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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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US CA: New Pot Research Leaves Clinic
San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Wednesday 04 Apr 2001 Pubdate: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Website: http://www.sjmercury.com/ Author: Karen De Sa NEW POT RESEARCH LEAVES CLINIC A medicinal marijuana study, the first of its kind in the United States funded by local authorities, is designed to determine whether the drug will be diverted to recreational users. Participants in the San Mateo County experiment will not be watched while they smoke. San Mateo County officials are recruiting HIV patients for a two-year medicinal marijuana study considered groundbreaking in that it aims to determine whether cannabis will be used medicinally or wind up on the streets. Participants will be monitored through self-reports, home visits, medication logs and the return of marijuana cigarette butts during weekly clinic visits. The study, launched at a Tuesday press conference, is the first of its kind in the United States funded by local, not state or federal, authorities and aims to determine whether medicinal marijuana use can be studied outside of a clinical setting. But in undertaking the experiment, the county has to trust patients to adhere to the rules. Unlike other publicly funded cannabis studies under way, participants will not be watched while they smoke. If marijuana is to come into widespread use as medication, "we're not going to use it in a locked ward,'' said Dr. Dennis Israelski, who will oversee the study. "We're going to use it out in the community.'' In the coming weeks, applicants will be screened based on specific criteria. They have to pledge not to sell or swap the drug. They must know how to smoke a marijuana joint. And they must log when and where they inhale, reporting back to San Mateo County General Hospital each week before they get more. It is there that the data will be tracked, with the goal of one day helping to answer whether pot can be safely administered outside of hospitals. Patients will collect a kit each week for six weeks, receiving as many as 35 rolled marijuana cigarettes a week and three plastic containers: one for marijuana grown on government farms in Mississippi, one for partially smoked joints, and one for finished butts, marked for identification purposes. And they must have a safe place to smoke. Because smoking and transporting marijuana is still a crime as far as the federal government is concerned, the study's 60 participants will have legal protection as well. Local sheriff's deputies and police officers will know that if they stop a person carrying a "medical marijuana research study'' card with the official county seal, that person is free to smoke in peace at home. "If a person is smoking a joint and they have 15 more in their house, they're not going to be arrested,'' San Mateo County Sheriff Don Horsley said. The county is hoping its study of HIV patients who suffer from a painful and largely untreatable condition in their nerves known as neuropathy will contribute more science to what is so far a legal and ethical dispute. The study came from three years' collaboration between an ex-cop turned county supervisor, Mike Nevin, and Israelski, an internationally renowned AIDS specialist who oversees the county's infectious disease treatment. Nevin wants compassionate care for his constituents; Israelski wants to know if what he hears about marijuana anecdotally from patients -- who suffer from often-untreatable nausea, wasting and chronic pain -- can be scientifically proved. Both want to know if sending the drug out into the community for medicinal purposes will work. And so do other professionals who are studying medicinal marijuana in the more traditional settings of clinics and hospital. Other studies funded by the federal government are under way in California, the first of eight states to legalize marijuana for medicinal use. But San Mateo County's $500,000 contribution places it in a unique spot as the first county in the nation to fund cannabis research, according to a spokeswoman with the federal government's National Institute on Drug Abuse and local officials. In addition to the San Mateo County project, four federally funded studies are under way at the Center for Medical Cannabis Research in La Jolla. They are a collaborative effort between the University of California campuses in San Francisco and San Diego. Studying marijuana use is hard to do in clinical settings, said Dr. Donald Abrams, the University of California-San Francisco professor of medicine who is overseeing the San Francisco research. San Mateo County is "taking us a step closer to seeing how this is used in the real world,'' Abrams said.
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