My Name is Paul H Cosentino. I started this Blog in 2011 because of what I believe to be wrongdoings in town government. This Blog is to keep the citizens of Templeton informed. It is also for the citizens of Templeton to post their comments and concerns.
Thursday, December 28, 2017
Why we need pot research
Why we need pot research
By Daniele Piomelli and Bob Solomon
Los Angeles Times (TNS)
An epidemic of opioid abuse is ravaging the United States and, as we
look for ways to respond to it, some see cannabis as part of the
solution, while others see it as part of the problem. This is just one
area in which unbiased scientific research is necessary, but outdated
federal legislation, having concluded almost 50 years ago that there is
no medical value to cannabis, is blocking all meaningful efforts to
understand the real benefits and risks of the plant.
There are
critical open questions about cannabis, and without research conducted
under rigorous scientific standards, we will not find answers. If you
think these questions don’t really matter in daily life, let’s look at
three scenarios.
Your friend is one of the 1,125,000 people in
California who use medical cannabis. Before going to bed, he drinks a
cannabis tea because it helps him go to sleep. The morning after, he
feels well rested and doesn’t experience any aftereffects. But one day,
as he is driving to work, the police stop him for a random blood THC
test (this type of test is already in use in Colorado and may be adopted
in California). Your friend turns out to be THC positive and loses his
driver’s license, even though there is no correlation between blood THC
levels and intoxication. A person can have detectable blood THC levels
and be perfectly functional, or have undetectable levels and be
impaired. We need research to develop objective, unbiased ways of
measuring cannabis intoxication, or innocent people will end up paying
for a crime they did not commit.
Or
let’s say your grandfather is convinced that cannabis is the only thing
that helps him with his arthritis pain. He is not alone in believing
this — cannabis use in persons over 50 has tripled in the last 10 years,
a phenomenon primarily driven by self-medication for pain and sleep
problems. You are happy for Grandpa, but then you notice that he has
become more forgetful than he used to be. Is this a normal consequence
of age, or a side effect of the drug? Will forgetfulness turn into
memory impairment? We can’t answer this question now, because the
effects of cannabis have never been studied in elderly people. Research
shows that that in old mice, low doses of cannabis may actually improve
memory — but what about in humans?
One last example, which takes us back to the opioid crisis.
States
in which cannabis is legal have 25 percent fewer deaths for opioid
overdose than states in which medical use of the drug is not allowed.
These are credible data, but do not necessarily mean that cannabis is a
solution to the opioid crisis. Cannabis reduces many forms of chronic
pain in people, but we do not know if it can replace opioids. Nor do we
know if the use of cannabis attenuates or worsens the risk of developing
an opioid addiction.
Finding the answers to all of the above questions is more than feasible.
Yet
the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, or CSA, stands in the way. First,
researchers seeking to study cannabis and its chemical constituents
(even the innocuous cannabidiol) may only use plant material from a
single federal contractor, the University of Mississippi. That cannabis
is very different from the cannabis generally available to the public in
California and elsewhere, which creates a problem of “external
validity”: What researchers are allowed to study in the lab or the
clinic does not tell them much about what happens in the real world.
In addition, the Food and Drug
Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration must approve any
use of the University of Mississippi’s cannabis, a lengthy process that
requires researchers to jump through unnecessary hoops.
This
is not news. We have known for years that the CSA is the single
greatest impediment to increasing our knowledge of cannabis. It matters
now because, come January, Proposition 64 (the Adult Use of Marijuana
Act approved by California voters in November 2016) will take effect in
full and cannabis will be legally available for recreational use in the
most populous state in the union.
California’s
Bureau of Cannabis Control is working hard to put sensible guidelines
in place and regulate its use, but even the most thoughtful regulation
cannot replace research. If science does not fill the knowledge void,
then interest-driven pseudo-science will. Ideologists and special
interests are already pushing hard in that direction.
Proposition
64 calls for and funds research on cannabis. Despite out-of-date
federal legislation, it is essential that we implement this key
component of the proposition and support the rigorous scientific work
needed by medical providers, consumers, law enforcement and
entrepreneurs alike.
Daniele Piomelli and Bob Solomon are
directors of the UCI Center for the Study of Cannabis. They wrote this
for the Los Angeles Times.
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