As medicinal marijuana advocates up their efforts in Florida, it would be the stuff of their dreams for a physician celebrity to announce a change of heart on the matter. And today, that happened.
In a feature piece for CNN titled, “Why I changed my mind on weed” chief medical correspondent and neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta shared his yearlong transformation of opinion on the medical use of marijuana, and describes his feeling that Americans have been “terribly and systematically misled” on its potentials.
Gupta had long been an opponent of medicinal marijuana, and penned an article for TIME magazine in 2009 stating as such.
“Well, I am here to apologize,” he wrote in Thursday’s story. “I apologize because I didn’t look hard enough, until now. I didn’t look far enough. I didn’t review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis. Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof.”
Yet in his own research, instead of uncovering sound scientific proof for marijuana’s schedule 1 designation, Gupta found that drug regulators lacked the science to back it up, and had disregarded what he sees as “very legitimate medical applications” for marijuana.
In part, Gupta writes, the original classification of marijuana as a schedule 1 substance in 1970 was based not because of sound science, but because of its absence. Even today, he writes, only about 6% of about 20,000 current US marijuana studies investigate its medical benefits, while the rest are designed to identify harm.
“That imbalance paints a highly distorted picture,” wrote Gupta.
Further, it seems, few of the studies view marijuana — its uses or harms — comparatively to other regulated treatments. For example, Gupta highlights neuropathic pain, which is miserable and difficult to treat: “While marijuana has long been documented to be effective for this awful pain, the most common medications prescribed today come from the poppy plant, including morphine, oxycodone and dilaudid. Here is the problem. Most of these medications don’t work very well for this kind of pain, and tolerance is a real problem.”
Gupta goes on to discuss various other inconsistencies in the regulation of medicinal marijuana relative to other substances, and lays out the challenges that researchers face in conducting legitimate marijuana studies.
His column is an eye-opening, refreshingly honest look at the political and medical contexts in which marijuana policy now sits.
“Looking forward, I am especially intrigued by studies like those in Spain and Israel looking at the anti-cancer effects of marijuana and its components. I’m intrigued by the neuro-protective study by Lev Meschoulam in Israel, and research in Israel and the United States on whether the drug might help alleviate symptoms of PTSD,” Gupta writes. “I promise to do my part to help, genuinely and honestly, fill the remaining void in our knowledge.”
In July, Florida’s Secretary of State gave approval for signature gathering to begin on a proposed medical marijuana legalization constitutional amendment, which would need about 700,000 signatures to be eligible for inclusion on the 2014 ballot, at which point it would require a 60% vote to be successful. Considering that a similar amendment passed in Arizona in 2010 by just 50.1% of the vote, advocates can sure use some more science on their side.
Karen Cyphers, PhD, is a public policy researcher, political consultant, and mother to three daughters. She can be reached at [email protected].
