Pubdate: Thu, 02 Nov 2000 Source: Orange County Register (CA) Copyright: 2000 The Orange County Register Contact: P.O. Box 11626, Santa Ana, CA 92711 Fax: (714) 565-3657 Website: http://www.ocregister.com/ Author: William Heisel CHILL, MAN -- THIS CHEMICAL WILL HELP YOU BREATHE DEEP The '70s rock song "Sweet Leaf," a homage to marijuana, begins with the singer coughing repeatedly. It's a given: You smoke pot, you cough. Now researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and elsewhere have found a way that a marijuana-like chemical in the lungs actually stops people from coughing. Their work appears today in the journal Nature. Dig this: The chemical is a neurotransmitter, a little messenger that occurs naturally in your body and tells your nerves what to do. It's one of a group of neurotransmitters called anandamides. The anandamide acts like tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Despite its nickname - "the bliss molecule" - anandamide doesn't get you high. Instead, it helps regulate your appetite, memory and feelings of pain. The Nature study explains that it also appears to stop you from coughing, or, if you smoke something that doesn't agree with you, forces you to cough. "It's kind of a jack of all trades depending on what you need," said Dr. Daniele Piomelli, a UCI pharmacologist. Other researchers say the study should give hope to cancer patients and others who suffer from a persistent cough. Instead of ineffective inhalers or cough syrups, the drugs of the future could trigger these anandamides. You'd start to cough, and the anandamide would tell your lungs and airways connected to them: "Chill." "I consider this to be an important finding, if nothing else to figure out what this endogenous cannabinoid system is doing," said Dr. Billy Martin, a pharmacologist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. "It will be intriguing to see what happens in a pathological system." In other words, far out, man. HEALTH: UCI scientists say a neurotransmitter in the body that works much like marijuana helps ease coughing. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens