Inhaled Marijuana ‘Clearly Has Medical Value’ For Hard to Treat Chronic Pain Conditions

[Editor's note: This post is excerpted from this week's forthcoming NORML weekly media advisory. To have NORML's media advisories delivered straight to your in-box, sign up for NORML's free e-zine here.]

Inhaled cannabis reduces pain and improves sleep compared to placebo, and is well tolerated by patients with chronic neuropathy, according to clinical trial data published this week in the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association (CMAJ).

Investigators at McGill University in Montreal assessed the efficacy of inhaled cannabis on pain intensity in 23 subjects with chronic post-traumatic or post-surgical neuropathic pain in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover trial. Participants in the study received a single inhalation of 25 mg of 9.4 percent herbal cannabis or placebo three times daily. All of the volunteers in the study suffered from refractory pain for which conventional therapies had proven ineffective.

Researchers reported: “[H]erbal cannabis … significantly reduced average pain scores compared with … cannabis placebo in adult participants. … We found significant improvement in measures of sleep quality and anxiety. … Our results support the claim that smoked cannabis reduces pain, improves mood, and helps sleep.”

Speaking to Web MD online, the study’s lead researcher Mark Ware said: “We’ve shown again that cannabis is an analgesic. Clearly it has medical value.”

In February, investigators from the California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research summarized the results of four separate FDA ‘gold standard’ designed clinical trials demonstrating that inhaled marijuana was safe and effective for the treatment of neuropathy.

An estimated one to two percent of the population suffers from some form of neuropathic pain, which typically goes untreated by standard analgesics.

Listen to NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre and NORML Advisory Board member Lester Grinspoon discuss this trial, and other subjects related to the medical use of cannabis, on NPR’s The Diane Rehm show here.

Medicinal Marijuana Eases Neuropathic Pain In HIV Patients

Oh, so this is why the Feds do everything they can to discourage any investigation into the safety and efficacy of inhaled cannabis.

Medicinal Marijuana Eases Neuropathic Pain in HIV
via The Washington Post

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 6 (HealthDay News) — Medicinal marijuana helps relieve neuropathic pain in people with HIV, says a University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine study.

It included 28 HIV patients with neuropathic pain that wasn’t adequately controlled by opiates or other pain relievers. The researchers found that 46 percent of patients who smoked medicinal marijuana reported clinically meaningful pain relief, compared with 18 percent of those who smoked a placebo.

The study, published online Aug. 6 in Neuropsychopharmacology, was sponsored by the University of California Center for Medical Cannabis Research (CMCR).

“Neuropathy is a chronic and significant problem in HIV patients as there are few existing treatments that offer adequate pain management to sufferers,” study leader Dr. Ronald J. Ellis, an associate professor of neurosciences, said in an UCSD news release. “We found that smoked cannabis was generally well-tolerated and effective when added to the patient’s existing pain medication, resulting in increased pain relief.”

The findings are consistent with and extend other recent CMCR-sponsored research supporting the short-term effectiveness of medicinal marijuana in treating neuropathic pain.

“This study adds to a growing body of evidence that indicates that cannabis is effective, in the short-term at least, in the management of neuropathic pain,” Dr. Igor Grant, a professor of psychiatry and director of the CMCR, said in the UCSD news release.   

By my count, this is the third clinical trial published in just over a year to conclude that inhaling cannabis significantly reduces neuropathic pain. (Read about the others here and here.) And that’s not even including this study that found that low doses of inhaled cannabis are more therapeutic for HIV-positive patients than Marinol (oral synthetic THC).

Kudos to The Washington Post for publicizing this important story. And an extra ‘shout out’ to the Post‘s editors for highlighting that this trial was sponsored by California’s Center for Medical Cannabis Research and not by the US government.