"I was totally amazed that an illegal substance... that to me was garbage, was helping me medically." "I was bed bound for about 5 years." "I couldn't hold a job, I had to quit school." "I was near death." "I believe that..." "medical marijuana saved my life." "I see it as a kind of wonder drug of our time." "What this really is is the marijuana legalization lobby taking advantage of sick patients." "Legitimate sick patients need legitimate medications." "It's a medicine!" "If it is a medicine, how come it is not regulated through medical fields." "Never in my career did I find a chemical so ill qualified to be defined as a pharmaceutical." "(?" ") I think the biggest problem is you're ?" "a highly impure substance." "All this stuff that's floating around in marijuana, 488 substances, 66 cannabinoids." "If you find a positive effect, then that justifies drilling down deeper and deeper to see where this positive effect is coming from." "There's quite a bit of evidence that suggested that cannabis would be useful for a number of indications." "Migraine and nausea and vomiting..." "Marijuana contains anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and probably anticancer compounds." "We found that cannabinoids can almost completely cure cancers in these mice." "Do you think that there has been much of a conversation about the science?" "Not nearly enough, not nearly enough." "I think the political controversies have harmed the research side." "You would think that our policies in this country should be driven by science, but I think for the most part they're not." "CLEARING THE SMOKE THE SCIENCE OF CANNABIS" "(?" ") I'm not one for just sitting around..." "I gotta be out... and it's outdoor stuff, I'm not much for going to a gym workout." "(?" ") My physical exercise had to be outdoors ?" "." "For Point Hatfield, the mountains and rivers in Montana have always been a certain kind of therapy." "Running and river guiding in the summer and teaching back country ski in the winter have helped him through life's many difficulties." "But the greatest challenge of his life took be outdoors away from him." "It was..." "like..." "two days after New Year's..." "I just dumped two feet of snow... (?" ") and a group of ?" "after work... and we went out for dinner." "And when we were sitting having dinner, I guess went like this and..." "Hmm, there's a lump there." "I had a radical neck discectomy." "So, they cut out this side of my neck..." "they took out the... ?" "external ?" ", all of the lip nodes..." "But the cancer came back." "Two more tumors and another surgery later, it was clear Hatfield would have to endure chemotherapy and radiation." "Chemo and radiation were horrible." "Literally horrible..." "'cause I was... throwing up... almost all day long... everyday." "zapped every ounce of..." "life I had in me just about." "I just... hanged on by a thread." "Just like he used to, Hatfield turned to the outdoors for comfort, trying to ski a small hill in his backyard." "(?" ") So, I got two runs of two turns and..." "and that's all I could do, wiped me out." "Two days after that..., I went cross-country skiing with my wife and I was able to do... about a mile." "That's all I could do..." "I was exhausted." "Then after the third round of treatment, I couldn't do anything." "Hatfield's athletic frame melted from a 160 pounds of muscle to barely a 124 pounds..." "I used to have 15 inch arms biceps... they went down to 9 inches." "I used to have thick legs..." "I'm skinny now." "I'm not used to being skinny." "Are there things that you know that can trigger your nausea and things like that?" "No, just comes..." "just like that, it just comes." "And we've used the other antinausea medications with you." "I was on Adivan, I was on Zoloft, I think Zofran too... and there was a couple of steroids that I wore a patch with..." "I think was a couple of other drugs too that they tried..." "Dr. Jack Hansol is Hatfield's oncologist." "He says these are common antinausea medications that work for most patients." "We have very good antinausea medications now and..." "I make a little bit of advertisements for that right now." "People don't get sick on chemotherapy as they used to be because the standard on the antinausea medications are so good." "But Point Hatfield wasn't one of those patients." "They just did not work." " Not at all?" " Not at all." "Didn't alleviate anything." "So, what was the next step?" "Well, then Dr. Hansol would ask me I would... be willing to try medical marijuana." "I said I'll try anything." "We've had patients who've tolerated it very well and it's done some very good things for them." "Even though Hatfield had his doctors blessing, he still needed the green light from Wendy Gwinner, the hospital's oncology social worker." "We had a fair number of patients who came out of the woodwork who probably were users anyway and said:" ""Gosh, I got cancer, can I get a card? "" "And the answer is no, you can't." "Gwinner carefully evaluated Hatfield's case just like she does with every patient, before signing off on the medical marijuana recommendation." "We have to be screening you, making sure that we've used" "(?" ")the appropriate medication as first ?" "treatment, if our antimedicines have not worked well and we've gone through a cadre of medicines, then we would go to medical marijuana." "After I got the medical marijuana it just... alleviated so much of that sick... puky feeling and alleviated the throwing up." " Immediately?" " Immediately." " Wow." " Immediately!" "It's like... it was... a godsend." "It's... was a wonderful thing." "'Cause that..." " throwing up all the time is not good." " Right, right." "I believe that..." "the medical marijuana saved my life." "I couldn't eat anything..." "couldn't swallow." "And I think it just saved..." "I just think it saved my life." "Five years after he was first diagnosed," "Hatfield is cancer free and enjoying Montana's beauty again." "Nowadays, he says the beauty isn't the only thing he loves about this state." "He loves the progressive voters who passed the state's Compassionate Use of Medical Marijuana Law in 2004." "Allowing patients like him the option of using a drug at the center of a growing controversy." "There's a false stigma attached to it... and I'm doing this interview to help other people." "Why not?" "It's our job to help other people, it's our responsibility." "If we can do something for people, why not do it?" "If something can help somebody, why not let those people have that?" "(?" ") In ?" "from patients just like Hatfield have been the spark behind a nation-wide movement to allow access to marijuana as a medicine." "By the fall of 2010, fifteen states have passed laws similar to Montana's." "This is all in direct conflict with federal law." "Since the 1970's, the US government has considered marijuana a dangerous drug." "One with a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use." "It's known as schedule 1 drug, the most restricted category." "Marijuana shares its schedule 1 status with drugs like heroin, ecstasy and LSD." "Drugs that have a high potential for abuse, but do have an accepted medical value, are placed on schedule 2." "Some of the drugs currently on schedule 2 are methamphetamine, cocaine, opium and morphine." "Doctors can legally prescribe medications on schedule 2, they cannot prescribe schedule 1 drugs." "So, doctors like Hensel cannot legally prescribe marijuana to patients like Hatfield." "(?" ") Instead, state marijuana ?" "carve out a gray area, allowing doctors to make a recommendation for medical use." "But they do so at their own peril, since the federal government still views any marijuana use, even medical, as illegal." "The government publicly says:" ""No, marijuana is not a medicine because with don't have studies to show it", or" ""We don't have this" or "we don't have that"." "And you go: "Well, here I am." "Even sending me this for 28 years. "" "Every month, Florida stockbroker Irving Rosenfeld receives a tin of 300 federally grown and rolled marijuana cigarettes, complete with a legal marijuana prescription glued to the side." " Does it seem hypocritical to you?" " Of course it's hypocritical, of course it is." "I mean, the fact that they've given me for all this time," "(?" ") they've given me over a 120,000 medical marijuana cigarettes so far in my lifetime." "And in 28 years, a 120,000." "Rosenfeld is one 4 surviving public patients in a little known federal program." "I show my tin can, I show my marijuana, they ? "what?"." "What do you mean the federal govern grows this?" "What do you mean the federal govern supplies this?" "They have no idea." "It was called The Federal Investigational New Drug Program." "Since applications to the program are confidential, the exact number of patients who made it in is unknown." "Rosenfeld believes he was one of about a dozen patients who received legal marijuana cigarettes from the federal government." "We were able to convince the government that nothing else worked and so... they had no choice but to give it to us." "Rosenfeld argued he needed marijuana to treat his terrible pain, caused by a rare disorder diagnosed at age 10." "It's called multiple congenital cartilaginous exostosis, which means bone tumors on the end of one bones, that whatever tumors I had at puberbity would grow as I grow." "They mostly grow outwardly into the muscles and the veins, stretching the muscles and the veins, making very painful, very tender." "I've been screaming and crawling on the floor for two hours, trying to get the muscles get back in place, then once they found they got back in place, the muscle would be so torn that I couldn't walk for three days." "On top of the pain, was the knowledge that any of the hundreds of benign tumors in his body could become malignant at any time." "Rosenfeld spent his youth in teen years on synthetic morphine, muscle relaxants and sleeping pills." "By age 20, he was taking more than 200 pills a month and he was a vocal critic of illegal drugs." "I hear kids talking about drugs and things like that and I go "why are you doing drugs?"." "I mean, look at all I have to do, you'd be thankful you're healthy." "Even so, Rosenfeld finally gave in to pure pressure and tried marijuana in college." "He says he didn't feel anything and decided the drug was useless and his friends were just imagining they were high." "But a strange thing happened one night while smoking marijuana and playing chess with a friend." "Rosenfeld did something he hadn't done in years:" "he sat comfortably for 30 full minutes." "(?" ") I thought: "wait a minute." "In what way did I take all the narcotics and drugs I had to allow me to sit? "." "I thought: "Gee, I haven't taken a pill in six hours." "Well, then how can I sit?"." "And just then, there was my turn with the joint." "They handed me the joint," "I looked at this piece of garbage, 'cause to me, that's all it was." "I said: "This is the only thing I've done differently, I've smoked this garbage. "" "I wonder if there's any medical benefit, this garbage." "Rosenfeld had stumbled onto another potential medical use for cannabis:" "chronic pain." "When he joined the federal program in the 80's, he became one of a rare group of medical marijuana patients, patients who could speak openly, without fear of arrest, about its medical benefits." "Their stories added some legitimacy to an expanding body of anecdotal evidence." "Medical marijuana has grown to a point where the government looks foolish, saying it's not a medicine." "It is a medicine." "82-year-old retired Harvard professor, doctor Lester Grinspoon is well versed in the anecdotal evidence surrounding medical marijuana." "He's told Irving Rosenfeld story, along with many other patients stories, in his book "Marijuana, the Forbidden Medicine"." "His opinion of cannabis has come a long way since he first began investigating it as a young assistant professor of psychiatry, at Harvard in the late 60's." "Back then, he certainly did not see it as a medicine." "I could only see it from my ivory tower that lots of people were using marijuana." "I had a concern that marijuana was a terribly..." "I believed it, a terribly dangerous drug." "And why wouldn't he?" "The 1930's era film Reefer Madness was a dramatic manifestation of government and media claims about the dangers of marijuana." "The film portrays marijuana smokers as delirious, insane, even homicidal." "Doctor Grinspoon was gravely concerned and he wanted to give young students the proof that marijuana was hurting them." "I went into the library and started to look at this." "I wanted to provide a scientific and medical basis for the prohibition, what was the government standing on and saying with this was a dangerous drug." "Psychotic reactions can happen." "Marijuana is now known to initiate depressive episodes, delusional episodes, manic episodes and even psychotic episodes." "Doctor Eric Voth is an internal medicine physician" "(?" ") and in addiction in pain specialist in Topeka, Kansas." "He's also the chairman of the Institute on Global Drug Policy and has advised former presidents Reagan, Bush Senior, Bush Junior and Clinton on drug policy." "A critic of medical marijuana, he says one of his biggest concerns is the risk of mental illness, specially schizophrenia." "There are clearly patients where it kind of uncaps the psychosis." "Schizophrenia is a form of a psychotic illness and... uncapping it in people who didn't know they had it, there have been episodes again of people who have sort of uncapped" "(?" ") and continued schizophrenic that did not have ahead of time." "Indeed, research has shown a connection between marijuana use and schizophrenia." "There's also great concern over marijuana use in teens and young adults because their brains are still developing." "But it's still unclear whether marijuana causes mental illness or someone with a mental illness is more likely to use marijuana." "As a psychiatrist, Dr. Grinspoon's expertise was in schizophrenia and he strongly disagrees with critics who say marijuana may trigger the disease." "I think that is... absurd." "If you just take the fact that schizophrenia, the frequency of schizophrenia is about one percent the world around." "Now, you would expect, with a drug as used as often as it is, you would expect that this to be a little... beep and this... it doesn't change a bit, it hasn't changed." "I, in fact, you can find as much literature about cannabis is useful to schizophrenic patients as is harmful..." "Dr. Grinspoon could not find evidence to back up the government and media reports that marijuana use leads to drug-induced violence... and incurable insanity." ""...he is hopelessly incurably insane, a condition caused by the drug marijuana to which he was addicted. "" "This substance, the most harmful thing about it, was not any inherent psycho-pharmacological property of the drug, but rather the way we, as a society, were treating the people who used this drug." "It's been a medicine for about three thousand years now." "It only hasn't been a medicine in this country for 68 years." "I'd say, in the scheme of things, it's been a medicine a whole lot longer than it hasn't been." "Dr. Donald Abrams is a professor of clinical medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and an oncology physician at San Francisco General Hospital." "He says doctors were able to freely prescribe cannabis for various ailments up until 1937." "Harry Anslinger, who was a prohibitionist and the first head of the" "Federal Narcotics Bureau, decided to introduce this so-called Marijuana Tax Act." "Physicians in the US knew the medicine as cannabis and by using marijuana it sort of did an end-run around the medical community." "The act imposed a high tax on medical marijuana and such owner's registration and reporting requirements that it effectively banned its use as a medicine altogether." "The American Medical Association came out in opposition to the act, with dr." "William C. Woodword testifying there was no evidence the medical use of cannabis was causing addiction and that" ""There are evident potentialities in the drug that should not be shut off by adverse legislation..."" "He opined that "it's impossible to foresee how much the new regulations will deprive the public of the benefits of a drug that on further research may prove to be of substantial value..."" "The Marijuana Tax Act delivered the final blow to a medicine that was already being replaced by the opiates and aspirin." "Cannabis was removed from the US pharmacopoeia in 1942." "The fact that cannabis was an accepted valuable medicine in the US for nearly a century, might be surprising to the teens who grew up watching the dramatizations of Reefer Madness." "It's certainly came as a surprise to Dr. Grinspoon." "I discovered when I get into the library that I, despite my training in science and medicine, had been brainwashed..." "He put his findings into an 80-page paper, aptly titled 'Marijuana Reconsidered'." "It was later published in Scientific American." "Then, his professional investigation of cannabis, took an unexpected personal turn." "His son Danny, suffering from childhood leukemia, had began chemotherapy." "The chemotherapeutics that he had to receive... were just devastating to him, in terms of the nausea and the vomiting." "It's a nausea that goes right down to your toe nails, I mean, it's... it's really beyond description." "Even with all his prior research, Dr. Grinspoon still had no idea that marijuana might be able to stop Danny's chemotherapy-induced nausea." "One night at a dinner party, an oncology doctor who has read his paper on marijuana, related the story of a 17-year-old with leukemia, who used marijuana to treat his terrible nausea." "On the way home from there, in the car, my wife Betsy asked me:" ""Don't you think we ought to get a little bit of marijuana for Danny, for next time he gets..."." "I said, I'm almost ashamed to say this, I said:" ""No, no, no, that would be breaking the law." "And I don't want to offend the physicians, you know, who are taking care of him. "" "And I... so, I was against it." "She is a rather plucky woman and next time he came in for his chemotherapy she... (?" ") went up to the ?" "high school parking lot, they found his friend Mark... and asked him if he..." "Mrs. Grinspoon wanted a little bit of marijuana." "When dr." "Grinspoon showed up for Danny's chemo treatment, he was surprised to find his wife and Danny so relaxed." "They were joking and he seemed smiling and... no problem!" "He got on the gurney, had the injection, and whereas before with this particular... he became nauseous, felt awful right away... and the race to get home before he started to vomit, and the bed with a bucket at aside there, until it was just dry..." "That day, he got off the gurney and said:" "(?" ") "Hey, mom, there's a Sub sandwich on B?" "Avenue I noticed." "Could we get a sub on the way home?"" "When he discovered Danny had smoked marijuana," "Dr. Grinspoon was not angry." "He was relieved." "And I called the doctor, the attending who was taking care of him, I said:" ""You know, I'm not gonna stand in his way doing this again. "" "He said: "Don't, don't, and don't having him do it on the parking lot," "I wanna see this myself. "" "And so it went." "He never had any difficulty, with nausea and vomiting." "With the further treatment, for as long as he lived, he was free of that anxiety." "And I can tell you, it was not only a relieve for him, it was a relieve for his parents and his siblings." "It was a godsend." "Not surprisingly, Dr. Grinspoon has become an ardent supporter of legalizing marijuana for medical use." "People who suffer from... these symptoms and syndromes, depending on just how serious they are, that's always accompanied by anxiety." "And to take an artificially imposed, another level of anxiety, anxiety involved in doing something which is illegal, for which you can be punished..." "is cruel." "By the 1980's, scientific interest in cannabis had began to catch up with the personal experiences." "According to an 1982 US Institute of Medicine report, Marijuana and Health, the preliminary research, coupled with anecdotal evidence, warranted a closer look at medicinal cannabis." "The report also found that marijuana attacks diseases and symptoms differently than other drugs." "This offered the tantalizing possibility for drug companies to develop new, novel drugs out of the chemicals in the marijuana plant." "The Institute of Medicine called for more research on these chemicals known as cannabinoids." "Even with this encouragement, research on cannabis failed to flower." "There aren't many scientists or clinical investigators who are particularly interested in doing research in medical marijuana because it's such a hassle." "Marijuana's schedule 1 status means Dr. Abrams has to get approval from more than a half dozen regulatory bodies before he can start a cannabis medical trial." "There's so many roadblocks that you have to go through." "Marijuana is an illegal substance that I think a lot of investigators and even organizations just don't want to get involved in something that is so controversial." "Dr. Igor Grant is a professor of psychiatry and the director of the" "California-based Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research." "He says not only is the research burocratically difficult, it's expensive and financial backers are hard to find." "You know, an ordinary investigator just does not have the time or resources to do this kind of work." "I mean, you really need, you know, either federal or state funding or pharma funding, something to navigate this whole system." "The Center's research was funded by a nine-million dollar grant from California tax payers." "The money allowed for a few legitimate small marijuana trials, including several done by dr." "Abrams." "They confirmed what Rosenfeld was saying all along, that cannabis works on pain, specially pain that does not respond to opiates." "All of them, to some extent or another, demonstrated that smoked marijuana is effective in this situation for which we really don't have very good treatments." "I can say that the cannabinoids are almost certain to be useful in neuropathic pain, based on the research that we've done." "But even when researchers get significant results like this," "Dr. Abrams says cannabis research can still be an academic dead end." "When I submitted for publication," "I have found what I perceived to be a publication bias, that people are not particularly interested in publishing data suggesting that marijuana might have some benefits." "All of those things, I think, sort of dampened anybody's enthusiasm to take on medical marijuana research." "And scientists are not getting much help from pharmaceutical companies either." "No pharmaceutical company is interested in supporting, you know, marijuana research." "'Cause it's a natural occurring substance out in the world, so, you can't patent it per se." "WENDY GWINNER Oncology Social Worker" "So, the research on it is quite dicey, it really is, nobody can make any money on that research or on that development." "Even if drug companies created a novel marijuana plant drug that they could patent, doctors could not prescribe it." "(?" ") ?" "can be a class 1 type of a drug." "You know, it's not gonna be broadly used, then again, why do you want to spend a lot of time developing a drug that you can't really sell." "Why would a pharmaceutical company wanna get involved with something like that?" "I think until, you know, marijuana is rescheduled, large scale research will probably not occur." "Advocates had been mired in a decade-long legal fight with the US Drug Enforcement Agency to do just that." "In the late 80's, they made the argument that marijuana has accepted medical value and that it belongs on schedule 2." "It was almost passed..." "Francis Young, I believe, was the DEA administrative judge who... my understanding was... basically, suggested that it be made schedule 2." "According to government documents, the DEA's administrative law judge," "Francis Young,he found there was incontrovertible evidence that cannabis was an effective medical treatment for nausea and appetite loss, multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injury spasms." "Judge Young ruled marijuana should be moved to schedule 2 writing:" ""The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people..."" ""...it would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance..."" "For those who were concerned about marijuana side effects," "Young ruled that, as a medicine under a doctor's supervision, marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man." "The DEA and other federal agencies disagreed." "They overruled judge Young's decision and kept marijuana on schedule 1." "But the ruling did add a growing pressure on the U.S. government to go beyond its own Compassionate Use Program and make marijuana legally available as a medicine." "The answer:" "provide a pill that can do what the plant does." "For years, the government had been sponsoring and funding research to put the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, into a capsule form." "Known as Dronabinol or Marinol, the drug is a synthetic version of THC created in the laboratory." "Since it did not come directly from the plant, the DEA placed it on schedule 2." "They wanted to have an answer to people like me:" ""There is a medicine out there that people can buy, they don't have to use herbal marijuana. "" "Doctor Grinspoon says the problem is" "Marinol does not work as well as marijuana." "You take people who have used both herbal marijuana, smoked it or ingested it, and Marinol or Dronabinol, every time, never an exception, "oh, I much prefer herbal marijuana. "" "It was my experience when AIDS patients first started taking" "Dronabinol back in 1992, they didn't like it." "The absorption, when taken orally, of THC is very variable and low." "The gut only absorbs 12%, plus or minus a few percent, depending on the individual." "The problem with taking it through the gut, you have to wait for an hour and a half to two hours to know whether you're getting relief from the pain, or the nausea, whatever it is you're trying to relieve." "How does Marinol compare in all of this I was talking earlier?" "Do you feel like it's as effective as the plant or no?" "No, I do not believe Marinol is as effective as marijuana THC." "And why do you say that?" "I've never really seen it work." "(?" ") ?" ", it's expensive and I've never had a patient who seemed to get much benefit from it." "We really haven't had very much success of patients with Marinol for any side effect management, so, there's something that is lost with the THC in that processing." "Doctor Abrams says what's lost in the processing are all the other cannabinoids in the plant, some of which are known to mitigate the high associated with THC, making the patient feel more relaxed instead of anxious." "There are 400 other compounds in the plant, including 70 others sort of look-alikes to delta-9-THC, and those are all there for a reason." "They provide balance, if you will, the yin and the yan, and, you know, my opinion that you loose that balance when you remove the single most psychoactive component from the plant and use that as a pharmaceutical." "I've used Marinol on some patients selectively." "I've not had any problems with Marinol." "Doctor Voth says while he's not overly impressed with Marinol, he would rather have patients take a pill." "He says" ""telling a patient to smoke an illegal plant is substandard medicine. "" "I treat a lot of sick patients with all sorts of different pain and neuropathic disorders and cancer, etc, and I cannot think of one circumstance in 27 years of active practice that I've had to say "well, it's time for you to smoke dope. "" "I just haven't." "And that includes terminal patients and hospice patients." "Anyone who says that, you know, we have adequate treatments for all of the conditions for which marijuana is purported to have some effect." "I don't think that is a correct statement." "I think the fact is that we have a lot of difficult to treat conditions and there may be a niche or a place for the cannabinoids with some of those conditions." "Oncology social worker Wendy Gwinner agrees." "She's personally seen patients who don't get adequate relieve from the antinausea drugs." "And when it comes to getting patients to eat, it is far and away the best medication that we have for chronic wasting and for increasing appetite in cancer patients." "There's probably nothing that works as well for appetite stimulation that we have as marijuana." "But doctor Hansol says cannabis does have one side effect that certain patients don't like, namely the "high"." "(?" ") Most of the side effects I worry about with patients." "I worry the euphoria and the altered sense of consciousness that people get, and whether they tolerate that or not." "Generally, you consider a high as an adverse effect, so, that adverse side effect, for people who don't want to be high, is really a problem." "For other patients, though, the high could be part of the therapeutic effect." "A 1999 U.S. Institute of Medicine report on marijuana found the drugs antianxiety and sedative effects could be a benefit." "I can't convince myself... that the psychoactive part doesn't play a part." "If they feel good, that's terrific." "But does feeling good lead to addiction?" "Absolutely." "Marijuana is habituating, addictive, whatever you wanna call it..." "Doctor Voth says marijuana has about the same addictive potential as alcohol." "The 1999 government report found marijuana was slightly less addictive than alcohol, with 9% of all users experiencing addiction." "And marijuana does not have the extreme physical withdrawal symptoms that alcohol and other drugs do." "(?" ") Potential withdrawal is really minimal because the cannabinoids are stored in fat, so that if you stop using marijuana abruptly, it still leaches out from fat, over a number of days, so you don't get a precipitous withdrawal." "Regardless of the mild withdrawal symptoms, Dr. Voth believes marijuana side effects and its addictive potential are just a few of the factors that make it unattractive for drug companies to research." "I think it's very unlikely that marijuana will ever make it through the FDA." "There's the fact that you're smoking dope, that you're smoking a plant, you're smoking something with 488 substances in it." "So, there's the rub, schedule 1 is a side issue, it may chill things a little, but it's really that you're looking at smoking dope as a medication." "Dr. Voth is not the only one concerned about smoking." "The 1999 Institute of Medicine report says:" ""Smoked marijuana is a crude THC delivery system that also delivers harmful substances"." "There's a lot of things that have hit the literature." "(?" ") ?" "talked about neck tumors, for instance." "Oral tumors, lung cancers, even." "The Institute of Medicine found that marijuana smoke can deposit up to 4 times the amount of tar in the lungs of a cannabis smoker as a tobacco smoker." "Studies have also shown that marijuana smoke contains higher concentrations of the same carcinogens found in cigarette smoke." "While scientists are concerned these factors may lead to lung cancer, they still have not found definitive proof and patient Point Hatfield says smoking is worth the risk." "The thing about smoking the marijuana is it's immediate." "You don't wait 20 minutes or half an hour or whatever, it's immediate." "And for me, immediate relieve was a blessing." "When you smoke cannabis, by the way, the peak concentration in the blood stream occurs in two and a half minutes." "When it goes through your lungs, it goes into the right side of the heart and the left side of the heart and then right up to the brain." "(?" ") Most people prefer the inhalation method because they can better ?" "when the effect comes on, how long it lasts..." "Dr. Grant says "until someone comes up with a fast acting inhaler, smoking may be their best option. "" "I'm not sort of in the camp of people who say "well, I grant you marijuana may work, but it's absolutely unacceptable, because it's smoked. "" "I don't think that's right." "Do you worry about patients smoking?" "I..." "I don't." "I look at the cost-benefit, the cost of having untreated cancer would be far outweigh whatever carcinogens might be introduced to the lungs." "Even Irving Rosenfeld, a patient who smokes 10 to 20 marijuana cigarettes a day doesn't waste anytime worrying about the smoke." " No." " Why not?" "First of all, I have over 200 tumors in my body that could go malignant." "(?" ") I should live so long as to dye of lung cancer, ok?" "A 2006 lung cancer study, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, gives Rosenfeld even more to smile about." "Researchers, unexpectedly, found that chronic heavy marijuana smokers not only had no increased risk of developing lung cancer, but they actually had a decreased risk." "Marijuana contains anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant and probably anti-cancer compounds in it." "This is where the complexity of the plant is both a blessing and a curse." "With dozens of cannabinoids and hundreds of other compounds, it's difficult to pinpoint the source of the beneficial effects found in the smoking study." "There are challenges in doing research on something that has, you know, 150 different chemicals in it." "Critic Dr. Eric Voth believes the true medical potential of cannabis lies in targeting some of those chemicals, not smoking the entire plant." "There are elements in the cannabinoids, in various cannabinoids, that have a lot of positive effect and very little addictive or high-causing effects." "Scientists have managed to isolate and focus attention on one of those." "It's called cannabidiol, and next to THC, it's one of the most abundant cannabinoids in the plant." "CBD is cannabidiol, which is another cannabinoid, like the main psychoactive ingredient, but instead of getting people high," "CBD seems to be a very potent anti-inflammatory and analgesic." "So, it relieves pain and decreases inflammation." "Well, what I'll do I just kinda put the stove on low," "(?" ") I'll spoon out a little bit of the canna butter," "(?" ") about that much is a dose is worth for tonight, and I put it into the pan and just let it melt down." "(?" ") CBD seem to help my seizures, I'm not using it... to get any psychological effects off of it," "(?" ") I'm just eating the butter raw with bread, so, ?" "And how often do you take..." "do you take that?" "Once a day, twice a day?" "At night, right before bed." "I used to be on approximately 14 different prescriptions... and I I would still have up to twelve seizures a day." "I used to take two handfuls of pills..." "no more." "While this 27 year old epilepsy patient is relieved to be taking medical marijuana, she's considerably more anxious about showing her face and has requested we conceal her identity." "Why do you not wanna show your face?" "I'm not comfortable showing my face because of EPILEPSY SUFFERER Medical Marijuana Patient all the discrimination that has already happened." "She says both she and her husband have lost jobs when she spoke openly about her use of marijuana as a medicine." "But... the fact of the matter is somebody has to speak up or nobody will hear these stories." "She chose to tell us her story in her artist studio." "Here, she creates much happier works than she did even a few years ago, when her self-portraits plainly show the toll epilepsy had taken, since she was diagnosed at 15." "I've taken pretty much every anti-epileptic on the market and some with a little bit more success than others." "Some of the medicines I was on had nothing to do with epilepsy and the doctors put me on them to help me sleep or to help with my anxiety issues." "(?" ") The seizures were so bad I needed to be sedated to ?" "sleep." "With the depression, it gets worst the more you're sedated." "Despite the constant seizures and depression, she graduated high school and was accepted into a private women's college to study psychology and fine arts." "The seizures were so intense, by my early twenties, that I couldn't stand class, and as the stress of the exams would come closer, that would trigger seizures." "She had to withdraw from college just a handful of credit short of graduation." "The seizures were so bad and the medication so debilitating, that getting a job wasn't even an option." "She was bed bound for years while the epilepsy ruled her life." "My husband would have to call me, you know, 25 times a day, from work just to make sure I was still breathing ok..." "I could not shower by myself because if I slipped and fell, you know, it only takes a half inch to drown..." "so... we were living on pins and needles with me having that many..." "That's when she decided to move to state with a medical marijuana program." "She had read stories about its potential to treat epilepsy and she wanted legal access to it." "How did that impact your seizures?" "They started slowing down." "I had to build it up in my system..." "It wasn't until I started ingesting it that they really stopped completely." "The potential of the CBDs in marijuana to mitigate epileptic seizures is not new." "Scientists who put together the 1982 US Institute of Medicine Report found" ""...substantial evidence from animal studies to indicate that cannabinoids are effective in blocking seizures." And that there" ""...is strong support for further investigation into the utility of CBD in human epilepsy."" "The subsequent 1999 Institute of Medicine Report was less enthusiastic, saying the solid scientific evidence still isn't there yet and that it was unlikely to be a fruitful area for drug research." "I'm not waiting for the FDA approval to come through, it is..." "I know how it affects my body and that's one thing that I've learned through taking prescription drugs all these years" "I have to know how this stuff is going to affect me." "Not what somebody else says it does for them." "Not only has it completely stopped her seizures, but she says something in the plant works for her anxiety, depression and insomnia too." "So, she sees the scientifically undesirable cornucopia of substances in the plant as a benefit, not a detriment." "The fact is that it works." "It works better than anything I've ever tried, any pill I've ever taken..." "The cannabinoids have multiple actions, it's not just for one pain or, in her case, maybe antiepileptic action, but for many people, they have a sedative, antianxiety effect and so forth." "I'm a cancer doctor and I often suggest to my patients that they consider marijuana for their loss of appetite, nausea, pain, depression and insomnia." "It's one medicine they could use instead of five." "Critics of medical marijuana are highly skeptical of claims it can treat just about everything." "How is it possible that one plant has the potential to treat so many different ailments?" "Intriguing answers started appearing in the early 90's when researchers pinpointed receptors in the brain and the body that bind with the cannabinoids." "Receptors can be described as locks on the surface of a cell and when the correct key binds with the correct lock or receptor it opens the door and delivers messages." "Sometimes, the message is that the body is feeling pain; other times, the message may be that there is an invader and the immune system must attack." "Scientists located two receptors..." "cannabinoid receptors, one called the CB1 receptor, mainly in the brain, and the other is the CB2 receptor, which is mainly in cells of the immune system." "The CB1 receptors are extremely abundant in the brain, but they're also found all over the body and the major organs:" "the heart, the liver, kidneys and pancreas." "After finding all these locks that accepted the cannabis key, researchers made the next big discovery:" "the human body makes its own cannabinoids called endocannabinoids." "We have this whole elaborate system where we have these receptors in our brain and in our immune system, and these circulating chemicals that we produce ourselves that really are very, very similar to the chemicals in the marijuana plant." "The only difference is that the endocannabinoids that we produce DR. PRAKASH NAGAKATTI" " Professor of Immunology USC are in such small quantities and they're also rapidly degraded, so that... therefore, we're not high all the time, or that we don't have that feeling of euphoria all the time." "Doctor Prakash Nagakatti is a professor of pathology and microbiology at the University of South Carolina." "For the last decade, he's been doing research on what's become known as the human endocannabinoid system." "The precise functions of the endocannabinoid system is still being understood, actually." "The discovery of the system, however, is already revealing clues that have bolstered the personal stories of relief." "The areas of the brain that control nausea and vomiting, chronic pain and epileptic seizures, all have cannabinoid receptors." "What did these things do?" "Well, in the brain and the nervous system, the cannabinoid system seems to... exert kind of a dampening effect." "It's kind of an internal..." "I think..." "I like to think of it as a neurological shock absorber." "And when they looked into other animals, they found these receptors were present in, basically all animal species." "So, why do dogs and monkeys, for example, need to have cannabinoid receptors?" "They must be playing a very critical role in trying to... maintain some other physiological functions." "The whole development of the fact that there are cannabinoid receptors and endocannabinoids has really given drug companies and pharmaceutical investigators a lot of opportunity to try to manipulate the body's own cannabinoid system." "That's because now they can create synthetic drugs that target the receptors, instead of taking chemicals from the plant." "By avoiding the plant, they get around the controversies and complications of its schedule 1 status." "A search of the US Patent database reveals numerous large pharmaceutical companies have filed recent patents claiming their cannabinoid receptor drug has the potential to treat almost everything:" "multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, rheumatoid arthritis, Tourette's, epilepsy, heart disease, obesity, various mental illnesses and the holy grail of medicine, a cancer cure." "We feel that these cannabinoids give us an opportunity to study their functions, you know, and see how we can exploit them, how we can manipulate these cannabinoids and the receptors to find cures for large number of diseases currently, in which there's practically no cure." "As an immunologist, Dr. Nagakatti and his researchers at the University of South Carolina are exploring the impact cannabinoids and the CB2 receptors have on the human immune system." "Both US reports on marijuana found the cannabinoids do suppress the immune system and previously this was seen as a concern." "But Dr. Nagakatti believes tamping down the immune system could be a good thing." "There are about 80 different autoimmune diseases." "And, basically, autoimmune diseases are triggered by the immune system going haywire, getting hyper activated and destroying certain cells and certain tissues." "In multiple sclerosis, for example, the immune system suddenly begins attacking the brain and the spinal cord." "Rheumatoid arthritis and lupus are similar diseases caused by the chronic inflammation associated with an immune system gone amuck." "(?" ") The cannabinoids dampen down response to bacterial or foreign agents or ?" "tissues." "A lot of scientists and researchers are interested in those properties of the cannabinoids." "In trying to see how we can suppress the immune response in autoimmune conditions." "For Dr. Nagakatti, the research has gone far beyond treating inflammatory problems." "He's narrowing in on the potential of cannabinoids to kill immune cells that had mutated and become cancerous." "Once they become cancerous, they no longer die a normal cell death." "Instead, they begin growing and spreading uncontrollably." "We were one of the first labs to demonstrate, basically, that, not only the immune cells, the normal immune cells, express these cannabinoid receptors, called the CB2 receptors, but also that when these immune cells get transformed and they become cancer," "to our surprise, we found that these cancer cells continue to express these CB2 receptors." "This was an exciting discovery because the CB2 receptor can act like a target for the cannabinoids." "Once they bind with the receptor, they can tell the cancer cell to die." "So, basically, telling the cells, basically, to commit suicide, and that's what they do." "And we demonstrated that that would be the mechanism by which the cannabinoids can kill the cancer and, therefore, it can be used effectively as an anticancer agent." "Dr. Nagakatti and his researchers were able to eradicate almost 100% of the cancer in test tubes." "But they were skeptical they would see similar results when they move on to tumors in mice." "To our surprise, we found that almost 25 to 30% of the mice completely rejected the tumor, they were completely cured." "And, in addition, we found that the remaining mice also... there was a significant reduction in the volume or the size of the tumors as well." "The lab results have been so promising that Dr. Nagakatti is beginning clinical trials with leukemia patients." "There's no doubt in his mind that the cannabinoids, either from the plant or lab-created, will play a major role in medicine in the future." "I feel that in the next five or ten years there's gonna be exponential growth in cannabinoid research." "It's an area where both the critics and the advocates agree." "Scientists are now well on their way to developing medicines based on the cannabinoids." "It begs the question, however:" "will modern medicine eventually make the marijuana plant obsolete?" "(?" ") No, it will not." "In fact, ?" "enhance it... ok?" "Because now, it's ?" "proof that the plant really does work, ok?" "And so, spending 600 hundred dollars a month on buying the pharmaceutical drug," "I can grow my own plants!" "I don't want them to ever take the choice away, because I don't know how long it's going to be before they really find out exactly what is working, for me or for others..." "and right now, having the raw plant available is the best solution... because you have all of it there, you don't have just what they've isolated, just what they decided it's important now." "Let's keep it in the quarters of science." "Let's keep it in the FDA." "Let's do what needs to be done, which is careful, longitudinal, placebo-controlled, crossover, head to head studies and see where it falls out." "But, let's deliver what's really medicine, that is, the individual cannabinoids." "They may come across some things that are better than herbal marijuana, for one thing or another, and good luck to them." "I'd love that." "But..." "I never wanna see compromised the capacity of people to use herbal marijuana, whether is because the drug that they've come up with is much more expensive, or it doesn't do as well, or..." "whatever the reason, the people should always have herbal marijuana available to them without any constraints..." "from the law." "Patients say, for now, the question is irrelevant." "Science has not yet given them the opportunity to choose between an effective pill or the plant." "This is something where I have no other medical alternative to treat this condition." "I had exhausted all of modern medicine's alternatives and they have really screw my body up." "She says cannabis has allowed her to hold down two jobs and make plans to go back to school and finish those last credits." "There is so much promise now where there was none before." "Without the 10 to 12 cannabis cigarettes a day, I would not be working." "I most likely would be on disability." "I'd be homebound... and I'd be a drain on society versus a productive member of society." "The federal program that allows Irving Rosenfeld to legally use marijuana for chronic pain was shut down in 1992." "(?" ") Today, he's one of a few living patients who were grant ?" "and still receive marijuana every month, courtesy of the US tax payer." "Point Hatfield believes he will never gain back the muscle he lost during his cancer fight, but he got his life back." "And thinks people should not underestimate this plant just because it doesn't come with a prescription." "It's a medicine!" "It's a medicine just like Aspirin is or..." "Zoloft..." "Adivan... it's a medicine." "Marijuana is here to stay." "It is certainly here to stay as a medicine." "Dr. Grinspoon says the social stigma surrounding marijuana has damaged the medical research for too long." "Today, he's on the advisory board for The Marijuana Advocacy Group Normal." "Because he believes the only way marijuana will reach its true medical potential is if it's fully legalized." "He's felt this way since the 70's, when he predicted the medical promise of cannabis would lead to a repeal of the prohibition in less than a decade." "For years, I've waited for my prophecy to come true." "And I despaired that I would never see it in my lifetime." "And I'm 82 and a half cans for now, so..." "I'm not sure I will, but at least..." "I'm seeing, you know, ?" ", this boat was dead in the water for all the years" "I was running around, testifying and so far... nothing, and now, since medical marijuana... wow!" "Are we making progress." "We're going straight to the heart of the issue which really is... the medical excuse movement... is a means to get the camel's nose under the tent." "The folks that are pushing the medical excuse movement really come from the medical legalization movement..." "I think it's not helpful to brand people's motivations..." "It may be the case that there are some people out there who really are trying to legalize marijuana under the cloak of medicine..." "I don't happen to be one of them." "I'm more interested in seeing if there is a medical indication here, and if there is, I think it is a social responsibility to provide that... for people who are suffering." "The scientists are not here to make, you know, like policy decisions, but our goal is to find out the truth." "To that end, the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians have taken positions that marijuana should be moved off of schedule 1 to make research on the cannabinoids easier." "We who are involved in the science sort of wish that science would become more of a dominant driver in the messaging, as oppose to politics, religion and ignorance and fear." "I'd like to say it's time to have more light than heat on the subject and... clear away the smoke here." "When you strip away the smoke of the social and political issues, one thing is clear:" "after decades of controversy, conjecture and limited research, we have arrived, at last, in the realm of science." "We know more about the secrets of this complex plant than at any other time in history." "The only question now is where that knowledge will take us." ""You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. "" "subtitle by:" "Tio Beto from Brazil" "tiobetonh@gmail. com ... =Peace Through Anarchy=..."