 |  | |  Marijuana leaf | | | ©2006 HSW, inc. | Marijuana is considered by most governments (notably America's) to be a drug without use, harming people and supporting both criminal gangs and corrupt governments.
However, marijuana is a drug of immense medical benefit, too. Cannabis can treat anything from pain to cancer and has got an extremely large pharmacopoeia.
Marijuana contains at least 70 chemicals, called cannabinoids, as THC and its cousins are known. Many of them resemble vital molecules of the human body.
These chemicals activate receptor molecules in the human body, especially the cannabinoid receptors on the surfaces of some nerve cells in the brain and stimulate changes in biological activity.
It is often still unknown which molecules are having which clinical effects, due to a lack of medical research.
But the American government is unwilling to change this. On April 20th America's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement, saying that smoked cannabis has no accepted medical use in treatment in the USA.
This statement is dubious in many ways. First, it ignores a report made in 1999 by the Institute of Medicine, which came to a completely different conclusion.
The committee found some scientific information supporting the medical use of marijuana for certain patients for brief periods. The drug gives patients, suffering from multiple sclerosis, AIDS and cancer special medical benefits, over and above the medication, they are already receiving.
This works, too when cannabis is being smoked. Though by doing that the patient inhales many of the harmful things found in tobacco smoke, like for example carcinogenic tar. However, the medical benefits of smoking the weed, while suffering from multiple sclerosis, cancer or AIDS, clearly exceed the risks of smoking.
A second reason, why the FDA's report is curious, is that it lacks common sense. As a matter of fact cannabis has been used for medical purposes for thousands of years and the American government even supplied it for some time, before the scheme was shut down in the early 90s.
Today cannabis is used in many parts of the world, even despite it's illegality, in order to relieve anxiety and pain, to prevent seizures of muscular spasms and to aid sleep.
In fact the FDA actually licensed a drug, called Marinol, a synthetic version of one of marijuana's active components, THC. But this drug isn't nearly as effective, nor cheap as real cannabis.
In order to create better marijuana-related drugs researchers need to be able to breed their own plants. In the USA, this is impossible. As a result other countries are gaining the medical knowledge.
In 1997 a British company, GW Pharmaceuticals has been requested by the British government, to come up with a program to develop cannabis in a pharmaceutical product. In the meantime the company has produced more than 300 varieties of cannabis, and obtained the right to plant between 30 and 40 of them.
GW has already launched it's first drug on the Canadian market, called Sativex.
Sativex consists of an extract of marijuana and is sprayed under the tongue.
It is designed for the relief of neuropathic pain in multiple sclerosis. Sativex is also available to a more limited degree in Spain and Britain. Moreover it is in clinical trials for other uses, such as relieving the pain of rheumatoid arthritis.
At the start of this year even the FDA has accepted it as candidate for clinical trials. But there is still a log way to go, until it will be sold in America.
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