This isn't cannabis, you know? - Well...the government says all I can study is these soybeans.
The New York Times is reporting a story about the frustrations of researchers trying to get permission to study Medical Cannabis. A professor of plant sciences at the University of Massachusetts has been trying to get permission from federal authorities for nine years to grow a supply of the plant that he could study and provide to researchers for clinical trials. The DEA has refused, even after the agency’s own administrative law judge ruled in 2007 that the application should be approved.
Marijuana is the only major drug for which the federal government controls the only legal research supply, and the University of Mississippi grows the nation’s only federally approved marijuana. If they wish to investigate marijuana, researchers must apply to the National Institute on Drug Abuse to use the Mississippi marijuana and must get approvals from a special Public Health Service panel, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Food and Drug Administration. Researchers investigating LSD, Ecstasy and other illegal drugs can use any of a number of suppliers licensed by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
If a researcher wants to use a variety of cannabis that the University of Mississippi does not grow they are out of luck, even though patients know that there are many different strains that work differently on their symptoms. The Food and Drug Administration in 1985 approved Marinol, a prescription pill of marijuana’s active ingredient, T.H.C. Although a few small-scale studies done decades ago suggest that smoked marijuana may prove effective when Marinol does not, no conclusive research has confirmed this finding. Until there is a major policy shift, the critics of medical marijuana can always use the weapon that there is no good scientific evidence that legalizing cannabis use could provide any benefits over current therapies.
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[...] and thousands of pounds of marijuana that they could have gone after, why go after a medical lab? Maybe this is the reason. Posted in Cannabis and the Law, Medical Marijuana | Tagged Betty Aldworth, Bob Winnicki, [...]
It’s not clear in this article, but Marinol is a SYNTHETIC version of THC. They can’t patent a plant, so they want cannabis kept illegal, making you have to pay $723 for 30 doses! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol Scroll down to the section on “Dronabinol”
Good point. Marinol is indeed an artificially-synthesized version of THC, and has different effects. But what about patenting plants? I think the law says that if they “create” it in a lab, they can patent it nowadays. Farmers are losing their businesses and their livelihoods, getting sued out of existence by big agribusiness because their crops were pollinated by wind-blown genetically-engineered, patented pollen. You can see it on TV.