What Your Government Knows About Cannabis And Cancer -- And Isn't Telling You

Posted June 24, 2008

Senator Ted Kennedy is putting forward a brave face following his recent surgery but the sad reality remains. Even with successful surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy treatment, gliomas -- a highly aggressive form of brain cancer that strikes approximately 10,000 Americans annually -- tragically claim the lives of 75 percent of its victims within two years and virtually all within five years.

But what if there was an alternative treatment for gliomas that could selectively target the cancer while leaving healthy cells intact? And what if federal bureaucrats were aware of this treatment, but deliberately withheld this information from the public?

Sadly, the questions posed above are not entirely hypothetical. Let me explain.

In 2007, I reviewed over 150 published preclinical and clinical studies assessing the therapeutic potential of marijuana and several of its active compounds, known as cannabinoids. I summarized these numerous studies in a book, now in its third edition, entitled Emerging Clinical Applications for Cannabis and Cannabinoids: A Review of the Scientific Literature. (NORML Foundation, 2008) One chapter in this book, which summarized the findings of more than 30 separate trials and literature reviews, was dedicated to the use of cannabinoids as potential anti-cancer agents, particularly in the treatment of gliomas.

Not familiar with this scientific research? Your government is.

In fact, the first experiment documenting pot's potent anti-cancer effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at the behest federal bureaucrats. The results of that study, reported in an Aug. 18, 1974, Washington Post newspaper feature, were that marijuana's primary psychoactive component, THC, "slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent."

Despite these favorable preliminary findings (eventually published the following year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute), U.S. government officials refused to authorize any follow-up research until conducting a similar -- though secret -- preclinical trial in the mid-1990s. That study, conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program to the tune of $2 million, concluded that mice and rats administered high doses of THC over long periods had greater protection against malignant tumors than untreated controls.

However, rather than publicize their findings, the U.S. government shelved the results, which only became public after a draft copy of its findings were leaked to the medical journal AIDS Treatment News, which in turn forwarded the story to the national media.

In the years since the completion of the National Toxicology trial, the U.S. government has yet to authorize a single additional study examining the drug's potential anti-cancer properties. (Federal permission is necessary in order to conduct clinical research on marijuana because of its illegal status as a schedule I controlled substance.)

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.

Writing earlier this year in the scientific journal Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics, Italian researchers reiterated, "©annabinoids have displayed a great potency in reducing glioma tumor growth. (They) appear to be selective antitumoral agents as they kill glioma cells without affecting the viability of nontransformed counterparts." Not one mainstream media outlet reported their findings. Perhaps now they'll pay better attention.

What possible advancements in the treatment of cancer may have been achieved over the past 34 years had U.S. government officials chosen to advance -- rather than suppress -- clinical research into the anti-cancer effects of cannabis? It's a shame we have to speculate; it's even more tragic that the families of Senator Kennedy and thousands of others must suffer while we do.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-armenta...w_b_108712.html

 

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Marijuana can prevent cancer, not cause it


The Office of National Drug Control Policy has been spending millions of taxpayer dollars on advertisements and printed material declaring that marijuana causes cancer. The truth is just the opposite - marijuana can prevent cancer. Recent research has shown that the cannabinoids found in marijuana can not only halt the spread of cancer but can also kill cancer cells.

A study conducted in 2005 by Dr. Donald Tashkin at the UCLA School of Medicine demonstrated that people who smoke marijuana are at less risk of developing lung cancer than tobacco smokers.

The study of 2,200 people in Los Angeles found that even heavy marijuana smokers were no more likely to develop lung, head or neck cancer than non-users. In comparison, tobacco users' risk of cancer increases the more they smoke.
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Data in Dr. Tashkin's study suggest that people who smoke marijuana are less likely to develop lung cancer than people who do not smoke anything at all. Since marijuana smoke contains the same cancer-causing agents as tobacco and the only difference between the nonsmokers and the marijuana smokers was their use of cannabis, then it is not an unreasonable hypothesis that marijuana can prevent the development of cancer.

In 2003, Dr. Manual Guzman at the Complutense University in Madrid Spain published a research paper entitled Cannabinoids: Potential Anticancer Agents. Dr. Guzman's research on the brains of laboratory rats found that the cannabinoids in cannabis inhibit tumor growth and are selective antitumor compounds, as they can kill tumor cells without affecting noncancerous cells.

Investigators at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health reported in January 2008 that the administration of cannabinoids halts the spread of a wide range of cancers, including brain cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer, pancreatic cancer, and lymphoma. The report noted that cannabis offer significant advantages over standard chemotherapy treatments because the cannabinoids in cannabis are both non-toxic and can uniquely target malignant cells while ignoring healthy ones.

Is the evidence incontrovertible that cannabis can inhibit the spread of cancer, kill cancer cells and prevent the development of cancer?

No it is not - but doctors are telling millions of people to spend billions of dollars and ingest all kinds of supplements on way less evidence than there is to support the anti-cancer properties of cannabis.

When taking any kind of medicine or supplement, a person needs to decide if the claimed benefits of a product outweigh the risks. Many times the answer is no.

Cannabis is not one of these products, as there has never been a single death attributed to cannabis or any other significant debilitating consequences.

Further, the vast majority of cannabis users report numerous beneficial effects.

If cannabis can prevent the development of cancer, then the appropriate ingestion of cannabis is desirable in the same way that the appropriate ingestion of calcium supplements can prevent or at least delay the onset of osteoporosis. Since for the vast majority of people, cannabis has no negative side effects and only beneficial effects, it would seem that the regular appropriate ingestion of cannabis as a cancer preventative agent would be a prudent course of action.

 

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 Feb. 18, 2009

Researchers learned that cannabinoids have been associated with anti-carcinogenic effects, which are responsible in preventing or delaying the development of cancer.
Medical marijuana
Salem-News.com

(SALEM, Ore.) - A new study reveals that Medical Marijuana can be an effective treatment for cancer, that is the word announced by doctors in Germany who concluded that this clarification of the mechanism of cannabinoid action may help investigators to further explore their therapeutic benefit.

The medical article was originally published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute Advance Access and online on December 25th 2007.

Cancer cells that were treated with combinations of cannabinoids, antagonists of cannabinoid receptors, and small interfering ribo nucleic acid or 'siRNA' to tissue inhibitor of matrix metalloproteinases-1 (TIMP-1) were assessed for invasiveness, protein expression, and activation of signal transduction pathways.

The biggest contribution of this breakthrough discovery, is that the expression of TIMP-1 was shown to be stimulated by cannabinoid receptor activation and to mediate the anti-invasive effect of cannabinoids.

In other words, they learned that treatment with cannabinoids, one of the active ingredients of the medicinal side of marijuana, has been shown to reduce the invasiveness of cancer cells. Prior to now the cellular mechanisms underlying this effect were unclear and the relevance of the findings to the behavior of tumor cells in vivo remains to be determined.

It is already known that marijuana can stimulate the appetite of patients, but researchers have learned that cannabinoids, in addition to having palliative benefits in cancer therapy, have been associated with anti-carcinogenic effects, which are responsible in preventing or delaying the development of cancer.

"Although the anti-proliferative activities of cannabinoids have been intensively investigated, little is known about their effects on tumor invasion," the article stated.

Method


In this now completed round of research, Matrigel-coated and uncoated Boyden chambers were used to quantify invasiveness and migration, respectively, of human cervical cancer 'HeLa' cells that had been treated with cannabinoids.

The stable anandamide analog R(+)-methanandamide 'MA' and the phytocannabinoid 9-tetrahydrocannabinol 'THC' in the presence or absence of antagonists of the CB1 or CB2 cannabinoid receptors or of transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) or inhibitors of p38 or p42/44 mitogen–activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathways.

A method known as 'reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction' and immunoblotting were used to assess the influence of cannabinoids on the expression of matrix metalloproteinases and endogenous tissue inhibitors. The role of TIMP-1 in the anti-invasive action of cannabinoids was analyzed by transfecting HeLa, human cervical carcinoma, or human lung carcinoma cells cells with siRNA targeting TIMP-1.

They say all statistical tests were two-sided.

Results

Without modifying migration, MA and THC caused a time and concentration-dependent suppression of HeLa cell invasion through Matrigel that was accompanied by increased expression of TIMP-1.

At the lowest concentrations tested, MA and THC led to a decrease in cell invasion.

"The stimulation of TIMP-1 expression and suppression of cell invasion were reversed by pretreatment of cells with antagonists to CB1 or CB2 receptors, with inhibitors of MAPKs, or, in the case of MA, with an antagonist to TRPV1. Knockdown of cannabinoid-induced TIMP-1 expression by siRNA led to a reversal of the cannabinoid-elicited decrease in tumor cell invasiveness in HeLa, A549, and C33A cells."

The researchers concluded that increased expression of TIMP-1 mediates an anti-invasive effect of cannabinoids. That means that in our future, cannabinoids may offer a therapeutic option in the treatment of highly invasive cancers.

Special thanks to the JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and to Burkhard Hinz, PhD, Institute of Toxicology and Pharmacology, University of Rostock and the affiliation of authors: Institute of Toxicology and Pharmacology, University of Rostock in Rostock, Germany.

The original report published by Oxford University Press was titled, "Inhibition of Cancer Cell Invasion by Cannabinoids via Increased Expression of Tissue Inhibitor of Matrix Metalloproteinases-1Robert Ramer, Burkhard Hinz."

source: http://www.salem-news.com/articles/january...tment_11008.php
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Cannabis: Cancer Research's Most Surprising Story

Bruce Mirken, a longtime health journalist, serves as director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, in Washington DC www.mpp.org .
Once again the cancer diagnosis of a well-known national figure -- in this case Sen. Ted Kennedy -- has sparked a flurry of interest in efforts to treat and cure this frustrating, complex and deadly illness. One of the most promising areas of research involves a group of chemicals whose origins may seem shocking.
The chemicals, called cannabinoids, are the active components in marijuana.

Yes, marijuana, the very same drug that seems to generate endless controversy here and abroad, and that our government still claims causes cancer -- a claim that appears to stand reality on its head.


The first solid data showing the anticancer effects of cannabinoids was developed by U.S. government researchers and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute back in 1975. The scientists found that THC, the component that produces marijuana's "high," inhibits the growth of lung cancer cells in the test tube and in mice.

In a world that made sense, this discovery would have set off a frenzy of new research. After all, President Richard Nixon had declared "war on cancer" just a few years before, and vast sums of money were being spent investigating new approaches. But Nixon had also declared "war on drugs," with marijuana at the top of the demon-drugs list, so our government -- by far the world's largest source of medical research funding -- never pursued these remarkable findings. Research ground to a near-complete halt until the late 1990s.

Since then, THC and other marijuana components have been shown to block growth not only of lung tumors but a variety of other cancers, including leukemia, lymphoma and cancers of the breast and skin. These effects seem to occur through a variety of different cellular mechanisms.

As Spanish researcher Dr. Manuel Guzman, one of the world's leading experts in the field, wrote in a 2003 review in the journal Nature Reviews: Cancer, "Cannabinoids are selective antitumor compounds, as they can kill tumor cells without affecting their non-transformed counterparts. It is probable that cannabinoid receptors regulate cell-survival and cell-death pathways differently in tumor and nontumor cells."

That is exactly what you want in a cancer drug: Something that kills the malignant cells without harming healthy cells. It's because most chemotherapy drugs aren't selective enough that they cause such terrible nausea, vomiting, hair loss and other side effects.

One of the most fruitful areas of research has involved gliomas, the same type of brain tumor that Sen. Kennedy is battling. A search of PubMed, the U.S. government's medical database, using the search terms "cannabis" (the scientific name for marijuana), "cannabinoid," and "glioma" turned up 94 scientific journal articles, most of them published since 2000.

Most are lab or animal studies, demonstrating various mechanisms by which these marijuana chemicals kill glioma cells or stop glioma tumor growth. Amazingly, despite all this evidence, there has been only one, tiny, human study thus far, conducted by Dr. Guzman.

Guzman and colleagues injected THC directly into brain tumors in a handful of patients with recurring, inoperable gliomas -- patients considered terminal. It was primarily a safety study, and the THC injections proved completely safe.

Although the researchers concluded that the injection method they used may not have adequately distributed the medicine to all parts of these large tumors, two patients seemed to show definite (albeit temporary) improvement due to the treatment. The researchers urge that additional trials testing THC and other cannabinoids in this and other types of tumors be undertaken.

This is an exciting area of research, but one that has been needlessly -- and perhaps lethally -- slowed down by the U.S. government's slavish devotion to anti-marijuana dogma. That most of the work testing these marijuana derivatives as anticancer drugs is occurring outside the United States is a sad commentary indeed.

By Bruce Mirken

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NEW Active Ingredient in Marijuana Kills Brain Cancer
April 2, 2009
HealthDay News -- New research out of Spain suggests that THC -- the active ingredient in marijuana -- appears to prompt the death of brain cancer cells.

The finding is based on work with mice designed to carry human cancer tumors, as well as from an analysis of THC's impact on tumor cells extracted from two patients coping with a highly aggressive form of brain cancer.

Explaining that the introduction of THC into the brain triggers a cellular self-digestion process known as "autophagy," study co-author Guillermo Velasco said his team has isolated the specific pathway by which this process unfolds, and noted that it appears "to kill cancer cells, while it does not affect normal cells."

Velasco is with the department of biochemistry and molecular biology in the School of Biology at Complutense University in Madrid. The findings were published in the April issue of The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The Spanish researchers focused on two patients suffering from "recurrent glioblastoma multiforme," a fast-moving form of brain cancer. Both patients had been enrolled in a clinical trial designed to test THC's potential as a cancer therapy.

Using electron microscopes to analyze brain tissue taken both before and after a 26- to 30-day THC treatment regimen, the researchers found that THC eliminated cancer cells while it left healthy cells intact.

The team also was able, in what it described as a "novel" discovery, to track the signaling route by which this process was activated.

These findings were replicated in work with mice, which had been "engineered" to carry three different types of human cancer tumor grafts.

"These results may help to design new cancer therapies based on the use of medicines containing the active principle of marijuana and/or in the activation of autophagy," Velasco said.

Outside experts suggested that more research is needed before advocating marijuana as a medicinal intervention for brain cancer.

Dr. John S. Yu, co-director of the Comprehensive Brain Tumor Program in the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said the findings were "not surprising."

"There have been previous reports to this effect as well," he said. "So this is yet another indication that THC has an anti-cancer effect, which means it's certainly worth further study. But it does not suggest that one should jump at marijuana for a potential cure for cancer, and one should not urge anyone to start smoking pot right away as a means of curing their own cancer."

But that's exactly what many brain cancer patients have been doing, said Dr. Paul Graham Fisher, the Beirne Family director of Neuro-Oncology at Stanford University.

"In fact, 40 percent of brain tumor patients in the U.S. are already using alternative treatments, ranging from herbals to vitamins to marijuana," he said.

"But that actually points out a cautionary tale here, which is that many brain cancer patients are already rolling a joint to treat themselves, but we're not really seeing brain tumors suddenly going away as a result, which we clearly would've noticed if it had that effect. So we need to be open-minded. But this suggests that the promise of THC might be a little over-hoped, and certainly requires further investigation before telling people to go out and roll a joint."

More information:

For additional details on the risks and benefits of marijuana use as it relates to cancer, visit the American Cancer Society.

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New Marijuana Ingredient May Reduce Tumors: Study
April 2, 2009
London -- The active ingredient in marijuana appears to reduce tumor growth, according to a Spanish study published on Wednesday. The researchers showed giving THC to mice with cancer decreased tumor growth and killed cells off in a process called autophagy.

"Our findings support that safe, therapeutically efficacious doses of THC may be reached in cancer patients," Guillermo Velasco of Complutense University in Madrid and colleagues reported in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The findings add to mixed evidence about the effects of marijuana on human health. Studies have suggested the drug can raise a person's risk of heart attack or stroke and cause cancer.

Other research has shown benefits, such as staving off Alzheimer's, and many doctors view THC as a valuable way to treat weight loss associated with AIDS, and nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy in cancer patients.

Velasco and his team's study included an analysis of two tumors from two people with a highly aggressive brain cancer which showed signs of autophagy after receiving THC.

The researchers said the findings could pave the way for cannabinoid-based drugs to treat cancer, although that approach has so proved unsuccessful when it comes to obesity.

Sanofi-Aventis SA in November terminated further development of its cannabinoid drug Acomplia, and Pfizer Inc, Merck & Co Inc and Belgium's Solvay have also scrapped similar products recently over health fears.

The drugs, which work by blocking the same receptors in the brain that make people hungry after smoking marijuana, have also been linked to psychiatric side effects, such as depression and suicidal thoughts.