Study confirms pot chemicals can relieve serious pain

NEW ORLEANS Adding new fuel to the controversy over medical uses of
marijuana, researchers reported yesterday that active chemicals found in
the plant could serve as an effective remedy for the millions of people who
suffer serious pain each year, without the unwanted side effects of more
traditional morphinelike drugs.

New animal studies by research groups at the University of California at
San Francisco, the University of Michigan and Brown University show that a
group of potent chemicals known as cannabinoids, which include the active
ingredient in marijuana, relieve several kinds of pain, including the kind
of inflammation associated with arthritis, as well as more severe forms of
chronic pain.

The scientists said they believe the new research opens the way for a new
class of drugs to control pain.

Marijuana's painkilling properties have long been an unheralded and
unconfirmed staple of medical folklore.

Now, sophisticated animal studies of the active biochemicals in marijuana,
presented yesterday in New Orleans at a meeting of the Society for
Neuroscience, for the first time demonstrates they have a direct effect on
pain signals in the central nervous system and other tissues.

Unlike the current crop of painkillers based on opiates, the new class of
chemicals is not addictive, nor does it appear to carry the risk that
patients may develop tolerance for it and require increasing doses, the
research indicates.

"Cannabinoids, at least in animal models, can reduce pain," said UCSF
pharmacology expert Ian Meng, who is studying the painkilling properties
of several synthetic cannabinoids.

To discover how these substances regulate pain, researchers traced the
biochemical pathway that pain signals follow from the site of an injury,
through the spinal cord, to the brain.

In their experiments, they used both the active ingredient in marijuana a
chemical called delta9THC and an array of more powerful synthetic
creations.

Scientists discovered that molecular receptors to which the chemicals can
bind are so widely present that researchers at the Medical College of
Virginia now suspect that naturally occurring cannabinoids may govern the
body's basic threshold of pain.