Illegal Drugs: Part 3

[Ganjarden]

Despite the ongoing political debate regarding the legality of medicinal marijuana, clinical investigations of the therapeutic use of cannabinoids are now more prevalent than at any time in history.

A search of the National Library of Medicine's PubMed website quantifies the fact. A keyword search using the terms "cannabis, 1996" (the year California voters became the first of 13 states to allow for the drug's medical use under state law) reveals just 258 scientific journal articles published on the subject during that year. Perform this same search for the year 2008, and one will find over 2,100 published scientific studies. There are 66 cannabinoids that have been identified in marijuana. The primary cannabinoids are the psychoactive THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), and the non-psychoactive CBD cannabitiol and CBN cannabinol.

While much of the renewed interest in cannabinoid therapeutics is a result of the discovery of the endocannabinoid regulatory system, some of this increased attention is also due to the growing body of testimonials from medicinal cannabis patients and their physicians.

Nevertheless, despite this influx of anecdotal reports, much of the modern investigation of medicinal cannabis remains limited to preclinical (animal) studies of individual cannabinoids (e.g. THC or cannabidoil) and/or synthetic cannabinoid agonists (e.g., dronabinol or WIN 55, 212-2), rather than clinical trial investigations involving whole plant material.

Predictably, because of the US government's strong public policy stance against any use of cannabis [classifying it as a Schedule 1 controlled substance with a high potential risk of abuse], the bulk of this modern cannabinoid research is taking place outside the United States.

As clinical research into the therapeutic value of cannabinoids has proliferated, there are now more than 17,000 published papers in the scientific literature analyzing marijuana and its constituents So too, has investigators' understanding of cannabis' remarkable capability to combat disease grown. Whereas researchers in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s primarily assessed cannabis' ability to temporarily alleviate various disease symptoms such as the nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy, scientists today are exploring the potential role of cannabinoids to actually modify disease.

Of particular interest, scientists are investigating cannabinoids' capacity to moderate autoimmune disorders such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, anti-inflammatory bowl disease, as well as their role in the treatment of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's disease).

Investigators are also studying the anticancer activities of cannabis, as a growing body of preclinical and clinical data concludes that cannabinoids can reduce the spread of specific cancer cells via apoptosis (programmed cell death) and by the inhibition of angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels). Arguably, these latter trends represent far broader and more significant applications for cannabinoid therapeutics than researchers could have imagined some thirty or even twenty years ago.


News Hawk- Ganjarden http://www.420Magazine.com
Source: Salem-News.com
Author: Dorsett Bennett
Contact: Salem-News.com
Copyright: 2009 Salem-News.com
Website: Illegal Drugs: Part 3