DOCTORS PUSH A CASE FOR DOPE

Cannabis could soon be widely used to relieve terminal illness and
chronic pain symptoms, with the Australian Medical Association
launching a push to legalise the drug for therapeutic use.

The AMA's Victorian branch council will next month consider a proposal
to support rescheduling the drug for medical use. The branch
president, Dr Michael Sedgley, said the proposal was likely to be passed.

"It (cannabis) does apparently have some place in easing suffering and
pain," he said.

An Alice Springs magistrate last week spared a man from jail,
accepting that laborer Nicholas Gallitch, 54, possessed and cultivated
cannabis to relieve back pain.

"This is a breach of the law that has been driven by the pain you have
suffered," magistrate Mr Warren Donald said at Alice Springs
courthouse on Tuesday.

It is not the first time an Australian court has accepted such an
argument. Last February, the Queensland Supreme Court accepted that
another man, also a builder, had grown 150 marijuana plants for use in
relieving back pain.

Dr Sedgley said the AMA did not support people using cannabis for
recreational use, nor did it support people growing the drug in their
homes. A synthetic form of the drug had to be found and supplied, and
the use of an inhaler was preferable to smoking cannabis, he said.

The New South Wales Premier, Mr Bob Carr, established a working party
to investigate the medical potential of cannabis after pressure was
applied by the AMA's New South Wales branch.

In the United Kingdom, two large clinical trials of cannabis are under
way.

In March last year, the American Institute of Medicine issued a
report, Marijuana and Medicine, which found the active compound in
cannabis helped alleviate pain and nausea and improve appetite.

There are more than 60 chemicals, or cannabinoids, in cannabis. One,
Delta 9-Tetrahydrocannabinol, is the major psychoactive ingredient of
the drug, and is thought to be the most important component for
medicinal purposes.

The private company GW Pharmaceuticals, which is conducting one of the
UK trials, has developed a process that enables the active ingredients
of cannabis to be produced in pharmaceutically safe
formulations.

A senior adviser to the British Government on medicinal cannabis, Dr
Phillip Robson of the University of Oxford, told ABC Radio National's
Health Report that there was some evidence that cannabis could relieve
pain, nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy, muscular spasticity
in multiple sclerosis sufferers, and eye pressure in some with glaucoma.

"The trouble is, of course, with raw cannabis you're dealing with 60
or more cannaboids, a huge range of chemicals, and you're never sure
which is the one that's doing the good or which is the one that's
producing the side effects," he said.

In people with AIDS, the drug can help alleviate nausea, vomiting,
weight loss, depression and infections, Dr Robson said. Much of the
evidence for the medicinal effects was, however, anecdotal.

Cannabis has a therapeutic history going back 5000 years, he
said.