http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/20008/Clinical research touted by the journal of the American Association for Cancer Research that shows marijuana's components can inhibit the growth of cancerous brain tumors is the latest in a long line of studies demonstrating the drug's potential as an anti-cancer agent. Not familiar with it? You're not alone.
Despite the value of these studies, both in terms of the treatment of life-threatening illnesses and as items of news – the latest being that performed by researchers at Madrid's Complutense University that found cannabis restricts the blood supply to Gliobastoma multiforme tumors, an aggressive brain tumor that kills some 7,000 people in the United States per year – U.S. media coverage of them has been almost non-existent.
Why the blackout? For starters, all of these medical cannabis studies were conducted overseas. Secondly, not one of them has been acknowledged by the U.S. government.
This wasn't always the case. In fact, the first experiment documenting pot's anti-tumor effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at the behest of the U.S. government. The results of that study, reported in an Aug. 18, 1974, Washington Post newspaper feature, were that marijuana's psychoactive component, THC, "slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent."
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