Brisbane, Queensland: Governments should grant federal exemptions to qualified patients who find therapeutic benefits from the medicinal use of marijuana, conclude a pair of researchers writing in the current issue of the journal CNS Drugs.
“The best prospects for the medical use of cannabinoids lie in finding ways to deliver THC that do not involve smoking and in developing synthetic cannabinoids that produce therapeutic effects with a minimum of psychoactive effects,” write Professors Wayne Hall and Louisa Degenhardt of the Office of Public Policy and Ethics at the University of Queensland. “While awaiting these developments, patients with specified medical conditions could be given exemptions from criminal prosecution to grow cannabis for their own use.”
Hall and Degenhardt note that governments could grant patients individual exemptions to use medical cannabis without conflicting with international drug control treaties.
Recently, the Canadian government enacted regulations exempting qualified patients from criminal marijuana penalties. To date, an estimated 580 Canadians have received federal exemption authorizing them to grow and use medical marijuana. A similar program (the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program) exempting US patients from state and federal pot laws existed during the 1970s and 80s, but was closed to new applicants in 1992. CNS Drugs is a “world leading peer reviewed publication providing independent and objective evaluations of drugs and their place in patient management.”
For more information, please contact Allen St. Pierre, Executive Director of The NORML Foundation, at (202) 483-8751. Abstracts of the article, entitled “Medical Marijuana Initiatives: Are They Justified? How Successful Are They Likely To Be?” are available online via the PubMed search engine at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/