OT - Results of Study of Medicinal Marijuana As A Pain Reliever - Interesting Article

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Why Pot Eases Pain

Reuters - 3:00 a.m. 12.Oct.99.PDT

Pain triggers the release of the brain's natural version of marijuana, researchers said Monday.

Their finding helps explain why marijuana can relieve pain and adds to a whole series of studies that show that the chemical, one of a class known as anandamides, has a range of important roles in the brain.

Read ongoing Med-Tech coverage

Michael Walker, a psychology professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and colleagues tested pain and anandamide in rats.

They found the brain produced anandamide when they stimulated an area -- the periaqueductal gray -- known for its role in modulating pain. It also released anandamide in response to a painful injection of the chemical formalin.

The secretion of anandamide eased the pain, they reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers anesthetized their rats, but were able to follow the pain signals and the passage of anandamide in the brain using a new type of mass spectrometry, which is able to detect minute amounts of a substance.

Walker said the knowledge might be used to devise new painkillers or analgesics. Perhaps a drug that made more anandamide available would be useful, he said.

"There are some types of pain that do not respond well to current treatments," he said in a statement. "The fact that you have different modulatory systems that are effective for different types of pain may offer hope."

Anandamides are neurotransmitters -- message-carrying chemicals -- and are known to be chemically very similar to cannabinoids in cannabis or marijuana.

Cannabis has been used for centuries to help relieve pain.

Other research has found a range of uses for anandamides.

In May, researchers at the University of California at Irvine found that people with schizophrenia have twice the normal levels of anandamide in their brains.

Anandamides have also been found to help regulate body movement and coordination, and may also be important in helping sperm get to and fertilize an egg.

-- snooze button (alarmclock_2000@yahoo.com), November 18, 1999

Answers

Thanks for the article, snooze. This issue has been beat to death already; prohibition doesn't work, so decriminalize it now (you can't ignore it forever boys).

-- Mori-Nu (silkenet@yahoo.com), November 18, 1999.

Agreed! I smoke weed. I have for a long time. This study explains to me maybe why I have all these years. Although my life probably would of been different if I had chose not to use cannabis, I really do have a HUGE tollerance for pain. Now that I think of it, when I was 14, I fell off a 40 foot cliff and landed on a sandrock creek bed. Based on the injuries I received, I was pretty well banged up and in alot of pain. Contusions, broken bones, overall soreness. I first smoked weed during my time of recuperation. I "liked" the way it relaxed me, the way it kinda numbed the physical pain for awhile and made things more tolerable.I eventually recovered totally from my injuries for the most partand have went on to live a normal middle class American life. During that time frame of the last 25 years, I have had numerous misfortune with "accidents" that have caused me misfortune and pain. My friend wrecked into a parked car at 45 miles and hour and guess who was in the passengers side of the front seat , and yep, I didn't have a seat belt on. We were in a pinto and hit a cadillac. Several years later, I was at work and some old man, (God bless him!) had a seizure while driving, came off the highway at an extremely high rate of speed guestimated at in excess of 90 miles an hour, and crashed into the building. Guess who was directly on the inside of point of entry? Yep, yours truly again! I still have physical issues from that one!!! Two years ago, I injured my knee at work hopping down off of a counter. I tried to rough it out for awhile assumimg I had twisted it and it would just take time to heal. Well, as weeks wore on and it wasn't getting better, I went for help. The treating physician "determined" based on his examination that I had slightly sprained it and prescribed the usual physical therapy and meds. Months wore on, about 5 to be exact, and the knee still hurt. Getting frustrated that it was not getting better, I went outside of the Worker's Comp. system and went to a different doctor and filed the claim with my personal hospitalization carrier. An MRI was ordered and it was determined that I had torn the cartilage. The surgeon told me after the surgery that he could not believe that I had walked on that knee for the last five months. In fact, he showed me the pictures he took of the damage to show his partner's in their medical practice. He said that they would not believe that I walked on that knee for 5 months. At the time I could not understand why this was such a big deal to him. Maybe, it's been the weed that has helped me through out all this misfortune. I never did understand why I liked it so much. Maybe it's the pain relief.

-- 5thamendment (notthistime@y2k.com), November 18, 1999.

snooze,

Respected journals have run this stuff. Anandamides add to the list of neurohumors that will undoubtedly grow as we learn. Bottom line is that pain is a perception. Whether you're stumping along on a blown off leg or exogenously pumped full of the necessary transmitters if your brain doesn't perceive pain there aint none. Narcotics are the same. It should hurt, must hurt, but I don't care because it doesn't. Complicated stuff. Mechanisms designed by nature for specific circumstances now available on a whim. Injury stress sets off a lot of mechanisms meant for short term benefit and in turn can have unknown effects absent of stress if over enjoyed. Good catch.

WANAKA, would note seriously the connection between anandamides and schizophrenia.

-- Carlos (riffraff1@cybertime.net), November 18, 1999.


WANAKA on wrong note. Meant Mori-Nu

-- Carlos (riffraff1@cybertime.net), November 18, 1999.

High anxieties

What the WHO doesn't want you to know
about cannabis

Health officials in Geneva have suppressed the
publication of a politically sensitive analysis that
confirms what ageing hippies have known for
decades: cannabis is safer than alcohol or tobacco.

According to a document leaked to New Scientist,
the analysis concludes not only that the amount of
dope smoked worldwide does less harm to public
health than drink and cigarettes, but that the same is
likely to hold true even if people consumed dope on
the same scale as these legal substances.

The comparison was due to appear in a report on
the harmful effects of cannabis published last
December by the WHO. But it was ditched at the
last minute following a long and intense dispute
between WHO officials, the cannabis experts who
drafted the report and a group of external advisers.

As the WHO's first report on cannabis for 15 years,
the document had been eagerly awaited by doctors
and specialists in drug abuse. The official
explanation for excluding the comparison of dope
with legal substances is that "the reliability and
public health significance of such comparisons are
doubtful". However, insiders say the comparison
was scientifically sound and that the WHO caved in
to political pressure. It is understood that advisers
from the US National Institute on Drug Abuse and
the UN International Drug Control Programme
warned the WHO that it would play into the hands
of groups campaigning to legalise marijuana.

One member of the expert panel which drafted the
report, says: "In the eyes of some, any such
comparison is tantamount to an argument for
marijuana legalisation." Another member, Billy
Martin of the Medical College of Virginia in
Richmond, says that some WHO officials "went
nuts" when they saw the draft report.

The leaked version of the excluded section states
that the reason for making the comparisons was
"not to promote one drug over another but rather to
minimise the double standards that have operated in
appraising the health effects of cannabis".
Nevertheless, in most of the comparisons it makes
between cannabis and alcohol, the illegal drug
comes out better--or at least on a par--with the legal
one.

The report concludes, for example, that "in
developed societies cannabis appears to play little
role in injuries caused by violence, as does alcohol".
It also says that while the evidence for fetal alcohol
syndrome is "good", the evidence that cannabis can
harm fetal development is "far from conclusive".

Cannabis also fared better in five out of seven
comparisons of long-term damage to health. For
example, the report says that while heavy
consumption of either drug can lead to dependence,
only alcohol produces a "well defined withdrawal
syndrome". And while heavy drinking leads to
cirrhosis, severe brain injury and a much increased
risk of accidents and suicide, the report concludes
that there is only "suggestive evidence that chronic
cannabis use may produce subtle defects in
cognitive functioning".

Two comparisons were more equivocal. The report
says that both heavy drinking and marijuana
smoking can produce symptoms of psychosis in
susceptible people. And, it says, there is evidence
that chronic cannabis smoking "may be a
contributory cause of cancers of the aerodigestive
tract".

From New Scientist, 21 February 1998

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), November 18, 1999.



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