POT SHRINKS TUMORS; GOVERNMENT KNEW IN '74

(Wednesday, March 28, The United States Supreme Court rules on whether
marijuana use for medicinal purposes can be a valid defense on charges
of marijuana possession. The following article was listed as one of
the top 25 censored stories of the year 2000. We reprint it here and
pose the question, why would the government want to keep us from
knowing this?)

The term medical marijuana took on dramatic new meaning in February
2000, when researchers in Madrid announced they had destroyed
incurable brain tumors in rats by injecting them with THC, the active
ingredient in cannabis.

The Madrid study marks only the second time that THC has been
administered to tumor-bearing animals. In 1974, researchers at the
Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National
Institutes of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the
immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds
of cancer in mice -- lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia.

The DEA quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further
cannabis/tumor research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on the
events in his book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes. In 1976, President
Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted
exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set
out -- unsuccessfully -- to develop synthetic forms of THC that would
deliver all the medical benefits without the "high."

The Madrid researchers reported in the March issue of Nature Medicine
that they injected the brains of 45 rats with cancer cells, producing
tumors whose presence they confirmed through magnetic resonance
imaging (MRI). On the 12th day they injected 15 of the rats with THC
and 15 with Win-55,212-2, a synthetic compound similar to THC. "All
the rats left untreated uniformly died 12-18 days after glioma (brain
cancer) cell inoculation ... Cannabinoid (THC)-treated rats survived
significantly longer than control rats. THC administration was
ineffective in three rats, which died by days 16-18. Nine of the
THC-treated rats surpassed the time of death of untreated rats, and
survived up to 19-35 days. Moreover, the tumor was completely
eradicated in three of the treated rats." The rats treated with
Win-55,212-2 showed similar results.

The Spanish researchers, led by Dr. Manuel Guzman of Complutense
University, also irrigated healthy rats' brains with large doses of
THC for seven days, to test for harmful biochemical or neurological
effects. They found none.

"Careful MRI analysis of all those tumor-free rats showed no sign of
damage related to necrosis, edema, infection or trauma ... We also
examined other potential side effects of cannabinoid administration.
In both tumor-free and tumor-bearing rats, cannabinoid administration
induced no substantial change in behavioral parameters such as motor
coordination or physical activity. Food and water intake, as well as
body weight gain, were unaffected during and after cannabinoid
delivery. Likewise, the general hematological profiles of
cannabinoid-treated rats were normal. Thus, neither biochemical
parameters nor markers of tissue damage changed substantially during
the seven-day delivery period or for at least two months after
cannabinoid treatment ended."

Guzman's investigation is the only time since the 1974 Virginia study
that THC has been administered to live, tumor-bearing animals. (The
Spanish researchers cite a 1998 study in which cannabinoids inhibited
breast cancer cell proliferation, but that was a "petri dish"
experiment that didn't involve live subjects.)

In an e-mail interview for this story, the Madrid researcher said he
had heard of the Virginia study, but had never been able to locate
literature on it. Hence, the Nature Medicine article characterizes the
new study as the first on tumor-laden animals and doesn't cite the
1974 Virginia investigation.

"I am aware of the existence of that research. In fact I have
attempted many times to obtain the journal article on the original
investigation by these people, but it has proven impossible," Guzman
said.

In 1983, the Reagan/Bush Administration tried to persuade American
universities and researchers to destroy all 1966-76 cannabis research
work, including compendiums in libraries, reports Jack Herer, who
states, "We know that large amounts of information have since
disappeared."

Guzman provided the title of the work -- "Antineoplastic activity of
cannabinoids," an article in a 1975 Journal of the National Cancer
Institute -- and this writer obtained a copy at the University of
California medical school library in Davis and faxed it to Madrid.

The summary of the Virginia study begins, "Lewis lung adenocarcinoma
growth was retarded by the oral administration of tetrahydrocannabinol
(THC) and cannabinol (CBN)" -- two types of cannabinoids, a family of
active components in marijuana. "Mice treated for 20 consecutive days
with THC and CBN had reduced primary tumor size."

The 1975 journal article doesn't mention breast cancer tumors, which
are featured in the only newspaper story ever to appear about the 1974
study -- in the "Local" section of The Washington Post on Aug. 18,
1974. Under the headline, "Cancer Curb Is Studied," it read in part:

"The active chemical agent in marijuana curbs the growth of three
kinds of cancer in mice and may also suppress the immunity reaction
that causes rejection of organ transplants, a Medical College of
Virginia team has discovered." The researchers "found that 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."

Guzman, writing from Madrid, was eloquent in his response after this
writer faxed him the clipping from The Washington Post of a quarter
century ago. In translation, he wrote:

"It is extremely interesting to me, the hope that the project seemed
to awaken at that moment, and the sad evolution of events during the
years following the discovery, until now we once again draw back the
veil, over the anti-tumoral power of THC, 25 years later.
Unfortunately, the world bumps along between such moments of hope and
long periods of intellectual castration."

News coverage of the Madrid discovery has been virtually nonexistent
in this country. The news broke quietly on Feb. 29, 2000 with a story
that ran once on the UPI wire about the Nature Medicine article. This
writer stumbled on it through a link that appeared briefly on the
Drudge Report Web page. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and
Los Angeles Times all ignored the story, even though its
newsworthiness is indisputable: a benign substance occurring in nature
destroys deadly brain tumors.
----