[Mb-civic] Pot Shows Promise as a Cancer Cure

Thu Sep 30 10:47:21 PDT 2004

Pot Shows Promise as Cancer Cure

By Paul Armentano, AlterNet
 Posted on September 28, 2004, Printed on September 30, 2004
 http://www.alternet.org/story/20008/

Clinical research touted by the journal of the American Association for
Cancer Research that shows marijuana's components can inhibit the growth of
cancerous brain tumors is the latest in a long line of studies demonstrating
the drug's potential as an anti-cancer agent. Not familiar with it? You're
not alone.

Despite the value of these studies, both in terms of the treatment of
life-threatening illnesses and as items of news  the latest being that
performed by researchers at Madrid's Complutense University that found
cannabis restricts the blood supply to glioblastoma multiforme tumors, an
aggressive brain tumor that kills some 7,000 people in the United States per
year  U.S. media coverage of them has been almost non-existent.

Why the blackout? For starters, all of these medical cannabis studies were
conducted overseas. Secondly, not one of them has been acknowledged by the
U.S. government.

This wasn't always the case. In fact, the first experiment documenting pot's
anti-tumor effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at
the behest of the U.S. government. The results of that study, reported in an
Aug. 18, 1974, Washington Post newspaper feature, were that marijuana's
psychoactive component, THC, "slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast
cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their
lives by as much as 36 percent."

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

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

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

Fortunately, scientists overseas have generously picked up where U.S.
researchers so abruptly left off. In 1998, a research team at Complutense's
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology discovered that THC can
selectively induce program cell death in brain tumor cells without
negatively impacting the surrounding healthy cells. Then in 2000, they
reported in the journal Nature Medicine that injections of synthetic THC
eradicated malignant gliomas (brain tumors) in one-third of treated rats,
and prolonged life in another third by six weeks.

Last year, researchers at the University of Milan in Naples, Italy, reported
in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics that
non-psychoactive compounds in marijuana inhibited the growth of glioma cells
in a dose dependent manner, and selectively targeted and killed malignant
cells through a process known as apoptosis.

And finally, this month, researchers reported that marijuana's constituents
inhibited the spread of brain cancer in human tumor biopsies from patients
who had failed standard cancer therapies.

Nevertheless, federal officials in this country have refused to express any
interest in funding  or even acknowledging  this clinical research. By
doing so, they are doing a disservice not only to the scientific process,
but also to the health and well being of America's citizenry.