Health & Cannabis

2006-03-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

Fed’s medpot is schwag, says POT conference organizer

At high noon on April 7th, Patients Out of Time organizer Al Byrne will open a sealed can of U.S. government marijuana, to prove that what they have been sending to patients in their IND* program is mostly schwag—seeds, sticks, stems, etc.

This event, to which the public and the media are cordially invited, will take place on April 6-8 in Santa Barbara, California, at the Fourth National Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics, co-sponsored by the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine and the California Nurses Association—in conjunction with Patients Out of Time.

Byrne was accused by government agencies of “doctoring” photographs showing the poor quality of the federally supplied medicinal marijuana. This time the sealed can will be opened in front of witnesses.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for supplying the drug to seven patients, including Barbara Douglass, Irv Rosenfeld, George McMahon and Elvy Musikka, who will be present at this event, and available for interviews.

So if you want to see egg on the faces of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the two agencies that were questioning the authenticity of Byrne’s photographs, visit the campus of Santa Barbara City College on April 7th. Should be a barrel of laughs!

For further information, please visit the POT website at http://www.medicalcannabis.com/.

* The program under which seven patients are still receiving U.S. government marijuana was started under the Carter administration. It’s called the Compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) program and is administered by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Four of these patients are on the Board of Directors of the Virginia-based advocacy group, Patients Out of Time (POT). A fifth patient, Elvy Musikka, is the national spokesperson of POT. Their personal stories can be accessed through the POT website at www.medicalcannabis.com.

Ethan Russo, MD of Missoula, Montana, intensively examined four of the patients over a 3-day period in 2001, looking closely at every system in their bodies, to determine any effects of prolonged marijuana use.

The Missoula Chronic Use Study, as it is widely known, came to the conclusion that the subjects, after having used cannabis therapeutically for 11 to 27 years, depending on each case, were all in fine condition, considering their original illness and the effects of age.

2006-03-15T00:48:00.000-08:00

THE FIGHT TO RESCHEDULE MARIJUANA

In 1970, the Nixon Administration passed the Controlled Substances Act that classified marijuana as a Schedule One drug.

President Nixon also ordered Mexican cannabis fields to be sprayed with toxic paraquat.

A commission in 1972 called for legalization of marijuana, but this was instantly rejected by the government. The organization.NORML launched a petition to have cannabis reclassified. That petition took 22 years to be reviewed and rejected. The second petition was launched by Jon Gettman and High Times magazine in 1995. This was dismissed on a technicality 7 years later.

The Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis launched a third petition in 2002. The Department of Health and Human Services has to issue a ruling on the petition by 2007.

The Coalition includes the American Alliance for Medical Cannabis; California NORML; the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws; Iowans for Medical Marijuana; Gettman and High Times; as well as Patients Out of Time.

Patients Out of Time (POT) are the Virginia-based organizers of the Fourth National Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics to be held in Santa Barbara, California on April 6-8, 2006. POT represents five IND patients who still receive medical pot from the U.S. government, under a program started during the Carter administration.

Cannabis is lumped with heroin, LSD, ecstasy, and qualuudes as a Schedule One drug, meaning that it "has a high potential for abuse, "has no currently accepted medical use," and exhibits a "lack of accepted safety.under medical supervision."

By comparison, morphine, cocaine, and methamphetamine are Schedule Two, meaning that they have a currently accepted medical use.

If cannabis is rescheduled to at least Schedule Two, its medical uses will be more easily accessible.The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) opposes rescheduling cannabis. DEA officials quote the 1999 report by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) that concluded that "smoked marijuana should generally not be recommended for medical use." The DEA conveniently omits mention of other parts of this IOM report. For instance, the report also says that "the accumulated data indicate a potential therapeutic value for cannabinoid drugs, particularly for symptoms such as pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation." It specifically says that "cannabinoids would be moderately well suited for particular conditions, such as chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and AIDS-wasting."

The IOM had more qualms about the negative effects of smoked marijuana rather than the effects of the drug itself. Even the DEA indirectly admitted that cannabinoids are therapeutic, when they classified Marinol, the synthetic THC drug, as Schedule Three.

Overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the DEA still insists that cannabis is not therapeutic, but POT has been instrumental in getting 13 Nurses Associations, including the prestigious American Nurses Association, to call for rescheduling of medical marijuana.

The oldest and largest health organization in the U.S., the American Public Health Association, followed suit, as did the legislatures of the 11 states that have legalized the use of medical cannabis within their borders.

POT representative Al Byrne says that the government has done a poor job of defending marijuana's Schedule One status, and that he and other rescheduling proponents believe that the case for rescheduling has already been made.

For further details, please visit the POT website, at http://www.medicalcannabis.com/.

2006-03-10T15:35:00.000-08:00

TRUE GRIT AND COURAGE OF IND PATIENTS, “PATIENTS OUT OF TIME”

Barbara Douglass, George McMahon, Corrine Miller, and Irvin Rosenfeld have more than one thing in common. They not only receive legal pot from the U.S. government, but all four of them are on the Board of Directors of the Virginia-based medpot advocacy group, Patients Out of Time.

Their personal stories of courage in the face of suffering are truly inspirational. You can read all about them and Patients Out of Time on the organization’s website, at http://www.medicalcannabis.com/.

A Florida stockbroker, Irv Rosenfeld has smoked over 220 pounds of government-supplied marijuana during the last 23 years. He suffers from chronic pain. The program under which he is allowed medicinal marijuana is called the Compassionate Investigational New Drug (IND) program of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In 1978, Robert Randall filed a lawsuit demanding that the U.S. government acknowledge the medical necessity of cannabis therapy for his glaucoma. The Carter administration subsequently launched the IND program, and Randall was one of the few individuals who were supplied with government-grown marijuana. He smoked it for 23 years, before he died of AIDS-related complications.

George McMahon suffers from a very rare neurological condition, Nail Patella Syndrome (NPS). He was operated on 19 times and has been prescribed countless medications. He was rushed to hospital six times because of the side effects of the harsh drugs he was given. He was so drugged, that he couldn’t function normally, and his stomach refused to accept food, without feeling nausea.

George obtained marijuana illegally for 20 years, before he was admitted to the IND program. Now he can smoke it legally in any one of the fifty states. The beneficial cannabinoids in cannabis help to control the symptoms of his disease, and have enabled him to eat normally once again.

Looking like a banker in his three-piece suit, the 50-year old McMahon describes himself as a “regular family man who has had to make wide adjustments because of the propensity for illness.” His wife, Margaret, credits therapeutic cannabis for his survival. “If he did not receive the marijuana, George would probably be dead by now from all the other narcotics he would be taking for his pain.”

The reason IND patients remain active in the fight to decriminalize medical marijuana, is because they recognize their privileged position. George McMahon’s website refers to Todd McCormick, who received compassionate pot according to the laws of California, but was imprisoned by the federal government, regardless of his status as a cancer survivor with four fused vertebrae.

McCormick worked for Peter McWilliams, who was a New York Times best-selling author. Judge George King ordered both men off their medical marijuana, allegedly causing the death of McWilliams. During the trial, these men were instructed not to talk about medical marijuana and the state guidelines they were following.

The quality of the federally supplied marijuana is so poor, that a number of IND patients have had to supplement their supply from “private sources.” This weed is grown at the University of Mississippi, and is packaged and distributed by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA).

In 2001, Ethan Russo, MD’s Missoula Chronic Cannabis Use Study subjected four IND patients to a rigorous testing of all their bodily systems, and came to the conclusion that prolonged marijuana use had no adverse effects.

The Missoula Study also examined the quality of the federally supplied marijuana, and found that “a close inspection of NIDA supplied cigarettes reveals them to be a crude mixture of leaf with an abundance of stem and seed components.”

The IND patients are also involved in the effort to have Washington reclassify marijuana as a Schedule II or Schedule III drug, instead of the Schedule I classification where it was placed under the Nixon administration in 1970.

The Controlled Substances Act, which was passed that year, put cannabis in the same category as heroin and LSD, claiming that it has no accepted medical uses and has a potential for abuse. By contrast, morphine, cocaine, and metamphetamine are Schedule II, and Marinol is Schedule III, acknowledging their potential medical benefits.

Being reclassified would allow marijuana to be legally prescribed according to federal law, in the eleven states that allow medpot. Among thirteen other such organizations, the Illinois Nurses Association passed a Resolution in 2004 to “support legislation to remove criminal penalties including arrest and imprisonment for bona fide patients and prescribers of therapeutic cannabis.”

The national spokesperson of Patients Out of Time is another IND patient, Elvy Musikka. She suffers from glaucoma, and has made some wrong choices about surgeries. As a result, she is now blind in one eye. She finds that medpot helps ease the pressure in her functioning eyeball. “For 25 years, it has been the most efficient, reliable, and the safest part of my treatment.”

Musikka is passionate about her cause. “Millions of Americans use cannabis daily, thus I suspect that we are the largest minority in the United States. We come from every segment of society and every financial background. We are for the most part, responsible adults who maintain occupations, families, and contribute to our communities. (Still we arrest 700,000 people yearly, for choosing a ‘Wiser Bud.’) We consider hemp/cannabis/marijuana prohibition a blasphemy on the Creator’s work.”

Patients Out of Time is organizing the Fourth National Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics in Santa Barbara, California on April 6-8, 2006. The previous conference held in 2004 in Virginia, was attended by 250 health professionals, caregivers, and patients and featured the world’s finest cannabis researchers.

This year, the topics scheduled to be discussed include the use of cannabis in pain management and palliative care; the current status of cannabis research in Israel, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom; treating MS and AIDS with cannabis; cannabis and mental health; therapeutic cannabis use in pregnancy; and the experiences of patients with medical marijuana.

Accredited by the University of California, San Francisco, hosted by the Santa Barbara City College, and co-sponsored by the California Nurses Association, this high-powered conference will once again challenge the U.S. government claim that cannabis has no medicinal value.

2006-03-08T11:50:00.000-08:00

FOURTH NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CANNABIS THERAPEUTICS

The latest instalment of the only series of nationally-recognized clinical conferences on medical marijuana is taking place in April in Santa, Barbara, California.

The latest conference is organized by the non-profit advocacy group Patients Out of Time; the Fourth National Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics will be held in Santa Barbara, California on April 6-8, 2006.

Accredited by the University of California, San Francisco, hosted by the Santa Barbara City College, and co-sponsored by the California Nurses Association, this professional conference challenges the government’s claim that cannabis has no medicinal value at all.

Many prominent physicians and researchers will head panels and deliver papers. Donald Abrams, MD will greet the participants. He is Professor of Clinical Medicine and Head of the Hematology-Oncology Section, of UCSC, San Francisco General Hospital. He will also deliver a lecture on “Cannabis in Pain and Palliative Care.”

Natalya Kogan, PhD will talk on “The Current Status of Cannabinoid Research in Israel.” Mark Wallace, MD will address the “Efficacy of Smoked Cannabis on Human Experimental Pain.” Daniele Piomelli, PhD, a Professor of Pharmacology and Biological Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, will enlighten participants with “Cannabis: Synthetic vs. Natural.”

The Santa Barbara conference will feature around 30 different sessions over a two-day period. Presenters will talk about treating Multiple Sclerosis, HIV and other conditions using cannabis. They will discuss medicinal cannabis in the UK, Canada, the Netherlands, and Spain, therapeutic cannabis use in pregnancy, cannabis and mental health; there will be patients talking about their experiences with medical marijuana.

Patients Out of Time (http://www.medicalcannabis.com/) was founded by the partnership of a highly regarded Registered Nurse and a retired Naval Officer. Mary Lynn Mathre, RN, MSN, CARN is President of the organization, whose primary purpose is to educate health professionals and the general public with regard to the medical uses of marijuana.

Co-founder and Secretary-Treasurer of Patients Out of Time is Al Byrne, the son of a cancer patient who had used cannabis in 1966 to relieve the negative side-effects of cancer chemotherapy. Byrne served for 24 years as a Naval Officer, and for 5 years as an outreach counsellor in Appalachia for Vietnam vet victims of Agent Orange.

His activism on behalf of medicinal marijuana led him to serve on the Board of Directors (from 1989 to 1994) of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). During some of that time he also became Managing Director and National Secretary of that organization. Mathre also served on the NORML board. Byrne and Mathre left NORML after they suspected financial irregularities that many investigators believed originated from the then-executive director of NORML, who later resigned under a cloud of suspicion and now lives in Canada.

Mathre worked as an addictions consultant for the University of Virginia Health System. As a practicing nurse, she made a presentation to the Virginia Nurses Association in 1994, which resulted in that organization passing a Resolution in support of medical cannabis. They were the first of 13 state nursing associations to do so, thanks to the work of Patients Out of Time.

Mathre and Byrne worked intensively from 1990 to 1995, when they incorporated Patients Out of Time as a Virginia non-profit charity. Since then, their medpot gospel has been heard and heeded by the oldest and largest health organization in the U.S., the American Public Health Association, the American Nurses Association, and the powerful Institute of Medicine.

An award-winning video, “Marijuana as Medicine,” was the first major project undertaken by Patients Out of Time. Patients were portrayed as ordinary folks who were ill and were helped by cannabis in coping with their illness. Although only 18-minutes-long, this video was viewed by thousands of people in 20 different countries.

Then Mathre edited a major work, entitled “Cannabis in Medical Practice: A Legal and Pharmacological Overview of the Therapeutic Use of Marijuana” in 1997. It featured contributions by 17 different experts from such diverse places as Jamaica, the Netherlands, Brazil, and the U.S., and it continues to be referenced.

The First National Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics was held in April, 2000 at the University of Iowa. It was transmitted by satellite to remote sites in the U.S. and Canada. It was the first accredited cannabis educational program to be held in the U.S. since 1860.

The second of these conferences was held in May, 2002 in Portland, Oregon, co-sponsored by the Oregon Department of Human and Health Services, the Oregon Nurses Association, Mothers Against Misuse and Abuse, and the Portland Community College Institute of Health Professionals. Because of the accreditation involved, these conferences had and have to meet the highest academic standards.

The third conference followed the success of the first two. It took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2004, co-sponsored by the Medical, Law, and Nursing Schools of the University of Virginia, the Pain Management Center, and the Virginia Nurses Association. Another sponsor was Advanced Nutrients.

The upcoming Santa Barbara conference has attracted a lot of attention because of the political climate surrounding medical cannabis. As the federal government continues to attack medical cannabis providers and patients in states that have legalized medpot, a growing majority of Americans tell pollsters that they support the medicinal use of marijuana. Patients awaiting legal marijuana in states that don’t allow it are realizing that they are being deprived of valuable medicine.

The Board of Directors of Patients Out of Time includes four of the seven U.S. federal cannabis patients who are legally supplied with medicinal marijuana by the American government by the “Compassionate Investigational New Drug” (IND) program of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which was initiated by President Carter in the 1970’s and closed to new patients by a Republican administration. A fifth patient in this program, Elvy Musikka, suffers from glaucoma, and is the national spokesperson of the organization.

The personal histories of these five patients (2 of the 7 prefer to remain anonymous) will form the basis of our next blog submission. Nurse Mathre works with these individuals and Ethan Russo, MD of Missoula, Montana, intensively examined four of the patients over a 3-day period in 2001, looking closely at every system in their bodies, to determine any effects of prolonged marijuana use.

The Missoula Chronic Use Study, as it is widely known, came to the conclusion that the subjects, after having used cannabis therapeutically for 11 to 27 years, depending on each case, were all in fine condition, considering their original illness and the effects of age.

Byrne and Mathre, along with other medical cannabis experts, believe that federal officials never initiated a long-term study because they knew that such a study would scientifically validate the efficacy of cannabis.

Anyone interested in medical marijuana, health, justice, civil liberties, patient care, medicine, and related issues is encouraged to attend the Santa Barbara POT conference and to contribute funding and other assistance to POT, which is the most statured, ethical and effective medical cannabis lobbying organization in the world.

2006-01-03T21:55:00.000-08:00

MEDICAL MARIJUANA IN AMERICA WINS AGAIN

The New Year began with a belated Christmas present for medical marijuana users in Rhode Island on January 3, when the Rhode Island House of Representatives voted to override a veto of a medical marijuana law passed in 2005 by both houses of the state legislature.

The override of Governor Don Carcieri’s veto means that Rhode Island is the eleventh state to legalize medical marijuana.

The other states that have legalized marijuana for medical use are Alaska, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.

According to John Evans, a Rhode Island cancer patient who wants to grow medical marijuana to ease the discomfort of chemotherapy and cancer pain, the override of the governor’s veto proves that more and more politicians are showing “compassion and sanity” regarding use of the medical herb.

“Upon hearing this great news I am ordering some growing equipment and nutrients from this company where I chat with other patients who grow or use medical marijuana,” he said. “I made three phone calls, wrote letters and visited my legislator’s offices, so I feel like democracy worked pretty well here and now I am going to send thank you letters.”

The House overrode a veto by Gov. Don Carcieri, 59-13, allowing people with illnesses such as cancer and AIDS to grow up to 12 marijuana plants or buy 2.5 ounces of marijuana to relieve their symptoms. Those who do are required to register with the state and get an identification card. The Senate had previously voted to override the veto.

The bill was first passed by the Rhode Island House and Senate in June 2005, but Carcieri vetoed it, claiming that an earlier anti-marijuana ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Raich case would make Rhode Island’s legalization of medical marijuana an unwise law.

Carcieri and other opponents of the law said that the medical marijuana law would encourage Rhode Islanders to break federal marijuana laws and could put them at risk of federal prosecution.

The Raich decision authorized federal agents to continue to prosecute bona fide medpot patients, even in states where medical marijuana is legal. Indeed, the DEA and other federal agents have continued to attack medical cannabis users, growers and providers in states where medical cannabis is legal, most notably in California.

Rhode Island is the first state to legalize medical marijuana since the Raich decision. The timing of the vote, just prior to the start of the state's 2006 legislative session, means that the new law will be able to take effect immediately.

“I'm sure everybody in this room knows at least one person who would have benefited from medical marijuana," Rep. Thomas Slater, who has cancer, told fellow lawmakers before the vote. Slater said he does not use marijuana now, but it could become part of his treatment in the future.

Carcieri’s response to the veto override was to claim that the law doesn’t provide ways for users to buy marijuana legally and leaves Rhode Islanders open to federal prosecution.

"Users will be forced to purchase marijuana in the illegal street market, putting them at risk and complicating the difficult jobs that our law enforcement personnel must do every day," the governor said.

Tom Riley, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in Washington, said the vote showed "misguided and out-of-touch" views on the harms of marijuana.

"There's this notion from the '60s or the '70s that marijuana is a harmless drug," Riley said. "It's not."

Evans, who said he had been forced to procure medical marijuana at $500 an ounce from the black market, said that Riley and Carcieri “have no idea what they are talking about.”

“The fact is, the pharmaceutical drugs and the chemo and the cigarettes that gave me cancer are a lot worse for me than marijuana ever could be,” he said. “I don’t know what the marijuana from the 60’s and 70’s was like, and I don’t care. It’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that I can take a couple of puffs or eat some brownies, and I feel better than when they had me on morphine.”

2005-12-16T19:43:00.000-08:00

MEDICAL MARIJUANA AND DEMOCRACY IN CALIFORNIA

I’m lucky to live in sunny California, the first state to legalize medical marijuana in the United States. That was in 1996. We all were naïve to think that when we passed the law by voting that it meant that we would immediately have the law put into effect. If that had happened then we could grow marijuana for ourselves and have it in our possession and nobody would be able to arrest us as long as. Or at least that was the way it was supposed to work. In reality, it depended on where you lived in California. If you lived in Frisco, medical marijuana was already legal, with Peron’s big medical marijuana club one of the biggest nightclubs in town, although they shut him down soon after he financed Prop. 215, the medical marijuana law. But if you lived in Southern Cal, then you could still get busted for a roach, even if you were dying of cancer. It was a big joke, how they enforced the law differently in different places. You had to hope that you were lucky enough to be sick in the right place, or else you could get arrested by the locals, and of course you could always get arrested by the feds, because they don’t believe that our law is valid.

There’s been a lot of court cases and arrests for medical marijuana, and it always shocks me and my friends. Recently the feds and locals swooped in on medical marijuana clubs in San Diego. You would think that San Diego and the federal government would have bigger things to worry about.

But this week, only a couple of weeks before Christmas, the DEA raided 13 San Diego-area marijuana dispensaries.

As always, the feds have easy answers for why they do what they do. John Fernandes, a DEA spokesperson, said that the medical clubs were “nothing more than a front for distributing marijuana.” Well, yes, that’s what medical pot clinics do, they distribute pot. Some of us believe that Prop. 215 requires the government to provide safe access to marijuana. Some counties and cities have created regulations that authorize medical marijuana clinics. They don’t want old people or sick people to have to buy pot from street dealers. The dispensaries do the buying and weighing and sorting, so sick people can just come in, buy and leave. Apparently, that offends the DEA and some local politicians.

Last month, San Diego County became the first county in California to defy a state-ordered medical marijuana identification card and registry program. The order was contained in 2004 legislation, SB 420, which ordered counties to provide pot ID cards to qualified patients as part of what the state believed was required by Prop. 215 language. The county supervisors, who apparently do not believe in democracy, told the state that they would not comply with the card and registry program, even though the county’s attorneys told them the county would get sued if they failed to comply. And on Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2005, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors defied the Senate bill at the same time they voted to seek to overturn Prop. 215 using a court challenge that could invalidate it statewide!

County Counsel John Sansone said his office expects to file a federal lawsuit against Prop. 215 in 2006. The lawsuit, Sansone said, will argue that the Controlled Substances Act, the law passed by Congress in 1970 that classified marijuana as a Schedule I drug in the same category as heroin, supercedes any state law that legalizes marijuana for medical use. The US Supreme Court has already ruled that federal prohibition trumps California law.

“The question is whether or not Prop. 215 is written in such a way that it conflicts with federal law,” Sansone said. “Our argument is going to be that we believe they conflict to the point of crossing the line.”

Sansone said he advised the supervisors on the pros and cons of filing such a lawsuit but wouldn’t comment further, citing attorney-client privilege. He said that from the beginning, when the supervisors were only going to challenge SB 420, he’d told them it would be an “uphill battle.”

“But we’ve had difficult uphill battles before and won them, and some we’ve lost,” Sansone said, adding that his own staff would handle the case. “Taxpayers aren’t going to pay any more or any less for the attorney staff time.”

Maybe not, but taxpayer money will be used to help the feds squash a state law that the taxpayers voted for, and will divert resources away from other cases that Sansone’s office could be prosecuting.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has supported Prop. 215 in the past, arguing that “States are in, by far, the best position to determine whether and under what circumstances the use of cannabis by seriously ill patients should be permitted.”

Dale Gieringer, who heads California NORML (National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws), said that a previous attorney general who opposed 215, Dan Lungren, consulted with federal officials and ultimately decided not to challenge the law. “Lungren declared that 215 was constitutional, since states have a right to decide which laws to enforce,” Gieringer said. He added that a subsequent challenge targeting doctors who recommended marijuana to patients (Conant v. Walters) was struck down in federal court in 2002. In 2003, Angel Raich and Diane Monson sued the federal government to block DEA agents from seizing marijuana from qualified patients. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the federal government’s right to do so, but Raich attorney Randy Barnett said that the ruling in no way affected California’s medical-marijuana laws.

California legal expert Glenn Smith told the media that the feds cannot challenge 215- it has to be done from within the state. Looks like the feds can thank San Diego politicians for doing the fed's work for them.

“The federal government can’t bring a lawsuit to stop an unconstitutional state law. It has to be somebody who is affected by that law and injured by it,” he said.

Smith said the challenge to 215 can’t be about whether 215 is legal according to federal law. The county supervisors will have to prove someone is negatively affected by the law. The supervisors might argue that SB 420’s requirement of participation in a registry and card program could negatively affect the county because “they’re being required to spend money by this state law in a way that is a waste to taxpayers’ money.”

Of course, one might instead argue that challenging a voter-approved law is a waste of tax money. One might argue that helping sick people avoid the use of harmful pharmaceutical drugs by using safe medical cannabis is a way of SAVING tax money. But don't try those arguments on Republican County Supervisor Bill Horn, easily the most vocal critic of medical marijuana, who says that any county support for Prop. 215 or SB 420 would send the wrong message, especially to kids. He compares his opposition to medical-marijuana laws as being similar to Rosa Parks’ stand against segregation laws, which makes no sense at all. Rosa Parks stood up against racism. Prop. 215 stands up against federal prohibition and for state's rights. There is no realistic analogy between Rosa Parks and anti-marijuana politicians like Republican Horn. In June, a county grand jury criticized supervisors for failing to implement SB 420, saying the board had been “blinded by its prejudices against medical marijuana.”

The December raids against medpot clinics was carried out by federal agents and San Diego police. Assistant Police Chief Cheryl Meyers said that the raids were not the federal government’s idea.

“We were convinced that the evidence was there” that the 13 locations raided were acting outside the boundaries of Prop. 215 and the city’s medical-marijuana guidelines, Meyers alleged. She said state and city laws do not allow for “caregivers,” which is what the dispensaries are supposed to be, to make a profit.

“They’re jacking up the prices so steep that they’re making a profit off of illness, and they were very loose in who they sold the marijuana to.” She added that in most cases, the dispensaries had more pot on hand than city law allows. The guidelines allow caregivers to have two pounds of pot and 48 plants. Most dispensaries had more that that, she said. One had psychedelic mushrooms; several had hashish. My reaction is, so what, who cares? Big deal. This is what warrants a federal raid??

Meyers said that the dispensaries were magnets for guns, greed and violent crime. Even local pot activists said that too many fast-buck dealers had moved in to the San Diego medpot club scene to sell pot for high prices.

During the raids, police officers allegedly found a man in a Loma Portal dispensary parking lot who had two pounds of pot, $2,600 in cash and a firearm on him, and another guy coming into a Kearny Mesa dispensary with two pounds of pot who said he’d picked the stuff up in Palm Springs and had heard he could unload it at the dispensary for $3,000 and an $800 profit. Police say that pot clubs draw people who want to rob them. Whoa. Big deal. Bars and 7-11’s are magnets for robbers and gun crime a lot more than pot clubs are. Instead of busting the medical dispensaries, the police should guard them!! If you want to shut down businesses that are magnets for crime, shut down the bars, the whorehouses, the crack houses and the convenience stores. And banks too, there are often robberies at banks, so they ought to be shut down so that the public isn't endangered by robbers.

Authorities began investigating San Diego's dispensaries six months ago, prompted by complaints from neighbors. Instead of providing marijuana to seriously ill patients as voters had intended, dispensaries allegedly sold marijuana to healthy young adults, police alleged, and there have also been armed robberies of clinics.

"The message here is to essentially notify the community through our actions that these dispensaries posed a severe public hazard," said the DEA’s Fernandes.

But how severe a public hazard do they pose? I used to go swimming off San Diego, until the ocean filled up with defecation from LA and Tijuana. I got tired of swimming with Mr. Turdman and Mr. Floaty, but nobody enforces the pollution laws. And there’s a bunch of gangs operating in the San Diego metro area and they will steal your car and cd’s and break into your house. There’s a bunch of illegal people coming across the border every night and sometimes they break into your house because they are hungry. I guess those situations are potential public hazards but the DEA and police are more interested in protecting us from pot-smoking paraplegics and the people who provide herb to them.

And isn’t it a severe public hazard to those who need medical marijuana, people dying of cancer, HIV and other diseases, who now have to go without their marijuana or try to score it on the street, because the DEA and the San Diego cops have shut down the pot clubs? Seems like that’s a pretty big hazard. Medical marijuana helps people, you can see that from the http://www.advancednutrientsmedical.ca/ website, where there are articles about medical marijuana. It's some website that sells Advanced Nutrients hydroponic plant food for people with hydroponics gardens, which is used by medical growers so they can get really kickass medicine out of their gardens.

It's a bit puzzling that the city council of San Diego has nothing better to do with their time except try to overturn the will of the voters of California, by challenging Prop. 215, what’s up with that? Seems to me like those politicians need to find a better job, maybe caring for sick and dying people, so they learn compassion. Why do some people in America seem so intent on harming others? Why do people with power use it to harm innocent and harmless people?

2005-12-09T14:02:00.000-08:00

VIOXX, THE GOVERNMENT, AND "BAD" DRUGS

By Ralph Erinbo

Courtesy of the Advance Nutrients hydroponic plant food website, www.advancednutrientsmedical.ca.

I read about Vioxx the drug and its maker, Merck, and how the drug hurt people and how the government that is so dedicated to protecting us from drugs, didn’t protect us.

I read about it on the http://www.advancednutrientsmedical.ca/ website before, about how the government agency called the Food and Drug Administration that is supposed to screen drugs before they are sold to the public, well the FDA is not screening them and is in bed with the companies that make the drugs. Now I see new reports about Vioxx and how the government helped Merck cover up the harms.

It makes me pissed off. I am into marijuana, and they won’t let us grow that, but they will let Merck sell us a pill that causes heart attacks, apparently, and they also have business connections with the very same people they are supposed to regulate.

Vioxx is a pain killer and anti-inflammatory; so is marijuana, which works a lot better and doesn’t cause heart attacks. So guess which one is legal? The fatal one, of course. Makes perfect sense to me.

Now I just read that the New England Journal of Medicine has said that Merck concealed heart attacks suffered by three patients during a clinical study of the now-withdrawn painkiller; the alleged concealment tainted a report on the Vioxx study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2000.

The Journal’s editor in chief, Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, executive editor Dr. Gregory D. Curfman and a third doctor alleges that the study’s authors deleted other relevant data before submitting their article to the Journal for publication.

“Taken together, these inaccuracies and deletions call into question the integrity of the data on adverse cardiovascular events in this article,” the Journal's editorial leadership wrote.

Adverse cardiovascular events attributed to Vioxx include heart attacks, strokes and deaths, the Journal said.

Findings of the year 2000 study were key parts of testimony in the three product liability trials to date over the withdrawn drug, including one being deliberated by a federal jury in Texas.

The exclusion of the three heart attacks “made certain calculations and conclusions in the article incorrect,” the doctors wrote in the Journal, adding that they have asked the report’s authors to submit a corrected article.

The Journal, in its statement labeled "Expression of Concern," said it had made the discovery of the alleged deletions as part of preparations for the recent deposition of the executive editor of the Journal in connection with Vioxx-related litigation.

The Journal said Merck had submitted its manuscript both on paper and on a computer diskette, but that the Journal’s pre-publication review and editing of the story were done only on the printed version of the manuscript.

The Journal said it did not review the diskette until October 5, 2004, several days after Vioxx was pulled from the market after other research showed the popular arthritis drug doubled risks of heart attacks and stroke with long-term use.

"In reviewing the diskette, we learned that data on cardiovascular events had been deleted from the manuscript before it was submitted," the Journal said.

This is outrageous. It looks to me like Merck deliberate hid negative data, just to protect profits. But who would ever suspect a drug company of doing something like that?

One of the study’s authors was Dr. Alise Reicin, Merck’s vice president for clinical research. Reicin testified in court that Merck never misled doctors and the public about studies linking heart attacks to Vioxx, but what do you expect him to say when his company faces at least 7,000 lawsuits over Vioxx and legal liability some analysts have estimated at up to $50 billion. Those problems were part of the reason Merck last week announced plans to cut 7,000 jobs and close eight manufacturing and research facilities around the world as the first step in a sweeping reorganization.

A former Merck scientist testified today that he initially concluded an internal study of Vioxx linked the drug to an increase in heart attacks and strokes less than a year after it was approved for sale.

In a videotaped deposition shown to a Houston jury, Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, the former president of Merck Research Labs until 2002, acknowledged writing a company e-mail in which he noted that the cardiovascular links to Vioxx were "clearly there." What a surprise that he testified that he changed his mind about Vioxx only a few days later, suddenly to believe that Vioxx doesn’t cause health problems. Still, the cardiovascular issue continued to bother him even after Merck's marketing department put out a press release claiming that Vioxx was totally safe, Scolnick said.

"I will tell you that my worry quotient is high," he wrote in an e-mail to the Vioxx project team. "I am actually in minor agony."

Vioxx, a profitable painkiller, was approved in 1999 after the FDA deemed it safe and effective. In September 2004, after repeated rumors of Vioxx-caused health problems, Merck pulled it from the market after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and strokes in patients who took it for 18 months or longer.

Merck is facing 7,000 lawsuits by former Vioxx users or their families. In August, 2005, a Brazoria County jury awarded the widow of a former marathon runner who died of a heart attack after taking the drug $253 million.

In a federal trial in Houston taking place in December, 2005 as this blog is being written, the jury has to decide if Vioxx contributed to the blood clot and death of 53-year-old Richard "Dicky" Irvin, a Florida seafood salesman and former college football player.

Also today, Scolnick acknowledged in his deposition that he called federal regulators "bastards" in an internal e-mail because they were considering adding a warning label to Vioxx following the VIGOR study's release.

Scolnick said he strongly disagreed with the FDA’s insistence that the label should be added to Vioxx.

"Be assured, we will not accept this label," Scolnick said in an e-mail to other Merck officials in October 2001.

Of regulators asking for additional safety information, he said, "They are bastards." Later he called them "devious."

Scolnick also testified that at the time Merck was developing Vioxx, patents were running out on two of the company's largest revenue-producing medicines. Asked if that put pressure on Merck to come up with a big drug to fill the void, Scolnick said, "Vioxx was going to fill the void."

Also, Monday, Irvin's widow Evelyn Irvin Plunkett testified that her husband of 30 years was a healthy, hard-working man who rarely got sick and took Vioxx for a back strain he got from lifting a box of shrimp.

She said she was stunned when she received a call from her husband's boss on the morning of May 15, 2001 telling her that Irvin had suffered a heart attack and had been rushed to the hospital.

Shortly after arriving there, she said, a doctor talked to her and two of her four children in the waiting room.

"She said 'We worked on your husband for over an hour and we couldn't save him,'" said Plunkett, who has since remarried.

"It was like my whole life went up in the air," she said.

The Vioxx problems involving the goverment's unwillingness to regulate pharma drugs are the tip of the iceberg. The FDA’s own drug safety offices said to Congress that, “The FDA as currently configured is incapable of protecting America against another Vioxx. We are virtually defenseless."

Several scientists testifying before the Senate in November, 2005 provided substantial evidence that the drug company Merck and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew of safety problems years before the drug Vioxx was withdrawn from the market.

Vioxx, which was used to treat arthritis and severe pain, was withdrawn by Merck on September 30, 2005 after evidence emerged that it greatly increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Some 80 million prescriptions of the drug have been filled around the world, most of them in the US, since it was approved in May 1999.

Damning testimony was given by Dr. David Graham, the associate director for science and medicine at the FDA’s own Office of Drug Safety. The ODS, responsible for monitoring the safety of drugs already on the market, is part of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), which also includes the Office of New Drugs (OND), responsible for approving new drugs for the market. Graham said he came into repeated conflict with the OND as he sought to raise concerns about the safety of Vioxx.

The OND is one of the branches of the FDA that is most closely tied to the giant drug companies it is responsible for regulating. Since 1992, the office gets much of its funding directly from drug companies, in the form of new drug application fees of more than $500,000 per application. Most of this money goes toward speeding up the approval of new drugs. It is a recipe for disaster, as the Vioxx case has proven.

Graham said that the OND has a higher position in the FDA hierarchy than the ODS, and is reluctant to issue stricter regulations for drugs already on the market or order mandatory withdrawals of unsafe drugs that the office has approved. In the case of Vioxx, the drug was pulled from the market only after its producer, Merck, decided that the evidence of harmful consequences was overwhelming. It was not withdrawn as a result of any regulatory action by the FDA!

A study led by Graham that was concluded in the summer of 2004 found that Vioxx was responsible for an estimated 38,000 excess heart attacks and sudden cardiac deaths. In his testimony, Graham said this was a conservative estimate. He said that “a more realistic and likely range of estimates for the number of excess cases in the US” was between 88,000 and 139,000. “Of these,” he added, “30-40 percent probably died. For the survivors, their lives were changed forever.”

To dramatize the number of people affected, Graham noted that “this range of 88,000 to 138,000 would be the rough equivalent of 500 to 900 aircraft dropping from the sky. This translates to 2-4 aircraft every week, week in and week out, for the past five years.”

Graham testified that as his team concluded its study and prepared to present its results, it was attacked by the Office of New Drugs and other sections of the FDA. “I was pressured to change my conclusions and recommendations, and basically threatened that if I did not change them, I would not be permitted to present” the paper reporting his study’s conclusions. “An email from the director for the entire Office of New Drugs was revealing. He suggested that since FDA was ‘not contemplating’ a warning against the use of high-dose Vioxx, my conclusions should be changed.”

Up to a week before the drug was pulled from the market by Merck, FDA management, according to Graham, was attempting to undermine Graham’s conclusions.

Graham said, “[W]e are virtually defenseless” against another catastrophe on the scale of Vioxx. “The organization structure within CDER is entirely geared towards the review and approval of new drugs. When a CDER new drug reviewing division approves a new drug, it is also saying the drug is ‘safe and effective.’ When a serious safety issue arises post-marketing, their immediate reaction is almost always one of denial, rejection and attack. At the same time, the Office of Drug Safety has no regulatory power and must first convince the new drug reviewing division that a problem exists before anything beneficial to the public can be done.”

The prevailing sentiment at the FDA, said Graham, is one that views “the pharmaceutical industry it is supposed to regulate as its client, over-values the benefits of the dugs it approves, and seriously under-values, disregards and disrespects drug safety.” When it comes to drug safety, he said, the operating principle is that the drug is safe unless it is proven to be unsafe beyond a shadow of a doubt. New drugs, including Vioxx, are pushed through the approval phase in a matter of months, before sufficient tests are done to ensure their safety. Independent clinical testing is rarely carried out by the FDA, and indications of safety problems are ignored or deliberately undermined.

Later, Graham pointed to five drugs currently on the market that he felt were potentially dangerous: Acutane, which is used to treat acne; Bextra, a painkiller; Crestor, used to lower cholesterol; Meridia, used to treat weight loss; and Serevent, used to treat asthma. All of these can cause dangerous side effects and have not been adequately tested for their safety, Graham asserted.

Others providing testimony included Gurkirpal Singh, from the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Bruce Psaty, co-director of the Cardiovascular Health Research Unit at the University of Washington. The two scientists reviewed some of the history of the testing of Vioxx and concluded that, even with the limited data available, the drug should have been pulled from the market long before it was withdrawn.

Singh noted that there was evidence of serious heart problems associated with Vioxx before it was approved in 1999. “In 1998, Dr. Doug Watson, a Merck scientist, presented an analysis of serious heart problems with Vioxx compared to patients enrolled in studies of other Merck drugs. This analysis concluded that men taking Vioxx had a 28 percent greater risk (not statistically significant), but in women, the risk was more than double (216 percent, statistically significant) compared to people not taking any drug in other Merck studies. To the best of my knowledge, these data were never made public.”

Merck has continually asserted that at the time of Vioxx’s approval, no evidence existed indicating that the drug caused additional heart attacks. The main study carried out by Merck, known as VIGOR, showed a fivefold increase in serious heart conditions relative to another drug, naproxen (the generic form of Aleve). Merck explained these results as a consequence of naproxen’s beneficial effects, rather than Vioxx’s harmful ones. However, in 1999 a scientist at the FDA remarked that “thromboembolic events [such as heart attack and stroke] are more frequent in patients receiving Vioxx than placebo.” Singh noted, “This meant that not only did Vioxx not [have the benefits of naproxen], but for some reason, it was likely to promote heart attacks directly.”

The evidence was still limited, Singh said. “There were not adequate data to make a firm conclusion one way or another. In fact, the FDA reviewer went on to point out that ‘[w]ith the available data, it is impossible to answer with complete certainty whether the risk of cardiovascular and thromboembolic events is increased in patients on rofecoxib [Vioxx]. A large database will be needed to answer this and other safety comparison questions.’ ”

Instead of carrying out a larger study, the FDA quickly approved the drug for use. This was in spite of the fact that the drug's availability did not meet an urgent medical necessity- there were already drugs on the market that performed the same function as Vioxx, which is suppoed to relieve inflammation without causing stomach problems. It is interesting to note that medical marijuana relieves inflammation and stomach problems, and is not fatal.

The FDA did not even require a caution on the drug’s label about the increased risk of hear attacks until April 2002.

Nor did Merck attempt a larger study. The New York Times reported on November 14 that such a study was contemplated in May 2000, but management rejected the idea. According to the Times, a slide prepared for an executives’ meeting stated, “At present, there is no compelling marketing need for such a study.... The implied message is not favorable.”

In their defense, Sandra Kweder, the deputy director of the Office of New Drugs, and Raymond Gilmartin, chairman and CEO of Merck, simply repeated the claim that everything was done to determine the safety of Vioxx as quickly as possible, and that the drug was immediately withdrawn as soon as safety problems became evident.

What is even more astounding than the lies told by Merck is that marijuana does all the same things that Vioxx does and does not cause heart attacks. That’s why the war on drugs is stupid.

When a scientist tries to fight the pharmaceutical industry, he or she often gets stomped. According to the Chicago Tribune, FDA officials tried to silence an independent scientist whose unique research project for detecting rare adverse drug reactions has uncovered potentially fatal side effects of 17 currently marketed drugs.

Dr. Charles Bennett, a Northwestern University researcher, developed a proactive method for detecting adverse drug effects by examining adverse drug reports submitted to FDA’s database and reports from reports by pharmaceutical companies and independent groups of researchers throughout the US and Canada. The project is called the Research on Adverse Drug Events and Reports (RADAR).

For example, Dr. Bennett discovered that the widely used anti-clotting drug, Plavix, can cause “a catastrophic collapse of the blood system.” He urged the FDA to issue Black Box warnings, but the FDA refused, but did add a less prominent warning.

Dr. Bennett published a paper in the journal Stroke (February) in which he compared the effectiveness of various systems for detecting adverse drug effects. The FDA system ranked at the very bottom:

“The study assessed how the FDA, Plavix's manufacturer and RADAR pursued adverse drug reports, documented the side effects and assessed patient outcomes over a four-year period. Basically it was a report card, and RADAR scored 92 to 100 percent; drug companies, 8 to 58 percent; and the FDA, 0 to 23 percent.”

The Tribune reports that The FDA retaliated against Dr. Bennett for publishing the results by cutting off his access to FDA’s post marketing surveillance database—as if the agency were a private contractor. FDA's Christine M. Bechtel wrote:

"While we have valued our relationship with you in the past, the thousands of requests we receive annually make it impractical and unfair to afford you and your group’s special status."

This kind of bureaucratic cover-up, and the constant attempts by the drug industry and government lackeys to fool us, are crimes.

While the government spends billions of dollars a year to protect us from a plant drug that we want to use, it protects companies that market deadly prescription drugs.

What has happened to the concept of morality? It sure seems to be a concept forgotten by the FDA and the drug companies.

2005-12-06T18:26:00.000-08:00

CANNABIS HELPS PEOPLE WITH ARTHRITIS AND OTHER MEDICAL PROBLEMS, BUT…

As I read the Advanced Nutrients hydroponic plant food website I see a very honest series of articles talking about the medical effects of cannabis.

When I say honest I mean that instead of a one-sided approach that either lies in favor of cannabis or lies to make a case against it, the articles contain a refreshing sense of candor and balance that shows me a lot of credibility and an intelligent approach to this very controversial and confusing topic.

Other than news from the United States about cannabis, which is usually all bad because the United States government and its social-medical establishment is very much against cannabis, there is interesting news about cannabis from around the world.

From Australia comes a study that says that four out of five people who were studied who were suffering from severe schizophrenia were pot smokers when they were young.

Some people would read this study and conclude that cannabis is a causal factor in development of schizophrenia. Other studies, conducted in the UK, Australia, Denmark, Sweden and Holland, also could indicate mild evidence of a causal link between cannabis and mental disorders.

A causal link means that the use of cannabis partially or wholly causes a disease or condition, not just that somebody who uses cannabis also happens to suffer from a disease or condition.

Perhaps the most famous “causal link” that has ever been asserted is the “gateway theory” which asserts that cannabis causes people to want to use other illegal drugs. The drug warriors would often say, “Almost everybody we’ve met who uses heroin tells us that the first illegal drug they ever used is cannabis. Therefore, there’s a link between cannabis and heroin use.”

Cannabis advocates have offered a humorous rebuttal to this assertion, stating that people who use heroin drank milk when they were young, but that doesn’t prove that milk causes heroin use!

It is the same situation with the alleged causal relationship between pot and mental illness. Somebody smokes pot when they are young and has schizophrenia later, so somebody proposes that the pot caused the schizophrenia. There is no real way to prove it. Statistics do lie, and it may well be that people smoke pot because they have mental problems anyway, rather than that the people were totally mentally healthy and then smoked pot and suddenly they went bonkers!

Nevertheless, if we are to be honest about cannabis, we must acknowledge research that indicates that when young people with mental illness risk factors use cannabis, it can destabilize them and lead to mental illness.

A Danish study in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that almost half of patients treated for a cannabis-related mental disorder go on to develop a schizophrenic illness. People who had used cannabis developed schizophrenia earlier than those with the illness who had not smoked marijuana.

Unlike drug warriors who will spin the study to back up the reefer madness/causal effect hypothesis, the Danish researchers emphasized that the study did not show that cannabis caused psychosis, because factors such as heredity, other drug use and socio-economic status had not been taken into account, and these factors are known to influence whether a person develops mental problems. However, an American study using sophisticated imaging techniques found abnormalities in the brains of adolescents with schizophrenia that are similar to those found in adolescents who use cannabis on a daily basis, but those who do not use cannabis daily had no such abnormalities.

"These findings suggest that, in addition to interfering with normal brain development, heavy marijuana use in adolescents may also lead to an earlier onset of schizophrenia in individuals who are genetically predisposed to the disorder," says Dr Sanjiv Kumra, assistant professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, who worked on the study.

According to Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, one person in four has the genes that make them susceptible to developing cannabis-induced psychosis.

The cause and effect relationship in how cannabis benefits people is a bit easier to explore and predict than whether it causes mental illness. For example, when GW Pharmaceuticals in England gave organic cannabis extracts to hundreds of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, and most of those patients reported beneficial effects; when those effects were also observed and proven by clinical observation and study, then it is possible to legitimately say that cannabis is causing specific effects. In this case, the effects are beneficial.

Last month, the UK Government announced that GW’s Sativex, an oral extract spray derived from cannabis that is licensed in Canada but not yet in the UK, could be prescribed on a "named patient" basis for pain relief in patients with MS.

GW announces that it has been informed by the Home Office that the Drugs Minister, Paul Goggins, has confirmed that Sativex® oromucosal spray, its cannabis-based medicine, may be imported from Canada to satisfy its prescription to individual patients in the UK as an unlicensed medicine. This development is in response to enquiries from a number of UK doctors and individual patients who have been in contact with the Home Office to request access to Sativex.

In accordance with the Medicines Act, a medicine which has yet to be licensed in the UK may be prescribed and supplied in response to an unsolicited request to fulfill the special needs of an individual patient under a physician’s direct personal responsibility. The basis on which Sativex may be imported, therefore, is the clinical judgment of doctors in relation to specific nominated patients.

This development follows the approval of Sativex by Health Canada in April 2005. The medicine has been available on prescription in Canada since late June, 2005.

More recently, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has issued to GW a Wholesale Dealer’s (Importation from non-EU countries) License, and has not objected to the importation of Sativex under the regulations for importation of medicines unlicensed in the UK.

Sativex will remain a Schedule 1 controlled drug in the UK in line with stated government policy. This means that the prescribing of Sativex can only be permitted under Home Office license. The Home Office will therefore be developing a licensing regime to fit these circumstances. GW expects to discuss the implementation practicalities with the Home Office over the coming weeks.

Clearance for supply on an unlicensed basis does not affect GW’s plans to seek full regulatory approval from the MHRA for Sativex in the UK; the company has been trying to get full regulatoy approval for three years. GW is currently conducting many Phase III trials and is still planning to submit an application for Marketing Authorization to the MHRA during 2006. Only after such an approval is granted can the product be promoted in the UK. Many people are disappointed at the slowness of the MHRA, noting that Canada has already approved Sativex.

Sativex, which is the only medicine in the world derived directly from organically-grown cannabis plants, works by influencing the way pain messages are transmitted through the body.

"It's not that patients get high and stop caring about their pain," asserts Mark Rogerson, spokesman for GW Pharmaceuticals. "A person taking a normal dose will receive only a fraction of the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) - the active ingredient in cannabis that causes a high - of a recreational user."

A recent study published in the journal Neurology showed that Sativex was significantly better than a placebo at reducing pain and sleep disturbances in MS patients.

Other new research shows that Sativex relieves pain and slows the progression of rheumatoid arthritis for patients who suffer from that disease.

Researchers from the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases, in Bath, England, say significant pain-relieving effects were observed and disease activity was significantly suppressed following Sativex treatment.

They say that while the differences are small and variable across the population, they represent benefits of clinical relevance and show the need for more detailed investigation.

Of the 56 patients in the five-week randomized study, 31 were given Sativex daily by fixed delivery oromucosal spray and 27 received placebo.

Each spray of Sativex delivers Tetrahydrocannabinol (2.7mg) and cannabidiol (2.5mg). The balancing of THC and CBD are crucial to the success of Sativex, according to GW scientists, who say that one of their main goals is to achieve medical benefits without getting people stoned. If THC was used solo, or if a person smokes a joint of whole cannabis, they are likely to get dosed with “too much” THC, which causes cannabis “intoxication.”

GW’s goal is to create medicine that has medical effects but no psychological effects. It doesn’t want to be accused of “getting people high,” because the euphoric and mind-altering effects of cannabis are seen as negative side-effects by people who only want relief from diseases or disease symptoms. While many of us who enjoy cannabis for recreation and medical use might think that people who don’t want to get high are weird, we must be open-minded enough to realize that some people want to stay “sober.” They don’t want a drug affecting the way they think, feel and perceive. For them, GW’s cannabis extracts are an ideal way to get medical effects without getting high.

In the rheumatoid arthritis study, the patients were tested for how cannabis affected their movement ability, as well as their stiffness in the morning, and their ability to sleep. GW’s extracts produced statistically significant improvements in pain of movement, pain at rest, quality of sleep, and disease activity. Better yet, GW’s Sativex appears to be safer and more effective than the prescription drugs it competes with. This is the case with most situations wherein cannabis competes with pharmaceuticals.

The GW arthritis study found that most Sativex “side effects” were mild or moderate and the treatment group showed no serious adverse effects or withdrawals due to side effects. Three patients (11 percent) withdrew from the placebo group after experiencing adverse events such as mild dizziness, light-headedness, and dry mouth.

In light of the “evidence” that cannabis might influence the onset of mental illness, a GW spokesperson felt the need to offer his company’s view of whether Sativex could cause mental problems.

According to Mark Rogerson of GW Pharmaceuticals: "We have found no evidence that Sativex causes psychosis. Such side effects as there are - and no drug is without them - are generally mild, reversible and well tolerated. There may be a temporary intoxication-like reaction, and, for this reason, we have always excluded people with serious mental illness from our trials."

Rogerson also noted that there’s plenty of momentum for Sativex to be used worldwide. GW is set to supply Sativex to the Health department of the Catalonia Government in Spain. Sativex will be used to treat 600 patients suffering from multiple sclerosis and other conditions under a compassionate access program.

The contract will mark the first time that patients in Europe have had access to Sativex outside a clinical trial.

Dr Geoffrey Guy, executive chairman of GW, said: “This initiative represents a pragmatic and compassionate approach for seriously ill patients with little alternative therapy. At the same time, it will provide a useful additional source of revenue for GW as we continue to invest in developing Sativex to bring it to the UK and other international markets through regulatory approval processes.”

Guy has his money goals, and patients want relief. Some people want the freedom to grow their own medicine; others want to use cannabis derivatives without getting high. What all of us need to focus on is that cannabis contains many compounds that are miraculously helpful.

Cannabis is a gift from the God of Nature. Whole smoked cannabis, orally ingested cannabis extracts and foods, and topically applied cannabis ointments grown with quality plant foods have all helped hundreds of thousands of people.

Despite all the divisive rhetoric, the fact is that when cannabis is intelligently used, it’s fantastic medicine!

2005-11-22T21:25:00.000-08:00

EFFECTS OF CANNABIS AND OTHER SUBSTANCES ON MY PERSONAL HEALTH

By Tom Bachman

Courtesy of Advanced Nutrients hydroponic plant food company, www.advancednutrientsmedical.ca

Copyright, 2005

It is interesting to read about the medical uses of cannabis. I have mostly used it recreationally, but I don’t know if there is all that much of a difference between recreational use and medical use, at least not for me.

My belief is that people use drugs so they can feel better. Maybe one definition of medicine is “something that makes you feel better.” By that definition, maybe all of us who use marijuana are using it medically, even if we don’t feel sick. Maybe all use of marijuana is a medical use. We're trying to medicate from the harshness of life sometimes, I guess.

I can compare the use of marijuana with the use of other drugs as it relates to my health. For example when I use alcohol, which I don’t do very often, I usually have predictable effects that include getting dizzy, talking loudly, feeling uncoordinated, and getting a headache. I guess I don’t tolerate alcohol very well, which is probably a good thing, because a lot of people I know who are able to tolerate it more than I can have a problem of becoming an alcoholic who cannot get through the day without a drink. I have known at least two people who were normal people but then they started drinking alcohol on a regular basis and they later on ended up on the street and homeless.

I also can compare the use of marijuana with the use of cigarettes. I tried smoking cigarettes when I was in junior high school and it was a major achievement just to get a puff of the stuff down my throat. I was trying to smoke cigarettes because I thought it was a hip thing to do. There was a lot of advertising of cigarettes at sporting events and in other places. When I look back on it, I realize that the idea of sucking on a burning tobacco cigarette is anything but cool. Smoking a marijuana cigarette is a totally different type of smoking, for several reasons, although I am sure that smoking a joint does transmit heat and carcinogens, it also transmits lots of other substances that are not contained in cigarettes and which have medical properties and which taste better than tobacco cigarettes. Also, I usually only have a puff or two off a joint; I rarely smoke an entire joint by myself. Lately, I have been smoking mostly from a glass pipe, so that I am not smoking any joint paper at all.

Before I got off on this tangent I was telling you that I tried cigarettes and felt sick to my stomach when I inhaled them. It was an ugly feeling that left me woozy and my mouth and hands smelling like crap. I am very glad that I never developed a liking for cigarettes, because it is obvious to me what a shitty habit they are. I mean- exactly what good do they do for anyone? They don’t get you high or provide a medical benefit. They are really a very strange product: you smoke them, you don’t get anything from them, then they addict you, and you have to keep smoking them so that you will not feel the ugly withdrawal effects that are related to being addicted to them. So they are like a medicine in that one way, in that they keep you from feeling the bad effects that you will experience when you try to quit using them. But what kind of “medicine” is that? It seems to me like a cruel hoax to sell people a product that is designed to addict them, so that they have to continue using the product or else they will get sick trying to give the product up. It is really a sinister and devious plot, don’t you think, to hook people on a product so that they suffer a lot of pain when they want to stop. It reminds me of the old government anti-marijuana advertising, which featured a shady-looking character lurking in the corner of a schoolyard cleverly luring little children into trying an “evil marijuana cigarette,” thereby to hook them and create more and more customers. It is unclear to me, but probably true, that few people in the marijuana world actually would try to “hook” kids on pot to create customers. Most people that I know who sell good pot, well, they don’t have to seek for customers, because they have so many customers coming to them, that they can’t keep up!

You know what, I also didn't like it that when I kissed a girl she told me that my mouth tasted like an ashtray!

The other substances that are probably relevant to this rambling blog discussion are things like over the counter medicines and prescription medicines. I have used them over the years for things like coughs, allergies, headaches, injuries. Without fail, these things have made me feel worse instead of better. They may even do what they are supposed to do, such as suppress a cough, or get rid of a headache, but there are other effects that come along with that relief, and those effects created their own problems that made it to me not worth it to have used the product in the first place. It’s not like I wanted to keep coughing or having a headache, but the stuff I took made me sleepy along with getting rid of my cough or headache, so it was a trade-off, and in most cases the trade-off wasn’t really worth it.

One thing I just thought of as another drug that people take is caffeine. Like, I can really feel it even when I drink a cup of coffee. It makes me so hyper, and it makes me have stomach acid. I see other people drinking gallons of coffee and I am like, wow, how can they do that? I also know that they are dependent on their coffee and that for some of them it’s almost like cigarettes; if they try to quit coffee they get really depressed, irritable and sad. Seems like there’s a coffee bar on every corner. Coffee is very useful for the ruling corporate people, because it’s a drug that doesn’t relax you and make you feel like listening to Bob Marley, it makes you hyper, so you can go work on an assembly line without falling asleep.

Marijuana makes me feel good in certain ways that nothing else does. It is hard to explain how it makes me feel. I have problems with my eyes that the doctors say are the beginning of glaucoma, and when I smoke marijuana I can feel those problems subside for about four hours. If I have a problem sleeping, I can smoke marijuana and it makes me relaxed and sleepy. If I want to eat a lot of food or go on a boat or airplane, I can take a puff of marijuana so that it makes my stomach able to handle what I am doing to it without it getting nauseated.

Marijuana makes me cough and it makes my mouth dry and my eyes red. It makes me tired the day after I use it. It makes me a bit depressed about two days after I use it, and I want to use it again. I suppose it is somewhat likely to cause me to be dependent on it, because it is such a comfort and is so easy to use. It is like a nice warm fire at the end of a long, cold day. We all need some kind of comfort, don't we?

I guess I haven’t exactly matched up my words to the title of this blog. The more I write, the more I realize that I know little about exactly why cannabis affects my health mostly for the good, instead of for the bad as prescription drugs do. I think it helps me be a happier person, and that is good for my health. I don’t think that it hurts my health. When I have used cannabis in moderate amounts, like once a week, it has no measurable negative effects that I can see. I have had a lot worse experiences with drugs I bought at the drug store. So if I have to use any drug at all, it’s going to be cannabis. That’s my healthy choice.

2005-11-21T20:55:00.000-08:00

MEDICAL MARIJUANA IN THE TREATMENT OF DIGESTIVE DISORDERS

COPYRIGHT, 2005, TOTAL HEALTH NETWORK, a public service of Advanced Nutrients, the world's leading hydroponic plant food company.

Licensed users and growers of medical marijuana know that the plant can be used to treat a variety of diseases and symptoms related to the gastrointestinal system. This isn't a bunch of stupid stoners trying to find a medical excuse to get high, folks, this is the real deal- the herb heals! The use of medical marijuana to treat digestive system problems is time-tested, and is usually a safer intervention than the use of pharmaceutical drugs or surgery.

Chron’s Disease, Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), ulcers, constipation, diarrhea, nausea, anorexia, bulimia, acid reflux, and appetite loss are some of the diseases and conditions that medical marijuana patients have treated using medical marijuana.

Studies indicate that cannabinoids in marijuana bind with cannabinoid receptors in the digestive tract, especially the small and large intestine, causing muscle relaxation, reduction of inflammation, analgesia, increased nerve-muscle coordination, anti-emesis, and relief of spasms such as those that cause nausea.

Cannabis is also an adaptogenic immune system modulator that can increase or decrease immune systems function in ways that almost always contribute to healthier outcomes.

Cannabis is unique among medicines because it has a comprehensive range of actions that can alleviate several symptoms by altering how the body and brain communicate, and how the self perceives its internal organs and systems.

The self-feedback loop that produces nausea in some circumstances, which includes a feeling of dizziness that circles back on itself to produce fear, tension and more dizziness, is often defeated by cannabis.

Indeed, research shows that cannabis can relieve symptoms in unique ways that no other medicine can duplicate.

Medical benefits of marijuana for people with gastrointestinal disorders were backed up by the United States Institute of Medicine medical marijuana study. According to the Institute, “For patients who suffer simultaneously from severe pain, nausea, and appetite loss, cannabinoid drugs might offer broad-spectrum relief not found in any other single medication."

Medical cannabis has been a blessing for people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Inflammatory Bowel Disease. These diseases cause diarrhea or constipation, nausea, and intestinal inflammation, pain and the inability of the digestive system to absorb nutrients.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) can cause pain, bloating, flatulence, cramps, spasms, motility loss, constipation, and diarrhea.

Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) is a term that describes Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn's Disease. Ulcerative colitis inflames the lining of the large intestine. Crohn's disease causes inflammation of the lining and wall of the large and/or small intestine. The typical symptoms of Crohn's are diarrhea, weight loss, abdominal pain, rectal bleeding and fever. Crohn’s can cause intestinal blockages and ulcerations that might require surgery. Ulcerative Colitis can cause abdominal cramps, sharp pain, low energy, weight loss, arthritic symptoms, eye problems, and liver disease.

These disorders can be crippling. In extreme cases, they may result in long-term hospitalization or surgery. The unique ability of medical cannabis to alleviate most of these symptoms is becoming more widely known in the medical community.

Recreational and medical marijuana users have long known that cannabis has an effect of appetite. The increase in appetite that often accompanies cannabis use has been called “the munchies.”

Scientists studying this phenomenon note that it probably involves blood sugar levels and other physiological markers affected by cannabis.

Many professional studies have shown that cannabis stimulates appetite and weight gain. Researchers say that medical cannabis users have to be careful to moderate their intake of carbohydrates and sugars when they are responding to the munchies. It is best to eat less carbos and sugars and eat more organic vegetables, fruits and protein, rather than to pig out on candy or ice cream.

Cannabis helps combat cramping that accompanies many GI disorders because cannabinoids relax contractions of the smooth muscle of the intestines. Research shows that the body’s own cannabinoids, known as anandamides, affect neurological systems that control the gastrointestinal system. External and internal cannabinoids strongly control gastrointestinal motility and inflammation. They also have the ability to decrease gastrointestinal fluid secretion and inflammation. This means that cannabis can be useful to stop ulcers and other syndromes.

The chronic pain and spasms that accompany many gastrointestinal disorders are a life hindrance to those who suffer from IBS and other diseases. Medical cannabis is a very effective pain reliever. It blocks spinal, peripheral and gastrointestinal mechanisms that promote pain in IBS and related disorders. It also can be used against gastroesophageal reflux disease (acid reflux). When acid reflux occurs, gastric acids attack the esophagus. The pharmaceutical medicines that doctors prescribe for this condition are in some ways as bad as the condition itself. They prescribe drugs like atropine, for example, which have severe side-effects.

Pharmaceutical drugs commonly prescribed to combat GI disorders include:
Megestrol acetate (Megace), an anticachectic. This substance can cause high blood pressure, diabetes, inflammation of the blood vessels, congestive heart failure, seizures, and pneumonia. Less serious side effects of this medicine include diarrhea, flatulence, nausea, vomiting, constipation, heartburn, dry mouth, increased salivation, and thrush; impotence, decreased libido, urinary frequency, urinary incontinence, urinary tract infection, vaginal bleeding and discharge; disease of the heart, palpitation, chest pain, chest pressure, and edema; pharyngitis, lung disorders, and rapid breathing; insomnia, headache, weakness, numbness, seizures, depression, and abnormal thinking.
Metronidazole (Flagyl) is carcinogenic. Patients treated with Metronidazole have reported convulsive seizures and peripheral neuropathy. Ironically, this medicine causes problems in the gastrointestinal tract; nausea is reported by about 12% of patients, and is sometimes accompanied by headache, anorexia, and occasionally vomiting; diarrhea; epigastric distress, and abdominal cramping. Constipation has also been reported.
Sulfasalazine (Azulfidine) -Common adverse reactions associated with sulfasalazine are anorexia, headache, nausea, vomiting, gastric distress, and apparently reversible oligospermia. These occur in about one-third of the patients. Less frequent adverse reactions are pruritus, urticaria, fever, Heinz body anemia, hemolytic anemia and cyanosis, which may occur at a frequency of one in every thirty patients or less.
Chlordiazepoxide/Clidinium (Librax) - Drowsiness, ataxia and confusion have been reported in some patients, particularly the elderly and debilitated. Adverse effects reported with use of Librax are those typical of anticholinergic agents, i.e., dryness of the mouth, blurring of vision, urinary hesitancy and constipation. Withdrawal symptoms, similar in character to those noted with barbiturates and alcohol (convulsions, tremor, abdominal and muscle cramps, vomiting and sweating), have occurred following abrupt discontinuance of chlordiazepoxide.
Hyoscyamine Sulfate (Levsin) - Adverse reactions may include dryness of the mouth; urinary hesitancy and retention; blurred vision; tachycardia; palpitations; mydriasis; cycloplegia; increased ocular tension; loss of taste; headache; nervousness; drowsiness; weakness; dizziness; insomnia; nausea; vomiting; impotence; suppression of lactation; constipation; bloated feeling; allergic reactions or drug idiosyncrasies; urticaria and other dermal manifestations; ataxia; speech disturbance; some degree of mental confusion and/or excitement (especially in elderly persons); and decreased sweating.
Mesalamine CR (Pentasa) - Common side effects are diarrhea, headache, nausea, abdominal pain, dyspepsia, vomiting, and rash.
Phosphorated carbohydrate (Emetrol) - Side effects include: fainting; swelling of face, arms, and legs; unusual bleeding; vomiting; weight loss; yellow eyes or skin. Less common-more common with large doses: Diarrhea; stomach or abdominal pain.
Dicyclomine (Bentyl) – Can cause blurred vision, dry mouth, heart problems, seizures, impotence, and difficulty in urinating, among other effects.
Ciprofloxacin (Cipro) - The most frequent side effects include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, rash, headache, and restlessness. Rare allergic reactions have been described, such as hives and anaphylaxis (shock).
Methotrexate (Rheumatrex, Trexall) – Is very toxic, depending on dose. The most frequent reactions include mouth sores, stomach upset, and low white blood counts. Methotrexate can cause severe toxicity
of the liver and bone marrow, which require regular monitoring with blood testing. It can cause headache and drowsiness, which may resolve if the dose is lowered. Methotrexate can cause itching, skin rash, dizziness, and hair loss.
Diphenoxylate and atropine (Lotomil) – Bad effects include drowsiness, dizziness, and headache, nausea or vomiting, and dry mouth. Euphoria, depression, lethargy, restlessness, numbness of extremities, loss of
appetite, and abdominal pain or discomfort has been reported less frequently. Although the dose of atropine in Lomotil is too low to cause side effects when taken in the recommended doses, side effects of atropine (including dryness of the skin and mucous membranes, increased heart rate, urinary retention, and increased body temperature) have been reported, particularly in children under 2.
Prednisone (Delatasone). This is a steroid drug that can have serious adverse musculoskeletal,
gastrointestinal, dermatologic, neurological, endocrine, and ophthalmic side effects. These include: congestive heart failure in susceptible patients, potassium loss, hypokalemic alkalosis, sodium retention, and hypertension. Muscle weakness, steroid myopathy, loss of muscle mass, osteoporosis, tendon rupture, vertebral compression fractures, aseptic necrosis of femoral and humeral heads, and pathologic fracture of long bones. Peptic ulcer with possible perforation and hemorrhage; pancreatitis; abdominal distention; ulcerative esophagitis. Impaired wound healing, thin fragile skin, petechiae and ecchymoses, facial erythema. Increased intracranial pressure, usually after treatment, convulsions, vertigo, and headache. Menstrual irregularities; development of Cushingoid state; secondary adrenocortical and pituitary
unresponsiveness; decreased carbohydrate tolerance; manifestations of latent diabetes mellitus. Posterior subcapsular cataracts, increased intraocular pressure, glaucoma, and exophthalmos.

Given this verified list of problems that can be created by prescription drugs used to treat gastrointestinal disorders, and the lack of such problems caused by medical marijuana which provides better relief, it’s amazing that medical marijuana is not already the most popularly prescribed medication for such disorders.

The overall opinion of enlightened people in the medical community is that medical cannabis can interact with the endogenous cannabinoid system to reduce problems associated with nausea, vomiting, gastric ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn's disease, secretory diarrhea, paralytic ileus and gastroesophageal reflux disease.

It is true that cannabis has to be used intelligently. Some people are disconcerted by spiritual, psychological, physiological and emotional changes they experience after using cannabis. Cannabis in rare cases increases schizophrenic symptoms in people who already have a predisposition for schizophrenia. Cannabis can interfere with cognitive function and body coordination, although the impairment is relatively minor and is temporary. Tachycardia and hypotension often occur with cannabis use. Ingesting cannabis as a smoked substance can cause negative effects on the respiratory system. Some people develop a tolerance to cannabis and have to use more and more of it to achieve the same results. Others develop a psychological dependence on it.

As you can see, none of these side effects come close to being as severe as the ones cited for the prescription drugs that cannabis competes with.

Licensed medical marijuana grower-patients who grow medical marijuana using organic ingredients and properly engineered synthetic ingredients have told us that cannabis provides a wide range of relief, without severe side-effects, in ways that other drugs, treatment and surgery do not.

Medical cannabis patients also report that other interventions are useful during the cannabis regimen. These interventions include detoxifying and cleansing the internal body with herbs, vitamins and supplements, eating only pure, living foods, completely abstaining from junk foods, coffee, caffeine and alcohol, doing yoga and meditation, exercise, nature experiences, and various types of bodywork such as cranial-sacral therapy.

Advanced Nutrients is dedicated to making the highest quality products so licensed medical cannabis growers can produce the best medicine for their condition. Our products contain superior source materials and manufacturing processes that create pure, potent plants with zero pathogens, pollutants, heavy metals, and other problematic substances and issues.

If you have gastrointestinal disorders and live in a place where you can legally grow medical marijuana, contact Advanced Nutrients to find out how our products can help you grow the best legal medical marijuana in the world.

2005-11-21T14:58:00.000-08:00

FROM THE TOTAL HEALTH NEWS SERVICE

Arthritis is a painful disease that used to be thought of only as a consequence of old age. Today, we know that arthritis is occurring with more frequency across age groups, and that sufferers can benefit from a variety of interventions, including medical marijuana.

Arthritis is a worldwide affliction, more common than cancer and heart disease. It's the world's leading cause of pain, and generates billions of dollars worth of sales of pain relief medication per year.

The disease has plagued humans for thousands of years; the famous ancient Roman baths were created not only to promote good hygiene, but to help Romans ease aches and pains caused by arthritis.

Arthritis focuses its fury on body joints. The joint lining, or cartilage, acts as a shock absorber. It consists of water and protein fibers called collagen. The collagen matrix that gives cartilage its shape and strength is insulated by a net of "proteglucans." These are filled with water to protect and nourish the cartilage tissue.

Proteglucans are long molecular chains that include chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine. Glucosamine is absolutely essential to the production of water-binding proteins in cartilage; chondroitin sulfates attract fluids that facilitate ease of movement and attract nutrients necessary for cartilage repair. Injury, wear, or corrosive enzymes can weaken this protection so cartilage loses its ability to repair itself. It slowly deteriorates and forms crevices that impede movement and cause arthritis pain.

There are an estimated 34 million people with arthritis in the US and Canada who are afflicted with either of two types of arthritis. One type is rheumatoid arthritis; the other type is osteoarthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a complex disease that occurs when the immune system mistakenly attacks a joint's "synovial membrane," which is crucial to joint movement. As rheumatoid arthritis becomes more severe, it destroys cartilage and weakens the skeleton. It is most common among people whose immune systems are compromised.

Osteoarthritis primarily attacks cartilage and bones, and is most often seen in older people. It can occur due to the mechanics of ongoing use of the body.

Musculoskeletal injury or immune system deficiency are often indicators of arthritis or co-existent with it. The most persistent symptom of arthritis is inflammation of joints, and pain caused by that inflammation.

Arthritis interferes with many facets of life. It can keep people from being totally ambulatory, which in turn prevents them from working, exercising, shopping, and enjoying family and social life. People with arthritis might lose muscle tone, jobs, and the ability to take care of themselves. They might also suffer from stress-related depression and anxiety, as the inexorable pain and lack of full body flexibility caused by arthritis grinds on their spirit.

The disease can cause a person to be unable to move without a wheelchair, and can gradually twist a person's limbs into painful configurations.

Women get rheumatoid arthritis (RA) at a higher rate than men. It is interesting to note that women's arthritis often goes into remission when they get pregnant. Women develop RA more frequently in the year after pregnancy; pre-existing symptoms can increase after a baby is born. These facts lead researchers to believe that gender and the female hormone system might play a role in the development and progression of RA.

Other researchers are looking into genetic causes of RA. The specific genetic marker associated with RA, HLA-DR4, is found in more than two-thirds of Caucasians with RA; it is only found in 20 percent of the general population.

Although people with this genetic marker have an increased risk of developing RA, its presence alone is not a diagnostic tool to predict or detect RA. Many people who have the marker either don't have or will never get RA. While this marker can be passed from parent to child, it is not definite that if you have RA your child will too.

Medical marijuana, meditation, bodywork, herbal therapy, hot springs, mineral baths, acupuncture, exercise, supplements, Far Infrared saunas, topical ointments, and other therapies have been used to treat arthritis without the use of surgery and chemical medicines. Standard allopathic doctors heavily rely on prescription drugs and surgery to treat arthritis, but the success rate of these interventions is not high, and the dangers of these approaches are substantial.

Most doctors will try to treat arthritis with medicines such as aspirin, ibuprofen and other oral or topical analgesics. The most commonly used analgesic, acetaminophen (found in aspirin-free Anacin, Excedrin, Panadol, Tylenol) does not cause severe side effects with moderate usage, but long-term use of acetaminophen is thought to cause kidney disease.

Doses of these medicines are often large. Some patients take thousands of milligrams of aspirin per day in continuous doses, which can cause stomach pain and damage; aspirin causes at least 1,000 deaths annually in the United States. Doctors worried about aspirin side-effects often prescribe aspirin alternatives that are called "nonacetylated salicylates," which are sold as CMT, Tricosal, and Trilisate. These medicines can cause deafness or ringing in the ears.

Stronger pain killers prescribed against arthritis pain include codeine (Dolacet, Hydrocet, Lorcet, Lortab); morphine (Avinza, Oramorph); oxycodone (Vicodin, Oxycontin, Roxicodone); propoxyphene (Percocet, Darvon, Darvocet) and tramadol (Ultram, Ultracet). These medicines are serious drugs with severe side-effects. Problems include psychological and physical dependence, addiction, constipation, dizziness, lightheadedness, mood changes, nausea, sedation, shortness of breath, vomiting, depression, and death.

People who take overdoses of these drugs, or who use them while also using alcohol, can suffer fatal consequences.

As with many standard medical approaches, the use of pain-killers doesn't actually solve the underlying causes of arthritis, it just masks the pain. It is joint and bone deterioration, along with joint inflammation, that causes arthritis pain.

To treat arthritis inflammation, standard allopathic doctors prescribe anti-inflammatories such as steroids, NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) and COX-2 inhibitors. All these substances can cause serious side-effects. Corticosteroids (Cortisone), prednisone and similar medications cause bruising, cataracts, elevated blood sugar, hypertension, increased appetite, indigestion, insomnia, mood swings, muscle weakness, nervousness or restlessness, osteoporosis, infection and thin skin.

In an effort to avoid use of chemical painkillers and anti-inflammatories, and to avoid undergoing surgery, some patients have turned to natural medicines such as cannabis. It is interesting to note that the use of cannabis as medicine arose many centuries ago in parts of China and India, and has long been a part of time-tested natural healing systems that deal with diseases such as arthritis.

The Indian health system known as Ayurveda includes cannabis as one of many herbs and plants that have medical efficacy. Herbs like ginger, turmeric, ashwaganda and frankincense have also been used to fight arthritis and similar ailments, such as fibromyalgia.

Ginger root inhibits production of prostaglandins and leukotrienes, which are partially responsible for pain and inflammation. Turmeric inhibits prostaglandin production and stimulates creation of cortisol, which relieves inflammation. It has similarities to capsaicin (an active ingredient in cayenne pepper), which depletes nerve endings of the neurotransmitter substance P, which is a component of neural pain transmission. When turmeric was taken internally along with cayenne pepper, it significantly lowered inflammation. Capsaicin is usually used in ointments that are applied externally to arthritic joints. Topical ointments containing carrier oils, cannabis extracts, turmeric, ginger root, and ashwaganda can deliver healing herbs into the skin efficiently.

Frankincense comes from a tree that yields gum when its bark is peeled away; studies show frankincense inhibits production of leukotrienes which cause inflammation. Ashwaganda is an Asian plant of the potato family. Its roots have long been used to treat rheumatism, high blood pressure, immune dysfunctions, male sexual performance problems; it also decreases inflammation. Ashwaganda is sometimes called "Indian ginseng."

Cannabis is an important anti-arthritis medicine because it is an analgesic, anti-inflammatory and muscle relaxant that inhibits the release of "cytokines." Cytokines are part of the mechanism that causes the inflammation that accompanies arthritis. Release of some cytokines is impaired by cannabis, but research shows that effects of cannabis differ by cell type, experimental conditions, and especially the concentration and type of cannabinoids studied.

A non-psychoactive cannabinoid, ajulemic acid, was found to reduce joint tissue damage in rats with arthritis. Tests on human tissue done in vitro showed a 50% suppression of one of the body chemicals (interleukin-1beta) central to the progression of inflammation and joint tissue injury in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

There's plenty of research evidence suggesting that cannabis therapies limit arthritis and other rheumatic and degenerative disorders of the hip, joint and connective tissues. One of the most important functions of cannabis in this regard is as a pain reliever.

Cannabis has immune-modulation and anti-inflammatory properties. It doesn't just mask pain- it may be working to reduce the actual causes of chronic inflammatory diseases. Research on cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychoactive component of cannabis, found it suppresses the immune response responsible for arthritis, protecting test subjects from more severe damage to their joints and markedly improving their condition.

Human studies have shown cannabis is effective treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, which is one of the diseases listed by the many government agencies that allow medical use of cannabis. Cannabis improves mobility and reduces morning stiffness and inflammation.

Patients who use cannabis often report that they are able to reduce their use of potentially harmful Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Medical researchers at Jerusalem's Hebrew University found that cannabidiol breaks down in the body to become an acid with potent anti-inflammatory action comparable to the drug indomethacin, but without the considerable gastrointestinal side effects associated with that indomethacin.

When the body metabolizes tetra-hydrocannibinol (THC), which is one of the primary components in cannabis and is responsible for much of its psychoactive effects, it produces metabolites that have anti-inflammatory and pain-killing effects.

By modifying this metabolite, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center have produced a synthetic carboxylic acid known as CT-3, which is more powerful than the natural metabolite and can be given in smaller doses.

Animal tests found CT-3 effective against both chronic and acute inflammation; it also prevented destruction of joint tissue from chronic inflammation.

Canada recently gave approval to a pharmaceutical grade extract made from whole, organic cannabis. The product is called Sativex, and is effective in pain relief and muscle disorders. The efficacy of natural organic cannabis extracts has been proven by the process that the Sativex manufacturer used when qualifying the drug for Canadian pharmaceutical regulators.

The long safety record of marijuana (no one has ever died of an overdose) and the fact that a metabolite with the desired anti-inflammatory effect is produced in the body when marijuana is used, strongly suggest that marijuana and its derivatives are safe, effective anti-inflammatory drugs.

In addition, CT3, THC, and other cannabinoids have proven analgesic effects in animals. In some cases the dose-dependent beneficial effect of THC was equivalent to that of morphine, but with a much greater duration of action and far less side effects when compared to morphine.

In contrast to the NSAIDs commonly prescribed arthritis sufferers, CT3 does not cause ulcers at therapeutically relevant doses. Moreover, it does not depress respiration, create dependence, induce weight loss, or cause mutations, as some arthritis pharmaceutical drugs do.
Studies on CT3's mechanism of action are currently underway, with cytokine synthesis one of the pathways being studied.

Scientists at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in London tested both injections and oral doses of the cannabinoid CBD in mice with collagen-induced arthritis, a joint disease that mimics human rheumatoid arthritis. CBD is a precursor of THC. The studies found that moderate doses of CBD prevent joint damage in arthritic test subjects. CBD also suppressed activity of immune cells and reduced inflammation in joint tissue by reducing tumor necrosis factor, which is a chemical cause of swelling.

Cannabis helps combat rheumatoid arthritis because it functions as an immune system modulator. Rheumatoid arthritis can be caused by disruption of normal immune system function in response to an initial infection or trauma.

Cannabis and other herbs are called adaptogens because they can help the immune system maintain normal function and fight off the effects of disease and infection.

Arthritis sufferers are advised to use cannabis intelligent as part of a comprehensive approach to regaining full function.

The common medical paradigm emphasizes symptom relief without seeking to address the causes of dysfunction. A holistic paradigm involving medical cannabis helps patients take control of their own bodies to determine what is causing dysfunction and remediate those causes.

Medical marijuana's ability to reduce inflammation, interfere with pain transmission, and regulate the immune system make it an ideal part of a holistic program. Arthritis sufferers can use cannabis to increase their mobility and reduce pain. After they have medicated with cannabis, they can exercise, do physical therapy, enjoy bodywork, and engage in heat therapy using Far Infrared saunas and mineral baths.

They can do total internal body cleanse programs that remove toxins that often contribute to immune disorders and related problems that can manifest themselves as arthritis.

Other anti-arthritis tactics include making nutrient-rich fresh juices from organic fruits and vegetables such as ginger, citrus, beets, celery, peppers, and cucumbers. The plant-produced phytochemicals in fresh juices are especially useful for cleansing, detoxifying, and restoring body tissue. Proper diet and nutrition, with an emphasis on fresh fruits and vegetables and an avoidance of caffeine, chemicals and junk food, are essential for people trying to reduce the impact of arthritis on their lives.

It is also useful to use cartilage-building supplements such as Glucosamine and Chondroitin. Another helpful supplement is methyl-sulfonyl-methane (MSM), which helps relieve arthritis pain and inflammation in joints and muscles. MSM boosts the blood supply to tissues, reduces muscle spasms, and softens scar tissue.

Intelligent users of medical cannabis experiment with various types of cannabis, as well as various methods for using it. Some varieties of cannabis contain higher percentages of CBD, which has shown promise as an effective anti-arthritis substance. Instead of smoking cannabis in a marijuana cigarette, some patients prefer to use water pipes, bongs, vaporizers and other methods for inhaling active ingredients from heated cannabis. The oral use of cannabis as tinctures, extracts or food products produces different effects that the smoking of cannabis because the digestive tract metabolizes the cannabis and causes a variety of effects that are not experienced when cannabis is smoked. The topical use of cannabis is also an interesting route of administration; the effects are more subtle than when cannabis is smoked, eaten or used as an extract, but can often be quite substantial.

Although medical cannabis has few if any severe side effects, especially when compared to prescription pharmaceuticals, it is not without its detractors.

Some people have a hard time handling the psychological effects of cannabis, which may include euphoria, forgetfulness, loss of concentration, mood swings, and depression.
Others find that cannabis interferes with coordination, motor skills, energy levels, motivation, eyesight, balance, hearing, and other body functions.

These effects are relatively minor, and are most often experienced by novice users who haven't properly regulated their dose level.

Patients who experience these effects can usually avoid cannabis discomfort by using different varieties, smaller doses, and different methods of administration.

Many medical marijuana patients have said that medical marijuana properly grown with products made by a Canadian company called Advanced Nutrients has given them increased ability to enjoy life by allowing them to utilize clean, potent marijuana that defeats their arthritis in ways that are superior to those of prescription drugs and other methods of treatment.

There is no magic pill or plant that can miraculously take away all pain all the time, but the interventions listed above can be helpful when utilized in an intelligent manner.