Investigators at the University of Naples assessed the effect of CBD on colon carcinogenesis in mice. Researchers reported that CBD administration was associated with cancerous tumor reduction and reduced cell proliferation.

Authors wrote: “Although cannabidiol has been shown to kill glioma cells, to inhibit cancer cell invasion and to reduce the growth of breast carcinoma and lung metastases in rodents, its effect on colon carcinogenesis has not been evaluated to date. This is an important omission, since colon cancer affects millions of individuals in Western countries. In the present study, we have shown that cannabidiol exerts (1) protective effects in an experimental model of colon cancer and (2) antiproliferative actions in colorectal carcinoma cells.”

Authors also acknowledged that CBD possesses “an extremely safe profile in humans.” They concluded, “[O]ur findings suggest that cannabidiol might be worthy of clinical consideration in colon cancer prevention.”

Clinical review data published in the scientific journal Current Drug Safety in December concluded that CBD is “non-toxic” to healthy cells and is “well tolerated” in humans. Nevertheless, cannabidiol is presently classified under federal law as a schedule I prohibited substance. Such substances are required by law to possess “a high potential for abuse,” “a lack of accepted safety … under medical supervision,” and “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.”

Separate preclinical trials evaluating the anti-cancer activities of cannabinoids and endocannabinoids show that their administration can inhibit the proliferation of a variety of cancerous cell lines, including breast carcinoma, prostate carcinoma, gastric adenocarcinoma, skin carcinoma, leukemia cells, neuroblastoma, lung carcinoma, uterus carcinoma, thyroid epithelioma, pancreatic adenocarcinoma, cervical carcinoma, oral cancer, biliary tract cancer (cholangiocarcinoma), and lymphoma. NORML provides summaries and links to these studies here.

Full text of this latest study, “Chemopreventive effect of the non-psychotropic phytocannabinoid cannabidiol on experimental colon cancer,” appears in the Journal of Molecular Medicine.

Huntington’s Disease is an inherited degenerative brain disorder characterized by motor abnormalities and dementia produced by selective lesions in the cerebral cortex and, in particular, the striatum. There are presently no known conventional therapies available to alleviate HD symptoms or delay HD-associated striatal degeneration.

An international team of investigators from Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom assessed whether THC and CBD-rich botanical extracts could delay the progress of the disease in laboratory animals. Authors reported, “[O]ur data demonstrate that a [one to one] combination of THC and CBD-enriched botanical extracts protected striatal neurons against … toxicity.” By contrast, the administration of individual, selective synthetic cannabinoid agonists did not produce similarly favorable outcomes.

Investigators concluded, “In our opinion, these data provide sufficient preclinical evidence to justify a clinical evaluation of [one to one THC to CBD] cannabis-based medicine … as a neuroprotective agent capable of delaying disease progression in patients affected by HD, a disorder that is currently poorly man- aged in the clinic, prompting an urgent need for clinical trials with agents showing positive results in preclinical studies.”

Additional studies documenting the disease modifying potential of marijuana is available in the NORML handbook, Emerging Clinical Applications For Cannabis & Cannabinoids: Fourth Edition, available online here.

Additional information on this study will appear in this week’s NORML news update. To receive these e-mail updates free, please sign up here.

Project CBD has just sent out its introductory pitch to California dispensaries. ProjectCBD.org is the medical marijuana movement living up to its name,” explains outreach coordinator Sarah Russo, optimistically, as she asks the dispensaries to participate in a “collective research effort.” But what are the chances that the dispensary owners, intent on building their own brands, will support a venture aimed at advancing the movement as a whole?

CBD, in case you’re just joining us, is Cannabidiol —a component of the Cannabis plant known to have anti-inflammatory, anti-tumor and other beneficial medical effects. CBD is not psychoactive and actually counters the psychoactive effects of THC. It is the predominant cannabinoid in hemp —plants grown to produce fiber or growing wild. CBD levels go down and THC levels go up when plants are bred to maximize psychoactive effect, as they have been in the U.S. for many generations of plants and people.

It was widely assumed for a long time that CBD had been almost entirely bred out of the Cannabis being grown in California for medical/commercial purposes. And because no analytic chemistry labs were testing Cannabis samples before the winter of 2008-09, there was no way to assess cannabinoid content. Overseas things were different. For many years researchers have been exploring the medical potential of CBD, and G.W. Pharmaceuticals conducted successful clinical trials and got U.K. government approval to market Sativex, a whole-plant extract with equal amounts of CBD and THC, for use by MS patients. Canada and Spain have also issued approvals for Sativex.

The situation in California changed in 2008 when Steve DeAngelo arranged for a lab to test the Cannabis he was providing at Oakland’s Harborside Health Center. DeAngelo had to fund a start-up to accomplish this. When Harborside opened in 2006 he had phoned every analytic lab in the Bay Area and been turned down when he mentioned the C word. In the spring of ’08 he decided to back two entrepreneurs who were launching a lab —the aptly named “Steep Hill”— and to supply them with a large, steady stream of samples to test for mold and cannabinoid content (THC, CBD and CBN, a breakdown product indicative of freshness). At least eight more labs have started testing Cannabis in California since then, and there are labs in Montana and Colorado. ProjectCBD’s Russo says, “We seem to hear from a new lab every week.”

It turns out that CBD is not all that rare —about one in every 600 samples tested by the labs is found to be high in CBD. Evidently, that’s the rate at which a mutation occurs resulting in an excess of the enzyme that transforms a precursor molecule of CBD and THC into one or the other. More than 25 CBD-rich strains have been identified, and Russo says, “We seem to hear about a new strain every week, too”

The prospect of CBD-rich cannabis becoming available prompted the Society of Cannabis Clinicians to plan a data collection effort. Jeffrey Hergenrather, MD, President of the SCC, had spent years listening to talks about CBD at meetings of the International Cannabinoid Research Society, wishing he could observe its effects on real patients. Hergenrather and co-worker Stacey Kerr, MD have now drafted a survey aimed at documenting patients’ answers to some basic questions about the effects of CBD-rich Cannabis. (For purposes of data collection, “CBD-rich” has been defined as 4% or more CBD, regardless of THC content. The amount of CBD that a given strain contains isn’t the only factor influencing the effects it will exert when ingested. The ratio of CBD to THC may be as or more important. Terpenoid and flavonoid content also appear to be very important.)

Project CBD was launched to publicize and promote the SCC survey(s). Martin A. Lee, the author of Acid Dreams, had been writing about CBD for O’Shaughnessy’s and convinced your correspondent that its re(introduction) into the grassroots supply was going to be a huge, ongoing story and would warrant its own journal of sorts. Over the past year we put a lot of effort into encouraging production by plant breeders and growers who had strains testing high in CBD. Many dispensary owners have been reluctant to stock CBD-rich strains because their present customers are seeking —or are not adverse to— Cannabis that causes euphoria or sedation. In other words, THC content sells, it’s a sure thing. Why should a dispensary spend money and devote shelf space to a type of Cannabis that most medical users haven’t heard of and whose effects are unproven?

Growers, in turn, have to anticipate the wants of dispensary buyers, and are reluctant to devote valuable garden space to plants for which there is no established market. ?Demand at the dispensary level might not take off until effectiveness is established. Which might not happen until significant numbers of patients have tried CBD-rich Cannabis and taken the SCC survey to report their results. Or, as Martin says, “there could be a tsunami of interest any day now.”

ProjectCBD.org provides the whole story to date and a “CBDiary” noting recent developments. The big news as of March 1: for the first time, a California grower has “stabilized” a CBD-rich strain. Lawrence Ringo of the Southern Humboldt Seed Collective is now offering seeds of “Sour Tsunami” that have a one-in-four chance of containing 10-11% CBD (and 6-7% THC).

Read all about it here.

Fred Gardner is the managing editor of O’Shaughnessy’s, the journal of cannabis in clinical practice. His email is fred@plebesite.com.

NORML’s updated primer on existing and potential cannabinoid and cannabis therapies is found here.

The administration of THC reduces the tumor growth of metastatic breast cancer and “might constitute a new therapeutic tool for the treatment” of cancerous tumors, according to preclinical data published online in the journal Molecular Cancer.

Investigators from Complutense University in Madrid assessed the anti-tumor potential of THC and JWH-133, a non-psychotropic CB2 receptor-selective agonist, in the treatment of ErbB2-positive breast tumors – a highly aggressive form of breast cancer that is typically unresponsive to standard therapies.

Researchers reported, “[B]oth Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol … and JWH-133 …reduce tumor growth [and] tumor number [in mice]. … [T]hese results provide a strong preclinical evidence for the use of cannabinoid-based therapies for the management of ErbB2-positive breast cancer.”

In 2007, investigators at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute reported that the administration of the nonpsychoactive cannabinoid CBD limited breast cancer metastasis in a manner that was superior to comparable synthesized agents.

Previous preclinical studies assessing the anticancer properties of cannabinoids have shown that they inhibit the proliferation of a wide range of cancers, including brain cancer, prostate cancer, oral cancers, lung cancer, skin cancer, pancreatic cancer, biliary tract cancers, and lymphoma.

Full text of the study, “Cannabinoids reduce ErbB2-driven breast cancer progression through Akt inhibition,” is available online here.

For example, researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY), Upstate Medical University in Syracuse published data in the June issue of the journal Pharmacology concluding that the administration of the plant cannabinoids delta-8-THC and delta-9-THC halted cellular respiration and tumor growth in human oral cancer cells. Specifically, investigators reported that cannabinoids were a “potent inhibitor” of Tu183 human cancer cells, a notoriously difficult to treat type of oral cancer.

Of course, this is hardly the first time that pot’s compounds have been demonstrated to possess anti-cancer properties. As has been widely reported here and elsewhere, US government researchers were first aware of this finding over 35 years ago, and today there exist published scientific studies demonstrating that cannabinoids can inhibit the proliferation of a wide range of cancers — including brain cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer, pancreatic cancer, biliary tract cancer, and lymphoma. Nonetheless, abstract prohibitionist concerns regarding marijuana’s supposed cancer risk continue to dominate the headlines while actual scientific studies debunking these allegations tend to go unnoticed.

Similarly, preclinical data published online last week in the journal Cell Communication and Signaling reported that the administration of the non-psychoactive cannabinoid cannabidiol (CBD) increases adult neurogenesis (the active production of new neurons) in laboratory animals. Authors speculated that cannabis’ pro-neurogenic effects may explain why the plant appears to be useful in the treatment of certain neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease or ALS.

As I wrote last week, to date there are now over 20,000 published studies or reviews in the scientific literature pertaining to marijuana and its active compounds — making marijuana the most studied plant on Earth. But what’s the point in further research if nobody even bothers to pay attention to the research that’s already been done?

Neither story particularly breaks any new ground, though the author (who I spoke with extensively prior to the stories publication) does note that investigators are now assessing the use of cannabis for a wide range of disease conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease and the so-called ‘superbug’ MRSA (multi-drug resistant bacterial infections).

Quoted in the story is Columbia University researcher Margaret Haney. I’ve written about Haney’s clinical work with cannabis before. In particular, Haney was the lead author of a 2007 clinical trial concluding that inhaled cannabis increased daily caloric intake and body weight in HIV-positive patients in a manner that was far superior to the effects of oral THC (Marinol aka Dronabinol). The study further reported that subjects’ use of marijuana was well tolerated, and did not impair their cognitive performance.

Yet Haney’s comments in US News and World Report ring tepid at best.

“I am not anti-marijuana, I’m not pro-marijuana. I want to understand it.” Haney expresses frustration at what she considers wrongheaded efforts by states to legalize medical marijuana. There is too much, she says, that scientists do not know.

Haney’s refrain is a common one, and at first glance it appears to make sense. After all, who among us doesn’t want to better understand the interactions between the marijuana plant and the human body? Yet placed in proper context this sentiment appears to be little more than a red herring. Here’s why.

Marijuana is already the most studied plant on Earth, and is arguably one of the most investigated therapeutically active substances known to man. To date, there are now over 20,000 published studies or reviews in the scientific literature pertaining to marijuana and its active compounds. That total includes over 2,700 separate papers published on cannabis in 2009 and another 900 published just this year alone (according to a key word search on the search engine PubMed).

And what have we learned from these 20,000+ studies? Not surprisingly, quite a lot. For starters, we know that cannabis and its active constituents are uniquely safe and effective as therapeutic compounds. Unlike most prescription or over-the-counter medications, cannabinoids are virtually non-toxic to health cells or organs, and they are incapable of causing the user to experience a fatal overdose. Unlike opiates, cannabinoids do not depress the central nervous system, and as a result they possess a virtually unparalleled safety profile. In fact, a 2008 meta-analysis published in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMAJ) reported that cannabis-based drugs were associated with virtually no serious adverse side effects in over 30 years of investigative use.

We also know that the cannabis plant contains in excess of 60 active compounds that likely possess distinctive therapeutic properties. These include THC, THCV, CBD, THCA, CBC, and CBG, among others. In fact, a recent review by Raphael Mechoulam and colleagues identifies nearly 30 separate therapeutic effects — including anti-cancer properties, anti-diabetic properties, neuroprotection, and anti-stroke properties — in cannabinoids other than THC. Most recently, a review by researchers in Germany reported that since 2005 there have been 37 controlled studies assessing the safety and efficacy of cannabinoids, involved a total of 2,563 subjects. By contrast, most FDA-approved drugs go through far fewer trials involving far fewer subjects.

Finally, we know that Western civilization has been using cannabis as a therapeutic agent or recreational intoxicant for thousands of years with relatively few adverse consequences — either to the individual user or to society. In fact, no less than the World Health Organization commissioned a team of experts to compare the health and societal consequences of marijuana use compared to other drugs, including alcohol, nicotine, and opiates. After quantifying the harms associated with both drugs, the researchers concluded: “Overall, most of these risks (associated with marijuana) are small to moderate in size. In aggregate they are unlikely to produce public health problems comparable in scale to those currently produced by alcohol and tobacco. On existing patterns of use, cannabis poses a much less serious public health problem than is currently posed by alcohol and tobacco in Western societies.”

That, in a nutshell, is what we ‘know’ about cannabis. I’d say that it’s ample enough information to, at the very least, cease the practice arresting people who possess it.  As for what else Dr. Haney and others of a similar mindset would still like to know — and how many additional studies would it take to provide them with that information — well, that’s anybody’s guess.

British health regulators have approved the sale and marketing of Sativex, an oral spray consisting of natural cannabis extracts (primarily the plant cannabinoids THC and cannabidiol aka CBD) as a treatment for symptoms of multiple sclerosis. (MS)

The spray, which has been legally available to patients in Canada since 2005, went on sale in Britain on Monday. The drug will be marketed in the United Kingdom by the Bayer Corporation which estimates that Sativex will cost the country’s state-run National Health Service roughly £11, or about $16, a day for each patient.

Commenting on the drug’s regulatory approval, NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said: “The approval of Sativex in the UK is newsworthy though hardly surprising, as the scientific evidence in support of marijuana’s medical safety and utility has been available for decades. However, the bigger question still remains. That is: ‘How can the US government continue to promote a policy that calls for the arrest and prosecution of patients who use a substance that fourteen states and much of the rest of the western world now acknowledges as a safe and legitimate medicine?’”

In clinical trials, Sativex has been demonstrated to reduce MS-associated spasticity, pain, and incontinence. Long-term investigational trials indicate that consistent use of the cannabis-based medicine may also slow the progression of the disease.

Surveys from the UK and elsewhere indicate that MS patients often report using cannabis therapeutically, with one study reporting that some four out of ten patients with the disease find relief from marijuana.

GW Pharmaceuticals, makers of the Sativex, is expected later this year to seek separate regulatory approval for the spray in Spain, France, Germany, and Italy.

In 2006, the US Food and Drug Administration authorized recruitment for the first-ever North American clinical trial of Sativex for cancer pain treatment. A Phase III trial is anticipated to begin the US later this year.

“You have to start somewhere.” —Willy Notcutt, MD

Fifteen members of the Society of Cannabis Clinicians -the doctors’ group founded by Tod Mikuriya in 1999 and now led by Jeffrey Hergenrather- met in Oakland Dec. 11. UCSF professor Donald Abrams recounted the obstacles he faced in conducting clinical trials with government-issued cannabis and getting his results published in peer-reviewed medical journals. The ensuing discussion focused on how SCC doctors might go about evaluating the effectiveness of high-CBD strains as they become available to patients in the year ahead.

CBD (cannabidiol) is a non-psychoactive cannabinoid. For many generations (of people and plants), cannabis in California and elsewhere has been bred to maximize psychoactivity, which is mainly a function of THC content. (Some  “minor” cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids also affect a plant’s effect.)  Because CBD and THC are in an either/or relationship at the genetic level, breeding for high THC means breeding out CBD. So it was widely assumed that the Cannabis available nowadays in California contains only trace amounts of CBD.

Surprisingly, six strains with buds ranging from 5% to 7% CBD by weight have been detected in the year since Steep Hill analytic lab began testing samples from dispensaries and individual growers.  Only two of these high-CBD strains have been made available to patients -and only intermittently, as the pounds delivered by the growers sell out in a day or two. “Soma A-plus” has been dispensed at Harborside Health Center in Oakland, and “Pineapple Thai” at Herbal Solutions in Long Beach. The other four strains are being grown out as clones and should be available by spring 2010 to collectives wishing to dispense them.

The doctors want, eventually, to test the effectiveness of cannabis with consistent CBD/THC ratios in treating various conditions. One hoped-for advantage of high-CBD strains is reduced psychoactivity, which might enable patients to take larger doses while remaining functional. The California doctors are somewhat enviously and somewhat gratefully tracking the progress of G.W. Pharmaceuticals, the British company that has been growing cannabis and making and testing whole-plant extracts for medical use since 1998 —with government approval and backing from corporate partners Bayer, Almirall, and Otsuka.

G.W.’s flagship product is Sativex, an oral spray that contains about equal amounts of CBD and THC. The rationale for the combination was set forth in “A Tale of Two Cannabinoids,” a 2005 article by doctors Ethan Russo and Geoffrey Guy in the online journal Medical Hypotheses. Here’s a summary:

“CBD is demonstrated to antagonise some undesirable effects of THC including intoxication, sedation and tachycardia, while contributing analgesic, anti-emetic, and anti-carcinogenic properties in its own right. In modern clinical trials, this has permitted the administration of higher doses of THC, providing evidence for clinical efficacy and safety for cannabis based extracts in treatment of spasticity, central pain and lower urinary tract symptoms in multiple sclerosis, as well as sleep disturbances, peripheral neuropathic pain, brachial plexus avulsion symptoms, rheumatoid arthritis and intractable cancer pain. Prospects for future application of whole cannabis extracts in neuroprotection, drug dependency, and neoplastic disorders are further examined. The hypothesis that the combination of THC and CBD increases clinical efficacy while reducing adverse events is supported”

Sativex has been approved by Health Canada for treating neuropathic pain in multiple sclerosis and cancer. It is obtainable by prescription in 22 countries. GW has applied for and is awaiting approval of Sativex as a treatment for MS spasticity in the UK and Spain. The U.S. FDA has given GW approval to conduct a clinical trial in advanced cancer patients whose pain is not adequately controlled by opioids. (GW is close to finishing an extensive study to determine optimum dosages.) The company hopes recruitment of subjects won’t take more than a year. When the results are in, assuming they’re favorable, GW will apply for marketing approval from the FDA

Dr. Notcutt’s Encouraging Input

The researcher who conducted Phase 2 trials on Sativex (to determine basic efficacy and optimum dosage range) back in 1999-2000 is Willy Notcutt, MD, a pain specialist at James Paget Hospital in Great Yarmouth, England. O’Shaughnessy’s recently asked Notcutt whether his approach could be adapted by California physicians and patients seeking to evaluate the efficacy of high-CBD strains. The setting was the International Association of Cannabinoid Medicine in Koln, and Notcutt was speaking for himself, not GW Pharmaceuticals, which expresses official corporate disdain for smoking as a delivery system and “the crude plant” as medicine.

Notcutt:  Indeed… Those were “N of 1″ trials. [In N of 1 trials, data is collected from individuals as their use pattern changes. The number N of patients involved in each study is one, hence the name.]  The advantages of  N-of-1 trials were first described by a chap named Guyatt in Toronto. The fundamental thing is that the patient acts as his own control.

O’S: Is there a standard design?

Notcutt: It’s very flexible, you can design it any which way you want to. Presumably the patients are currently using a high-THC strain. First you establish the baseline: what’s the patient’s [self-reported score on a] pain scale or the sleep line, or whatever parameters you want to measure. Then you start them on the current drug for a week. Then you put them on the new one. Then you switch them back to the current one, and so forth. You can do it as many times as you like until you say…

[Stefan offers to buy beer, thread not picked up]

“It can be done as many times as you want and for any period -one week, two weeks, six weeks. You can leave it open, you can do it single-blinded [not letting the patient know what he's taking], you can do it double-blinded [neither doctor nor patient knowing which strain is being used].  But by far the easiest way to start out is to do a straight observational study: open observation and open label. The patients are going to tell you pretty quickly whether they prefer current drug or new drug. The advantage of going from current drug to new drug is, that is what a clnician actually does. That’s how medicine is practiced. I say ‘try this…’ ‘Not much help.’ ‘Now let’s try you on this new drug…’ ‘Yeah, well I think that drug has helped me…’

“I appreciate that you have a problem with standardization, but a lot of people [medical cannabis users] say, ‘I always get this type, I know how to work it, I fine tune it, if it’s a little weak or strong I smoke a little more or smoke a little less.’ Call that the current drug, which we assume is high-THC, and then compare it with high-CBD. That’s what you’re testing: the comparative efficicacy of high-THC and high-CBD cannabis.

“You’re using the patient as his own control and you plot it out: How many times do they smoke each day? What effects are they getting?  It’s close to what you normally would do as a clinician. That’s how I evaluate a drug anyway. If you define your parameters, and gets reports from 20 patients, you can then get a feel for whether it works.

“I would suggest that it be done completely open-label at first.

“Guyatt’s is not the only paper on N-of-1 trials. I have one from the BMJ [British Medical Journal] from a few years ago sayng that this is the way we should be studying chronic disease. It’s a well-recognized, acceptable clinical approach. But people have gotten so fixated in the last 20 years on the randomized, placebo-controlled trial- (sarcastically) ‘the only way you can do it,’ ‘the gold standard.’

“I think the N-of-1 trial is the only way you study this cohort at this time, because of your problems with standardization. You have people doing it different ways… But your individual patient becomes your study. And then you can aggregate your studies. You can do some simple statistics on it: of 20 patients that started, five found it didn’t work for them at all. Now let’s look at the 15 that reported effect…

“Then you can go on and blind your subjects and not tell them which is which. Or blind the physician. Guyatt wrote about building in a placebo, but you needn’t go to that extent. That’s not how we do medicine. The RCT [randomized, controlled trial] is furthest from normal clinical practice.

“The N-of-1 trial is a good way of generating some data where no data exists. The first two or three GW studies were all N-of-1, until we knew that it worked. If the first nine of ten patients had said, ‘This doesn’t work,’ then you don’t go further.

“You have to start somewhere. An observational study has the force of common sense. It may be best suited when you have a longterm chronic illness and you need some information about whether a drug works…

“Do we give an orthopedic surgeon and an eye surgeon the same tools? No. So should we statistically evaluate every medical problem by the same technique? If we’re evaluating a drug where the blood pressure goes up or down, or the sugar level goes up or down in diabetes, we use one technique. Why use the same technique for a drug that has a completely different spectrum of activity, in an area where you don’t get nice, number data, where you get much softer data, you get subjective opinion. There’s a whole difference in the quality of the data -why use the same statistical tools?

“People are now starting to say that evidence-based medicine is becoming a tyranny that’s killing off research. I’m very interested in this because I’m the lead for research in our district I’m also the lead for research in my own field.  If you start insisting on these big multi-center big studies, all randomized, and you don’t nurture the small studies -the little ones that come along, the N-of-1s that come along where the guy sits down and works on an idea, ‘try this out, try that out’ in a few patients, and generates a little bit more information that then leads to a bit of a better study…

“I still regard as one of the best studies ever, the guy who treated pain after shingles with amtriptyline or nortrypteline. All he did was he found out that when he used the amitriptyline, 60 percent of the patients hated it. When he used nortriptyline only about 30 percent of the patients hated it. A simple trial -but it changed our practice. We stopped using amitriptyline, we use nortriptyline. And now we know the reasons why. That was 10, 15 years ago. I’ve never seen that simple study replicated as a clinical trial of amitriptyline versus nortriptyline because there’s no money it for the drug companies.”

Notcutt offered to review any study design that the SCC docs come up with.

Fred Gardner edits O’Shaughnessy’s, the journal of cannabis in clinical practice, now online at www.pcmd4u.org

A just published scientific review by Sao Paulo University (Brazil) researcher Antonio Zuardi reports that there’s been an “explosive increase” of interest in CBD over the past five years. It’s apparent why.

“Studies have suggested a wide range of possible therapeutic effects of cannabidiol on several conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral ischemia, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, other inflammatory diseases, nausea and cancer,” Zuardi writes. Let’s look at a few of these in detail, shall we?

1. Antiepileptic action
“In 1973, a Brazilian group reported that CBD was active in … blocking convulsions produced in experimental animals.”

2. Sedative action
“In humans with insomnia, high doses of CBD increased sleep duration compared to placebo.”

3. Anxiolytic action
“CBD induce[s] a clear anxiolytic effect and a pattern of cerebral activity compatible with an anxiolytic activity.”

4. Antipsychcotic action
“[C]linical studies suggest that CBD is an effective, safe and well-tolerated alternative treatment for schizophrenic patients.”

5. Antidystonic action
“CBD … had antidystonic effects in humans when administered along with standard medication to five patients with dystonia, in an open study.”

6. Antioxidative action
“[I]t was demonstrated that CBD can reduce hydroperoxide-induced oxidative damage as well as or better than other antioxidants. CBD was more protective against glutamate neurotoxicity than either ascorbate or a-tocopherol, indicating that this drug is a potent antioxidant.”

7. Neuroprotective action
“A marked reduction in the cell survival was observed following exposure of cultured rat pheochromocytoma PC12 cells to beta-A peptide. Treatment of the cells with CBD prior to beta-A exposure significantly elevated the cell survival.”

8. Antiinflammatory action
“CBD, administered i.p. or orally, has blocked the progression of arthritis.”

9. Cardioprotective action
“CBD induces a substantial cardioprotective effect.”

10. Action on diabetes
“CBD treatment of NOD (non-obese diabetic) mice before the development of the disease reduced its incidence from 86% in the non-treated control mice to 30% in CBD-treated mice. … It was also observed that administration of CBD to 11-14 week old female NOD mice, which were either in a latent diabetes stage or had initial symptoms of diabetes, ameliorated the manifestations of the disease.”

11. Antiemetic action
“The expression of this conditioned retching reaction was completely suppressed by CBD and delta9-THC, but not by ondansetron, [an] antagonist that interferes with acute vomiting.”

12. Anticancer action
“A study of the effect of different cannabinoids on eight tumor cell lines, in vitro, has clearly indicated that, of the five natural compounds tested, CBD was the most potent inhibitor of cancer cell growth.”

In sum, the past 45 years of scientific study on CBD has revealed the compound to be non-toxic, non-psychoactive, and to possess a multitude of therapeutic properties. Yet, to this day it remains illegal to possess or use (and nearly impossible to study in US clinical trials) simply because it is associated with marijuana.

What possible advancements in medical treatment may have been achieved over the past decades had US government officials chosen to advance — rather than inhibit — clinical research into CBD (which, under federal law, remains a Schedule I drug defined as having “no currently accepted medical use”)? Perhaps it’s time someone asks John Walters or the DEA?