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Straw's challenge over cannabis drugs
The Independent (UK)
Monday 05 Jan 1998 or cancer are likely to be legally available within a few years, a senior adviser to the British Medical Association said last night. The claim by Dr Bill O'Neill, the BMA's science and research adviser, followed a challenge by Jack Straw to drug companies and pressure groups to prove cannabis has medicinal benefits and is safe. The Home Secretary, revealed on Friday as the Cabinet minister whose son has been accused of dealing cannabis, said in a radio interview on Saturday that he would rethink his hard line on the issue if such proof could be found. While most experts agree there is still a need for more research, sufferers from MS say cannabis eases chronic pain while cancer patients have argued that it helps suppress the nausea associated with chemotherapy. With 17 research projects on the medicinal uses of cannabis derivatives currently licensed by the government, an application to the Medicines Control Agency to market such a product was likely to be put forward, Dr O'Neill said. "If they found and could show that there were specific benefits, that it was more effective or had fewer side effects, then it is likely that there would be licences granted," he said. The drugs concerned would be based on constituent parts of cannabis called cannabinoids, rather than on the whole drug. Dr O'Neill said the BMA was concerned that patients smoking cannabis could suffer both short- and long-term side effects. Most of the projects are based in universities, though some are believed to have been set up in partnership with pharmaceutical companies. In fact one drug, Nabilone, is already licensed as a nausea-suppressant for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, but it is not widely used because it is not thought to be as effective as other treatments. In a separate development last night Brian Sedgemore, the Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, attacked the handling of the Straw case by the Attorney General, John Morris. In a statement to his constituency committee he said that Mr Morris would never have sought an injunction to prevent the naming of a juvenile, as he did in this case, if that juvenile had been an ordinary teenager. "He is a government lawyer but in this case he has acted on behalf not of the Government but on behalf of the son of a cabinet minister. "That seems to me to be both a wanton waste of public funds and also an abuse of power involving a possible conflict of interest," he said.
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