Smokedot pointed to an article on THC Today that states that the US government has known about studies that indicate that THC may slow the growth of certain cancers. The article mentions a study that was suppressed in the 70s, as well as a more recent Madrid Test (which I remember reading about last year on Yahoo! Daily News but I can’t find it anymore). Anyway, I’m not sure this is reliable info about the 1974 study, but the Madrid study is certainly interesting.
And speaking of weed… Plastic reports that there is a Dutch company that has figured out a way to legally ship weed to the US (I don’t recommend trying this, though).
Update: The link to overgrow.com is now permanently broken. The domain name has apparently been seized by the Canadian government, and it’s excluded from Archive.org.
But this may be the same article, I can’t remember:
The term medical marijuana took on dramatic new meaning in February, 2000 when researchers in Madrid announced they had destroyed incurable brain tumors in rats by injecting them with THC, the active ingredient in cannabis.
The Madrid study marks only the second time that THC has been administered to tumor-bearing animals; the first was a Virginia investigation 26 years ago. In both studies, the THC shrank or destroyed tumors in a majority of the test subjects.
Most Americans don’t know anything about the Madrid discovery. Virtually no major U.S. newspapers carried the story, which ran only once on the AP and UPI news wires, on Feb. 29, 2000.
The ominous part is that this isn’t the first time scientists have discovered that THC shrinks tumors. In 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice – lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia.
The DEA quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further cannabis/tumor research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on the events in his book, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.” In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set out – unsuccessfully – to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the “high.”