Coastal Post Online
MARIN COUNTY'S NEWS
MONTHLY - FREE PRESS
(415)868-1600 -
(415)868-0502(fax) - P.O. Box 31, Bolinas, CA, 94924
November, 2004
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Report Supressed That Marijuana
Components Can Inhibit Cancer Growth
By Paul Armentano
Clinical research touted by the journal of the American Association for Cancer
Research that shows marijuana's components can inhibit the growth of cancerous
brain tumors is the latest in a long line of studies demonstrating the drug's
potential as an anti-cancer agent. Not familiar with it? You're not alone.
Despite the value of these studies, both in terms of the treatment of
life-threatening illnesses and as items of news - the latest being that
performed by researchers at Madrid's Complutense University that found cannabis
restricts the blood supply to glioblastoma multiforme tumors, an aggressive
brain tumor that kills some 7,000 people in the United States per year - US
media coverage of them has been almost non-existent.
Why the blackout? For starters, all of these medical cannabis studies were
conducted overseas. Secondly, not one of them has been acknowledged by the US government.
This wasn't always the case. In fact, the first experiment documenting pot's
anti-tumor effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at the
behest of the US government. The results of that study, reported in an Aug. 18,
1974, Washington Post newspaper feature, were that marijuana's psychoactive
component, THC, "slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a
virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much
as 36 percent."
Despite these favorable preliminary findings, US government officials
banished the study, and refused to fund any follow-up research until conducting
a similar - though secret - clinical trial in the mid-1990s. That study,
conducted by the US National Toxicology Program to the tune of $2 million concluded
that mice and rats administered high doses of THC over long periods had greater
protection against malignant tumors than untreated controls.
However, rather than publicize their findings, government researchers
shelved the results, which only became public after a draft copy of its
findings were leaked in 1997 to a medical journal which in turn forwarded the
story to the national media.
However, in the eight years since the completion of the National Toxicology
trial, the US government has yet to fund a single additional study examining
the drug's potential anti-cancer properties. Is this a case of federal
bureaucrats putting politics over the health and safety of patients? You be the
judge.
Fortunately, scientists overseas have generously picked up where US researchers so abruptly left off. In 1998, a research team at Complutense's Department
of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology discovered that THC can selectively
induce program cell death in brain tumor cells without negatively impacting the
surrounding healthy cells. Then in 2000, they reported in the journal Nature
Medicine that injections of synthetic THC eradicated malignant gliomas (brain
tumors) in one-third of treated rats, and prolonged life in another third by
six weeks.
Last year, researchers at the University of Milan in Naples, Italy, reported in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics that non-psychoactive
compounds in marijuana inhibited the growth of glioma cells in a dose dependent
manner, and selectively targeted and killed malignant cells through a process
known as apoptosis.
And finally, this month, researchers reported that marijuana's constituents
inhibited the spread of brain cancer in human tumor biopsies from patients who
had failed standard cancer therapies.