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Although cannabis smoke has been shown to have pre-cancerous effects in animal tissue,
countless studies have failed to find the link between cannabis smoking and cancer.
And in fact have shown that heavy marijuana users have considerably fewer cancers than the general population.
Dr Donald Tashkin, is a very good researcher at UCLA.
He is a pulmonologist. His research demonstrated that the incidents of
lung cancer in people who smoke cannabis was less then the incidence of lung cancer in people who smoke nothing at all.
We actually succeded in studying about 600 lung cancer cases.
About 600, head and neck cancer cases. And the bottom line is we failed to find any positive association
between marijuana even heavy marijuana use.
Which we define as more than 10 joints a year.
Even if you're looking more at 60 joints/year, joints/day, we could not see an association.
So I think it is really essentially a negative study.
We failed to find any positive association with cancer.
Is it possible, that the taryn smoked pot could be causing malignancies while the chemical constitutents in pot are curing them at the same time?
It was only in the 1960s that fat soluble THC was isolated from pot plants.
And declared the substance that got us high. The substances in the cannabis plant
and which are active are kind of fatty like, liquid like. And they are hard to work with.
So it has been very hard for chemists to get a handle on these kind of substances.
Therefore, it took until 1964,
For Raphael Mechoulam and he's collegue Andre to discover the active compound in the cannabis plant.
Which they called delta nine tetrahydrocanabenoid or as we know it THC.
That compound, that we isolated in 1964,
tetrahydrocanabenoid, THC,
has been looked into in great depth.
And indeed, for the next 20 years
People got to know, a lot about the chemistry, a lot about the clinical effects, a lot about biochemistry of THC.
One thing was still unknown 20 years later.
Now, I'm speaking of 1964 in the mid 80s nothing was known about the mechanism.
How does THC act in the body?
Dozens of major studies have been published in the last few years,
that indicate that the chemicals in cannabis in the lab and in animals
have a significant effect on fighting almost all major cancers including brain, breast, prostate, lung, thyroid, colon, skin,
pituitary, melanoma and leukemia cancers. They do this by promoting the death of cancer cells,
that have forgotten how to die. As well as a reduction in their crucial blood supply.
While leaving healthy cells untouched.
But why, you may wonder,
would cannabis have any effect on cancer?
The answer can be explained in one word: Endocanabinoids.
Amazing as it sounds,
we are all born with a form of cannabis already in our bodies.
It's called the endocanabinoid system.
The endocanabinoid system or ECS influences multiple physiological processes.
This intricate system modulates energy intake as well as nutrient transport metabolism and storage.
A completely natural collection of compounds. Endocanabinoids are our body's own form of marijuana.
And are involved in most of our cells and structures. They control a variety of functions in the nervous system: heart, reproductive, and immune systems.
Endocanabinoid messengers help the cells communicate.
Typically they protect our good cells, while killing the bad ones, like cancer cells.
In all animals, the nervous system is made of the same components, large numbers of nerve cells carrying electrical signals.
And wherever the cells meet these signals are past to a receptor in the next cell. By a chemical messenger called a neuro transmitter.
Inside the brain, there are different types of neuro transmitters, including dopamine and serotonin.
All animals, from rodents to fish, to elephants to humans, have inherited this basic structure.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, the sea squirt and other primitive invertebrates, evolved in innovation to this system.
What happened was the nervous system acquired a new chemical that have a new flavor, a new type of chemical.
And it's this chemical that is related in structure, a similar shape to the chemical found in cannabis.
Because of the similarity, these new signals came to be known as cannabinoids.
It was inevitable that eventually cannabis would meet it's perfect partner, us!
Whether you like it or not, each and every one of us is fundamentally wired to respond to cannabis.
Now, receptors are not built in our brain or anywhere in our body of course, or animal bodies.
Because, there is a plant out there, that will produce a compound that acks on them. That just doesn't work that way.
Receptors are found in our body because we produce compound that will activate those receptors.
So obviously, we thought that there should be indigenous compounds which act on those receptors.
The fact that there is a plant compounds tetrahydrocanabinoids THC which acts on those receptors is just a work of nature.
A good Italian friend Di Marzo, summarized the activity, which is really a summary
Says well what do endocanabinoids do!
They relax.
Help us eat.
Sleep, forget and protect. Not remember. Forget!
And don't think forgetting is less important then recalling.
We should have a system to forget, otherwise, if you wish we can burst.
If you go down a mont and see a thousand faces, do you want to remember all of them? Of course not!
Despite all the difficulties, there's a group of doctors in the US and abroad,
who have been advancing the research on the medical use of cannabis with highly impressive and sometimes revolutionary discoveries.
In a Scholarly Cancer Review article published in 2009
there were over 421 chemical compounds identified in the cannabis plant. And within this group of natural substances,
there are many chemicals that have significant antitumor properties.
At low enough doses to where they would be effective cancer treatments.
That's an important part of this. It's one thing to be able to kill a cancer cell but could you really survive such treatment?
A botanist from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs branch Robert Melamede
who has written an article, sort of comparing the carcinogenic effect of cannabis with tobacco and explaining,
why he thinks that cannabis has the anticancer effect for lung cancer.
There is nothing else that impacts on so many of our illnesses.
You see, when i talk about these age related illnesses,
we are all aging but we don't all come down with cardiovascular disease. We don't all come down with autoimmune disease. We don't all come down with cognitive disfunction. We don't all come down with cancer.
But the chances are, we're gonna come down with one of them.
Alright?
And here we have this one drug that's able to help us holistically with our biochemistry to restore balance.
Now, cannabis kills cancer cells in many cases. People are not aware of that. They think cancer + cannabis = antinausea. It's way beyond that!
There also studies taking a look at other organ systems,
that have found that marijuana seeks out the cancer cells and preferentially kills them over the healthy cells.
There's a wealth of laboratory evidence that these antitumor properties, kill cancer cells in a variety of ways.
There are multiple mechanisms of action, identified by which cannabis kills cancer cells.
And they are divided into various categories.
And among these are antiproliferative effects.
Normally, that's one of the hallmarks of a cancer cell.
Is that it just keeps reproducing. So if you stop the reproduction, that's an antiproliferative effect.
There are antiangiogenesis effects. And this means that the cannabinoids will stop the tumor from being able to elaborate or grow new blood vessels to support the growth of the tumor.
There are antimetastatic effects. And that is simple enough to mean that the cannabinoids block the ability of the cancer cells to spread into other tissues.
And there's another effect that has a wilding apoptotic effect.
Apoptosis refers to the ability of cannabinoids to speed the death of the abnormal cells.
That's something that is especially important in cancer, because you're able to hasten the death of the cell without disturbing the normal cells around it.
Seth Research Laboratories in California have recently demonstrated that in some tumors cancer cells are killed by marijuana while the other healthy cells are left untouched.
Cells that stop moving and becomes still white dots are dead cancer cells.
The ability of cannabinoids to kill bad cells while protecting healthy ones
is particularly important when we're talking about brain cancer,
because of the so-called blood-brain barrier.
The brain has to be sheltered from outside influences
that might hitch a ride on the bloodstream and cause havoc.
What is exciting and unique about cannabinoids is that they can pass through the blood-brain barrier because of their slipery fat loving nature.
Cannabinoids get right into the brains cancer cells by moving easily through the cells membranes, Which are also composed of lipides.
The evidence is piling up in mice infested labs that the endocannabinoid system when stimulated by cannabinoids has an antitumor effect and can instruct cancer cells to commit suicide.
This was done by Manuel Guzaman's Group within the past and less than ten years and what they showed there, was that originaly the THC when injected into a brain tumor in mice and rats,
a significant number of those animals the tumor would regress and disappear.
So that you actually had survival of rats that would otherwise die.
And they examined all the surrounding nerve tissue,
and that was all fine. Once again cannabinoids protect nerves.
Doctor Manuel Guzman, is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, in Madrid, Spain.
And is known for his groundbreaking studies on medical cannabis.
We have observed that cannabinoids have the effect of inducing death in cancer cells.
They inhibit the growth and multiplication of cancer cells.
They actually reduce the growth of tumors.
If cannabis might be the miracle cancer cure that everybody's been searching for, then why don't doctors everywhere know about it?
People have a hard time believing that cannabis can have all of these fantastic effects that are described.
But what we're doing is we're just stimulating a natural system that's already there.
This has been developing for hundreds of millions of years.
The early invertebrates, the sea squirts, the hydrant, there are primitive endocanabinoid systems in those organisms dating back 600-700 million years ago.
The cannabis plant came along maybe 50 or 60 million years ago.
Why aren't billions in funds being directed toward cannabinoids research by the organizations that raise money for cancer therapies?
Talking about medical research, that you know, it's really a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, i'm thrilled that there's really more research taking place now than anytime in history, when it comes to the therapeutic use of cannabis,
and specifically, the cannabinoids, the components in cannabis.
Unfortunately, a lot of that research is still relegated to taking place overseas.
We see a little bit now finally taking place in this country.
But really, the United States remains fairly well behind the curve when it comes to cutting-edge medical cannabis research