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June 6, 2005.
The Medical Marijuana Case, And Why Marijuana is Illegal
by H.L.
Excerpt: The Marijuana plant, also known as the hemp plant, was widely used for many purposes before it became illegal in 1938. George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp according to "The Emperor Wears No Clothes, The Authoritative Historical Record of Cannabis and The Conspiracy against Marijuana." By Jack Herer.
Contribute
THE GENERAL IDEA
For as long as I can remember, the debate over cannabis has centered on whether it is harmful. I would like to focus instead on marijuana's uses and possible benefits. Some ten million Americans smoke marijuana regularly. Millions more use it occasionally. But why, exactly? I know that some people use marijuana as a medicine, while others use it simply to "party." But between these two poles are many other uses and effects that might best be described by words like enhancing, therapeutic, exploratory, expansive, and so on. The Uses of Marijuana will explore these various possibilities. I hope you will join me by writing about your experience.Here are a few suggestions:# You could write a personal essay -- serious, whimsical, or some of each -- about the place of marijuana in your life, or why you use it, or what you especially enjoy about it.# Or you could cover the same ground in other ways: by exchanging a series of letters (or e-mails) with a friend and sending them on to us; by writing up a dialogue about marijuana with your spouse or partner; by sending sections from a journal; or perhaps even by keeping a journal for a few weeks and sending us some excerpts from it.# Or you might write up an interview with yourself on the subject of marijuana, or ask a friend to interview you; or send us something you have already written on this subject -- or any other writing about marijuana that you'd like us to be aware of.THE FINE PRINTWhether or not we can use your name, please identify who you are and how to contact you. And kindly provide at least four basic details: your age, your gender, your occupation, and what part of the country you live in. If you'd like to identify yourself further, please do.Submissions to The Uses of Marijuana should be typed and easy to read. Longer contributions are fine, but whatever you send, please keep a copy. I hope to respond to all contributions within 2-3 weeks. If you have questions or comments about this project, I'll do my best to respond.Please forward your submissions as soon as possible!Please send all submissions and correspondence, preferably in electronic form, to:[email protected] Grinspoon, MD
35 Skyline Drive
Wellesley, MA 02482Cordially,
Lester Grinspoon, M.D.
Smoking Marijuana
Study Finds No Cancer-Marijuana Connection
The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years."We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought.Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.Tashkin's study, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse, involved 1,200 people in Los Angeles who had lung, neck or head cancer and an additional 1,040 people without cancer matched by age, sex and neighborhood.They were all asked about their lifetime use of marijuana, tobacco and alcohol. The heaviest marijuana smokers had lighted up more than 22,000 times, while moderately heavy usage was defined as smoking 11,000 to 22,000 marijuana cigarettes. Tashkin found that even the very heavy marijuana smokers showed no increased incidence of the three cancers studied."This is the largest case-control study ever done, and everyone had to fill out a very extensive questionnaire about marijuana use," he said. "Bias can creep into any research, but we controlled for as many confounding factors as we could, and so I believe these results have real meaning."Tashkin's group at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA had hypothesized that marijuana would raise the risk of cancer on the basis of earlier small human studies, lab studies of animals, and the fact that marijuana users inhale more deeply and generally hold smoke in their lungs longer than tobacco smokers -- exposing them to the dangerous chemicals for a longer time. In addition, Tashkin said, previous studies found that marijuana tar has 50 percent higher concentrations of chemicals linked to cancer than tobacco cigarette tar.While no association between marijuana smoking and cancer was found, the study findings, presented to the American Thoracic Society International Conference this week, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.The study was limited to people younger than 60 because those older than that were generally not exposed to marijuana in their youth, when it is most often tried.
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