LAST year the British Medical Association recommended against the use of
cannabis as medication but suggested that its derivatives, the cannabinoids,
should be more thoroughly investigated.

There is evidence that many of these derivatives are remarkably safe and
might be more effective than several remedies at present in use to treat,
for instance, the spasms experienced in multiple sclerosis.

The British Medical Journal has recently reported that a committee of
experts, to be headed by Sir William Asscher, has now been set up to study
the role of cannabis and its derivatives in medicine. The same edition of
the BMJ covered the result of random drug tests performed on recruits being
called up for National Service in Italy.

The survey found that in the group examined 133 were positive for cannabis,
but not for other drugs. Sixty-four per cent of those that were cannabis
positive had evidence of psychiatric disorders and the likelihood of them
having a psychiatric condition was proportional to the amount of the drug
they had taken in the past.

A recent correspondent to The Times wrote that in the early 19th century
French psychiatrists took cannabis when they wanted to understand the world
from a perspective of their psychotic patients, as the symptoms it induced
proved to be an early experimental model for schizophrenia.

The writer, as an experiment, had tried cannabis and experienced a psychotic
reaction in which he thought others were controlling his thoughts. He also
had a quite unprovoked flashback three days later.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett