JCT: I missed these last year:

>Study Finds No Cancer-Marijuana Connection
>washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/25/AR2006052501729.html
>By Marc Kaufman
>Washington Post Staff Writer
>Friday, May 26, 2006; Page A03

MK: The largest study of its kind has unexpectedly concluded
that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, does not
lead to lung cancer.

JCT: All those lies and the truth finally gets out.

MK: The new findings "were against our expectations," said
Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los
Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30
years. "We hypothesized that there would be a positive
association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that
the association would be more positive with heavier use," he
said. "What we found instead was no association at all, and
even a suggestion of some protective effect."

JCT: Even protective effect. How else to explain that
cigarette smokers get lung cancer, non-smokers get lung
cancer, but only marijuana smokers do not get lung cancer.
Gee, I've often wondered why. Is it possible to deduce?

MK: Federal health and drug enforcement officials have
widely used Tashkin's previous work on marijuana to make the
case that the drug is dangerous. Tashkin said that while he
still believes marijuana is potentially harmful, its cancer-
causing effects appear to be of less concern than previously
thought.

JCT: They found no link, even benefit, and it's only "of
less concerned." They're still concerned about its health
dangers after being proved wrong. And just last month, the
big news was a British journal apologizing for not realizing
how dangerous marijuana really was!!! Last year, the cited
expert changed his tune.

MK: Earlier work established that marijuana does contain
cancer-causing chemicals as potentially harmful as those in
tobacco, he said. However, marijuana also contains the
chemical THC, which he said may kill aging cells and keep
them from becoming cancerous.

JCT: THC keeps cells from becoming cancerous would explain
why marijuana smokers don't get lung cancer.

MK: Tashkin's study, funded by the National Institutes of
Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse, involved 1,200
people in Los Angeles who had lung, neck or head cancer and
an additional 1,040 people without cancer matched by age,
sex and neighborhood. They were all asked about their
lifetime use of marijuana, tobacco and alcohol. The heaviest
marijuana smokers had lighted up more than 22,000 times,
while moderately heavy usage was defined as smoking 11,000
to 22,000 marijuana cigarettes. Tashkin found that even the
very heavy marijuana smokers showed no increased incidence
of the three cancers studied. "This is the largest case-
control study ever done, and everyone had to fill out a very
extensive questionnaire about marijuana use," he said. "Bias
can creep into any research, but we controlled for as many
confounding factors as we could, and so I believe these
results have real meaning."

Tashkin's group at the David Geffen School of Medicine at
UCLA had hypothesized that marijuana would raise the risk of
cancer on the basis of earlier small human studies, lab
studies of animals, and the fact that marijuana users inhale
more deeply and generally hold smoke in their lungs longer
than tobacco smokers -- exposing them to the dangerous
chemicals for a longer time. In addition, Tashkin said,
previous studies found that marijuana tar has 50 percent
higher concentrations of chemicals linked to cancer than
tobacco cigarette tar.

JCT: And yet, no lung cancer!!! THC must be a pretty
powerful cancer killer. Maybe better than apricot seeds
since apricot seeds aren't officially banned like cannabis,
yet.

MK: While no association between marijuana smoking and
cancer was found, the study findings, presented to the
American Thoracic Society International Conference this
week, did find a 20-fold increase in lung cancer among
people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.

JCT: And keep in mind it's probably not the tobacco that's
the cause. It's probably the 500 chemicals they poison them
with.

MK:The study was limited to people younger than 60 because
those older than that were generally not exposed to
marijuana in their youth, when it is most often tried.

>Pot Kills Cancer Cells
>Posted by: "Big Bodie" fluttergas@... fluttergas
>Date: Sat Jul 8, 2006 4:16 pm (PDT)
>http://www.sierratimes.com/03/11/07/article_kubby.htm

A new study published in Nature Reviews-Cancer provides an
historic and detailed explanation about how THC and natural
cannabinoids counteract cancer, but preserve normal cells.

The study by Manuel Guzman of Madrid Spain found that
cannabinoids, the active components of marijuana, inhibit
tumor growth in laboratory animals. They do so by modulating
key cell-signalling pathways, thereby inducing direct growth
arrest and death of tumor cells, as well as by inhibiting
the growth of blood vessels that supply the tumor.

The Guzman study is very important according to Dr. Ethan
Russo, a neurologist and world authority on medical
cannabis: "Cancer occurs because cells become immortalized;
they fail to heed normal signals to turn off growth. A
normal function of remodelling in the body requires that
cells die on cue. This is called apoptosis, or programmed
cell death. That process fails to work in tumors. THC
promotes its reappearance so that gliomas, leukemias,
melanomas and other cell types will in fact heed the
signals, stop dividing, and die."

"But, that is not all," explains Dr. Russo: "The other way
that tumors grow is by ensuring that they are nourished:
they send out signals to promote angiogenesis, the growth of
new blood vessels. Cannabinoids turn off these signals as
well. It is truly incredible, and elegant."

In other words, this article explains several ways in which
cannabinoids might be used to fight cancer, and, as the
article says, "Cannabinoids are usually well tolerated, and
do not produce the generalized toxic effects of conventional
chemotherapies.

Usually, any story that even suggests the possibility of a
new treatment for cancer is greeted with headlines about a
"cancer cure" - however remote in the future and improbable
in fact it might be. But if marijuana is involved, don't
expect any coverage from mainstream media, especially since
mainstream editors have been quietly killing this story for
the past thirty years.

That's right, news about the abilility of pot to shrink
tumors first surfaced, way back in 1974. Researchers at the
Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the
National Institutes 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
Washington Post reported on the 1974 study -- in the "Local"
section -- on Aug. 18, 1974. Under the headline, "Cancer
Curb Is Studied," it read in part: "The active chemical
agent in marijuana curbs the growth of three kinds of cancer
in mice and may also suppress the immunity reaction that
causes rejection of organ transplants, a Medical College of
Virginia team has discovered." The researchers "found that
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."

"News coverage of the Madrid discovery has been virtually
nonexistent in this country. The news broke quietly on Feb.
29, 2000 with a story that ran once on the UPI wire about
the Nature Medicine article," complained MarijuanaNews.com
editor Richard Cowan , who said he was only able to find the
article through a link that appeared briefly on the Drudge
Report Web page. "The New York Times, The Washington Post,
and Los Angeles Times all ignored the story, even though its
newsworthiness is indisputable: a benign substance occurring
in nature destroys deadly brain tumors," added Cowan.

On March 29, 2001, the San Antonio Current printed a
carefully researched bombshell of a story by Raymond Cushing
titled, "POT SHRINKS TUMORS; GOVERNMENT KNEW IN '74." Media
coverage since then has been nonexistant, except for a copy
of the story on Alternet.

It is hard to believe that the knowledge that cannabis can
be used to fight cancer has been suppressed for almost
thirty years, yet it seems likely that it will continue to
be suppressed. Why?

According to Cowan, the answer is because it is a threat to
cannabis prohibition. "If this article and its predecessors
from 2000 and 1974 were the only evidence of the suppression
of medical cannabis, then one might perhaps be able to
rationalize it in some herniated way. However, there really
is massive proof that the suppression of medical cannabis
represents the greatest failure of the institutions of a
free society, medicine, journalism, science, and our
fundamental values," Cowan notes.

Millions of people have died horrible deaths and in many
cases, familes exhausted their savings on dangerous, toxic
and expensive drugs. Now we are beginning to realize that
while marijuana has never killed anyone, marijuana
prohibition has killed millions.

JCT: And I only accused Justices Doherty Goudge and Simmons
for the deaths of the greater than 5000 epileptics who died
since their 2003 ruling pretending they brought the criminal
prohibition on medicine back to life. Now I can add cancer
victims over the past 2.5 years to their K-slab too.

Prohibiting medicine is genocide, obvious to a child,
cognitively dissonant to adults. I hope finding out that
recent cancer victims could have been saved wakes them up.


--
Abolitionist Debt Slave Leader John C."The Banking Systems Engineer"
Turmel for UNILETS interest-free time-based currency in U.N. resolution
C6 to Governments in the http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration.htm
http://www.cyberclass.net/turmel USENET blog: alt.fan.john-turmel