Cannabis and Cancer Continued

Following up on the ability of cannabis to cure cancer and, via the same VGF inhibition process (and its vasodilative properties), preserve diabetic eyesight, here’s another article, from the NORML blog on the subject.

Is Senator Kennedy A Victim Of Pot Prohibition?

May 20th, 2008 By: Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director

Forgive me if the headline above sounds slightly exploitive. My intention is not to piggyback on a personal tragedy, but I did want to get your attention.

In the fourteen years I’ve worked in marijuana law reform, few events have struck me as so needlessly tragic as the federal government’s consistent and deliberate stifling of medical cannabis research. Nowhere is the Feds’ refusal to allow this science more overt and inhumane than as it pertains to the investigation of cannabinoids as anti-cancer agents, particularly in the treatment of gliomas.

As noted in today’s wire stories regarding Senator Edward Kennedy’s diagnosis, glioma is an aggressive form of cancer that affects an estimated 10,000 Americans annually. Standard treatments for the cancer include radiation and chemotherapy, though neither procedure has proven particularly effective — with the disease killing approximately half its victims within one year and all within three years.

But what if there was an alternative treatment for gliomas that could selectively target the cancer while leaving healthy cells in tact? And what if federal bureaucrats were aware of this treatment, but deliberately withheld this information from the public?

Sadly, the above questions are not hypothetical. As I originally wrote in 2004 essay for Alternet.org, entitled “Pot Shows Promise as a Cancer Cure”

In fact, the first experiment documenting pot’s anti-tumor effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at the behest of the U.S. government. The results of that study, reported in an Aug. 18, 1974, Washington Post newspaper feature, were that marijuana’s psychoactive component, THC, “slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent.”

Despite these favorable preliminary findings, U.S. government officials banished the study, and refused to fund any follow-up research until conducting a similar – though secret – clinical trial in the mid-1990s. That study, conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program to the tune of $2 million concluded that mice and rats administered high doses of THC over long periods had greater protection against malignant tumors than untreated controls.

However, rather than publicize their findings, government researchers shelved the results, which only became public after a draft copy of its findings were leaked in 1997 to a medical journal which in turn forwarded the story to the national media.

In the years since the completion of the National Toxicology trial, the U.S. government has yet to fund a single additional study examining the drug’s potential anti-cancer properties. Is this a case of federal bureaucrats putting politics over the health and safety of patients? You be the judge.

Fortunately, in the past ten years scientists overseas have generously picked up where U.S. researchers so abruptly left off, reporting that cannabinoids can halt the spread of numerous cancer cells — including prostate cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and in one human clinical trial, brain cancer.

Writing earlier this year in the journal Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics, Italian researchers reiterated, “[C]annabinoids have displayed a great potency in reducing glioma tumor growth either in vitro or in animal experimental models. … [They] appear to be selective antitumoral agents as they kill glioma cells without affecting the viability of nontransformed counterparts.” Not one mainstream media outlet reported their findings. Perhaps now they’ll pay better attention.

What possible advancements in the treatment of cancer may have been achieved over the past 34 years had US government officials chosen to advance — rather than suppress — clinical research into the anti-cancer effects of cannabis? It’s a shame we have to speculate; it’s even more tragic that the families of Senator Kennedy and thousands of others must suffer while we do.

WHAT’S an equal shame is the number of diabetics who have gone blind unnecessarily because the circulation-enhancing and VGF inhibiting properties of cannabis have gone largely uninvestigated and hence, their importance to diabetics in preserving their eyesight.

Preserving Your Eyesight

It was obvious to me for a long time that cannabis is a vasodilator, that is, it expands your blood vessels. This was because it turned your eyes red, and looking closely one can see the blood vessels themselves on the eyeball are visibly swollen. This vascular expansion is also responsible for the ‘munchies.’ As more blood is delivered to the stomach, it starts churning, producing acids, in anticipation of incoming food. If that food is not quickly forthcoming, hunger motivates us to find it.

The increase in blood supply provided by regular cannabis ingestion, even if only twice a week, coupled with the beneficial effects of a workout, followed by hot water immersion, facilitates blood flow to the retina, maintaining the health of the existing vessels.  If that’s not enough, the VGF inhibitory property, (proven, published and peer reviewed) goes a step further and protects you from any additional vascularization that might possibly occur.

Regardless of your feelings concerning cannabis, this plant could prevent diabetic blindness from now on, eradicating one of the main causes worldwide of loss of eyesight. It needs to be investigated as do the anticarcinogenic properties of this amazing plant.

Increasing Blood Flow

OK, once you’re getting more oxygen into the blood stream, the next thing is getting more of that blood to the body’s tissues. If you could widen your blood vessels to carry more blood, that is, use a fatter pipe, this would have that effect. There are several ways to accomplish vasodilation, one of them is heat. When your body gets hotter, the blood vessels dilate to carry heat away faster. Saunas are good for this, and my personal favorite, hot baths. A 20-30 minute soak, every day in hot water, the hotter the better, up to a point, helps deliver an increased supply of oxygen-carrying blood to all your cells, literally their lifeblood. Personally, I also use the time to meditate, sinking low enough so my ears are covered, but I can breathe freely and can’t sink further, to aproximate sensory deprivation. I’ve been doing this for thirty years, following work by John Lilly (another one of my science heroes since reading his books on dolphin reasearch in high school) on sensory deprivation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Lilly

So:    A daily hot soak, maybe some prana (breathing) exercises, and if desired, meditation.

Another way to dilate the blood vessels is with exercise, specifically bodybuilding. You look at bodybuilders and they have massive veins. You can easily see they are transferring larger amounts of blood to their tissues. Of course, when relaxed, not flexed, the veins don’t stand out like that and they’re pretty much invisible. I think the swollen tubes look puts off a lot of people, especially potential women weightlifters who don’t realize that with their higher percentage of smooth muscle tissue, still look smooth and tapered not bulgy (also the smaller ratio of striated [striped] tissue lets women be a third stronger for the same muscle mass). I’d like to strongly advocate bodybuilding for women.

Bodybuilders tend to remain young and healthy looking well into their sunset years. Take Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who still looks great and check out Clarence Bass, who is now past 70 and still ripped.

http://cbass.com/

There’s one more way of dilating the body’s vessels, I want to mention, and this will detail the way I’ve been able to intercept any (so far) excess growth of blood vessels over my retina, or excess vascularization, which is the reason diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in the US. The reason this happens is that in most diabetics (that is those who are not maintaining their sugars as close to normal as possible) the tiny blood vessels carrying blood to the retina gradually fail, due to compromise of the overall cardiovascular system. That is to say, diabetics typically have poor circulation, or poor blood delivery, especially to the extremities, which why our feet tend to drop off. Quoting off the top of my head, Parkinson’s Principles of Internal Medicine (13th–I think, edition), “Typically by the time a patient has had diabetes for 10 to 15 years, it is virtually (I’m not sure about the ‘virtually’) inevitable he or she will show some degree of retinopathy,” Of course, when you use terms like ‘virtually’ and ’some degree,’ it’s a pretty safe bet, but you get the idea. Type 1 diabetics nearly always start losing, partially or wholly, their eyesight almost from the time the condition first manifests.

What you need is something that accomplishes two tasks: Prevent the degradation of the existing blood supply to the retina, and inhibit uncontrolled vascular formation. First keep the retina healthy by maintaining the flow of blood to the cells, and second, enhance that protection by have a mechanism in place that prevents new blood vessels from growing where they shouldn’t.

A substance exists which possesses both of these properties and is easily found. Before I get into it, please cut and paste the following address into your address bar and visit this site. You need to at least glance over it, at least the discussion at the end which outlines other possible applications for this discovery. Please note the study is actually the 2nd to reach these conclusions, the 1st having been performed in the Virginia university system in the 1970s, and that the most recent researchers are all established, respected members of Spanish academic and medical circles.

http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/full/64/16/5617

OK, looking at it, I realize it’s a little dense, but skip to the Discussion section, 2/3 of the way down, and keep in mind that ‘angiogenesis’ means the formation (genesis) of new blood vessels (angio) and you’ll quickly realize that what they’re saying is that cannabinoids, inhibit the formation of new blood vessels that carry blood to the tumor, and the tumor dies. Not just in a small percentage either. Note that the researchers point out, in the discussion, the wide range of applications this technique may have, and they’re just thinking about cancers.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about enhancing bloodflow to the retina so that revascularization isn’t necessary in the 1st place.

This is the last part of a NY Times article (see the link below for full page), mentioning, almost as an afterthought the ongoing research into the anticarcinogenic potential of cannabinoids.

http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/19581/drug_war_briefs%3A_illegal_cures/

August 15- Scotland on Sunday reports: Cannabis is set to be used in the battle against deadly brain cancers that affect around 4,000 people in the UK each year, it has emerged.

Scientists have shown that cannabinoids – the active ingredients responsible for the drug’s ‘high’ – hold back the growth of blood vessels which feed tumors.

Tumors of the brain and the central nervous system kill about 340 Scots each year, and many more undergo extensive surgery in a bid to save their lives.

The cannabis findings hold out hope for brain tumor sufferers that they could live longer and be treated using less invasive techniques. The new research, which was conducted by scientists at Complutense University in Madrid, saw cannabinoids injected into mice with gliomas, which are fast-growing brain tumors.

The cannabinoids appear to block genes making a protein called VEGF ( vascular endothelial growth factor ) that stimulates the sprouting of blood vessels. Cutting off the blood supply to a tumor makes it unable to grow and spread.

In studies, cannabinoids significantly reduced the activity of VEGF in laboratory mice. They also lowered VEGF levels in tumor tissue samples taken from two patients with glioblastoma multiforme, the most lethal type of brain tumor.

About 4,400 new cases of brain tumor are diagnosed in the UK each year. A small percentage of these are grade four gliomas, the most aggressive and dangerous brain tumors.