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

I volunteer

[pklinken]

Human trials!

Too bad I don't have breasts ...

But...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever stopped breast cancer from metastasizing...on weed???

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.

CBD

[spazmolytic666]

The article notes that smoking cannabis will not deliver significant quantities of CBD.

Actually, you can get CBD from smoking cannabis, but most cannabis is optimized for the best high (most abount of THC).

CBD is one of the two lesser psychoactive chemicals (CBN is the other) that THC breaks down to in the late life cycle of the cannabis plant. Most growers harvest when the plant is "ripe", when it has the most THC. If you wait a week or two after the peek harvest time, the THC will break down and have a higher percentage of CBD and CBN and a lesser percentage of THC.

Re:This comes up every few years

[Scrameustache]

That weed is a magic cure for "X". A while back they where offering it for glaucoma then M.S. and now cancer. In the end it's still used mostly for getting high.
I don't care what you do, but until there is a viable way to get all the positive herbal healing from it, don't sound the "smoke weed to cure [blah]" horns. It was listed by Hypocrates as a cure-all.
It was prescribed by Queen Victoria's doctor.

It was then made illegal under false pretenses, kept illegal "pending review", and kept illegal under new false pretenses once the scientific review proved it shouldn't be illegal. No honest, free-thinking, educated person wants this to be illegal.

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:Bad article summary!

[caffeinemessiah]

No worries, you will still get emphysema which is almost as unpleasant and tourchers you for longer. By the way, this explains why Cannabis has a ratio of emphysema to lung cancer that is quite different from cigarettes which is something that has been suspected for a while (hard to get good data because people generally smoke both).

This is righteous bullshit. Allow me to elaborate:

• Cannabis studies have a history of being stooped in politics, alternating between pro and con. If you're talking about the ratio of emphysema to lung cancer, I'd be interested in how the population was sampled. Was it a random sampling of cannabis users? Was it people who showed up in a clinic with emphysema, and were then entered into the study? Consider the next point.
• Suppose there are two equal-sized populations of cigarette smokers and cannabis smokers. Each population has exactly the same emphysema/lung cancer ratio. We'll assume that cannabis smokers don't smoke cigarettes for now, although if they did it would only make the study more dubious. If everyone reported accurately if there were a cannabis smoker or just cigarette smoker, we'd find approximately equal ratios. On the other hand, if some healthy cannabis smokers, out of fear of law enforcement or privacy reasons, reported themselves as cigarette smokers, the emphysema/lung cancer ratio in the sampled cannabis 'group' would appear to be much higher. I'd also doubt non-cannabis smokers reporting themselves as cannabis smokers.
• The final point. You don't actually need to smoke cannabis, thereby removing all risk of emphysema and associated respiratory disorders. THC is fat-soluble, and so can be cooked or baked into anything that requires the use of fat or oil. Popular recipes include pasta and confectioneries, and I'm pretty sure none of those give you cancer. If you do choose to smoke cannabis, a vaporizer is often advocated in the Netherlands. I don't know what the health risks are, but they certainly seem to have a lot lower concentration of particulate matter (hence the name).