The results of the pilot study you cite has not yet been published in a peer review medical journal. However, I found this study by the lead author of that one on the benefits of cannabis with HIV patients. As you know, HIV is one of the diagnoses approved for medical marijuana in CA. The last sentence of this abstract says it all, in my opinion.
J Psychoactive Drugs. 1998 Apr-Jun;30(2):163-9.
Medical marijuana: tribulations and trials.
Abrams DI.
AIDS Program, San Francisco General Hospital, and University of California, San Francisco 94110, USA.
Widespread use of smoked marijuana in the San Francisco Bay Area as a treatment for HIV-related anorexia and weight loss, as well as nausea related to prescribed therapy, prompted the design of a clinical trial to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of this controlled substance. The Community Consortium–the Bay Area’s community-based HIV clinical trials organization–designed a first pilot evaluation of smoked marijuana compared to oral tetrahydrocannabinol (THC, synthesized as dronabinol or Marinol) in 1993. A legal source of marijuana could not be identified. Two subsequent applications to the National Institutes of Health were submitted in 1996 and 1997. During the intervening period, increasing numbers of people with HIV infection were obtaining marijuana for “medicinal use” from local Cannabis Buyer’s Clubs. In November 1996, California voters endorsed the medical use of marijuana by approving Proposition 215. The federal government’s attempt to oppose the voters’ mandate led to public outrage. Organized medicine demanded more studies into marijuana’s potential use as medicine. The consortium’s 1997 proposal to evaluate the potential interaction between THC and widely-prescribed protease inhibitors was positively received. Funding and study-required marijuana cigarettes have been obtained from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and the first subjects are being enrolled in the trial. When politically sensitive research proposals include sound science, they can prevail if investigators are willing to persist.
Here’s an old PSA from musician/politician Sonny Bono, who looks to be in no condition to give a lecture about the dangers of smoking pot. From what I can tell, smoking pot makes you do three things: 1.) bowl horribly, 2.) forget to put your car in “park”, and 3.) dress badly.
Seriously, was Bono just naturally laid back or did he do something before filming began to give kids another example of the dangers of smoking pot? I’m not sure how effective these spots were for helping kids steer clear of weed, but if they helped just one person from wearing a headband or a gold jumpsuit, they were worth it.
(Hat Tip TV Squad via Daily Dish)
BILL that was great sono bono looks like he has had a bong hit or two. My fiance has taken up weed Im proud of her its been a while but her epo dose has been on hold since she started smoking buda and no more F—g KLONIPIN what a joke that was also she used to like VICODIN i would argue with her that she doesnt need it she would tell me to go to hell. Now she hasnt filled that RX since .Why is this bad again and for who drug companies!!!
I would smoke two but Im allready fat so I dont want to gain anymore but I do smoke cigs and Im going to stop I hate it .
Does anyone know about making your own sleep apnea machines with a fish tank air pump I was going to a sleep clinic till they told me my insurance sucked and I had to pay 1200 for the study and 800 for the machine so I made my own it works fine the hell with insurance !!!
[quote=HOme tech nhd;12878]BILL that was great sono bono looks like he has had a bong hit or two. My fiance has taken up weed Im proud of her its been a while but her epo dose has been on hold since she started smoking buda and no more F—g KLONIPIN what a joke that was also she used to like VICODIN i would argue with her that she doesnt need it she would tell me to go to hell. Now she hasnt filled that RX since .Why is this bad again and for who drug companies!!!
I would smoke two but Im allready fat so I dont want to gain anymore but I do smoke cigs and Im going to stop I hate it .
Does anyone know about making your own sleep apnea machines with a fish tank air pump I was going to a sleep clinic till they told me my insurance sucked and I had to pay 1200 for the study and 800 for the machine so I made my own it works fine the hell with insurance !!![/quote]
I don’t think so, he was quite tired after re-redoing this spot over and over…Sonny Bono in those days was quite overworked.
Albert Einstein ,My First Impression of the U.S.A., 1921
“The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.”
Sir Paul McCartney
“I support decriminalization. People are smoking pot anyway and to make them criminal is wrong.”
Nobel Prize Winners Who Oppose Prohibition
Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Peace, 1980
Ilya Prigogine, Chemistry, 1977
New Mexico – Gov. Bill Richardson said Friday that he has begun meeting with lawmakers in an effort to resurrect a medical-marijuana bill, which the House narrowly defeated Thursday night. “I think it’s important that we pass it,” Richardson said.
By midday Friday, he said he had talked “one-on-one with at least five House members” in an effort to get them to change their votes.
Posted by CN Staff on February 12, 2007 at 21:20:12 PT
By Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer
Source: Washington Post
Washington, DC – AIDS patients suffering from debilitating nerve pain got as much or more relief by smoking marijuana as they would typically get from prescription drugs – and with fewer side effects – according to a study conducted under rigorously controlled conditions with government-grown pot.
In a five-day study performed in a specially ventilated hospital ward where patients smoked three marijuana cigarettes a day, more than half the participants tallied significant reductions in pain.
By contrast, less than one-quarter of those who smoked “placebo” pot, which had its primary psychoactive ingredients removed, reported benefits, as measured by subjective pain reports and standardized neurological tests.
The White House belittled the study as “a smoke screen,” short on proof of efficacy and flawed because it did not consider the health impacts of inhaling smoke.
But other doctors and advocates of marijuana policy reform said the findings, in today’s issue of the journal Neurology, offer powerful evidence that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s classification of cannabis as having “no currently accepted medical use” is outdated.
“This should be a wake-up call for Congress to hold hearings to investigate the therapeutic use of cannabis and to encourage more research,” said Barbara T. Roberts, a former interim associate deputy director in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, now with Americans for Safe Access, which promotes access to marijuana for therapies and research.
Countless anecdotal reports have suggested that smoking marijuana can help relieve the pain, nausea and muscular spasticity that often accompany cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and other ailments. But few well-controlled studies have been conducted.
The new study enrolled 50 AIDS patients with severe foot pain caused by their disease or by the medicines they take.
The team first measured baseline pain, both subjectively (patients ranked their pain on a scale of 1 to 100) and with two standardized tests, one involving a small hot iron held to the skin and another involving hot chili pepper cream.
Then, for five days, patients lit up at 8 a.m., 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. using a calibrated puff method that calls for inhaling for five seconds, holding one’s breath for 10, then waiting 45 seconds before the next.
The cigarettes were kept frozen and locked in a safe, then thawed and humidified one day before use. Cigarette butts and other debris were collected, weighed and returned to the safe to ensure no diversion for recreational purposes.
Grown on the government’s official pot farm in Mississippi, the drug was about one-quarter the potency of quality street marijuana. The inactive version was chemically cleansed of cannabinoids, the drug’s main active ingredients.
“It smelled like and looked like” normal marijuana, said study leader Donald I. Abrams, a physician at San Francisco General Hospital, where the smoking ward was located. Like the patients, Abrams was not told who had the active pot until the study was over.
Thirteen of 25 patients who smoked the regular marijuana achieved pain reduction of at least 30 percent, compared with six of 25 who smoked placebo pot. The average pain reduction for the real cannabis was 34 percent, compared with17 percent for the placebo.
Opioids and other pills can reduce nerve pain by 20 to 30 percent but can cause drowsiness and confusion, Abrams said. And many patients complain that a prescription version of pot’s main ingredient in pill form does not work for them.
That was true for Diana Dodson, 50, who received an AIDS diagnosis in 1997 after a blood transfusion.
“I have so many layers of pain I can hardly walk,” said Dodson, who was in the new study. Prescription drugs made her feel worse. “But inhaled cannabis works,” she said.
Patients in the study – all of whom had smoked pot previously – reported no notable side effects, though the researchers acknowledged that people unfamiliar with the drug may not fare as well.
Igor Grant, director of the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, which funded the research, said the study was probably the best-designed U.S. test of marijuana’s medical potential in decades. He called the results “highly believable.”
But David Murray, chief scientist at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, called the findings “not particularly persuasive.” The study was relatively small, he said, and it is likely that those who received the real pot were aware of that, introducing a bias of expected efficacy.
“We’re very much supportive of any effort to ameliorate the suffering of AIDS patients,” Murray said. But even if ingredients in marijuana prove useful, he added, they ought to be synthesized in a pill to make dosing more accurate and to minimize lung damage.
Separately, ending a six-year effort, a Massachusetts group learned yesterday that it had won a legal victory against the DEA in its battle for federal permission to grow its own cannabis for federally approved studies, instead of relying on government pot.
In an 87-page opinion, administrative law judge Mary Ellen Bittner ruled that it “would be in the public interest” to allow a University of Massachusetts researcher to cultivate marijuana under contract to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which sponsors medical research on marijuana and other drugs.
The DEA is not obligated to follow the advice of its law judges, but the detailed decision should make it difficult for the agency to balk, said MAPS President Rick Doblin.
Note: AIDS Patients in Controlled Study Had Significant Pain Relief.
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Author: Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer
Published: Tuesday, February 13, 2007; A14
Copyright: 2007 Washington Post
Contact: letterstoed@washpost.com
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
[quote=DOC POT smoke;12912]New Mexico – Gov. Bill Richardson said Friday that he has begun meeting with lawmakers in an effort to resurrect a medical-marijuana bill, which the House narrowly defeated Thursday night. “I think it’s important that we pass it,” Richardson said.
By midday Friday, he said he had talked “one-on-one with at least five House members” in an effort to get them to change their votes.
Posted by CN Staff on February 12, 2007 at 21:20:12 PT
By Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer
Source: Washington Post
Washington, DC – AIDS patients suffering from debilitating nerve pain got as much or more relief by smoking marijuana as they would typically get from prescription drugs – and with fewer side effects – according to a study conducted under rigorously controlled conditions with government-grown pot.
In a five-day study performed in a specially ventilated hospital ward where patients smoked three marijuana cigarettes a day, more than half the participants tallied significant reductions in pain.
By contrast, less than one-quarter of those who smoked “placebo” pot, which had its primary psychoactive ingredients removed, reported benefits, as measured by subjective pain reports and standardized neurological tests.
The White House belittled the study as “a smoke screen,” short on proof of efficacy and flawed because it did not consider the health impacts of inhaling smoke.
But other doctors and advocates of marijuana policy reform said the findings, in today’s issue of the journal Neurology, offer powerful evidence that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s classification of cannabis as having “no currently accepted medical use” is outdated.
“This should be a wake-up call for Congress to hold hearings to investigate the therapeutic use of cannabis and to encourage more research,” said Barbara T. Roberts, a former interim associate deputy director in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, now with Americans for Safe Access, which promotes access to marijuana for therapies and research.
Countless anecdotal reports have suggested that smoking marijuana can help relieve the pain, nausea and muscular spasticity that often accompany cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and other ailments. But few well-controlled studies have been conducted.
The new study enrolled 50 AIDS patients with severe foot pain caused by their disease or by the medicines they take.
The team first measured baseline pain, both subjectively (patients ranked their pain on a scale of 1 to 100) and with two standardized tests, one involving a small hot iron held to the skin and another involving hot chili pepper cream.
Then, for five days, patients lit up at 8 a.m., 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. using a calibrated puff method that calls for inhaling for five seconds, holding one’s breath for 10, then waiting 45 seconds before the next.
The cigarettes were kept frozen and locked in a safe, then thawed and humidified one day before use. Cigarette butts and other debris were collected, weighed and returned to the safe to ensure no diversion for recreational purposes.
Grown on the government’s official pot farm in Mississippi, the drug was about one-quarter the potency of quality street marijuana. The inactive version was chemically cleansed of cannabinoids, the drug’s main active ingredients.
“It smelled like and looked like” normal marijuana, said study leader Donald I. Abrams, a physician at San Francisco General Hospital, where the smoking ward was located. Like the patients, Abrams was not told who had the active pot until the study was over.
Thirteen of 25 patients who smoked the regular marijuana achieved pain reduction of at least 30 percent, compared with six of 25 who smoked placebo pot. The average pain reduction for the real cannabis was 34 percent, compared with17 percent for the placebo.
Opioids and other pills can reduce nerve pain by 20 to 30 percent but can cause drowsiness and confusion, Abrams said. And many patients complain that a prescription version of pot’s main ingredient in pill form does not work for them.
That was true for Diana Dodson, 50, who received an AIDS diagnosis in 1997 after a blood transfusion.
“I have so many layers of pain I can hardly walk,” said Dodson, who was in the new study. Prescription drugs made her feel worse. “But inhaled cannabis works,” she said.
Patients in the study – all of whom had smoked pot previously – reported no notable side effects, though the researchers acknowledged that people unfamiliar with the drug may not fare as well.
Igor Grant, director of the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, which funded the research, said the study was probably the best-designed U.S. test of marijuana’s medical potential in decades. He called the results “highly believable.”
But David Murray, chief scientist at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, called the findings “not particularly persuasive.” The study was relatively small, he said, and it is likely that those who received the real pot were aware of that, introducing a bias of expected efficacy.
“We’re very much supportive of any effort to ameliorate the suffering of AIDS patients,” Murray said. But even if ingredients in marijuana prove useful, he added, they ought to be synthesized in a pill to make dosing more accurate and to minimize lung damage.
Separately, ending a six-year effort, a Massachusetts group learned yesterday that it had won a legal victory against the DEA in its battle for federal permission to grow its own cannabis for federally approved studies, instead of relying on government pot.
In an 87-page opinion, administrative law judge Mary Ellen Bittner ruled that it “would be in the public interest” to allow a University of Massachusetts researcher to cultivate marijuana under contract to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which sponsors medical research on marijuana and other drugs.
The DEA is not obligated to follow the advice of its law judges, but the detailed decision should make it difficult for the agency to balk, said MAPS President Rick Doblin.
Note: AIDS Patients in Controlled Study Had Significant Pain Relief.
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Author: Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer
Published: Tuesday, February 13, 2007; A14
Copyright: 2007 Washington Post
Contact: letterstoed@washpost.com
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Smoking is not the only way to ingest cannabis. You can eat it in food, you can vaporize it, you make a salve from it and rub it in where it is needed, you can make a wonderfull tincture from it. Cannabis can be used in many other ways then smoking it. Each method has different benefits and effects. One thing should be considered when talking about synthetic forms of it. When you synthesize the plant you lose the plants chi or spirit. There is no longer a guardian to watch over the user. Marinol works, but it is a out of control type of works.
As far as transplant centers being against cannabis smoking. This souly has to do with fear of a loss of federal funding. The claims of aspergilis mold and other way out there claims are all a wash. If aspergilis was such a issue with transplant patients, then they coulded be around whole peanuts or live on the russian river. I had to stop using cannabis medicaly when I went on the transplant list here. It was the most bogus thing to me. I had been successfully been using cannabis to control my blood pressure for sometime. My doctor was in full support of my use and even signed a script for me while under duress from the feds. Now the transplant people wanted to call me a drug addict cause I use cannabis.
I can say however in hindsight I am glad I had to stop for awhile. I realized that there was a good way to use and a bad way to use. I also realized that some people can handle somethings differently then others. I have extreme addictive personality and have my own share of mental issues. Stayed stoned all the time didn’t exactly help things either. I had a hard time getting things done and I was pretty much unaware of the feelings of others.
Now I don’t smoke cannabis. I do eat a cookie every now and then when things are just out of control. when the throwing up hasn’t allowed me to hold food down for eight days. That kinda out of control, deffinently not the I am depressed and things are out control. Then is the time to be clear and able to think things through.
Most stoners are just that though. They are selfish unaware self absorbed spaced out fools. I am sorry to all you heads out there, but I was a head too. I am still friends with a few of you and I watch you day in and day out exibit the same lame behaviour. If you could take that part of the cannabis equation out then cannabis would be legal by now. Those of you that are in control and level headed. SOrry for you but the bad apples have spoiled the bunch for you.
I still think all drugs should be legal. everything is a drug in one way or another. Even going walking in the sun is a drug. When will that be illegal?
Peace;
LSB
If you dont have a vaporizer which can be expensive try a heat gun looks like a blow drier but run alott hotter its primary use is heating hoses or tile it doesnt burn the pot it heats it till the chems come out. I really hope people are not nieveve to the fact that most of the population smokes pot and will with or without the goverments aproval they cant even do there jobs anyway. There great a being asses. I really cant wait till our age group stats to be up in the house like 30ish now pot will be leagal ya
you are great who cares about the fedral goverment there just thieves anyway, do what you want smoke what you want the hell with Bush this country needs a civil war to win it back to the peolple we lost it once we will get it back
Unregistered, this post is off-topic. The topic is home dialysis and, in this case, smoking pot–not general politics. Any further off-topic threads will be deleted in the interests of keeping these boards centered on home dialysis.
Just think about it, POT smoking and home dialysis don’t fit. If I were POT smoking and doing home dialysis my mind wouldn’t be alert on my obligations as a home dialysis patient. Even worse POT smoking would drift my mind to miss a treatment or two!!
I’d say lock this thread, its inconsistent to what this website and forum is all about.
[quote=Gus;12951]Just think about it, POT smoking and home dialysis don’t fit. If I were POT smoking and doing home dialysis my mind wouldn’t be alert on my obligations as a home dialysis patient. Even worse POT smoking would drift my mind to miss a treatment or two!!
I’d say lock this thread, its inconsistent to what this website and forum is all about.[/quote]