The National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) will provide 3,600 marijuana cigarettes to 60 AIDS patients in San Mateo County for a study on the effectiveness of AIDS-related pain in the extremities.
San Mateo County will be the first local government in the country to distribute marijuana for a medical study. The county will distribute the marijuana through public health clinics.
The study will be conducted for 12 weeks with the participants smoking marijuana for six weeks and abstaining for the study’s duration. The study will be tightly monitored, including home visits, from county health officials. Only AIDS patients who have previously used marijuana to assist in their treatment will be allowed to participate in the study.
“We don’t want to introduce marijuana to someone who hasn’t smoked it before,” said study coordinator Jonathan Mesinger.
The government-grown marijuana from the University of Mississippi, which will be used in the study, will likely contain less tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) than the marijuana patients in California cultivate on their own, buy through cannabis buyers’ clubs or on the street. Dennis Israelski, M.D. the chief of infectious diseases and chief research officer for the San Mateo County Hospitals and Clinics, said the potency level of the marijuana will not affect the study.
“Because we’re not doing a (medical) efficacy study per se, it’s not important,” Israelski said. “It will be more important to get feedback on the potency, and see how it might influence how marijuana is grown on government farms.”
“The federal government has enjoyed a monopoly on growing ‘research’ marijuana for almost 25 years,” said Allen St. Pierre, NORML Foundation Executive Director. “Due to public pressure from both medical patients and the scientific community, NIDA is finally making marijuana available for therapeutic research. None of this would be happening unless voters in eight states had not recently passed medical marijuana initiatives. It’s a great example of the people leading and the policy-makers logically following.”
For more information, please contact Allen St. Pierre, NORML Foundation Executive Director at (202) 483-8751.
