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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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US: High Hopes
Phillip Cohen, San Francisco New Scientist
Saturday 28 Jul 2001 Can You Get The Benefits Of Cannabis Without The Drag? The painkilling effect of cannabis can be reproduced by boosting the effect of the body's own cannabis-like chemicals, according to American scientists. The finding raises the prospect of painkillers that do the same trick as smoking a joint but without any of the side effects. The active ingredient of marijuana, called tetrahydrocannabinol, has a variety of effects. It reduces pain, lowers body temperature and enhances appetite. It achieves these effects by binding to cells in the brain called cannabinoid receptors. However, the medicinal use of marijuana is highly controversial, and even some of the drug's advocates admit that its action is less specific than doctors would like. Harnessing the pain relief without the psychoactive effects of the drug would be useful, says Benjamin Cravatt of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. But cannabinoid receptors are widespread in the brain and the immune system, so it hasn't been possible to separate the desired effects of THC from the others. Now Cravatt's team, together with Billy Martin and Aron Lichtman of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond have stumbled across a novel strategy. This strategy relies on harnessing the body's own supply of cannabinoid-like compounds, such as anandamide. The researchers were studying genetically engineered mice with a switched-off gene that would normally code for a protein called fatty acid amide hydrolase. Because FAAH's job is to break down anandamide, the mice had an excess of the chemical. Apart from this disrupted gene the mice were normal. "These animals were not cataleptic or wasted," says Cravatt. But they did have a higher pain threshold. For example, the modified mice licked wounded areas less than half as often as controls. This suggests that drugs that inhibit FAAH could be powerful painkillers with few side effects. The painkilling effect completely disappeared when the mice were injected with a drug that clogs the receptors, proving that the pain relief used the same pathway as THC. "It's an outstanding result," says George Kunos of the National Institutes of Health near Washington DC, who studies the effects of endogenous cannabinoids. "These mice are going to be a major breakthrough in understanding how cannabinoids work." Why the modification has such a specific effect on pain isn't clear, but Cravatt believes that anandamide is released in the brain in response to pain. If he's right, FAAH inhibitors could be of great therapeutic value. "We might be able to let the body produce anandamide exactly where it's needed," says Cravatt. "By simply blocking its degradation we'll get a more robust effect," he says. More at: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (vol 98, p 9371)
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