I watched Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s CNN Weed 3 special last week. It’s another in his series about medical marijuana, and for the first time he is calling for national legalization. He also provides more fascinating evidence of how politics have stopped any meaningful study of medical cannabis here in the United States — and how public awareness and education might be finally changing that.
This one takes us through the case of researcher Sue Sisley, who has been long working with veterans returning from action with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. She found many being treated with different prescriptions for various symptoms, often heavy narcotics, which she says left patients in a “zombie” state. Sisley, not a pot proselytizer, was surprised to find that some of her patients had stopped taking their prescription medicines like Lamotrigine and GHB and were instead self-medicating with marijuana — and getting better results.
She hooked up with Dr. Rick Doblin, a researcher from Harvard and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, who had been working with patients using medical marijuana. Like good doctors, they were encouraged by what they were seeing but wanted to study in better detail whether or not marijuana was actually what was helping these patients. They sought proof in the form of clinical trials and work that would be written up in peer-reviewed journals.
What they found was the catch-22 that has comprised the federal government’s basic approach to cannabis research. Since it’s a Schedule One drug, the U.S. has unilaterally opposed almost all study of marijuana’s possible beneficial effects. All marijuana for studies has to be obtained through the government’s single growing facility in Oxford, Miss., and research must be approved by the FDA, the DEA, the U.S. Public Health Service and the National Institute for Drug Abuse.
Not surprisingly, the Sisley/Doblin study was rejected in 2010. Gupta mentioned that rejection in his last special. Miraculously, their study was approved four days after the episode aired. Some months after that, Sisley was fired from her position at the University of Arizona, which claimed it had nothing to do with her marijuana research. Colorado chipped in $9 million of cannabis tax money, and today, Sisley and Doblin are ready to begin their research.
They will even have government product. When Gupta visited the government’s Mississippi grow facility two years ago, it had produced 46 pounds of cannabis for study that year. Today it is overflowing with more than 1,400 pounds of researchready product for studies on medical marijuana, some of it bound for Sisley and Doblin as well as others studying epilepsy and cancer.
Surprisingly, both Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute for Drug Abuse and a vocal marijuana prohibitionist, and FDA director Douglas Throckmorton, both explain that the government is now serious about studying medical cannabis. President Barack Obama sits down long enough to tell Gupta that government must “follow the science.”
Gupta also checks back in with Harvard researcher Staci Gruber, who recently ran a study that examined the brains of patients who never used marijuana and was able to track the changes after cannabis use. The most fascinating thing Gruber found was that there was no impairment of the brain after using cannabis, and she actually found an improvement in the anterior singular cortex, the part of the brain that affects decision-making, empathy and emotions. This finding begs for more study.
Gupta also grills U.S. senators Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Rand Paul, who recently brought to the U.S. Senate a bill to end the federal prohibition on medical pot. Now in committees, it now has 13 other co-sponsors. The Compassionate Access, Research Expansion, and Respect States (CARERS) Act would move it from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2, which would allow for research without the threat of federal prosecution. “We are seeing a revolution of common sense and compassion,” says Booker.
With this third special report, Gupta has become the most important voice for medical marijuana reform in the United States.
“Journalists shouldn’t take a position. Objectivity is king,” Gupta says. “But, at some point, open questions do get answered. At some point, contentious issues do get resolved. At some point, common sense prevails.”
Let’s hope he’s right about all three of those things. Bring on the research.
You can hear Leland discuss his most recent column and Colorado cannabis issues each Thursday morning on KGNU. http://news.kgnu.org/weed
