Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2013, and the legal situation of cannabis it describes reflects that time. The legal status of cannabis in the United States has since changed considerably, including state legalisation of medical and recreational use and a federal rescheduling review.
Dr Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, says he was wrong to dismiss the medical potential of marijuana when he wrote an article in 2009 urging people not to vote in favour of legalising this “drug”. This very week, Gupta changed his mind about the plant and its medicinal effects, as reported by Business Insider.
After travelling around the world and meeting medical experts and medical marijuana patients, he concludes that “we have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years”, and at the same time he apologises for his own role in that deception.
The doctor gives some of the reasons that made him change his mind:
1. Marijuana laws are not based on science or on the opinions of sound scientists, and for some reason, in the absence of credible studies, marijuana was placed on Schedule I (the most restrictive category of the US drug laws), alongside other drugs.
2. In some cases, marijuana is the only solution: Gupta visited a patient in Colorado (US) who used marijuana to reduce the number of seizures. They went from 300 seizures a week to just two or three a month.
3. Marijuana is safer than other prescription drugs: Gupta says that in the United States someone dies of a prescription drug overdose every 19 minutes, but he has not found a single death caused by an overdose during marijuana therapy.
4. Doctors believe in marijuana: According to Gupta, 76% of practising doctors would prescribe marijuana to relieve the pain of women with breast cancer, among other illnesses.
5. Marijuana is nothing new in medicine. The plant was already being used before 1943 to treat neuropathic pain. For Gupta, marijuana is a medicinal plant like any other, and like any plant it must be used in the right doses.
6. The deception of the studies. Only 6% of medical studies have been funded to analyse the benefits of marijuana. The other 94% were carried out to look for the negative side of its use, so the studies have been deliberately skewed and are therefore useless.
Our view
Sanjay Gupta’s change of position is surprising, given that he has gone from a radical stance against marijuana to a radical stance against the studies that attack marijuana’s beneficial properties.
The main problem with marijuana is that it cannot be patented, and so there is no business in it as a medicinal remedy. That changes everything.
Featured image: Cubie King, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
