LITTLE RESEARCH ON MEDICAL BENEFITS OF MARIJUANA

Despite ongoing controversy over marijuana's medical efficacy, almost no
research is being done on the topic.

Some proponents of medical marijuana say sufficient research was performed
during the 1970s and '80s in the United States, when the federal government
provided marijuana for studies done mostly by states.

Many of those studies were suspended in 1991 when the U.S. National
Institutes of Health concluded there wasn't enough proof that marijuana
would be better than a synthetic version of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC,
the drug's major chemical component.

Proponents said the studies were going to prove the opposite, but the
government stopped supplying the marijuana.

Work was mostly suspended until 1996, when California and Arizona passed
initiatives to legalize marijuana and other drugs for medical use.

An expert panel formed by the National Institutes of Health found in August,
1997, that existing research showed some patients can be helped by the drug,
principally to relieve nausea after cancer chemotherapy or to increase AIDS
patients' appetites.

The drug also has helped some patients control glaucoma, the panel found.

The institutes' director, Dr. Harold Varmus, said at the time that
applications for marijuana research were welcome, but the agency has
approved only one project, a study of smoked marijuana in AIDS patients.

"The government is saying out of one side of its mouth that we need more
research, but then they don't provide the marijuana," says Bill Zimmerman,
director of Americans for Medical Rights, a private advocacy group that
sponsors state initiatives to legalize medical marijuana.

Others, however, say research isn't funded because marijuana is so hard to
study. It's difficult to create a placebo that accurately replicates the
experience of smoking the drug and to measure how much of the drug each
patient ingests from the smoke. In addition, no drug companies are lined up
to invest in it.

"There isn't a government conspiracy to discourage it," says Dr. Reese
Jones, a psychiatry professor at University of California-San Francisco and
a longtime marijuana researcher.

"The issue is, what else are we not going to do in order to pay for it?"

Checked-by: Don Beck