CHILL, MAN -- THIS CHEMICAL WILL HELP YOU BREATHE DEEP

The '70s rock song "Sweet Leaf," a homage to marijuana, begins with the
singer coughing repeatedly. It's a given: You smoke pot, you cough.

Now researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and elsewhere have
found a way that a marijuana-like chemical in the lungs actually stops
people from coughing. Their work appears today in the journal Nature.

Dig this: The chemical is a neurotransmitter, a little messenger that
occurs naturally in your body and tells your nerves what to do. It's one of
a group of neurotransmitters called anandamides.

The anandamide acts like tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active
ingredient in marijuana. Despite its nickname - "the bliss molecule" -
anandamide doesn't get you high. Instead, it helps regulate your appetite,
memory and feelings of pain. The Nature study explains that it also appears
to stop you from coughing, or, if you smoke something that doesn't agree
with you, forces you to cough.

"It's kind of a jack of all trades depending on what you need," said Dr.
Daniele Piomelli, a UCI pharmacologist.

Other researchers say the study should give hope to cancer patients and
others who suffer from a persistent cough. Instead of ineffective inhalers
or cough syrups, the drugs of the future could trigger these anandamides.
You'd start to cough, and the anandamide would tell your lungs and airways
connected to them: "Chill."

"I consider this to be an important finding, if nothing else to figure out
what this endogenous cannabinoid system is doing," said Dr. Billy Martin, a
pharmacologist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. "It will be
intriguing to see what happens in a pathological system."

In other words, far out, man.

HEALTH: UCI scientists say a neurotransmitter in the body that works much
like marijuana helps ease coughing.