Archive for Friday, May 26, 2006
Study finds no marijuana link to lung cancer
May 26, 2006
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The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not lead to lung cancer.
The new findings "were against our expectations," said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.
"We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use," he said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect."
Federal health and drug enforcement officials have widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he still believes marijuana potentially is harmful, its cancer-causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously thought.
Earlier work established that marijuana does contain cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous.
Tashkin's study, funded by the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse, involved 1,200 people in Los Angeles who had lung, neck or head cancer and an additional 1,040 people without cancer.
They were all asked about their lifetime use of marijuana, tobacco and alcohol. The heaviest marijuana smokers had lit up more than 22,000 times, while moderately heavy usage was defined as smoking 11,000 to 22,000 marijuana cigarettes. Tashkin found that even the very heavy marijuana smokers showed no increased incidence of the three cancers studied.
The study findings, presented this week to the American Thoracic Society International Conference, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.
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26 May 2006
at 6:31 a.m.
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xenophonschild (Anonymous) says…
Hurrah! See the light … and legalize! The Wonderful Weed is good for us … so let us go play.
26 May 2006
at 7:36 a.m.
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GSWtotheheart (Anonymous) says…
puff puff give
26 May 2006
at 8:35 a.m.
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ljreader (Anonymous) says…
Actually, there is evidence that marijuana shrinks tumors and slows the progression of cancer, but the goverment censored the data:
Pot Shrinks Tumors; Government Knew in '74
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/…
http://www.projectcensored.org/public…
The term medical marijuana took on dramatic new meaning in February, 2000 when researchers in Madrid announced they had destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats by injecting them with THC, the active ingredient in cannabis.
Most Americans don't know anything about the Madrid discovery. Virtually no major U.S. newspapers carried the story, which ran only once on the AP and UPI news wires, on Feb. 29, 2000.
The ominous part is that this isn't the first time scientists have discovered that THC shrinks tumors. In 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice — lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia…..
26 May 2006
at 12:09 p.m.
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Ragingbear (Anonymous) says…
There are a few reason why it is not yet legalized. 1. Conservatives believe that anything fun is bad. 2. The stuff is not that hard to grow, and takes very little to produce a large amount. 3. Alchohol lobbyist.
26 May 2006
at 2:34 p.m.
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crazyks (Anonymous) says…
So, regular smoking is cancerous, but marijuana smoking is not?
I thought all you pro-ban people believed that smoking and second-hand smoke was always unhealthy. This is smoking. Where's the health risk?
Maybe we should just let all the restaurants and bars allow people to fire up their marijuana instead. No harm done, huh?
26 May 2006
at 4:58 p.m.
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mom13 (Anonymous) says…
not only helpful for cancer but think of how much money the government could make. We could be fixing our debt for sure and it's not a bad thing especially when talking about cancer
27 May 2006
at 1:54 p.m.
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space_rabbit_kerosene (Anonymous) says…
WHAT? Legalize it? I didn't know marijuana was illegal; surely there must be some mistake!