cannabisnews.com: Studying AIDS Patients Who Use Their Own Marijuana





Studying AIDS Patients Who Use Their Own Marijuana
Posted by FoM on May 30, 2000 at 09:55:43 PT
Avoiding the Obstacles By Lila Guterman
Source: The Chronicle
One researcher chose not to leap the many hurdles to using the government's supply of marijuana to test the plant's medical benefits. She decided to study people already smoking cannabis for medicinal purposes, who had procured the drug from their own sources. 
Kathleen Boyle, a social psychologist at the Drug Abuse Research Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, is nearing completion of a study of 125 AIDS patients who smoke marijuana legally under California's Proposition 215, which exempts people from arrest for use and cultivation of the plant if their doctors recommend it. Many of the patients get their marijuana from the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center, a nonprofit organization that provides marijuana and support services to patients. Ms. Boyle has conducted in-depth interviews, and follow-ups one year later, with the patients. "The marijuana helps people not just to stay on their regimen [of medicine], but to keep up with their lives," she says. Though her study is not a placebo-controlled, clinical trial, the sine qua non of medical research, she notes that it has more real-world significance than one in which patients spend a month alone in a hospital lab, as in Donald I. Abrams's clinical trial at the University of California at San Francisco. "I think we need all kinds of studies to be done," she says. Because Ms. Boyle did not apply to use the federal supply of marijuana in her trial, she experienced much less difficulty in getting her study financed and under way. Her study is supported by the University of California's Universitywide AIDS Research Program, which she says approved her project quickly, taking about four months to review it. The review board on her campus did raise questions. "U.C.L.A. was concerned because [marijuana] is still considered a contraband substance, so they wanted to make sure that the research subjects would not be threatened at all," she says. "My background is research with street drugs: crack cocaine or heroin. Marijuana didn't seem very threatening to me." Ms. Boyle knows of no other studies likes hers. People to whom she talks about it often "giggle and don't take it seriously when you tell them that [patients] don't want to get stoned," she says. "The people who voted for Proposition 215 and who are in favor of it sometimes don't help medical marijuana as a cause, because they trivialize it. They make it into a holdover from the 60's. It is a serious medicine and should be thought of as a medicine. Nobody snickers if you tell them you're taking a Tylenol with codeine." Issue Dated June 2, 2000Section: Research & Publishing, Page: A22Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education Los Angeles Cannabis Research Centerhttp://www.lacbc.org/CannabisNews Medical Marijuana Archives:http://cannabisnews.com/news/list/medical.shtmlJoin an online discussion of the impediments to research on the medical uses of marijuana:http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2000/marijuana/marijuana.htm
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