New Insights on Marijuana in Israel, Where It’s Illegal. In Israel, he said, research in the field is “definitely a work in progress,” and he cautioned, “Science is not a 100-meters Olympic race; it is not who is first on the line that is important.” The real advances, he said, are being made not on farms but in laboratories around the world, including in the United States and Europe. The professor, who collaborates with many teams abroad, said that chances were that in the next few years well-defined mixtures of the compounds, refined into something more like a medical drug, would replace today’s medicinal marijuana.
In the meantime, he said, offering products with different levels of key ingredients, as Tikkun Olam does, “is going towards personalized medicine.” Yet experts say that many medical professionals in Israel remain skeptical and are reluctant to encourage patients to use marijuana, be it because of conservatism or a lack of knowledge about its potential benefits. Still, there are stories of transformation. Gov. Mitt Romney meets a medical marijuana patient--Oct. 6. Feds Remove Anti-Tumor Cannabis Info After Just Days Online. Just 11 days after adding a section on medical marijuana to its treatment database, the National Cancer Institute has altered the new page, removing any mention of the evidence that marijuana can diminish and even reverse tumor growth.
In an edit appearing Monday afternoon, NCI replaced a sentence about marijuana's direct anti-tumor effect with one saying that it is prescribed mainly to control nausea, pain and insomnia for cancer patients, reports Kyle Daly at The Colorado Independent. The original language, published to the Web on March 17, had read: The potential benefits of medicinal Cannabis for people living with cancer include antiemetic effects, appetite stimulation, pain relief, and improved sleep. In the practice of integrative oncology, the health care provider may recommend medicinal Cannabis not only for symptom management but also for its possible direct antitumor effect.
After being changed Monday, it now reads: Was Big Pharm behind the changes? Smart People Do More Drugs--Because of Evolution - Entertainment. Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa has this theory, which he calls the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis. Here's how it goes: intelligence evolved as a way to deal with "evolutionary novelties"--to help humans respond to things in their environment to which they were, as a species, unaccustomed.
Thus, smart people are more likely to deal with new things and try them. Those new things seem to include drugs. Why? Because, as Kanazawa explains, while "the use of opium dates back to about 5,000 years ago ... Other psychoactive drugs are 'chemical' (pharmacological, 17 ); they require modern chemistry to manufacture. " Kanazawa even finds a study with support: Consistent with the prediction of the Hypothesis, the analysis of the National Child Development Study shows that more intelligent children in the United Kingdom are more likely to grow up to consume psychoactive drugs than less intelligent children. ... Illustration via digitalbob8's Flickr. Marilyn Monroe: Pot Smoker? Blog Archive » Mr. X by Carl Sagan. This account was written in 1969 for publication in Marihuana Reconsidered (1971).
Sagan was in his mid-thirties at that time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life. It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life – a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure.
I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. I want to explain that at no time did I think these things ‘really’ were out there. There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis.
Cannabis and Cannabinoids. Kaleidoskop.