Cannabis Compound Said To "Halt Cancer"

h.ross.perot informs us of research out of the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute suggesting that a compound found in cannabis may stop breast cancer from metastasizing. Cannabidiol, or CBD, could develop into a non-toxic alternative to chemotherapy some years down the road, if animal and human trials bear out its effectiveness. The article notes that smoking cannabis will not deliver significant quantities of CBD.

Comments

Less talk, more action.

[sherriw]

My mom had breast cancer several years ago. The treatments are just horrible, but I'm thankful she's still with us. It seems however that once a year we hear about some potential breakthrough or another. Well, with the truckloads of donations going to 'breast cancer research', I'm getting a little sick of hearing about 'potential' breakthroughs. I want something we can start using right now. It's hard to be patient when people you care about are sick or dying. I hope some of these possibilities pan out soon.

Estimating Risk

[PIPBoy3000]

Basically everyone I've known who has died, has died of cancer. It drives me crazy that we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to avenge the deaths of 3,000 people, while under four billion is spent on fighting cancer, which kills half a million people each year. It reminds me again how terrible people are at estimating risk.

References:
NCI budget
Cost of Iraq war
cancer deaths

Re:I volunteer

[Plutonite]

I thik there was an episode of "Oz" where a mobster got breast cancer, and tried to keep it secret. That's friggin hilarious. Even more hilarious is the fact that you're using the mobster who got breast cancer in Oz as some sort of reference.

I *heart* slashdot.

It'll never be legal (in the States)

[kcdoodle]

I used to think that it would be legal by the time I was thirty.

I high school (circa 1977), at least 70% of the kids smoked regularly or occasionally.
25% didn't care if anyone smoked it and only 5% were against it. (These numbers are all personal observation so take with a grain of salt.) The point is -- I was a geek, I occasionally did imbibe, I didn't care if anyone else smoked all day long.

Fast forward a couple decades. Those same pot-heads are now republicans and swear that they never, ever smoked pot. In fact they believe it is immoral to do so. And anyone who does should be thrown in jail. Amazing how raising kids changes your perspective.

I believe that alcohol is far worse than pot to your body and to society as a whole. BTW, I quit smoking pot years ago, but that doesn't mean you should.

flat out wrong

[circletimessquare]

with all the waste a government system obviously means, it is still far better than an equally wasteful system, that only cares about profit, that doesn't insure everyone

i am not stumping for universal healthcare as some sort of nirvana, i am saying it is the less worse of two evils

all of the negatives you can throw at me about universl ahealthcare, i agree with you 100%

and it's still better than what we have now

Thank the USA's 'war on drugs'!

[FatSean]

Making pot use a felony offense drives alot of people in many ways. If you want more time spent on "real" diseases, get the gov't to lay off pot. Otherwise, STFU and GBTW.

Re:This comes up every few years

[misanthrope101]

I'm just tired of it being presented as a snake oil cure for everything when it isn't.

I'm tired of people claiming that medical marijuana proponents claim that marijuana cures everything, when in fact they don't. You're making a sensible, supportable position--that marijuana can help with a wide variety of conditions--and turning it into a caricature, then objecting to the caricature you've made as if it's the position people actually hold.

Cue the tin foil hats about how this is a conspiracy from the government/Big Pharms.

If people are working in concert to do something they shouldn't be doing, that meets the textbook definition of a conspiracy. Government used fraudulent data and scare tactics to ban marijuana, and "Big Pharma" supports them in this--that isn't "tin foil hat" material. You're caricaturing a reasonable position, one backed up by well-documented facts, and then spewing your contemptuous bile at your own caricature, once again pretending that it's the position people actually take.

Re:I volunteer

[Cajun Hell]

So why is it illegal?

People will quote the special interests against it, but there's a bigger reason that dominates them all, and makes racism and the chemical company lobby fade into the background. That reason is: attitude about government.

Americans still overwhelmingly think the purpose of government is to implement whatever good ideas come up, and solve our problems. That's why this particular article is political: people are talking about the presence of useful compounds inside the plant. People talk about how harmful it is, how harmful it isn't, etc, as though the utility of the plant, or its side-effects, actually matter.

As long as you engage in discussion of the merits (or lack of merits) of the plant, in the context of whether or not it should be illegal, you lose. There will always be arguments against anything, whether its heroin or hydrogen hydroxide, that the material is harmful to the user. There's nothing on this earth that is provably safe.

The debate should always be about who owns people, not the decisions that the owner makes. Is it the government's decision on what people should ingest, or the people's decision? People, stop citing the plant's advantages, and start talking about the real political issues. Don't ask "why is this illegal?" Ask, "How is does local gardening fall under the intent of the 'interstate commerce' clause?" Ask, "Why do voters in Texas have a say in Vermont citizens' health?"

Re:Bad article summary!

[caffeinemessiah]

You just fired off a bunch of things that COULD be wrong with the studies. That's like me saying that your parents could have been the ones who assasinated JFK. Its not really based in fact

In science, if something *plausible* COULD be wrong with a study, it deserves to be analyzed before the study is assumed to be rigorous. This also applies to studies on the other side, i.e. the ones which claim marijuana cures death and stops global warming. In your analogy, you can't possibly give me any plausible evidence that my parents killed JFK. I pointed out a rather common methodological flaw (check the literature) with using self-reporting in smoked marijuana studies.

Look, I agree that people CAN cook cannabis and they SHOULD use a vaporizer if they want to smoke it. However plenty of people do smoke it in bowls. In fact I'd bet money that In the United States, most people smoke it without using a vaporizer. Even more people smoke it then cook it.

Would you say there's an honest culture of information about cannabis in the United States? I wouldn't. I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but I'd be all for a campaign to educate people on the safe use of marijuana. In the Netherlands, most coffee shops stock a vaporizer and a lot of Dutch people I've talked to would prefer to use a vaporizer. Ultimately, people will probably still smoke cannabis because of the social bonding aspect, but they should be educated about the alternatives. After that, it's a choice you make for yourself.

In case you were NOT being sarcastic, here are some websites that advocate safe marijuana use:
safer choice, regulate, marijuana uses (not really an organization, but an emeritus harvard professor who's studying the positive uses of marijuana)

Bad study

[bpkiwi]

Have you read that study? They took 17 people with collapsed lungs or emphysema, all of whom smoked on average six joints a day over a period of more than eight years and also consumed cigarettes on a daily basis for nearly 12 years. They then said that tests were unable to show which substances had caused the lung damage.