May 7, 2008
Marijuana May Help Prevent Cancer
Under the title ”The Greatest Story Never Told” Fred Gardner, the editor of O'Shaughnessy's, explains what is involved in making so many people falsely believe that marijuana smoking is a cause of lung cancer. He reveals that the work of Dr. Donald Tashkin, in the past no friend of cannabis, not only failed to find causation but also discovered evidence of a protective effect. Gardner reports that, ”as to the highly promising implication of his own study -that something in marijuana stops damaged cells from becoming malignant- Tashkin noted that an anti-proliferative effect of THC has been observed in cell-culture systems and animal models of brain, breast, prostate, and lung cancer. THC has been shown to promote known apoptosis (damaged cells die instead of reproducing) and to counter angiogenesis (the process by which blood vessels are formed -a requirement of tumor growth). Other antioxidants in cannabis may also be involved in countering malignancy, said Tashkin.”
Nevertheless, the government has decided to ruin the lives of 75 students attending San Diego State University. The DEA, at great taxpayer expense, has arrested them primarily for supplying fellow classmates with marijuana, a practice that has been going on since the 1960s. While it is true that these young people went about their business in a particularly reckless and arrogant manner using cell phone text messages to fill orders, still the effects of using marijuana do not even come close to justifying the waste of their talents and destruction of their careers.
Hat tip Ian Goddard
Cross posted on The Trebach Report