CANCER KILLER

U.S. War on Drugs Stalling Mind-Blowing Research into Pot's Cancer-Healing
Properties

Clinical research published in a journal of the American Association for
Cancer Research showing that marijuana's components can inhibit the growth
of cancerous brain tumours is the latest in a long line of studies
demonstrating the drug's potential as an anti-cancer agent.

This latest study, performed by researchers at Madrid's Complutense
University, found that cannabis restricts the blood supply to glioblastoma
multiforme tumours, an aggressive brain tumour that kills some 7,000 people
in the United States every year. But despite the value of such findings
both in terms of the treatment of life-threatening illnesses and as news,
U.S. media coverage has been almost non-existent.

Why the blackout? Not one such study has been acknowledged by the U.S.
government.

This wasn't always the case. In fact, the first experiment documenting
pot's anti-tumour effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of
Virginia at the behest of the U.S. government.

It showed that marijuana's psychoactive component, THC, "slowed the growth
of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory
mice and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 per cent."

Despite these favourable preliminary findings, U.S. government officials
refused to fund any follow-up research for two decades, until it conducted
a similar - though secret - clinical trial in the mid-1990s.

That study, carried out by the U.S. National Toxicology Program, concluded
that mice and rats administered high doses of THC over long periods had
greater protection against malignant tumours than untreated controls.

Rather than publicize these findings, government researchers shelved the
results, which only became public after a draft copy of the findings were
leaked in 1997 to a medical journal that in turn forwarded the story to the
national media.

However, in the eight years since then, the U.S. government has yet to fund
a single additional study examining the drug's potential anti-cancer
properties. Is this a case of federal bureaucrats valuing politics more
than the health and safety of patients? You be the judge.

Fortunately, scientists overseas have generously picked up where U.S.
researchers so abruptly left off.

This month, researchers at the University of Milan in Italy, reported that
marijuana's constituents inhibit the spread of brain cancer in human tumour
biopsies from patients failed by standard cancer therapies.

Last year, the same researchers reported in the Journal of Pharmacology and
Experimental Therapeutics that non-psychoactive compounds in marijuana
inhibited the growth of glioma cells in a dose-dependent manner and
selectively targeted and killed malignant cells, stimulating them to
"commit suicide" in a natural process called apoptosis.

In 2000, a research team at Complutense's department of biochemistry and
molecular biology reported in the journal Nature Medicine that injections
of synthetic THC eradicated malignant gliomas (brain tumours) in one-third
of treated rats. The study was undertaken after the discovery in 1998 that
THC can selectively induce apoptosis in brain tumour cells without
negatively affecting the surrounding healthy cells.

Nevertheless, federal officials in the U.S. continue to refuse to express
any interest in funding - or even acknowledging - this clinical research.