SpiralArchitect

So whats the deal with Marinol and Sativex?

Cannabis is a Schedule I drug.
Marinol is Schedule III
Sativex is undergoing the final phases of trials.

Schedule 1 Drug

• The drug or other substance has high potential for abuse.
• The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
• There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.

Since these pharmaceutical products are synthetic derivatives of marijuana, doesn't that automatically mean marijuana does have medicinal value?

Can anyone explain this hypocrisy*?


* Yes, I understand this is the United States of America government we are talking about

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joshpackr

I've always wondered this same thing Spiral. It makes about as much sense to me as it does you. I really don't get it.

I guess it just shows you what throwing some money at the FDA will accomplish. You can take an illegal plant with supposedly no medicinal value, re-invent it into a synthetic, patentable medication, get its schedule changed, then make millions off it while all along keeping the actual plant illegal.

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Buzzby

Marinol has passed all of the FDA's tests for a safe and useful drug. Marijuana has not. One of the primary objections to scheduling marijuana as something that can be prescribed is that it's hard to standardize a plant. You won't find any other plants in the US Pharmacopeia. Another is that no other legitimate drug is smoked. How much THC is in a "bowl"? It depends on the size of the bowl and the percentage of THC in the weed. How would it be prescribed?

It would be possible to create a standardized blend of marijuana with specific percentages of different cannabinoids. Setting up standard doses would still be a problem unless it was ground up and put in capsules.

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SpiralArchitect

Thanks for the insight Buzzby

How can the government have a patent for medical marijuana then?

Buzzby

They don't. The patent doesn't make clear exactly what they're claiming as a private right to manufacture, but it isn't medical marijuana. It's something to do with cannabinoids, not the plant.

A patent on "cannabinoids" wouldn't stand up to a court challenge, in that they are naturally occurring components of plants and aren't manufactured at all. A patent requires that you create something new. A patent on a specific synthetic cannabinoid would stand up to a court challenge.

5drive

"Ever since California and other states began passing medical marijuana laws in 1996, the federal government has claimed that -- as a 2003 White House press release put it -- "research has not demonstrated that smoked marijuana is safe and effective medicine." A new study, just published in the journal Neurology, definitively refutes that claim and underlines the urgent need for the federal government to change its prohibitionist policies.

The study, conducted by Dr. Donald Abrams of the University of California at San Francisco, found marijuana to be safe and effective at treating peripheral neuropathy, which causes great suffering to HIV/AIDS patients. This type of extreme pain, which is caused by damage to the nerves, can make patients feel like their feet and hands are on fire, or being stabbed with a knife. Similar pain is seen in a number of other illnesses, including multiple sclerosis and diabetes, and cannot be treated effectively with conventional pain medications. Standard pain medicines -- even addictive, dangerous narcotics -- have little effect on this type of pain."

New Study Shows Medical Value of Marijuana | DrugReporter | AlterNet

Of course, the feds are going to want to stick to their 'no research has proven...' stance, as long as a single study backs it. Like Buzzby said, the difficulty of setting standard doses alone puts cannabis in a deep hole vs. Dronabinol (sold as Marinol). And since big pharma can't make money from a natural herb....

I thought this was interesting, on the subject of standard doses-

"It takes over one hour for Marinol to reach full systemic effect, compared to minutes for smoked or vaporized cannabis. Some patients accustomed to inhaling just enough cannabis smoke to manage symptoms have complained of too-intense intoxication via Marinol's predetermined dosages." Dronabinol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And another reason Marinol has been 2nd choice to the whole plant is that it doesn't contain the 60+ cannbinoids of cannabis, especially CBC (an anti-inflammatory) and CBD (anti-convulsant).

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SpiralArchitect

I understand that you may want to be very precise in dosing with medicine, but marijuana is relatively benign, am I correct?

Start low and increase dosage until you reach your effects seems simple enough to me, then again I am no pharmacist/doctor.

Thanks for the info 5drive

Buzzby

If it's going to be a prescription drug, then precise dosing is mandatory. I don't think it should be a prescription drug, but going from Schedule I to unscheduled in one step doesn't seem likely.

Can you imagine a doctor saying, "Take this morphine, starting low and increasing until you get the effect you want"? He wouldn't be a doctor for long. As long as they're going to treat marijuana in the same class as other drugs considered to be dangerous but having valid medical purposes (Schedule II), dosage would have to be tightly controlled, just as it is with morphine.

I much prefer the position that marijuana is a medicinal herb, not a dangerous drug. It should be sold in herb and health food stores, not pharmacies. If it didn't also get people high, that's where it would be sold today. When marijuana was made illegal, many people were surprised to find that they could no longer get the patent medicines they'd come to depend on. They contained "cannabis extract". Most people didn't realize the "The Killer Weed" and the primary ingredient of their arthritis medicine were one and the same.

SpiralArchitect

So it's likely to 'climb down the ladder', so to speak? Interesting, alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine are all unscheduled. Why is that? I know you have to have a liscense of some sort I assume and pay taxes, but those two are much more dangerous.


But is marijuana really dangerous? Like I mentioned, alcohol and tobacco are not scheduled. We both know marijuana is a relatively benign substance (if that would be the proper word) so why would precise doses start, when in this case, you actually could incrementally increase your dose.

As a rather unrelated, but somewhat related note,
When I was on anti-depressants they put me on the lowest dose and cranked it up until it worked. Apparently that was their method for medicating someone...

So very true.