This is a very old article that I stumbled across. I'm providing a copy here because the website it came from had very small font and I figured some of our members would NOT be able to read it.

How Does Marijuana Kill Pain?

Associated Press - Sunday, October 4, 1998
Maria Welch, a 52-year-old Baker City, Ore., resident who underwent surgery in July to remove most of her cancerous right lung, was in misery after doctors sent her home with some potent pain-killers. The drugs deadened some of the pain, but left her nauseous, hallucinatory and suffering from sleepless nights.

I felt like my body was asleep but my mind was awake. I just had to stop taking them because they didn't agree with me."

Then a friend gave Welch two marijuana brownies. Though she had never tried illegal drugs, she was desperate for relief.

"When I ate them I couldn't believe it. It was like a miracle. It took the pain away and it gave me an appetite," said Welch, a food industry researcher. "I slept like a log that night."

Scientists once scoffed at the claims of cancer patients like Welch that they enjoyed relief from pain by puffing on a joint of marijuana or gobbling a plate of pot-laced brownies.

But research during the past decade has buoyed the case for marijuana as medicine. Scientists have made progress untangling pot's chemical makeup and gained insight into how its ingredients act on the brain to produce the anecdotal benefits claimed by cancer, AIDS, glaucoma and multiple sclerosis patients.

Now research has confirmed what some of those patients have been claiming all along: Marijuana does indeed kill pain.

Scientists at the University of California at San Francisco found that a marijuana-like drug deadens pain in rats by interacting with the same pain-modulating area of the brain activated by morphine.

The findings prove that cannabinoids -- which include marijuana's active ingredient, THC -- are potent analgesics that deliver true pain relief, said Ian Meng, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF's Department of Neurology.

In findings reported in the Sept. 24 issue of the journal Nature, the UCSF researchers describe how they injected rats with a synthetic cannabinoid to test how quickly the rodents reacted when a heat source was applied to their tails.

The drugged rats reacted more slowly to the heat than those not given the drug WIN55,212-2, and when a region of brain called the rostral ventromedial medulla that acts like a volume dial for pain was switched off, the drug's analgesic attributes ended, the team found.

A second set of tests demonstrated that it was the cannabinoid's pain-killing abilities -- not the loss of motor coordination it also induces-- that caused the rats to react slowly to their heated tails.

Meng said that given the findings, scientists should now push ahead and test cannabinoids on humans.

"People are smoking marijuana and giving anecdotal accounts. I think the time is here for real, controlled clinical trials," he said.

Proponents of the medical use of marijuana have claimed for decades that pot stifles chronic pain without the nausea, weight loss and addiction associated with morphine and other opiates.

The finding that cannabinoids target the same area of the brain as opiates, albeit through a different mechanism, raises the prospect that marijuana and opiates might be used together to exploit their combined analgesic qualities.

Using the drugs together in smaller amounts might also reduce the nausea caused by morphine and the euphoria sparked by cannabinoids that are undesirable in chronically ill patients, said Dr. Gavril Pasternak, who studies the biology of pain at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

"I would say that it sounds reasonable that if used together the combination could work quite good," he said. "We know now that the brain circuitry can be activated by more than just morphine. So there's not a single key to make it work, there's two and maybe more keys."

Dr. Billy Martin, a professor of pharmacology at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond who has studied cannabinoids for 25 years, said the UCSF team's findings are illuminating, but offer no magic bullet.

"This study is a little tiny piece of this whole big puzzle," Martin said. "...It opens up the possibility of developing new ways of treating and controlling pain and understanding pain, but it doesn't get us any closer to a cannabinoid pill tomorrow that's going to be useful."

Martin is one of several researchers who discovered that the human brain has a naturally occurring system that processes cannabinoids.

He said while scientists have made strides in understanding how marijuana's hundreds of compounds act on the brain to deliver the laundry list of benefits users claim to enjoy, the hardest work lies ahead.

Supporters of the medical use of marijuana who campaigned successfully for ballot measures legalizing its medical use in California and Arizona complain that the federal government has made advanced marijuana studies more difficult by erecting roadblocks to researchers.

The reason, they say, is that exposing marijuana's good side would undermine the government's war on drugs.

"The government has decided to wage a war against marijuana and they don't want any kinks in the armor. They don't want people knowing that marijuana, like morphine, has a medical use," said Bill Zimmerman, director of the Los Angeles-based group Americans for Medical Rights.

The nonprofit group is campaigning for medical marijuana measures that are on the ballot in five other states -- including Oregon, where Welch must now travel to Canada to buy her marijuana brownies -- and the District of Columbia this November.

The group's criticisms are unfair, said Dr. Frank Vocci, director of the medication development division of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which co-funded the UCFS study. He said the reality is that the government has received very few proposals for research into marijuana and its components.

"Until there's more interest in this you can't really say there's a conspiracy because there's a dearth of applications," Vocci said. The only human clinical trial under way involving medical marijuana is one that seeks to determine whether cannabinoids have any adverse effect on drugs being used to treat AIDS patients.

Meanwhile, the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, is evaluating medical literature about the therapeutic value of marijuana and its chemical components.

It is expected to state whether medical evidence supports marijuana as medicine late this year or early in 1999

[dorena420]

this is a great article. thanks for posting it.

[Big K R]

Thank you!! This is a very great article. Time to medicate with some Spice cake

[stopthemadness]

Great article - thanks for posting. I wonder if anyone has ever tried to privately fund a set of clinical trials. Conduct them under clinical conditions using accepted standards for control and measurement and then publish the results to an accredited medical journal?

[b1joy2c]

My son is a pharmacology professor; and if memory serves me correct Ole Miss.college had a pot farm that was being cultivated for research in 80's I believe. Will ask him the next time I talk to him., think it was for this subject;pain management and nausea.

[Sonny Bono]

Originally Posted by b1joy2c

My son is a pharmacology professor; and if memory serves me correct Ole Miss.college had a pot farm that was being cultivated for research in 80's I believe. Will ask him the next time I talk to him., think it was for this subject;pain management and nausea.

Yeah, but I hear the quality of meds they are growing is comparable to shwag. They are growing weak shit to prove that cannabis doesn't work. They won't even consider growing the bombeazy. And Mississippi, what a great geographical area to grow pot. We all know great pot comes from Mississippi right!? The best place to test and grow pot in the U.S. is right here in good Ol' Cali baby. So, why they do it there I have no idea. They need to move the program out of Ole Miss and into UCLA

Peace

[b1joy2c]

Really a good article, thanks for the post.

[b1joy2c]

Originally Posted by Sonny Bono

Yeah, but I hear the quality of meds they are growing is comparable to shwag. They are growing weak shit to prove that cannabis doesn't work. They won't even consider growing the bombeazy. And Mississippi, what a great geographical area to grow pot. We all know great pot comes from Mississippi right!? The best place to test and grow pot in the U.S. is right here in good Ol' Cali baby. So, why they do it there I have no idea. They need to move the program out of Ole Miss and into UCLA

Peace

Quite right and I do agree with you! Altho I would like to do a poll on depression with illness; and if weed can sometimes heighten the depression factor.

Would like some feedback from other's on this. I find the closer I get to death the more I want to live, or at least that was true a while ago. Now I just don't really care. It seems to becoming toooo much trouble.

[Frankie]

SAN JOSE, Calif. - The pot is unsmokeable, they say, full of sticks, stems and seeds. The leaves have gone stale after at least a year of storage, freezing and then thawing.

Marijuana supplied to researchers from the government farm in Mississippi isn't quality product, according to a range of observers, from Redwood Shores HIV patient Phillip Alden to a cop-turned county supervisor.

Alden said he knows from experience - he's smoked it. And the result? An upper respiratory infection and an early departure from a landmark research study, the first publicly funded analysis of HIV patients smoking cannabis in their homes.

In 10 months, fewer than 10 subjects have been accepted into San Mateo County's marijuana study, which took years to get funded and approved. The county's medical chief of staff, Dr. Dennis Israelski, had planned for 60.

Some say it must be the pot.

"I couldn't smoke the stuff anymore," said Alden, a freelance writer who relies on marijuana to ease HIV-related wasting disease. "I was disgusted with the federal government."

Dale Gieringer, California coordinator for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, agrees. "It's unconscionable that they would be giving this marijuana to patients," he said. "It's stale, low-potency ditch weed."

The National Institute on Drug Abuse, which grows the marijuana plants that are pre-rolled, frozen and sent out to officially sanctioned researchers across the country, denies its research product is substandard.

"The marijuana we provide does not contain sticks and seeds. The problem is re-humidifying - it makes it kind of harsh," said Steve Gust, special assistant to the director of NIDA. "Certain procedures are needed to make it smoke right."

Gust said researchers themselves aren't complaining about quality. He thinks groups like NORML are looking for something to blame if the results of the studies show it has little medicinal value. "Then they can say the marijuana isn't of sufficient quality," Gust said.

Cannabis trials in San Mateo County began last July, but few patients so far meet the strict standards to enroll. There is no hard evidence that the quality of the cannabis used in the study is hindering recruiting.

But stories - and rumors in some cases - have slowed progress, said Israelski, an associate clinical professor at Stanford University. When Alden was forced to drop out of the study late last year because of an inflamed throat, for example, published reports of his experience swirled quickly through Internet circles and HIV support groups.

"We've been hurt by word on the streets," Israelski said. "But the word on the street might not reflect reality."

To counteract the slow start, the county is trying to broaden its study.

In a letter sent to regulatory agencies this month, researchers ask to expand the HIV patient pool to include people suffering from nausea, weight loss and wasting disease.

Supervisor **** Nevin is frustrated that the county is once again asking for approvals from the myriad agencies that must OK any changes to the research plan. He spent three years fighting for funding and regulatory approval.

Nevin envisioned his county's research program after a beloved colleague, Joni Commons, died of breast cancer in 1998. Commons won him over, convincing the former San Francisco police inspector that marijuana brought her critical pain relief.

"We've put too much effort into this, and we don't want to be playing games here," Nevin said. "It needs to be a certain grade of substance, and unless it's stronger, they'll set us up for defeat."

Medicinal marijuana research is moving steadily forward in other parts of the country, with multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS patients. The newly inaugurated Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research in La Jolla will soon oversee studies at 15 university sites.

Most researchers interviewed, unlike marijuana advocates, did not complain about the quality of the NIDA product. According to strict protocols, they can't unroll the carefully measured, frozen joints they receive, although several said they can hear seeds popping when some of their patients smoke, or they fall out the untwisted end. They've heard that the sticky buds gum up the government's rolling machine.

But that hasn't stopped more than 500 people from joining waiting lists for clinical trials at the La Jolla center, where in contrast, two recently enrolled subjects complained that the pot was too potent.

"They've reported getting high shortly after the first few puffs," said Dr. Andrew Mattison, the center's co-director. "These are people with a chronic, debilitating illness who do not want to get high. They want to get pain relief."

Dr. Donald Abrams, a University of California-San Francisco professor of medicine, agreed that most patients don't want their heads spinning, even though years ago he fought with federal regulators for more potent pot.

Now, he's satisfied. "Nobody is saying they don't want to participate in our study because they hear the marijuana isn't good," Abrams said.

Researchers concede that the less a patient has to smoke, the better. More potent cannabis delivers a more concentrated effect, with fewer smoking-related hazards.

Advocates say this is why they complain about the government-grown marijuana. According to a 1999 NORML survey, the government's cannabis scored lowest on levels of THC - marijuana's essential ingredient - when compared with 48 samples.

Dr. Ethan Russo, a Montana neurologist and editor of the Journal of Cannabis Therapeutics, said NIDA's marijuana is "medically inexplicable and inexcusable." He said American patients in any other drug study would not be given a stale product, and cannabis subjects deserve equal treatment.

http://cannabis.net/articles/badpot.html

[blameme]

I have pinched nerves is very any thing that would help and still seem not medicated to the boss type people.

[tubadjim]

Maria Welch was a pot smoker for years, pot doesn't help releive pain, she just says it does so she can get high!

[madmountain]

Originally Posted by dismalqueen

A second set of tests demonstrated that it was the cannabinoid's pain-killing abilities -- not the loss of motor coordination it also induces-- that caused the rats to react slowly to their heated tails.

Meng said that given the findings, scientists should now push ahead and test cannabinoids on humans.

They're not putting a fire under MY tail.

[tokermom]

Originally Posted by tubadjim

Maria Welch was a pot smoker for years, pot doesn't help releive pain, she just says it does so she can get high!

This is the second post I have read tonite that you have written that was very insensitive and rude. Why would you make such uncompassionate posts at a site that is here to help people who believe in the medicinal effects of mj ? You must just like to spew negativity? I've reported you once and hope you get bored with bashing this community and find someone else to take your bitterness out on. Get another hobby and leave sick people alone.

[tokermom]

Originally Posted by b1joy2c

Quite right and I do agree with you! Altho I would like to do a poll on depression with illness; and if weed can sometimes heighten the depression factor.

Would like some feedback from other's on this. I find the closer I get to death the more I want to live, or at least that was true a while ago. Now I just don't really care. It seems to becoming toooo much trouble.

Hi b1joy- You seem very depressed and I just wanted to tell ya- People care and life is worth it. I know how you feel and I myself deal with depression, so I really know the feeling of just not wanting to deal with life, but, then I think again and I realize, there are so many people that have it so much worse then me. I do not know what is going on in your life but your comments made me feel so bad. You are worth taking care of yourself and going on. Their are many wters' who have been inspiration when I felt like you do. Many Wters helped me and continue to. If I can help you in any way- I'am here for you. You can PM me and I will get right back to you. I noticed you mention a son, b1joy- Think about the people that you love and know they need you here with them. Take Care Fellow Wter- People Care!!!

[Justonevoice]

Depression is a tough thing. It is tough because it is such a pesonal issue and is so different but yet the same to many of us.

I am a big (300 lbs) mans man but I am not afraid to share with you all that I suffer from severe depression at times to the point where I have considered the worst case senerio (9mm to the head), but what always keeps me going is my obligation. My obligation to my fellow people to share the truth and to helpmake a change for those that come after me. Marijuana is "Not a Drug" but instead is a medicine that if our "Stick in the Ass" leaders would just recognize could make the whole world a happier place that there just might be a chance to tackle other world issue's.

[tokermom]

Depression can be debilitating and I sympathize with anyone out there dealing with it. Thank You Justonevoice for rethinking the issue and sticking it out with the rest of us. The world needs you and weedtracker needs you. I agree that none of us know exactly how bad it is for someone else but I know that things can get better from day to day. To anyone out there hanging by a thread- get help. Talk to someone, anyone but know that people care.

[timberwolf]

Originally Posted by dismalqueen

This is a very old article that I stumbled across. I'm providing a copy here because the website it came from had very small font and I figured some of our members would NOT be able to read it.

How Does Marijuana Kill Pain?

Associated Press - Sunday, October 4, 1998
Maria Welch, a 52-year-old Baker City, Ore., resident who underwent surgery in July to remove most of her cancerous right lung, was in misery after doctors sent her home with some potent pain-killers. The drugs deadened some of the pain, but left her nauseous, hallucinatory and suffering from sleepless nights.

I felt like my body was asleep but my mind was awake. I just had to stop taking them because they didn't agree with me."

Then a friend gave Welch two marijuana brownies. Though she had never tried illegal drugs, she was desperate for relief.

"When I ate them I couldn't believe it. It was like a miracle. It took the pain away and it gave me an appetite," said Welch, a food industry researcher. "I slept like a log that night."

Scientists once scoffed at the claims of cancer patients like Welch that they enjoyed relief from pain by puffing on a joint of marijuana or gobbling a plate of pot-laced brownies.

But research during the past decade has buoyed the case for marijuana as medicine. Scientists have made progress untangling pot's chemical makeup and gained insight into how its ingredients act on the brain to produce the anecdotal benefits claimed by cancer, AIDS, glaucoma and multiple sclerosis patients.

Now research has confirmed what some of those patients have been claiming all along: Marijuana does indeed kill pain.

Scientists at the University of California at San Francisco found that a marijuana-like drug deadens pain in rats by interacting with the same pain-modulating area of the brain activated by morphine.

The findings prove that cannabinoids -- which include marijuana's active ingredient, THC -- are potent analgesics that deliver true pain relief, said Ian Meng, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF's Department of Neurology.

In findings reported in the Sept. 24 issue of the journal Nature, the UCSF researchers describe how they injected rats with a synthetic cannabinoid to test how quickly the rodents reacted when a heat source was applied to their tails.

The drugged rats reacted more slowly to the heat than those not given the drug WIN55,212-2, and when a region of brain called the rostral ventromedial medulla that acts like a volume dial for pain was switched off, the drug's analgesic attributes ended, the team found.

A second set of tests demonstrated that it was the cannabinoid's pain-killing abilities -- not the loss of motor coordination it also induces-- that caused the rats to react slowly to their heated tails.

Meng said that given the findings, scientists should now push ahead and test cannabinoids on humans.

"People are smoking marijuana and giving anecdotal accounts. I think the time is here for real, controlled clinical trials," he said.

Proponents of the medical use of marijuana have claimed for decades that pot stifles chronic pain without the nausea, weight loss and addiction associated with morphine and other opiates.

The finding that cannabinoids target the same area of the brain as opiates, albeit through a different mechanism, raises the prospect that marijuana and opiates might be used together to exploit their combined analgesic qualities.

Using the drugs together in smaller amounts might also reduce the nausea caused by morphine and the euphoria sparked by cannabinoids that are undesirable in chronically ill patients, said Dr. Gavril Pasternak, who studies the biology of pain at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

"I would say that it sounds reasonable that if used together the combination could work quite good," he said. "We know now that the brain circuitry can be activated by more than just morphine. So there's not a single key to make it work, there's two and maybe more keys."

Dr. Billy Martin, a professor of pharmacology at the Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond who has studied cannabinoids for 25 years, said the UCSF team's findings are illuminating, but offer no magic bullet.

"This study is a little tiny piece of this whole big puzzle," Martin said. "...It opens up the possibility of developing new ways of treating and controlling pain and understanding pain, but it doesn't get us any closer to a cannabinoid pill tomorrow that's going to be useful."

Martin is one of several researchers who discovered that the human brain has a naturally occurring system that processes cannabinoids.

He said while scientists have made strides in understanding how marijuana's hundreds of compounds act on the brain to deliver the laundry list of benefits users claim to enjoy, the hardest work lies ahead.

Supporters of the medical use of marijuana who campaigned successfully for ballot measures legalizing its medical use in California and Arizona complain that the federal government has made advanced marijuana studies more difficult by erecting roadblocks to researchers.

The reason, they say, is that exposing marijuana's good side would undermine the government's war on drugs.

"The government has decided to wage a war against marijuana and they don't want any kinks in the armor. They don't want people knowing that marijuana, like morphine, has a medical use," said Bill Zimmerman, director of the Los Angeles-based group Americans for Medical Rights.

The nonprofit group is campaigning for medical marijuana measures that are on the ballot in five other states -- including Oregon, where Welch must now travel to Canada to buy her marijuana brownies -- and the District of Columbia this November.

The group's criticisms are unfair, said Dr. Frank Vocci, director of the medication development division of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which co-funded the UCFS study. He said the reality is that the government has received very few proposals for research into marijuana and its components.

"Until there's more interest in this you can't really say there's a conspiracy because there's a dearth of applications," Vocci said. The only human clinical trial under way involving medical marijuana is one that seeks to determine whether cannabinoids have any adverse effect on drugs being used to treat AIDS patients.

Meanwhile, the Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, is evaluating medical literature about the therapeutic value of marijuana and its chemical components.

It is expected to state whether medical evidence supports marijuana as medicine late this year or early in 1999

[timberwolf]

Great article, thanks. I've been dealing with pain w/o mmj. It seems to help me the more I learn about reserch and studies as such. I can't wait till the day I can smoke again. I've got OG Kush, Sour Diesel, and Strawberry Cough
waiting for me. yee haw.

Originally Posted by Sonny Bono

Yeah, but I hear the quality of meds they are growing is comparable to shwag. They are growing weak shit to prove that cannabis doesn't work. They won't even consider growing the bombeazy. And Mississippi, what a great geographical area to grow pot. We all know great pot comes from Mississippi right!? The best place to test and grow pot in the U.S. is right here in good Ol' Cali baby. So, why they do it there I have no idea. They need to move the program out of Ole Miss and into UCLA

Peace

I would totally sign up for a UCLA pot research project....hahahah. All joking aside I know UCLA is doing marijuana experiments with labrats and the marijuana is some kind of oil...Other than that I know nothing.

[IndivaOrangeCounty]

thanks for the article, very interesting. I have had chronic back pain for two years now and mmj is the only thing that works without crazy side effects and addiction (ie opiates).

I believe that mmj helps my mind relax and manage the pain better than simply killing the pain sensations in my body because i have also experienced heightened physical sensitivity when using mmj.

[boogerlayne]

Indiva Orange County, I am with you! I destroyed my lower back in 1996 while serving overseas. The only thing that has helped is MMJ and an occasional trip to the chriopractor. My pain ate at me so much that I became extremely depressed due to poor quality of life. I have sense gained improved mobility and the MMJ helps me stay more active.

[boogerlayne]

Any thanks for posting the article!

[kanybus]

thank you for taking the time to post this.