Pubdate: Thu, 08 Oct 2015
Source: Tucson Weekly (AZ)
Copyright: 2015 Tucson Weekly
Contact:  http://www.tucsonweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/462
Authors: Jayson Chesler and Alexa Ard
Series: News21: America's Weed Rush

Part 1:

GOVERNMENT FUNDING, LACK OF RESTRICTIONS SLOW PROGRESS ON MEDICAL 
MARIJUANA RESEARCH

Research on marijuana's potential for medicinal use has been hampered 
for years by federal restrictions, even though nearly half of the 
states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana 
in some form.

An analysis by News21 shows that $1.1 billion of the $1.4 billion 
that the National Institute of Health spent on marijuana research 
from 2008 to 2014 went toward research on marijuana abuse and 
addiction. Only $297 million was spent on its effects on the brain 
and potential medical benefits for those suffering from conditions 
like chronic pain.

"We don't have new things to treat for pain," said Dr. Todd Vanderah, 
chief of pharmacology at the University of Arizona. "We're still 
dealing with narcotics that have been around for thousands of years, 
and it's led to this issue of people abusing drugs and the rise of heroin."

Some parents with children suffering from seizures want to try 
medical marijuana to treat their children more effectively than 
current medicine has been able to, but the Food and Drug 
Administration has not approved any marijuana-based medicines for seizures.

"We know it will help our children or potentially give them a better 
quality of life," said Heather Shuker, the mother of a girl with 
Dravet syndrome,a form of epilepsy. "We're being denied that because 
they (federal agencies and doctors) don't know the long-term side 
effects of medical cannabis."

Amphetamine and stimulants like it, typically prescribed as Adderall 
or Ritalin, are used to treat attention deficit disorder despite 
their potential to be addictive. "I was diagnosed with ADD when I was 
a kid. They gave me Ritalin and that was just a really bad thing," 
said Jason Mac Adam, a medical marijuana patient in Hawaii. "I ended 
up becoming a meth addict. ... I've used medical marijuana to help me 
get away from my meth addiction, as a medication to get me away from 
my anxiety."

Yet researchers like Vanderah have faced challenges getting federal 
approval and funding to study marijuana's potential medical uses for 
these and many other conditions. "The progress is a little limited 
because research is done based off of grants that have been harder 
and harder to get," Vanderah said.

Although medical and even recreational marijuana use has been 
increasingly legalized by states, the federal government still 
classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug - like heroin and ecstasy - 
meaning there is potential for its abuse and it has no medical benefits.

So the approval process for doing any kind of research on marijuana 
is lengthy and difficult, with the FDA, DEA and NIDA all playing 
roles in allowing an approved researcher access to federal funding 
and federally-provided marijuana.

"It took me three years from the time I got funding to the time I 
could enroll my first subject," said Dr. Mark Wallace, a researcher 
studying pain treatments at the University of California, San Diego. 
"Once we got approval it wasn't that hard to do, as far as getting 
the marijuana."

Fewer than 1,000 NIH-supported research projects studied marijuana 
for purposes other than abuse or addiction in the last seven years. 
University-backed researchers and a few larger companies have been 
able to use their own funding, rather than grants from the NIH, and 
their own advanced laboratories to study marijuana and 
cannabinoids-the chemicals found within it-as potential treatments 
for conditions like seizures and breast cancer pain.

"I think in the near future we're going to see it (research) get 
easier and easier to do," Wallace said. "I don't see how the federal 
government is going to continue to put so many restrictions on it."

Spending disparity

News21 analyzed federally funded drug research projects from 2008 to 
2014 using the NIH's publicly available database, Project Reporter. 
The $1.1 billion NIH spent to study marijuana abuse and addiction was 
$200 million more than what the organization spent working on and 
studying crystal meth, a highly addictive stimulant that the DEA has 
called an epidemic.

While NIH spent $297 million on grants for non-abuse research of 
marijuana, it provide two to four times as much for similar research 
of opiates and benzodiazepines, including drugs like Xanax, according 
to the News21 analysis. Opiates are the narcotics that Vanderah said 
can cause prescription drug dependency that leads to heroin abuse.

The research on marijuana abuse and addiction was largely, but not 
exclusively, funded by NIDA, a branch of NIH. The research covered 
subjects like how parents can prevent substance abuse and studies of 
cannabis use disorder, which the American Psychiatric Association 
calls a problematic pattern of marijuana use.

More federal money was spent researching potential marijuana abuse 
than on abuse of amphetamine and ketamine (an anesthetic sometimes 
used as a club drug), despite their histories of recreational use.

This is from a continuing series from America's Weed Rush, an 
investigation of marijuana legalization in America, a 2015 project of 
the Carnegie-Knight News21 program produced by the nation's top 
journalism students and graduates.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom