Cannabis vs. Alzheimer's

[Hogeye]

Here's an article the Drugsense.org people sent me about recent promising research indicating that cannabis extracts may prevent or treat Alzheimer's disease.


CORPORATE DRUGS USELESS AGAINST ALZHEIMER'S

Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, and AstraZeneca have been making $2
billion a year selling useless pills to Alzheimer's patients
(including almost a million Medicare "beneficiaries"). This is the
bottom line of a study published this week in the New England Journal
of Medicine that evaluated the effectiveness of Seroquel, Risperdal
and Zyprexa, drugs known as "atypical antipsychotics," which are
routinely prescribed to Alzheimer's patients. A group led by Lon
Schneider, MD, at the University of Southern California School of
Medicine found that 80% of Alzheimer's patients they studied stopped
taking the drugs before the trial ended due to ineffectiveness and
side-effects.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health,
whose director, Thomas R. Insel, commented "We need to come up with
better medications." Indeed -more than 4.5 million Americans have
been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Its environmental causes remain
unknown (the fake food must factor in) and it is occurring with
increasing frequency.

The rage associated with Alzheimer's is one of the conditions for
which Oregon doctors can authorize cannabis use. Perhaps Dr. Insel
should fund a study of its efficacy there -it's just a matter of
collecting the data.

Paul Armentano of NORML has summarized the recent scientific
literature on cannabinoid therapy for Alzheimer's patients. It looks
promising:

• Writing in the February 2005 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience,
investigators at Madrid's Complutense University and the Cajal
Institute in Spain reported that administration of the synthetic
cannabinoid WIN 55,212-2 directly to the brain prevented cognitive
impairment and decreased neurotoxicity in rats injected with
amyloid-beta peptide (a protein believed to induce Alzheimer's).
Other cannabinoids were also found to reduce the inflammation
associated with Alzheimer's disease in human brain tissue in culture.
"Our results indicate that ... cannabinoids succeed in preventing the
neurodegenerative process occurring in the disease," investigators
concluded.

• Investigators at The Scripps Research Institute in California have
reported that THC inhibits the enzyme responsible for the aggregation
of amyloid plaque -the primary marker for Alzheimer's disease-in a
manner "considerably superior" to approved drugs such as donepezil and
tacrine.

• "Our results provide a mechanism whereby the THC molecule can
directly impact Alzheimer's disease pathology," researchers
concluded. "THC and its analogues may provide an improved therapeutic
[option] for Alzheimer's disease [by]... simultaneously treating both
the symptoms and the progression of [the] disease." Previous
preclinical studies have demonstrated that cannabinoids can prevent
cell death by anti-oxidation. Some experts believe that cannabinoids'
neuroprotective properties could also play a role in moderating
Alzhemier's.

• Clinical trials also indicate that cannabinoid therapy can reduce
agitation and stimulate weight gain Alzheimer's patients.
Investigators at Berlin 's Charite Universitatmedizin, Department of
Psychiatry and Psychotherapy have reported that the daily
administration of 2.5 mg of synthetic THC over a two-week period
reduced nocturnal motor activity and agitation in Alzheimer's
patients in an open-label pilot study.

• Clinical data presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the
International Psychogeriatric Association previously reported that
the oral administration of up to 10 mg of synthetic THC reduced
agitation and stimulated weight gain in late-stage Alzheimer's
patients in an open-label clinical trial. Weight gain and a decrease
in negative feelings among Alzheimer's patients administered
cannabinoids had been reported by investigators in the International
Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry in 1997.

The U.S. now has a two-tier system of medical expertise; there are
doctors who have educated themselves about the endocannabinoid system and the drugs that affect it, and doctors who have not.
Unfortunately, the head of the National Institute of Mental Health is
in the lower tier. A soon-to-be published survey of California
doctors who have approved cannabis use by more than 100,000 patients
asked, among other things, "What drugs has cannabis enabled your
patients to discontinue or use less of?" All the respondents
mentioned atypical antipsychotics. No wonder the pharmaceutical
companies -and the corporations they interconnect with, i.e.
petrochemicals, agribiz, banks- are committed to Prohibition.

[ChristianLoeschel]

Thing is...who gives a flying fuck if Alzheimer patients are allowed to smoke pot, IT DOESNT SOLVE THE PROBLEM!

"Our results indicate that ... cannabinoids succeed in preventing the
neurodegenerative process occurring in the disease," investigators
concluded

Yeah Im sorry, but this summary is over-simplified and taken out of context. It slows down the "decay" of the brain, but by no means does it stop it. Yeah better than nothing, but no solution.

Let the potheads smoke all they want, but please, let the real scientists work on an effective way to stop and reverse the disease.

[Betsy]

That was a surprising response.

No one said that scientists would throw up their hands and give up on working on a "cure" for Alzheimer's. All they're saying is that marijuana is a more effective drug than the corporate drugs. If it slows down the effects of the disease and/or improves the quality of life of its victims, then it should be legal for patients to use.

It's so retarded that marijuana can't be used legally for medical purposes when it is so much less harmful than other drugs and often more effective, and with much fewer side effects.

[ChristianLoeschel]

See, the thing about research that you have to realize is this: At any given moment theres dozens of research group working on this problem, at universities as well as in the R&D departments of the pharmaceutical giants. Most of the advances come out of the universities to be picked up by the pharma companies and turned into drugs. The drugs didnt work, but instead of realizing that they were quite likely a step in the right direction, just missing some crucial piece, people trash the valuable results and say "Fuck it, lets smoke pot instead". As someone who works in this research field (not Alzheimer specifically, but still in the area), this is a slap in the face.

Oh hey, you dont have to smoke canabis to get the beneficial effects. It is quite possible to isolate the active ingredient and pack it into a pill, quite likely not haluzinogenic. But Im guessing 90% of the NORML people loose interest quite quickly at this point.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Possibly the NORML people do, Christian, but not the normal people. A friend of mine who is a doctor in the Kansas City area prescribes the pill form to her MS patients. Some of them really appreciate it - it doesn't cure MS any more than it cures alzheimers, but it does reduce the symptoms - but since the pill form still can make a non-user stoned, some prefer the symptoms to feeling stoned. Matter of choice - which is what it should be. Hogeye may be making it a shot at research/ers (actually he's probably making a shot at the drug industry and their bought and paid for lapdogs at DEA), but most of the rest of us are just P.O.d that a substance that has medicinal uses in ameliorating symptoms of many severe diseases is not legal - and in fact our taxes dollars are being wasted in going after poor sick folks who have enough trouble already.

[Dardedar]

Oh hey, you dont have to smoke canabis to get the beneficial effects. It is quite possible to isolate the active ingredient and pack it into a pill, quite likely not haluzinogenic.

DAR
You have to have a prescription and the pills are quite expensive and for some people trying to alleviate nausea, it's obviously not useful to ingest medicine.
Inhaling smoke is not good for lungs, period. If any one wants to take MJ regularly I don't understand why they wouldn't use the smokeless option: a vaporizor.

But Im guessing 90% of the NORML people loose interest quite quickly at this point.

DAR
It's quite possible to be for the right to ingest drugs like MJ without actually being interested in doing it yourself. I used to be rather involved in the medical MJ group here in Arkansas but it was purely because it pisses me off that the government goes to insane ends (drug war) to control what people want to put in their bodies.

D.

[Hogeye]

Christian, you seem to misunderstand the research issue. No one I know of, not NORML or anyone else, has disparaged drug research per se. What we criticize is the squelching of cannabis research - research which shows much promise, not only for Alzheimer's, but for many types of cancer, as a pain-reliever, tranquilizer, anti-spasmotic (for MS patients), as an anti-nauseant and appetite enhancer for cancer and AIDS patients, etc. The US (and other governments) makes it extremely difficult to do research with cannibis, and the big pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to put research money into something that can be grown by anyone (as opposed to patentable substances).

"A slap in the face" to cancer patients is when the US finds that cannabis reduces or eliminates cancerous tumors in 1974, and then buries the evidence until the same is rediscovered in Europe in 2000. How many people did setting back cancer research 26 years kill?

Much of the problem is neo-Lysenkoism - the intermingling of science and state, with the inevitable political bias which results. The US rulers' anti-drug hysteria makes objective research virtually impossible in this area.

[Betsy]

Medical marijuana has been empirically proven to make great improvements in the lives of people who suffer from the side effects of cancer treatment, from glaucoma, mental illness, tourette's, severe pain from injury, tremors, and much more. The pill, marinol, is not as effective and is expensive. Other drugs thus far may not help as much and are addictive or even deadly if overdosed. IMHO, to not allow people to smoke marijuana to get relief from these legitimately medical problems is cruel. Of course, it's obvious why the drug companies don't want that to happen - after all, if you could grow your own medicine, they'd take a big hit (no pun intended) (although it WAS pretty funny, eh?)

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

America's drug laws are fronted by "moral" people and backed by the drug industry. It's one of the unfortunately many cases (the petroleum and insurance industries come to mind) where the tail is wagging the dog - the industry is controlling what the government makes into law rather than the government reigning in the power of the industry for the benefit of the citizens. Hemp, in either of its forms, is currently illegal. Industrial hemp was made illegal (except for the WWII years when our foreign sources of cordage were in Japanese hands) in the 1930s because Rockerfeller didn't want hemp oil competing with his petroleum diesel and Randolph Hearst didn't want hemp-fiber paper competing with his tree-fiber paper. Post WWII the drug industry got the mj form banned because they didn't it competing with their patented products. If the government had been doing its job, those companies would have been slapped with bribery/ethics violation fines and hit with "restraint of trade" lawsuits. The unethical behavior of the 109th Congress was nothing new, just more extreme (no previous Congress, even if they wanted to, managed to turn America into Mussolini's fascist Italy - without the efficiency that "made the trains run on time".)

[Hogeye]

It's one of the unfortunately many cases (the petroleum and insurance industries come to mind) where the tail is wagging the dog - the industry is controlling what the government makes into law rather than the government reigning in the power of the industry for the benefit of the citizens.

Yes, it's so common there's a name for it: regulatory capture.

Industrial hemp was made illegal (except for the WWII years when our foreign sources of cordage were in Japanese hands) in the 1930s because Rockerfeller didn't want hemp oil competing with his petroleum diesel and Randolph Hearst didn't want hemp-fiber paper competing with his tree-fiber paper.

Right, Barbara. There were a few other special interests in the reefer madness "conspiracy." DuPont (which incidentally provided chemicals for Hearst's pulp paper production) was just coming out with petrol-based artificial fibers like nylon - they wanted to sqelch what Popular Mechanics 1937 called "the next billion dollar crop." Then there was the government employee lobby - all those G-men who were about to become unemployed due to the end of alcohol prohibition. Elliot Ness's boys became Harry Anslinger's boys. Finally, there was considerable "anti-immigrant" sentiment in the southwest, where cheap Mexican labor had become common. Due to the depression, gringo laborers decided that they wanted the grunt jobs back, and used marijuana as an excuse to deport Mexicans.

If the government had been doing its job, those companies would have been slapped with bribery/ethics violation fines and hit with "restraint of trade" lawsuits.

But the government was doing its job perfectly - favoring special interests and political cronies. Government created prohibition and made regulatory capture possible. We know the nature of the institution of State, and should not be surprised in the least at the result. The main culprit is the institution of State; the lesser opportunistic culprits are Hearst, DuPont, the g-man govt employee lobby, and southwestern white laborers and their politicians. We should not forget who the main enemy is, the institution making it all possible.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Government's job is protect the people from tyranny of any kind. Government that gives corporations "perks" and free reign is corrupt and is most certainly not doing it's job any more than a government that become the tyrant.

The Depression years saw many bad things as well as many good things done by the government. The "regulatory capture" Hogeye mentions was the direct result of corporations utilizing the 1880s Court case abstract that a law clerk wrote that, while directly opposite of the actual ruling, stated corporations were persons under law and had all the rights and protections of same. Just like Hitler taking over Germany and then starting WWII, the corporations started slowly but every step they took that wasn't stopped gave them a stronger base for the next step. At this point, it is unlikely we could reverse all the years of case law based on that possibly deliberately erroneous abstract. I'd love for someone to try (but not with the Roberts court).

[Hogeye]

There is a discrepancy in how we are interpreting "government's job." We can interpret it as what actually existing governments do, i.e. descriptively, or we can interpret it as what one hopes governments would do in an ideal world. The former interpretation is based on observation and institutional analysis; the latter on wishful thinking in spite of actual practice. The cruel reality is that government's main job is to preserve and protect its system of legalized plunder. The pie in the sky faith-based view is that government will, contrary to all incentives and past performance, magically become angelically altruistic and magically just.

Needless to say, anarchists like me take the former "elitist" model of the State - that political decisions are generally made by an elite, with grassroots input managed and controlled. Archists tend to believe in the "pluralist" model - that decisions are made on a grassroots level by the masses, and the rulers generally do what they are told. The elitist view sees rulers as generally doing what they believe to be in their individual interest, like "giv[ing] corporations perks and free reign" in return for money and power. To put it in economic terms, we see rulers as engaging in rent-seeking behavior wrt government power. Thus, the corruption that Barbara bemoans is the natural result of monopoly government.

I disagree with Barbara's explanation of regulatory capture. She believes, as I read her, that something about fictional personhood (of corporations) causes this capture. But regulatory capture occurs with non-corporate entities, too, such as employee unions, non-profit groups, partnerships and even individuals, so her explanation can't be right. I have a better explanation based on the notion of public goods.

"Good" regulations are a public good - meaning that the benefits cannot easily be restricted or focused. The marginal benefit of "good regulation" accrues to the masses of people, but the costs of getting "good regulation" must be borne by a few advocates. It is individually rational to not pay a huge price to get a marginal benefit. Someone who expects to get 25 cents a year benefit is unlikely to spend vast amounts of time and money trying to pass a "good law." "Bad" regulation is a private good - one can capture much or all of the benefits. Thus, a special interest may be willing to spend a large amount of time and money to get a beneficial law passed. A drug company can spend millions to limit competition, a munitions firm can lobby opulently, and so on since they can capture even more millions with favorable regulation. In short, the few with huge focused potential benefits will win out over the many with dispersed potential benefits nearly every time. So it is only to be expected that big established pharm guys run the FDA, big established media run the FCC, big established protectionists run the FTC, and so on.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

You buy, train, and feed a dog to protect your chickens. If the dog starts killing chickens, your response may or may not be to shoot the dog (probably will be), but it most certainly won't be to give the chickens to the fox. You get another, better trained, dog - and keep a closer eye on him.

[Hogeye]

The fox and hen-house thing is a very good analogy to government. Statists put a fox in charge of protecting the hen-house, and seem surprised when the fox eats the chickens, even though it is in the nature of the fox to do so. Statists refuse to see the nature of foxes, so their "solution" is to get another fox, perhaps of a different color. Then they're surprised that the Tweedledee fox is just as hungry as Tweedledum.

Until they do a rigorous institutional analysis of the State, (uh, fox) and finally face the nature of the beast, they'll continue to get eaten.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

The fox v. guard dog (that will go bad if not watched) is the core difference in the way Hogeye and I (and hopefully a whole lot of others) see government. Hogeye sees government as the former, I see government as the latter. With his view, the only solution can be to destroy government, as he continually recommends. I see the uncontrolled mega-corporations as the fox, and must rely on my government/guard dog to protect me from them - but I still must keep an eye on the dog, make sure he's fed properly and well taken care of - and removed if he goes bad anyway.