Legislature did something to push back against a federal government that insisted there was no medical value to cannabis: it created the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at UC San Diego’s School of Medicine and gave it funding to conduct clinical trials. The Center’s charge was to investigate on the efficacy and risks of using cannabis to treat human ailments.

Opened in 2000, the Center recently published its final study, one of six randomized, clinical trials that it has underwritten over the last 13 years. The studies mostly centered on cannabis’ use as a pain treatment. In the final study published last December in the Journal of Pain, researchers found that low-strength vaporized cannabis (1.29 percent THC) reduced pain in patients with neuropathic pain by 30 percent. Many medical cannabis studies include a small number of subjects, but this study had 39 subjects. Other Center-sponsored studies have had similarly large sample sizes.

But with its original funding now gone, the Center will not be gathering anymore data, certainly not until California’s budget picture improves. In summarizing the six studies, the Center’s co-director took a small swing at the federal government.

“The big picture is that there’s enough positive data that this notion of cannabis being a Schedule 1 drug certainly deserves reconsideration,” says J. Hampton Atkinson, the Center’s co-director and a psychiatrist at UCSD. He adds that California is the only state in the U.S. to spend its own money on medical cannabis research. In terms of getting positive attention from more mainstream researchers, Atkinson says it’s still a tough slog.

“I don’t know that we’re bending things too much,” he says. “These sorts of results would get more attention if this were [a] Schedule 2 drug and researchers could get research funding. The federal government discourages people.”

Atkinson reports that all of the Center’s studies found positive results for medicinal cannabis and no risks. Interestingly, he says that research found the best results at THC concentrations of 2 percent to 4 percent, and that effects were no more profound at 8 percent THC. While many in the medical cannabis world assume that more is better when it comes to THC percentages, Atkinson says the “therapeutic window” appears at lower doses. Keep in mind, however, that the Center had to use cannabis grown at the University of Mississippi under contract to the federal government and Ole Miss cannabis is renowned for being weak in THC. How would today’s super strains of medical cannabis with 20 percent and more of THC work medically? That will, of course, need to await further research.

Atkinson is not a fan of the old Drug Warrior argument that America cannot have cannabis use of any kind because it’s a threat to children somehow.

“We’re talking about treating cancer and HIV patients in their 40s and 50s, not pre-adolescent kids,” he says.

For now, the center’s mission is complete but it will remain in existence as a resource for other interested researchers, says Atkinson.

www.cmcr.ucsd.edu

Prioritizing

Since its founding, the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research has worked hard to look at cannabis research that will “enhance understanding of the efficacy and adverse effects of marijuana as a pharmacological agent.” The diseases and conditions that the Center had prioritized for funding and study include—and these should be pretty familiar to longtime MMJ patients—appetite suppression, weight loss and cachexia due to HIV and other conditions; chronic pain, such as neuropathic pain; severe nausea and vomiting due to cancer and its treatment; and severe muscle spasticity, such as caused by multiple sclerosis (this is what Montel Williams has).