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There are 60 or more therapeutic compounds in cannabis that are healing agents in medical and herbal treatments. The primary known one is THC, and the effectiveness of therapy is directly proportionate to the herb’s potency or concentration of THC. Recent DEA reports of more potent marijuana therefore represent a major medical advance; but, incredibly, the government uses these very numbers to solicit bigger budgets and harsher penalties.
Here’s how persons will benefit once the judgment and freedom of choice of doctor and patient are once again respected:
There is no pharmacological free lunch in cannabis or any drug. Negative reactions can result. A small percentage of persons have negative or allergic reactions to marijuana. Heart patients could have problems, even though cannabis generally relieves stress, dilates the arteries, and in general lowers the diastolic pressure. A small percentage of persons get especially high heart rates and anxieties with cannabis. These persons should not use it. Some bronchial asthma sufferers benefit from cannabis; however, for others it may serve as an additional irritant. For the overwhelming majority of persons, cannabis has demonstrated literally hundreds of therapeutic uses. Among them:
More than 15 million Americans are affected by asthma. Smoking cannabis (what the AMA called the ‘raw drug’) would be beneficial for 80% of them and add 30 to 60 million person-years in the aggregate of extended life to current asthmatics over presently legal toxic medicines—especially theophylline for children.
“Taking a hit of marijuana has been known to stop a full blown asthma attack.” (Personal communication with Dr. Donald Tashkin, December 12, 1989.) The use of cannabis for asthmatics goes back thousands of years in literature. American doctors of the last century wrote in medical papers that asthma sufferers of the world would “bless” Indian Hemp (cannabis) all their lives.
Today, no California (or American, for that matter) receives or uses legal cannabis for asthma.
(Tashkin, Dr. Donald, UCLA Pulmonary Studies, 1969-92; Ibid., asthma studies, 1969-1976; Cohen, Sidney, & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, 1976; Life Insurance Actuarial rates; Life shortening effects of childhood asthma, 1983.)
Fourteen percent of all blindness in America is from glaucoma, a progressive loss of vision. Cannabis smoking would benefit 90% of our 2,500,000 glaucoma victims, and is two to three times as effective as any current medicines for reducing ocular pressure. And, cannabis use has no toxic side effects to the liver and kidneys, nor is there any danger of the occasional sudden death syndromes associated with the legal pharmaceutical glaucoma drugs/drops. Most California eye doctors will discreetly advise their patients to use “street” marijuana in addition to (or to mitigate) their toxic legal glaucoma medicines.
(Harvard; Hepler & Frank, 1971, UCLA; Medical College of Georgia; University of North Carolina School of Medicine, 1975; Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, UCLA, 1976; National Eye Institute.)
A tumor is a mass of swollen tissue. Researchers at the Medical College of Virginia discovered that cannabis is an incredibly successful herb for reducing many types of tumors, both benign and malignant (cancerous).
The DEA and other federal agencies had ordered these tumor studies done after hearing of erroneous reports of possible immunicological problems associated with cannabis smoke. When, instead of health problems, an apparent medical breakthrough occurred in 1975 and successful tumor reductions were recorded, orders were handed down by the DEA and the National Institute of Health to defund all further cannabis/tumor research and reporting.1
1. Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, UCLA, 1976; personal interviews with researchers who did this study in Washington, D.C., November, 1982.
Chemotherapy treatment can help control cancer and AIDS, but it has some bad side effects, including nausea. “Marijuana is the best agent for control of nausea in cancer chemotherapy,” according to Dr. Thomas Ungerleider, who headed California’s Marijuana for Cancer research program from 1979 to 1984. This is also true in AIDS and even in the unsettled stomach common in motion sickness.
Pharmaceutical nausea control drugs come in pills that are often swallowed by the patient only to be thrown back up. Because cannabis can be ingested as smoke, it stays in the system and keeps working even if vomiting continues.
Throughout the state’s 10-year Compassionate Marijuana Medical law, George Deukmejian, both as attorney general and as governor, made it virtually impossible for any dying cancer patients to get cannabis, with no regard for their suffering. Currently, Gov. Pete Wilson is following the same course.
In September 1993, Santa Cruz City, CA Sheriffs re-arrested epileptic Valerie Corral and confiscated the five marijuana plants she was growing for medicine even though 77% of the citizens of Santa Cruz voted in Nov. 1992 to instruct local law enforcement not to prosecute medical users. Charges against Corral had been dropped earlier, in March 1993, because she was the first person in California to meet all six points of a medical necessity defense.
Cannabis is beneficial for 60% of all epileptics. It is definitely the best treatment for many, but not all types of epilepsy, and for victims’ post-seizure mental traumas. Cannabis extract is more effective than Dilantin (a commonly prescribed anti-epileptic with severe side effects). Medical World News reported in 1971: “Marijuana is probably the most potent anti-epileptic known to medicine today.” (Mikuriya, Marijuana Medical Papers, 1829-1972, page xxii.)
Cannabis users’ epileptic seizures are of less intensity than the more dangerous seizures experienced by users of Pharmaceuticals. Similarly, smoking cannabis has proven to be a major source of relief for multiple sclerosis, which affects the nervous system and is characterized by muscular weakness, tremors, etc.
Cannabis, smoked or applied as a herbal pack or poultice, is also the best muscle relaxant, back spasm medicine, and antispasmodic medication on our planet, short of morphine.
(Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, 1976; Consult U.S. Pharmacopoeia prior to 1937; Mikuriya, Tod H., M.D., Marijuana Medical Papers, 1839-1972.)
Young un-budded hemp plants provide extractions of CBDs (cannabidiolic acids). There are many antibiotic uses of the cannabidiols, including treatment for gonorrhea. A 1990 Florida study indicates its use in treating herpes.
The acid side of tetrahydrocannabinol, cannabidiols occur inversely to the amount of the plant’s THC and is therefore more acceptable to prohibitionists because “it won’t get you high.” For virtually any disease or infection that can be treated with teramycin, cannabis derivatives did better in Czechoslovakian studies, 1952-1955.3 The Czechs in 1989 still publish farm crop reports on strategies to grow Cannabidiol rich hemp.
3. The Antibiotic Effect of Cannabis Indica, 1952-53-55. The Antibacterial Effect of Cannabis Indica, 1955, from Marijuana Medical Papers; Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, UCLA, 1976
(Also see Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana; Mikuriya, Tod H., M.D., Marijuana Medical Papers; Roffman, Marijuana as Medicine, 1982; International Farm Crop abstracts.)
Cannabis is a topical analgesic.2 Until 1937, virtually all corn plasters, mustard plasters, muscle ointments, and fibrosis poultices were made from or with cannabis extracts.
2. Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, UCLA, 1976; Mikuriya, Tod H., M.D., Marijuana Medical Papers 1839-1972, Medi-Comp Press, Oakland, CA, 1973.
Rheumatism was treated throughout South American until the 1960s with hemp leaves and/or flower tops heated in water or alcohol and placed on painful joints. In fact, this form of herbal medicine is still widely used in rural areas of Mexico, Central and South America, and by California Latinos for relief of arthritis pain.
Direct contact with THC killed herpes virus in a University of South Florida (Tampa) 1990 research study by Dr. Gerald Lancz, who warns that “smoking marijuana will not cure herpes.” However, anecdotal reports indicate a faster drying and healing of the outbreak after topical application of “strong bud,” soaked in rubbing alcohol and crushed into a paste.
Cannabis is the best natural expectorant to clear the human lungs of smog, dust, and the phlegm associated with tobacco use.
Marijuana smoke effectively dilates the airways of the lungs, the bronchi, opening them to allow more oxygen into the lungs. It is also the best natural dilator of the tiny airways of the lungs, the bronchial tubes—making cannabis the best overall bronchial dilator for 80% of the population (the remaining 20% sometimes show minor negative reactions).
(See section on asthma—a disease that closes these passages in spasms—UCLA Tashkin studies, 1969-95; U.S. Costa Rican, 1980-82; Jamaican studies 1968-74.)
Statistical evidence—showing up consistently as anomalies in matched populations—indicates that persons who smoke tobacco cigarettes are usually better off and will live longer if they smoke cannabis moderately, too. (Jamaican, Costa Rican studies.)
Millions of Americans have given up or avoided smoking tobacco products in favor of cannabis, which is not good news to the powerful tobacco lobby—Senator Jesse Helms and his cohorts. A turn of the century grandfather clause in U.S. tobacco law allows 400 to 6000 additional chemicals to be added. Additions since then to the average tobacco cigarette are unknown, and the public in the U.S. has “no right” to know what they are.
Many joggers and marathon runners feel cannabis use cleans their lungs, allowing better endurance.
The evidence indicates cannabis use will probably increase these outlaw American marijuana-users’ lives by about one to two years—but they can lose their rights, property, children, state licenses, etc., for using that safest of substances: Cannabis.
Cannabis lowers blood pressure, dilates the arteries, and reduces body temperature an average of 1/2 degree, thereby relieving stress. Evening cannabis smokers in general report more restful sleep.
Using cannabis allows most persons a more complete rest with the highest amount of “alpha time” possible in sleep as compared to prescription or sleep-inducing patent sedatives.
Prescription sleeping pills (the so called ‘legal, safe, and effective’ drugs) are often just synthesized analogs of truly dangerous plants like mandrake, henbane, and belladonna. As late as 1991, doctors, pharmacists, and drug companies were fighting off new legislation to restrict these often abused compounds (L.A. Times, April 2, 1991).
Unlike Valium, cannabis does not potentiate the effects of alcohol. It is estimated that cannabis could replace more than 50% of Valium, Librium, Thorazine, Stelazine, other “-zine” drugs, and most sleeping pills.
It is unconscionable that, over the past two decades, tens of thousands of parents have committed their own children, aged 11 to 17, to be treated by massive doses of so-called “-zine” drugs in order to get them off pot, at the urging of parent groups, the Feds, and administrators and doctors from federally approved, private and high-profit drug rehabilitation centers.
Often, “-zine” drugs do work to stop these youths from using pot. They also stop a kid from loving his or her dog, too—and the child stands a one-in-four chance of suffering from uncontrollable shaking for the rest of their lives.* But at least they’re not high.
* The U.S. Center for Disease Control in Atlanta said that 20% to 40% of “-zine” drug users have or will develop permanent lifetime palsies (shakes), November, 1983. These prescription neurotoxins are chemically related to pesticide and the warfare nerve gas Sarin.
Hundreds of private drug-rehabilitation centers and their leaders keep this policy alive and in front of the media, often quoting discredited reports from NIDA or DEA (see chapter 16, debunking)— because they earn fat profits selling their useless or destructive ‘marijuana treatment’ for children.
After all, a relapse just means using marijuana again after a number of bouts with an ‘authority.’ This is mind-control and an attempt to destroy individual free will.
Medical research indicates that light cannabis smoking might be useful for a majority of mild emphysema victims. It would improve the quality of life for millions of sufferers and extend their life spans.
The U.S. government and DEA (since 1976) say the side effect, being ‘high,’ is not acceptable, no matter how many years or lives it saves; even though some 60 million Americans have tried marijuana and 25 to 30 million still smoke marijuana relaxationally, or use it responsibly as a form of daily self-medication, without one single death from overdose—ever.
All research into the oxygen blood transfer effects caused by cannabis indicates that the chest (lung) pains, extremity pains, shallowness of breath, and headaches we may experience on heavy smog days are usually alleviated by light cannabis smoking throughout the day. However, heavy pot smoking works no better.
Dr. Donald Tashkin, the U.S. government’s leading scientist on pulmonary research, told us in December, 1989* that you cannot get or potentiate emphysema with cannabis smoking.
* See Tashkin’s marijuana pulmonary research, UCLA, 1969-1995. This author has personally taken part in these studies for 10 years and has continuously interviewed Tashkin on cannabis’s medical indications; last personal interview on February 16, 1995.
Most of all: it is best for the world’s number one killer—stress. It can safely curtail or replace Valium, Librium, or alcohol for millions of Americans.
While cannabis intoxication varies with psychological set and social setting, “the most common response is a calm, mildly euphoric state in which time slows and a sensitivity to sights, sounds and touch is enhanced.” 4
4. Harvard Medical School Mental Health Letter, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1987.
In contrast to marijuana’s safe therapeutic action, Benzodiazepines (valium) abuse is the number one drug abuse problem in the country, and is responsible for more emergency room admissions in the United States than either cocaine-related problems or morphine- and heroin-related admissions combined.6
6. Stopping Valium Public Citizen Health Research Group, 2000 P St., NW, Washington, D.C.
While tobacco constricts arteries, cannabis dilates them. Because migraine headaches are the result of artery spasms combined with over-relaxation of veins, the vascular changes cannabis causes in the covering of the brain (the meninges) usually make migraines disappear.
Evidence of vascular change caused by cannabis can be seen in the user’s red eyes, which are extensions of the brain. However, unlike most other drugs, cannabis has no apparent effect on the vascular system in general, except for a slight increased heart rate during the onset of the high.
Marijuana users often (but not always) get “the munchies,” a stimulated appetite for food, which makes cannabis the very best medicine on the planet to date for anorexia.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans in old age, convalescent wards or hospital situations have anorexia. Most could be helped by cannabis—yet these Americans are being denied a healthy life by governmental policy dictated by government police!
This effect can also extend the lives of victims of pancreatic cancer (eat or die). However, the DEA, and U.S. Government prevented any research or use of cannabis in pancreatic cancer therapy since 1976.
They have collectively allowed tens of thousands of persons to die each year, denied the right to live relatively normal, healthy, and productive lives.
Marijuana smoking can help dry your mouth for the dentist. This is the best way to dry the mouth’s saliva non-toxically in what is known among smokers as its “cotton mouth” effect.
It could replace the highly toxic Probathine compounds produced by Searle & Co., the Canadian Board of Dentistry reported in studies conducted in the 1970s. This may also indicate that cannabis could be good for treating peptic ulcers.
One well known effect of THC is to lift the spirit, or make you “high.” Cannabis users in Jamaica praise ganja’s benefits for meditation, concentration, consciousness-raising, and promoting a state of well-being and self assertiveness.5 This kind of attitude adjustment, along with a healthier appetite and better rest, often represents the difference between “dying of” AIDS and “living with” AIDS.
5. Ruben, Vera & Comitas, Lambros, Ganja in Jamaica, A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marijuana Use, Mouton & Co., The Hague and Paris, Anchor Books, U.S.A., 1976.
Cannabis also eases small pains and some big ones and helps senior citizens live with aches and pains like arthritis, insomnia, and debilitating infirmities, and enjoy life in greater dignity and comfort. Legend has it, and medical evidence indicates, that cannabis is the best overall treatment for dementia, senility, and maybe Alzheimer’s disease, for long-term memory “gain”, and hundreds of other benefits.
U.S. statistics indicate that you will live eight to 24 years longer if you substitute daily cannabis use for daily tobacco and alcohol use. New research is outlawed, of course.
Every U.S. Commission or federal judge who has studies the evidence has agreed that cannabis is one of the safest drugs known. With all its therapeutic uses, it has only one side effect that has been exaggerated as a concern: the “high.” The DEA says this is not acceptable, so cannabis continues to be totally illegal in utter disrespect for both doctor and patient.
Every day we entrust physicians to determine whether the risks associated with therapeutic, yet potentially dangerous, drugs are acceptable for their patients. Yet, doctors are not allowed to prescribe the herb that Federal Judge Francis Young in 1988 called “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” We don’t put our doctors in charge of stopping violent crimes. The police and prosecutors should not be in charge of which herbal therapies persons may use to treat their personal health problems.
1. Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, UCLA, 1976; personal interviews with researchers who did this study in Washington, D.C., November, 1982.
2. Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, UCLA, 1976; Mikuriya, Tod H., M.D., Marijuana Medical Papers 1839-1972, Medi-Comp Press, Oakland, CA, 1973.
3. The Antibiotic Effect of Cannabis Indica, 1952-53-55. The Antibacterial Effect of Cannabis Indica, 1955, from Marijuana Medical Papers; Cohen & Stillman, Therapeutic Potential of Marijuana, UCLA, 1976
4. Harvard Medical School Mental Health Letter, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1987.
5. Ruben, Vera & Comitas, Lambros, Ganja in Jamaica, A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marijuana Use, Mouton & Co., The Hague and Paris, Anchor Books, U.S.A., 1976.
6. Stopping Valium Public Citizen Health Research Group, 2000 P St., NW, Washington, D.C.
Patric Mayers, with his testimony and personal lobbying, was instrumental in getting the California Legislature to pass a state law allowing cannabis for medical use. Mayers’ life was saved in 1976 when his doctors illegally advised him to use marijuana for his chemotherapy nausea. At this point, Mayers weighed only 93 pounds. The easily smoked cannabis eased Patric’s nausea and gave him an appetite for food. This lifesaving function of Cannabis, if developed in a laboratory, would be hailed around the globe and in every medical publication, it would be Nobel Prize material. Instead, there is a forced silence because there is no money to be made on it.
Mayers received the “best flower tops of Thai and sinsemilla” free from dealers and students in his San Francisco law school where Mayers was class president when stricken with cancer in 1975.
Healthy, vigorous, and living in L.A., Mayers was shocked in 1981 to learn that the state attorney general, in charge of the medical cannabis program, refused to supply federally grown or even police-impounded contraband marijuana to cancer patients; cannabis to which he had legal access for doctors to prescribe or obtain for dying patients.
In 1982, Mayers got mad and caused the L.A. Times, other media, and Willie Brown, Speaker of the California Assembly, to demand compliance with the state’s 1979 marijuana law.
Following a few months of visible compliance, the policy to block medical access was back in full force. After 10 years of run-arounds, refusals, and harassment, the well intentioned “Compassionate Marijuana” program lapsed automatically.
From 1979 to 1989, California had a law that was supposed to help persons get cannabis for medical purposes. Many states now have doctors in charge of their own, independent cannabis programs (L.A. Times, 1982, et al.). However, instead of putting the California “compassionate cannabis” program under the health department, it was given to the attorney general — the state prosecutor.
As far as we know, no Californian receives or has received legal cannabis for glaucoma, even though California law allowed for experimental cannabis medicine for 10 years (from 1979 to 1989). Its use in any illness other than chemotherapy nausea is rare due to the current federal government’s natural-medical marijuana prohibition.
Both as state Attorney General (1979-83) and as governor (1983-91), George Deukmejian deliberately and consciously thwarted doctors’ and researchers’ attempts to acquire federal cannabis from him and refused to carry out the program passed by California legislators. When the state’s bill authorizing medical cannabis lapsed in July, 1989, almost no one had benefited from it — and no legislator even bothered to try to extend or implement it.
The federal government has had no coordinating program since 1976 to deal with the 36 states whose legislators have passed medical marijuana laws (over federal and DEA objections). Even worse, the Feds give these patients and doctors, consciously and with malice aforethought, the harshest and least therapeutic cannabis: the broad leaf.
Healing agents and therapeutic compounds are concentrated in the flower tops. For these patients to buy top-grade “grass” on the black market costs anywhere from $200 to $400 per ounce. When the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act was passed, one ounce of cannabis (what the AMA called the ‘raw drug’) was available from the drugstore for one dollar.
The Merck Manual, the U.S. military’s field guide to medicine states:
“Chronic or periodic administration of cannabis or cannabis substances produc[es] some psychic dependence because of the desired subjective effects, but no physical dependence; there is no abstinence syndrome when the drug is discontinued.
“Cannabis can be used on episodic but continuous basis without evidence of social or psychic dysfunction. In many users the term dependence with its obvious connotations probably is misapplied.
“Many of the claims regarding severe biologic impact are still uncertain, but some others are not. Despite the acceptance of the “new” dangers of marijuana, there is still little evidence of biologic damage even among relatively heavy users. This is true even in the areas intensively investigated, such as pulmonary, immunologic, and reproductive function.
“Marijuana used in the USA has a higher THC content than in the past. Many critics have incorporated this fact into warnings, but the chief opposition to the drug rests on a moral and political, and not a toxicological, foundation.”
Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, Fifteenth Edition, 1987, Robert Berkow, M.D., Editor-in-Chief. Published by Merck Sharp and Dohme Research Laboratories Division of Merck and Co., Inc. (Pharmaceutical) Rahway, New Jersey, 1987.
CANNABIS
(Marijuana)
Over 60 Synergistic compounds in one natural medication
Available:
Cigarettes (350mg.-500mg. r.d.)
Concentrated cannabis oil (grass oil)
Concentrated cannabis pollen (kif)
Concentrated cannabis resin (hashish)
Description:
Cannabis is the crude vegetable preparation of the plants Cannabis sativa L. and Cannabis Indica. The pharmacologically active components of the drug are a cannabinoids, including delta-9 trans-tetrahydrocannabinol, cannabidiol, cannabinol, tetrahydrocannabivarin and perhaps 60 other cannabinoids of varying pharmacalogical properties. Unique in both botany and pharmacological action, cannabinoids are not nitrogenous alkaloids, and their site and mode of action in the body are unknown, though they clearly modify neurotransmission in the CSN. Cannibinoids work synergistically, in that the effects of delta-9 trans-tetrahydrocannibinol in isolation, for example, are very greatly modified by its interaction in crude cannabis with Cannibidiol, which antagonizes some effects of the tetrahydrocannibinol and potentiates others. Cannabis also necessarily comprises a broad variety of non-pharmacological substances common to vegetable matter in general; however, most or all of these extraneous materials can be substantially eliminated, before the drug is ingested, by appropriate filtering devices.
Precautions:
Cannabis is proscribed under the Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Act of 1972. Its possession is a felony under federal law and physicians who facilitate its use by patients are subject to prosecution under conspiracy statutes; merely advising a patient where he or she might obtain cannabis renders a physician liable to arrest. Patients who use cannabis should be advised of the risk of prosecution and imprisonment and the material health hazards posed thereby.
Contraindications:
Persons suffering from viral or bacterial pulmonary infections should not ingest Cannabis by inhalation until the remission of the infection. Extended and regular administration to persons with emphysema and lung fibrosis may aggravate these conditions.
Adverse Reactions:
Idiosyncratic anxiety crises, dysphoric dissociation and depersonalization syndromes may occur in a very few patients experiencing acute onset of cannabis’s mental effects for the first time; dosage should be lowered and an attempt should be made to determine the root emotional cause of the reaction. If the reaction persists long after the drug wears off or dependably occurs with succeeding administrations, a preexisting premorbid psychotic condition may be suspected and therapy should be discontinued.
Raw cannabis contains significant levels of mutagenic hydrocarbon condensates, toxins that irritate pharyngo-laryngeal, bronchial and alveolar tissues; water-soluble cytotoxins exist in cannabis that inhibit the bactericidal activity of ciliated esophageal cells. While none of these effects poses any material hazard to patients free from pulmonary dysfunction or disease, the use of smoking devices that both filter and cool the smoke is recommended over cigarettes for therapeutic administration. Oral administration of Cannabis has shown considerable effectiveness, particularly with glaucoma and antiemesis; but the physician cannot determine the dosage dependably when cannabis is eaten, since the drug is absorbed very unevenly through the G.I. tract and it decarboxylation there by HCl may alter its psychic and physiological effects in ways not yet adequately studied. The minimal untoward effects of cannabis upon lung function and tissue renders inhalation of its smoke a superior route of administration for therapeutic purposes; the patient is able to self-titrate the dosage, inhalation by inhalation, until the precise therapeutic effect is achieved.
Tachycardia, showing a pulse-rate increase of 30 to 60 percent, dependably occurs during the drug’s onset in patients previously unexposed to cannabis; this usually persists 30 to 45 minutes. The rise and decline in heart action is smooth and uniform. Cannabis-induced tachycardia may render the drug inadvisable for use with patients who are receive Digitalis in cardiac therapy.
Cannabis commonly promotes lassitude and drowsiness and has been shown to significantly prolong reaction time in human subjects. Patients receiving it should be advised not to drive or operate heavy machinery.
Drug Interactions:
While the site and nature of cannabis’s mental effects in the CSN are largely unknown, it appears to raise the free levels of serotonin in the intersynactic gap probably by blocking it reuptake into the presynaptic neuron. Thus it appears to intensify and facilitate the effects of tricyclic antidepressants by promoting a higher intersynaptic ratio of serotonin to norepinephrine and dopamine. Its interaction with monamine oxidase inhibitors is similarly felicitous , since both medications work to raise free sertonin levels. With benzodiazepenes, it has been suggested that cannabis may exert some yet-determined influence on the brain hormone GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) to facilitate the penetration of benzodiazepene metabolites into the brain tissue and to potentiate their anxiety relieving action there. (Note: By itself, cannabis is not an antidepressant but a potentiator of moods. As an adjunct to antidepressant therapy, it should be employed only by physicians as part of a broad program of personal counseling.)
Cannabis has no adverse reactions with any other drug. Suspicion exists, however, that in the liver cannabis metabolites may react with alcohol metabolites to promote an unwholesome modification of both drugs’ psychotropic effects.
Dosage and Administration
Psychophysiological responses to cannabis are greatly dependent on the individual patient’s experience with the drug: After an initial period of three to five weeks of regular administration, a subject will exhibit a measure of habituation to some acute effects such as euphoria and tachycardia, while other effects, such as intraocular pressure reduction and antimesis, will remain constant. Therefore it is advisable in most cases to have the patient determine the dosage for himself until the desired therapeutic effect is realized. Inhaling cannabis smoke is the most dependable known way to accomplish this.
Due to the nature of cannabis as a crude vegetable material , a standard uniform dose is virtually impossible to establish. The erratic provenance of street cannabis, which can originate from anywhere in the world, complicates it even further. Cannabis grown in Northern latitudes, as a rule, will generally produce pronounced sedative effect and its physical effects will typically be muted though prolonged. Equatorial cultivars of cannabis by contrast, may exert a decided tonic effect with immediate and conspicuous physical effects of relatively brief duration per single dose. Of the cannabis cultivars most widely available on the street market to patients in the United States, the commonest commercial Colombian cultivar — “Santa Marta Gold” — probably has the most dependable uniform effect per dose.
Usage in pregnancy:
Cannabis has no proven teratogenic properties. Due to the illegal status of the drug, however, no longitudinal epidemiological statistics are available in this regard. The United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare has imposed an arbitrary cannabis-testing ban on all women “who are or may become pregnant,” rendering it impossible to scientifically investigate the influence on this or any other health concerns unique to women. The antemetic properties of cannabis have been widely exploited by pregnant women to counteract morning nausea, but until more is known of its precise action in the body, it should not be recommended for regular use during pregnancy. Recent research has suggested that all psychtropic drugs may exert some measure of subtle teratogeny, and there is no substantive reason to believe that cannabis escapes this category.
(Reprinted from High Times, July, 1980.)
Every year, tons of medicine are destroyed by cutting and burning or toxic herbacides in a multi-million dollar federal and state program, the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP).
This CD-ROM created on Macintosh computers by Milo and Stephen.
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