Research? Yes please . . . Part 2

There have been no formal clinical studies of cannabis in ALS in the US.

In the September, 1975 edition of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, S.E. Munson and colleagues showed that substances found in cannabis could reduce the size of tumors in animals and kill cancer cells in cell culture. Again, no subsequent clinical trials were carried out.

In 2007, a team of researchers at California Pacific University found that cannabidiol, a compound found in marijuana, could inhibit a gene that promotes the spread of breast cancer cells. Although their 2007 study was conducted in cell cultures, the results were replicated in animals and reported in 2012. As exciting as those findings are, it appears that no clinical studies are being conducted on those results.

And there are many other examples of similarly compelling observations that should have led to a great many formal scientific studies, and would have for any other substance.

Bear in mind that between its introduction to the western world as a medical treatment by Dr. William Brook O’Shaughnessy in 1838 and its banning in the United States in 1937, as many as 1/3 of all prescriptions written in the US included cannabis extracts as one of the major components. And although the American Medical Association opposed the ban, larger financial and business interests, such as the burgeoning chemical and pharmaceutical industries were able to enlist the machinery of government to eliminate a competitor. With the exception of World War II, when around 1 million acres were under cultivation growing hemp for fiber, no cannabis has been grown legally in the United States since 1937–for any purpose.

And the situation hasn’t changed much since then. Despite the mounting evidence, both anecdotal and experimental, that cannabis has significant medical benefits, research on it can’t be easily conducted in the United States.

Conducting clinical trials on marijuana requires the approval of three Federal agencies: the FDA, the DEA, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA. It’s difficult enough to get approval from one agency, let alone three, but in the New York Times article of January 19, 2010 entitled “Researchers Find Medical Study of Marijuana Discouraged”, NIDA spokeswoman Shirley Simson spelled out quite clearly why it is so difficult to get permission from NIDA, saying: “As the National Institute on Drug Abuse, our focus is primarily on the negative consequences of marijuana use. We generally do not fund research focused on the potential beneficial medical effects of marijuana.” Unfortunately for patients everywhere, neither do any of the other traditional government sources of funding for medical research such as the National Institutes of Health.

There is one country that does not have the kind of institutional bias against conducting research on cannabis we have here, and that is Israel.

Research on cannabis has been conducted in Israel since at least 1963, when Prof. Raphael Mechoulam first synthesized cannabidiol, and then in 1964 discovered the structure of THC using confiscated Lebanese hashish provided to his laboratory by the police. Israel has had a national medical cannabis program since the late 1990’s, and is increasingly focused on studying cannabis as a medical treatment. In fact, the Israeli Ministry of Health has expressed an interest in making clinical trials even easier by further reducing administrative hurdles. Israel has many prominent professors and highly skilled researchers and technicians who are interested in studying cannabis and developing sophisticated cannabis-based treatments. And the Ministry of Health has issued a formal invitation to Dr. Alan Shackelford to oversee studies there when he is not seeing patients in Colorado.

The need for such studies is becoming ever more obvious and urgent, as mounting evidence of the benefits of cannabis as a treatment option accumulates.

In our practice at Amarimed of Colorado we have seen patients with ALS benefit from using marijuana. We see patients reduce and even eliminate their narcotic pain medicines with cannabis. We see wounded veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan deal successfully with the pain of their injuries and the PTSD they experience from combat. We see people go back to work and provide for their families.

We think these cases make it obvious that cannabis should immediately be removed from DEA Schedule 1 because they so completely refute the claim that marijuana has no medical benefit. And every day, we see the compelling need for research to more completely understand how cannabis achieves those often miraculous results.

Alan Shackelford, M.D., graduated from the University of Heidelberg School of Medicine and trained at major teaching hospitals of Harvard Medical School in internal medicine, nutritional medicine and hyperalimentation and behavioral medicine. He is principle physician of Intermedical Consulting, LLC, and Amarimed of Colorado, LLC. He can be contacted at amarimed.com.