You're listening to SciencePversers, the show where we pick fact against FAD, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and on today's show, Medical Marijuana. It's been called a miracle drug, but what illnesses can pot really trade? Researchers have been celebrating a breakthrough. It's been breaking in poetry.
And covering the seems to seem brightest across the world. The idea of medical marijuana is that this plant should be used as a pharmaceutical drug. Some claim it can stop pain, reduce epileptic seizures, and even cure cancer. So today, we're taking a trip deep into the scientific literature to find out what cannabis, scientifically, has been demonstrated to help with.
And we'll also find out where the claims are going to pot. But first, we're going to blaze through marijuana's curious history with the law, because as you'll soon see, the fact that the drug is illegal in most corners of the globe doesn't actually tell us much about its ability to treat disease. So here we go. Cannabis was brought into Western medicine from the Indian subcontinent by an Irish surgeon whose name was William Brooke O'Shaughnessy.
This was back in 1839. He thought cannabis was a great painkiller and muscle relaxant. And once cannabis hit Britain, it was treated by some as a golden nugget. The 1800s were really cannabis's medical heyday.
It was even said to be the treatment of choice for Queen Victoria's menstrual cramps. But by the 1930s, the whiff of cannabis was getting into the noses of legislators across the pond. Over in the United States, Harry Anselinga, the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, said, quote, marijuana is the most violent causing drug in the history of mankind. End quote.
Also not sure about his use of violence causing. I just don't think the gram is very good. The Treasury Department intends to pursue a relentless warfare against the despicable, dope-edling bosser who prays on the weakness of his government. That's Harry Anselinga himself and it was taken from the 1999 documentary Grass, the History of Marijuana.
And it was part of this tirade against pot. In 1937, a tax was introduced, making marijuana prohibitively expensive. It was all really smoky mirrors to make people stop using the plant, including doctors. And that was the effective downturn of cannabis as a medical product.
This is Laurie Mather, an Emeritus Professor of Anastasia at the University of Signy. He says that while politicians in the US were keen to block the use of marijuana. The American Medical Association opposed the moves. They didn't think there was enough evidence that the drug was harmful and wanted to keep studying it to find out its potential medicinal uses.
At the time, Dr Robert Walden, who was from the University of Mississippi, published a review pleading with legislators not to prohibit the medical and scientific use of marijuana. But more restrictions were placed on the plant anyway. The nail in the coffin from marijuana came in the 1960s. The so-called hippie movement was associated with cannabis.
And these were the anti-war movement at the time during Vietnam War years. And I remember those days very well. You remember them? I remember them well.
I remember them well. And at the time, President Nixon, who was certainly didn't want his war effort in Vietnam upset, he was the instigator of the so-called war on drugs. And that effectively was the next wave of putting cannabis out of reach. Cannabis was soon class as a Schedule 1 drug, along with heroin and LSD.
But, fast forward to today. You can smell change in the air. It's the scent of legal marijuana for recreation. And there are all these claims that marijuana cures more than just Queen Victoria's craps.
So Tara was having anywhere from 65 to 200 seizures every day. With the health of medicinal cannabis, the three-year-old who once had 1400 epileptic seizures a day now has a bit alive. It would start taking one mill of cannabis oil daily. We got the result saying that the pit scan was clear.
No treatments. No treatments. But that's all anecdotal, personal stories. Because then, there's science.
First up, we're going to look at what chemicals in marijuana can affect the human body. And we'll roll that up to help explain what diseases a little whack to baggy might be able to treat. And I can say whack to baggy. Here's Professor Laurie Mathur again.
Well, the plate itself is really a fruit salad. And that's the important thing. Like there are hundreds of substances in the plate. So you might have heard of Tetra, Tetra, Hydro, and Chavonon.
THC. This is stuff people used to get stoned, essentially. And another famous component of cannabis is cannibidiol. CBD.
But when you start weeding through the plant very closely, you find that there aren't just two important chemicals here. So far, they were simply coming out 70 or 80 substances related to THC being progressively discovered in the cannabis plant. We have THC and CBD and CBN and THCV and all sorts of things like this now, which are recognised as the principal active ingredients. By active ingredients, Laurie means that they can interact with cells in the human body and so have an effect on how we function.
Some of these chemicals are called cannibinoids. They're active, they all vary. Some stimulate appetite, some promote sleep and things of that kind. In fact, we're still unraveling how many of these ingredients affect the human body.
Scientists only worked out this year why pot gives us the munchies. marijuana promotes hunger because it flips the function of neurons in the brain that normally would promote sative. This is Professor Thomas Horvath from Yale University, and he worked out the cannibinoid called Delta 9 THC, acts on particular neurons in the brain. Now this appetite, stimulation or munching making effect can be very important as a therapy.
For example, during cancer, kekexia, patients lose appetite, they're not interested in food. So cannabis has been demonstrated to help with appetite stimulation. Get some sour cream and onion chips with some dip. Next up, pain killing.
Can any of the chemicals inside marijuana reduce pain? There's very clear evidence for pain relief in a variety of conditions. This is David Pennington, an Emeritus Professor at Melbourne University. And that's particularly important in patients with inoperable cancer along suffering pain, which is in time, poorly relieved by morphine, which is the usual condition.
And interestingly, he says there's not just one active ingredient here. There's a joint effort going on where two chemicals are working in cahoots to have their pain killing effect. So, while THC on its own is not a smoking pain killer. We've taken together with cannibidiol, CBD, those two interact within the body.
Improving THC's ability to reduce pain. There's also evidence that marijuana can reduce muscle spasms in patients with multiple sclerosis and control nausea and vomiting, which is really important. Example in cancer chemotherapy. So marijuana can ease some of the symptoms that come with cancer treatments.
But can marijuana cure cancers? We got the result saying that the PET scan was clear. No treatments. No treatments.
That's from a report that aired on Radio National. But despite these anecdotes, Professor Herbert Cleaver, Director of the Division on Substance Abuse at New York State Psychiatric Institute, is pretty blunt about the scientific literature. I have seen no evidence that marijuana can cure cancer. None.
But Laurie Mather at Sydney University reckons? There's something in it. How is it in it? Well, it's very difficult to tell from anecdotal studies because really what's not known is what the condition was exactly like before it started.
What the particular medication being used was, how it was treated, etc. So it's hard to sort of be able to put that to scientific testing. So instead, scientists have started doing early research in laboratory using mouse models and human tumor cells. There's evidence to show that various of the cannabinoid substances can really inhibit tumor growth in certain laboratory models.
So in these experiments, sometimes scientists will take a dish with tumor cells and douse it with THC or CBD or another chemical in marijuana. And they see that the tumor cells get smaller. In other cases, they can inject THC or CBD into cancer that's found in a mouse. And sometimes that cancer will shrink.
Now, the idea is that these chemicals are somehow interacting with the cancer to ultimately suppress its growth. Perhaps they're changing the environment of the cancer or perhaps they're getting inside that cancer cell. Those are all possibilities. This is David Pennington again?
It may be that some forms of cancer respond and others don't. And that's something that really needs to be rigorously tested. Because in some of those lab studies, marijuana products will come to increase the size of some cancers, which just tells you how early this research is and how much it might depend on the lab model they're using, the species of mouse, the type of tumor. Plus, some of the most advanced studies done in this area have been done on mice, not humans.
And then you can have a sex in mice that we don't have in humans unless they're Australians. I mean... I didn't get it. Why would Australia mice react differently?
Is that an Australian joke? I'm sorry. I can't make catrices. That's part of what keeps me sober and sane.
Ultimately, a report published earlier this year concluded that despite some quotes impressive and quote findings in Petri dishes and non-human animal studies, quote, there is still no solid basis for ongoing claims by the proponents of highly concentrated cannabis extracts or oils that these preparations can cure cancer. End quote. Conclusion. We don't have the scientific evidence that cannabis cures cancer.
There have been media reports of marijuana helping kids with certain types of epilepsy such as drive-A syndrome. So the very first day that Tara took this? This, for example, is from SBS's The Feige. She went down to about 10 seizures, around 65 plus.
But as the days went on, the seizures got less and less. But the scientific evidence is harder to find. How effective it is is still not clear. In theory, how could marijuana reduce seizures?
Well, it's kind of unclear at this point, but one idea is that a couple, or perhaps many of the active ingredients in marijuana, act on the processes that cause seizures and somehow dampen their activity. And it appears that CBD, rather than THC, might be the active agent here. But we don't really know. So what do we find when we look at studies in people?
Well, unfortunately, there aren't a lot of them. So one small study with 19 kids who had either a drive-A syndrome, do saw other rare forms of epilepsy, found that a particular kind of marijuana, which had a high CBD content, could reduce seizures in 16 of the children. But in 2014, a review published in the New England Journal of Medicine ultimately concluded that while these sorts of reports were, quote, promising, end quote, there wasn't enough data to know if marijuana could help most kids with these forms of epilepsy. The jury is still out.
This is her bit clear. Clearly some of the youngsters are helped. Others are not helped. Now, before we reach our final stop on Train 420, it's time to talk about side effects.
Because just like all drugs, there are downsides to marijuana. It can be addictive for some people, although it's less addictive than morphine. There are chemicals in the smoke of marijuana that are linked to lung diseases. Cannabis, particularly with a high THC content, has been linked to schizophrenia and psychosis.
And for some, cannabis can be disturbing. Here's Professor David Pennington again. Of course, his anxiety and tension and even hallucination. But that's uncommon with modest dosage.
It's mostly dose related. So when it comes to medical marijuana, does it stack up? Thank you so much for your excited day. Marijuana has been shown to help with nausea, pain relief and to stimulate appetite.
But when it comes to cancer and epilepsy, the research is half baked. On the other hand, cannabis has a bunch of chemicals in it that we know trigger effects in the human body. We just don't know exactly how they work. And part of the reason for this is because...
Cannabis was really put out of research, rich to most people, by political judgments. Long before we knew much about science. And this is crazy. Even today, Laurie Mathis says...
It's relatively easy to get funds to demonstrate the evils and of cannabis abuse, the problems with cannabis law enforcement and things of that kind. But it's very, very difficult indeed to get funds to demonstrate the medical uses of cannabis. So when it comes to science versus medical marijuana, that's science. I'm going to say one, but you've got a long way to understand this plant.
So keep up that good work. And medical marijuana, that's one too. It's no panacea, but it can definitely help some people. And that's it for science versus if you like.
Tell us how many cannabis puns we managed to squeeze into this 15 minute podcast. You can do that using the hashtag, science versus, yes, hashtag. Right, versus. Got it?
Hash. Next week. Pornography. Is it really destroying our brains and our sex lives?
It looks like he's taking his blood to explode, tricking back in the head. It's insane. Tossing tea? No, I'm good.
Thanks to Caitlin Sorey, my quick producer and Joel Wern over recording our interview with Herbert Cleber. If you like what you hear, you should subscribe to us. We are a podcast. You should subscribe.
You can do that on iTunes, SoundCloud or your favorite podcast app. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Talk to you next time.