Reply #157: It's about selectively targeting cancer cells

[hokies4ever]

The best novel treatments find specific receptors on cancer cells and use them to attack those cells. When designing new drugs, you want them to target specific cells, not all cells in the body. Research in this field is actually very advanced. If you can target a specific receptor of a cell, then a drug will selectively target that cell many orders of magnitude more than other cells.

Think of the analogy of using a smart bomb to attack a target and minimize civilian casualties. You want the bomb to be specifically guided toward the intended target. You don't want to just carpet bomb everything to kill the target. Designing a new carpet bomb that doesn't kill as many civilians just wouldn't make sense, because you should be designing a smart bomb.

Marijuana killing other cells less doesn't make it that attractive of a cancer drug, because the 'less' really won't make much of a difference unless the drug specifically targets cancer cells and avoids exposure to other cells. If marijuana was found to bind receptors on cancer cells, then that would be a completely different story and every major drug company would find a way to market it. Often you can take a chemical compound, modify it slightly, and still get the same result without the hurdles that the original compound might have. Also, you should keep in mind that much of drug research is funded by private companies, so I think that the concept of the government preventing the pharmaceutical industry from finding ways to use marijuana to cure cancer is scientific low-information hysteria.