Study finds little evidence supporting medical marijuana for treatment of...

[Fate]

Marijuana as a treatment for depression and anxiety? 

Studies have shown increased rates of those disorders amongst marijuana users.

http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana

In 2007 The Lancet published a systematic review on the relation between marijuana and affective (i.e. anexity, depression) or psychotic disorder (schizophrenia). There isn't any convincing evidence that marijuana increases the rate of depression. There is pretty definitive proof that schizophrenia has an earlier age of onset in people who use marijuana. Although it's not clear that it necessarily causes schizophrenia - it may just unmask it susceptible individuals who would have otherwise presented later in life.

I'd link the study but it's behind a pay wall.

[garbon]

Should I trust medical professionals in California or a lawyer in Alberta?

No.

I should trust no one?

[Barrister]

Marijuana as a treatment for depression and anxiety? 

Studies have shown increased rates of those disorders amongst marijuana users.

http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana

In 2007 The Lancet published a systematic review on the relation between marijuana and affective (i.e. anexity, depression) or psychotic disorder (schizophrenia). There isn't any convincing evidence that marijuana increases the rate of depression. There is pretty definitive proof that schizophrenia has an earlier age of onset in people who use marijuana. Although it's not clear that it necessarily causes schizophrenia - it may just unmask it susceptible individuals who would have otherwise presented later in life.

I'd link the study but it's behind a pay wall.

Danke.

Anything on marijuana used as a treatment for and affective disorders?

[Razgovory]

Yes I've seen that.

Also the whole 'Sacred Weed' mantra has gotten real old, I take if more seriously if the people who were advocating it, didn't just jump-cut to any old shit piece of cardboard to make the filter for their joint; perhaps they should look into the printing inks and chemicals used in making the cardboard product ? 

Would the whole spiritual event them be so purifying ? 

What's that? 

I think Mongers is just posting in the wrong thread.  Apparently there is some thread (maybe on his occupy web site) about some British "Sacred Weed' mantra, and he just mistakenly posted here instead.

Either that, or he is just clueless.

And there is no Zombie Craze.

[Fate]

Marijuana as a treatment for depression and anxiety? 

Studies have shown increased rates of those disorders amongst marijuana users.

http://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/marijuana

In 2007 The Lancet published a systematic review on the relation between marijuana and affective (i.e. anexity, depression) or psychotic disorder (schizophrenia). There isn't any convincing evidence that marijuana increases the rate of depression. There is pretty definitive proof that schizophrenia has an earlier age of onset in people who use marijuana. Although it's not clear that it necessarily causes schizophrenia - it may just unmask it susceptible individuals who would have otherwise presented later in life.

I'd link the study but it's behind a pay wall.

Danke.

Anything on marijuana used as a treatment for and affective disorders?

There's definitive evidence that supports using high potency oral cannabinoids to treat chemotherapy associated nausea and cachexia (profound wasting associated with AIDS, cancer, etc.) There really isn't sufficient evidence out there for medical professionals to be using it for anything else.

You'll also always hear about smoking weed for glaucoma. It does transiently lower pressure in the eye , but if you truly have glaucoma you need to get your ass to an ophthalmologist.

[merithyn]

There's definitive evidence that supports using high potency oral cannabinoids to treat chemotherapy associated nausea and cachexia (profound wasting associated with AIDS, cancer, etc.) There really isn't sufficient evidence out there for medical professionals to be using it for anything else.

You'll also always hear about smoking weed for glaucoma. It does transiently lower pressure in the eye , but if you truly have glaucoma you need to get your ass to an ophthalmologist.

Again, it is also incredibly difficult to conduct such studies because of the legality of the product. Until there's a bit more freedom for trials, we will never know all of its benefits or detriments.

[Fate]

There's definitive evidence that supports using high potency oral cannabinoids to treat chemotherapy associated nausea and cachexia (profound wasting associated with AIDS, cancer, etc.) There really isn't sufficient evidence out there for medical professionals to be using it for anything else.

You'll also always hear about smoking weed for glaucoma. It does transiently lower pressure in the eye , but if you truly have glaucoma you need to get your ass to an ophthalmologist.

Again, it is also incredibly difficult to conduct such studies because of the legality of the product. Until there's a bit more freedom for trials, we will never know all of its benefits or detriments.

You can buy dronabinol (marinol) legally with a prescription in all 50 states. It's essentially THC in a pill. It may not be as cool as lighting up, but it has the same efficacy albeit with a slower onset of action.

[merithyn]

You can buy dronabinol (marinol) legally with a prescription in all 50 states. It's essentially THC in a pill. It may not be as cool as lighting up, but it has the same efficacy albeit with a slower onset of action.

Hm. I thought it wasn't the same efficacy as marijuana, but I may have just read that on one of those forums that advocated full legalization.

[Fate]

When I say efficacy I am using it in the technical/pharmacological sense of the word. Essentially, both inhaled and oral THC have the same effect on a THC receptor in the brain.

I'm guessing when lay people hear the word efficacy they conflate it with onset of action. Inhaled THC does enter into the body almost instantaneously versus an hour or two when you take it in a pill form. That isn't a difference in efficacy. However it is an advantage of smoking weed versus taking pills.

[merithyn]

When I say efficacy I am using it in the technical/pharmacological sense of the word. Essentially, both inhaled and oral THC have the same effect on a THC receptor in the brain.

I'm guessing when lay people hear the word efficacy they conflate it with onset of action. Inhaled THC does have the advantaged that it gets into the body almost instantaneously versus an hour or two when you take it in a pill form. That isn't efficacy. However it is an advantage of smoking weed versus taking pills.

Thanks. I'll use the word the way I mean it now.

Hm. I thought it wasn't the same efficacy as marijuana, but I may have just read that on one of those forums that advocated full legalization.

[garbon]

So I saw Massachusetts is voting on medical marijuana this year again and apparently the pro-side has some big donors. KRonn, looking at you to do the right thing, buddy.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Again, it is also incredibly difficult to conduct such studies because of the legality of the product. Until there's a bit more freedom for trials, we will never know all of its benefits or detriments.

It's a shame no countries outside the United States exist and have medical research, especially countries that don't have marijuana so tightly controlled.

I think the reality about why medical marijuana hasn't become a significant thing other than a legalization strategy (which any reasonable person is fine with just from doing a societal cost-benefit analysis), is it's basically anathema to what modern medicine is about. Ask a doctor what they'd rather prescribe:

1. A plant that is burnt and inhaled into the lungs, and which does not have a guaranteed active chemical content.

2. A pill, injection, or etc that has a known, predictable, guaranteed chemical content per unit.

The problem with plants is even grown by the best, most ethical farmer and controlled perfectly from ground to human will have natural variability. It's the same reason even with modern farming no two peaches or two apples are exactly, 100% the same. That's no big deal when you're just eating a peach or an apple but in general when they can avoid it doctors aren't huge fans of dosing that way.

The other problem with the plant is you are smoking burnt carbon into your lungs. A big part of the reason cigarettes cause lung cancer is because of all the chemicals in the tobacco product and etc, but even if you removed all that, hell even if you just had a paper tube stuffed with Kentucky bluegrass (the shit you mow, not some euphemism for a Kentucky strain of weed) any carbon burnt and inhaled causes damage to the lungs and is carcinogenic. Burnt carbon and the lungs just don't mix, at all.

Because marijuana doesn't have the exact same negative shit in it that mass market cigarettes do I believe most lung cancer studies looking at MJ users have shown it isn't nearly as bad for your as cigarettes (also probably because you don't smoke the equivalent of two packs a day of marijuana), but it does correlate to increased risk of lung cancer. When it's only widely accepted treatment is for nausea, and typically for people undergoing chemotherapy because they have cancer, ingesting a known carcinogen (burnt carbon) isn't going to be something a lot of doctors are super happy to just go and do.

There are vaporizers which actually eliminate the burnt carbon problem, but most medical MJ users don't seem attracted to that. Most likely because it's really just, as I said, a path to legalization. In California medical MJ clinics are essentially openly operated as places for anyone to get their fix, and people looking to get high don't actually care to use a vaporizer because they're used to hitting up a bowl, joint, bong (whatever kids do these days) and the vaporizer just hasn't caught on as much.

[merithyn]

Huh. Seems like using marijuana in food would be the better, safer option. Were I given it as a prescription, I sure as hell wouldn't smoke it for the very reasons you offer up.

I get the variation aspect. Makes sense, actually.

And any chance you have any studies from those other countries handy? I've looked and having seen any, but my language skills are limited to English and Pigeon Spanish.

[garbon]

OvBs take on California:

[OttoVonBismarck]

Oh I don't actually know if any studies have been done in other countries. It's just a standard canned response of mine. Anytime someone starts going on and on about how certain knowledge (see: water-powered cars, for example) would have been fully developed if not for draconian American laws I immediately feel the need to point out there are lots of other first world countries out there that do serious research. And you're not really doing any of that meri, but you're sort of "stomping around that territory" enough that the people who do that might nod at you as a "fellow traveler."

The money involved if you could come up with a major, widespread, commonly accepted drug is big enough that there would be at least some research going on if it was a serious line of inquiry. The reality is chemists and biologists are really only interested in plants as places to get ideas, for actual research they tend to synthesize chemicals to approximate what was found in the plant or break it down into constituent chemicals. Their interest is in figuring out the biochemistry, because most likely that's the only way to actually get it into a form worthwhile. It's like Aspirin, or acetylsalicylic acid, it could be found in Willow Bark and back to antiquity people used Willow Bark extract in homeopathic medicine. However pharmaceutical aspirin is way better than any shit you'd ever get by boiling down the bark from a willow, because willow bark extract is actually toxic in the doses required to get enough aspirin to approach modern usages of aspirin in a clinical setting. By actually working at a biochemical level scientists were able to take a valid medical compound found in a plant and actually turn it into real medicine, something that can be used predictably and in a controlled setting. Also, something that can be more easily mass produced, stored, and distributed.

The pharmaceutical industry takes ideas and compounds from plants all the time, but we don't really get prescribed plants for anything. This is because the scientists and doctors involved don't want to be prescribing plants because plants vary and also come with tons of other biochemical compounds that have umpteen unknown affects. The pharmaceutical industry is interested in isolating relevant compounds in plants, and either synthesizing them into something by itself, or if that particular chemical doesn't have quite the affect wanted they will study how it works in the body and try to develop new chemicals that function in a similar way but "better" (basically novel drug discovery, an expensive, time consuming process.) I think that is why you haven't had a ton of research into what smoking bud does for you, but I am willing to bet a lot of work has been done by pharmaceutical companies involving the chemical compounds found in marijuana. It just is too hard for the average legalization hippie to understand and too far removed from toking up to get their attention.

But rest assured, major international pharmaceutical companies like GSK would be all over selling pot if it had a chance of being successful as a medicine. I think it's telling they aren't doing that.