Is there any reliable scientific evidence that marijuana has medical value?
Absolutely, you know we live in a time of science based and evidenced based clinical care, so I don't think anybody would be recommending cannabis for patients unless there was a good science base. In particular we have recently performed studies that are placebo controlled, double blind studies using federally contracted grown and distributed marijuana for research purposes. And this has been shown to both be an effective analgesic, or pain reliever for peripheral neuropathy of various sources including HIV. It's been shown to be very good at increasing the appetite and suppressing the nausea secondary to cancer treatments, chemotherapy, radiation treatments. I don't know if there are double blind studies but there's certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence that is useful in Multiple Sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease and a number of other musculo-skeletal diseases that involve muscle spasms and pain. And the list goes on and on, but I think most of the placebo-controlled studies of whole cannabis are in the analgesic area. There's also been a large amount of research done in Canada, which has a federally legislated medical cannabis system for the entire country. The government even contracts to grow and supply standardized high quality cannabis to patients who have registered in the system. And researchers at the University of Toronto and McGill in Montreal and so forth have done a lot more studies, actually hundreds of studies in various conditions, mostly pain conditions.
