For over a decade now I’ve been telling folks that compounds in cannabis can selectively target and kill malignant cancer cells. It seems like some media outlets finally starting to get the message.

Today, the good folks at HuffingtonPost.com published my latest essay on the subject, “What Your Government Knows About Cannabis And Cancer — And Isn’t Telling You.”

Since the Huffington Post is an online medium, I made it a point to include nearly a dozen links to pertinent research and clinical/pre-clinical trials demonstrating that cannabinoids possess anti-cancer properties.

Fortunately, in the past 10 years scientists overseas have generously picked up where U.S. researchers so abruptly left off, reporting that cannabinoids can halt the spread of numerous cancer cells — including prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and brain cancer. (An excellent paper summarizing much of this research, “Cannabinoids for Cancer Treatment: Progress and Promise,” appears in the January 2008 edition of the journal Cancer Research.) A 2006 patient trial published in the British Journal of Cancer even reported that the intracranial administration of THC was associated with reduced tumor cell proliferation in humans with advanced glioblastoma.

For most visitors to the Huffington Post, my essay will be their first exposure to this information, but ideally, not their last. Hopefully, readers of the site — which is one of the most visited on the Internet — will join us in our calls to end the US government’s multi-decade long denial of this potentially groundbreaking research.

You can read the full text of my essay here.

Please feel free to leave a comment and/or circulate this article widely (Digg it, reddit, buzz up, etc.) My last Huff Post essay, “Don’t Buy The ‘Potent Pot’ Hype,” received nearly 100 comments, a personal response from the Drug Czar’s office, and earned me a guest spot on Dr. Drew Pinsky’s live nationally syndicated radio show. That said, in my opinion, the government’s cover-up of pot’s anti-cancer abilities is a far more important topic; hopefully we can get a similar buzz started.

PS: Those interested in learning more about this topic can download an audio file of my recent guest appearance on the radio show, “Sex, Drugs, and Civil Liberties,” (KOPN: Columbia, Missouri) here.

I’m proud to be a guest on this week’s edition of KPFT’s Century of Lies radio program to discuss the therapeutic use of cannabis and the federal government’s multi-decade campaign to suppress research documenting its clinical utility. You can listen to the radio show online here.

You can also watch a separate interview with me discussing the anti-cancer properties of pot, and join the ongoing discussion on Alternet.org here.

Following yesterday’s blog post regarding the use of cannabinoids as potential treatment agents for gliomas, the good folks at Cannabis TV have made available a short video presentation on the subject.

The following interview took place this past April, just prior to my presentation at the Fifth National Clinical Conference on Cannabis Therapeutics.

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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