Study Says Cannabis Less Harmful Than Tobacco, Alcohol

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Study Says Cannabis Less Harmful Than Tobacco, Alcohol

Postby bigearth » Sun Oct 05, 2008 9:38 am

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Study Says Cannabis Less Harmful Than Tobacco, Alcohol
Posted Oct 2, 2008 by [Citizen Journalist] Bob Ewing in Health | 9 comments | 260 views

The report was produced by the Beckley Foundation, a charity, which numbers senior experts and other academics among its advisers. The report said banning cannabis has no impact on supply and turns users into criminals.

"Although cannabis can have a negative impact on health, including mental health, in terms of relative harms it is considerably less harmful than alcohol or tobacco," says the report by the Foundation's Global Cannabis Commission.

The British government is pressing for cannabis to be re-classified in law as a Class B drug compared with its current, less serious, Class C classification.

Authorities have become concerned because of the growing prevalence of the potent "skunk" form of the drug. Around 80 per cent of cannabis seizures are of this strain, said to be linked to mental health problems, official figures show.

The Beckley Foundation is a charitable trust and claimed only two deaths worldwide have been attributed to cannabis, while alcohol and tobacco used together kill an estimated 150,000 people in Britain alone.

"Many of the harms associated with cannabis use are the result of prohibition itself, particularly the social harms arising from arrest and imprisonment," it said.

"It is only through a regulated market that we can better protect young people from the ever more potent forms of dope," it added.

The decision to reclassify cannabis upwards into the more punitive Class B category -- which includes amphetamines represents a U-turn for the Labour government.

Cannabis was downgraded from Class B when Tony Blair was prime minister, but in June 2007, Gordon Brown announced a review of its status.


http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/260633
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marijuana update

Postby harry ashburn » Sun Nov 25, 2012 1:30 pm

The Healing Power of Marijuana Has Barely Been Tapped




Medical marijuana is now legal in 18 states, but it's clear we've discovered a fraction of its potential for health.


November 23, 2012 |










Photo Credit: ShutterStock.com






































There are now legal medical cannabis programs in 18 states plus Washington, DC, with pot fully legal for adults in two other states. Ironically, however, the actual healing power of the plant has barely been tapped. Smoking marijuana with THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), or better, vaporizing it (using a device to bake the plant material and inhale the active ingredients), has an indisputably palliative effect and can be medically useful for pain relief, calming and appetite stimulation. It already has confirmed benefits against glaucoma, epilepsy and other specific diseases and disorders. It also gets people high. THC triggers cannabinoid receptors in the brain and this produces the sensation of being stoned. These receptors are found in the parts of the brain linked to pleasure, memory, concentration, and time perception.

But, based mostly on research overseas there is an increasing consensus that the medicinal benefits of psychoactive THC pale in comparison to the non-psychoactive cannabidiol (CBD) from the leaves of the same plant--raw and unheated. Depending on the strain, some plants are high in CBD but also contain a lesser amount of THC which is said to enhance the healing potentiality. CBD does not make people feel “stoned” and actually counters some of the effects of THC (for example, suppressing the appetite vs. stimulating it). CBD is beginning to be recognized by researchers at mainstream medical institutions around the world as a potentially very powerful weapon against cancer.



Researchers Sean D. McAllister and Pierre Desprez, who conducted studies of CBD's effect on cancer cells for California Pacific Medical Center, suggest that these non-psychoactive compounds from the cannabis plant might, in short order, render chemotherapy and radiation distant second and third options for cancer patients. Based on a more recent study, McAllister and Desprez feel that CBD's "could stop breast cancer from spreading."



Dr. Donald Abrams, a cancer specialist and professor of integrative medicine at UCSF, conducted early trials involving THC medical cannabis, and now he is excited about the powerful impacts of CBD on cancer cells. The National Cancer Institute was busy researching this in the 1970s, Abrams explains, but restrictions on the use of cannabis for research in the United States resulted in most of the research on this subject disappearing in the U.S., and being picked up in other countries, such as Israel, Spain and Italy. He says existing studies point to a remarkable ability of CBD to arrest cancer cell division, cell migration, metastasis, and invasiveness.



Other studies point to CBD as having great promise as a defense against Alzheimer’s disease. In a 2006 study published in Molecular Pharmaceutics , a team of University of Connecticut researchers reported that cannabis “could be considerably better at suppressing the abnormal clumping of malformed proteins that is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease than any currently approved prescription.” The research team predicted that cannabinoid-based medications "will be the new breakout medicine treatments of the near future.”

Medical cannabis has a long history of use, starting in India, and then in China and the Middle East some 6,000 years ago. It came to the West in the 1800s, where it was listed in the U.S. Pharmacopeia until the 1930s. Used for over 100 ailments, cannabis was a favorite of our grandparents for cough remedies, analgesics, and tonics and was available over the counter at every local drugstore as well as companies such as Sears, Roebuck and Co. Banned in 1937 via the Marijuana Tax Act as part of a politically and racially driven prohibition craze, it was gradually removed from the pharmacopeia and research was discouraged and later prohibited via drug scheduling. The FBI linked the herb with insanity and claimed a direct correlation between cannabis and violence, and even death, especially when used by people of color.

http://www.alternet.org/drugs/healing-p ... een-tapped
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Re: Study Says Cannabis Less Harmful Than Tobacco, Alcohol

Postby DrEvil » Sun Nov 25, 2012 4:06 pm

Yay! I agree, and I will write more after smoking this... wait.. What was the OP about again?
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Re: Study Says Cannabis Less Harmful Than Tobacco, Alcohol

Postby harry ashburn » Sun Nov 25, 2012 5:52 pm

i forget..
A skeleton walks into a bar. Orders a beer, and a mop. -anon
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