LACK OF PROFIT MOTIVE HURTING CANNABIS' PLACE IN MEDICINE

Re: Doctors refuse to authorize pot use, leaving patients in pain,
Web only, Oct. 30

As a therapeutic herb, or natural health product, cannabis cannot be
subjected to the sort of clinical trials applied to pharmaceuticals.

Perhaps more importantly, herbs cannot be patented, so there is no
incentive for private pharmaceutical companies to shepherd them
through the expensive drug approval process.

However, cannabis already surpasses the accepted standards for
natural health products.

According to the Institute of Medicine, the benefit-risk profile of
cannabis is well within that of many commonly used pharmaceutical drugs.

A far greater number of studies have already demonstrated the health
benefits and safety of cannabis than exist for such medical standbys
as Aspirin, penicillin and codeine.

Indeed, these latter drugs ( and many more) were approved for sale
without any controlled clinical trials whatsoever.

Instead, they were "grandfathered" into the approved formulary back
in the 1930s by virtue of longtime experience showing them to be safe
( the socalled Generally Recognized As Safe, or GRAS process).

As a similarly long-used medicine ( much longer if we count over
10,000 years of experience in Asia and India), cannabis should also
have received grandfathered status but, for purely political reasons,
it did not.

Given the widespread use of cannabis, surely doctors should already
be familiar with the effects, contraindications and drug interactions.

At a minimum, surely doctors could attest to the fact that their
patients would benefit from not fearing arrest or being criminalized.

Matthew M. Elrod

Victoria