WEED DEALINGS - PAINLESS POSSIBILITIES

Recently I spoke to Brian Schmidt, a researcher at NYU’s Capstone facility whose life is dedicated to oral cancer. He’s trying to find medications that help his patients avoid the pain of their illness. For reasons that remain unclear, oral cancer is the most painful cancer. It is also difficult to treat the painful symptoms, so when Dr.Schmidt found out about the analgesic effects of cannabis at a pain conference he was prompted to put together his own study.

Schmidt got a team together and went about testing the effects of cannabinoids as an analgesic on rats. However over the course of his study he realized that not only were cannabinoids helping to decrease pain, they also arrested the development of tumors. While great news, this meant that Dr. Schmidt had to do another study to answer the question that arose out of his first study: “Do cannabinoids ease pain because they decrease tumor size, or do cannabinoids ease pain because of an explicit analgesic effect?

In order to answer the question Dr. Schmidt relied on existing CB (cannabinoid) and CBR (cannabinoid receptor) research. That meant that he tested THC—the most prominent cannabinoid, the one that early cultivators bred plants to be rich in—and CBD—a more recently-discovered cannabinoid, and the second most prominent. Because of legalities Dr.Schmidt used synthesized versions of the two cannabinoids, and they were administered both in the body of the rat, and in a cultured cancer growth. Consistently,

Dr.Schmidt and his researchers found that the cannabinoids worked to agitate CBRs in skin cells across the cancer, and when the receptors are agitated they stimulate an immune response. “The cannabinoids in marijuana are very similar to the cannabinoids we produce endogenously. The only difference is that we don’t make them in quantities anywhere near as concentrated as the cannabis plant.”

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