Forgive me if the headline above sounds slightly exploitive. My intention is not to piggyback on a personal tragedy, but I did want to get your attention.

In the fourteen years I’ve worked in marijuana law reform, few events have struck me as so needlessly tragic as the federal government’s consistent and deliberate stifling of medical cannabis research. Nowhere is the Feds’ refusal to allow this science more overt and inhumane than as it pertains to the investigation of cannabinoids as anti-cancer agents, particularly in the treatment of gliomas.

As noted in today’s wire stories regarding Senator Edward Kennedy’s diagnosis, glioma is an aggressive form of cancer that affects an estimated 10,000 Americans annually. Standard treatments for the cancer include radiation and chemotherapy, though neither procedure has proven particularly effective — with the disease killing approximately half its victims within one year and all within three years.

But what if there was an alternative treatment for gliomas that could selectively target the cancer while leaving healthy cells in tact? And what if federal bureaucrats were aware of this treatment, but deliberately withheld this information from the public?

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Smoking pot, even long-term, is not associated with an increased risk of developing cancers of the head and neck, according to the results of a just-published case-control study from New Zealand.  

“This population-based study did not find a statistically significant increase in the risk of head and neck cancer in adults [under age 55] from cannabis,” authors concluded. “[Even] the risk associated with the highest tertile of cannabis use (defined as one joint per day for more than eight years) was not statistically significant after adjustment for cofounding variables including tobacco smoking, alcohol consumption, and level of income.”

So for the second month in a row we have researchers from New Zealand telling us that pot smoking has little-to-no association with cancer. But perhaps you missed the first study. That would be understandable because the mainstream media deliberately obscured its findings with alarmist headlines like “Cannabis Bigger Cancer Risk Than Cigarettes” and “Experts Warn of Cannabis Cancer ‘Epidemic’” — headlines that, in fact, were nearly the opposite of what the study actually said.

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Longtime NORML Board Member and cancer survivor Norman Kent reflects on his 40+ years as a cannabis activist and enthusiast here.

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You can listen to host Dean Becker and I debunk the latest marijuana myths regarding potency, cancer risk, driving, and a plethora of other issues on the February 6 edition of the syndicated radio show Cultural Baggage.

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International media headlines reporting that heavy marijuana smokers have a six-fold risk of coming down with lung cancer are, predictably, a whole lot of hot air.

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