Researchers are finding evidence that marijuana can lessen neuropathic pain.

It seems to me that a compassionate person shouldn't care what substances sick people use to relieve their suffering. So I've never understood the knee-jerk resistance to allowing cancer patients (among others) to smoke a little marijuana. One person I know used marijuana while undergoing chemo for breast cancer: She was unable to keep down ordinary foods, especially gluten -- and said pot significantly reduced her nausea (10+ years later, she's still alive).

So it's good to see there are efforts to assess marijuana's medical benefits using traditional scientific methods. The L.A. Times has a story about several research studies: Recent evidence suggests that it can reduce neuropathic pain "in which burning sensations occur and simple touch can feel like hurt. It is unaffected by aspirin-like drugs and fairly resistant to stronger analgesics such as opiates." Not-so-fun fact: There are roughly 100 different types of neuropathy, many of them horrific. Someone close to me suffered greatly for years from neuropathy, and eventually lost the use of her legs.

The L.A. Times continues "In a 2007 study on neuropathic pain related to HIV infection, 50 patients smoked marijuana cigarettes three times a day or marijuana cigarettes from which active ingredients had been extracted.... The results, published in the journal Neurology, showed a 34% reduction in ratings of pain in the marijuana group compared with 17% in the placebo group over five days of treatment. Another study in 44 patients reported in June in the Journal of Pain found that marijuana alleviated neuropathic pain arising from a variety of conditions, including spinal-cord injury and diabetes.... Average pain ratings before smoking were 55 on a 100-point scale and decreased by 46% in both treatment groups and by 27% in the placebo group one hour after the last puff."

The so-called War on Drugs here in the U.S. has been expensive, and is still costing us dearly -- prisons are packed with recreational users, and the wisdom of stiff prison sentences (rather than rehab) for minor drug crimes is only now being addressed (see my recent post on the Divert program). I hate to see policies that prescribe uniform treatment of all people with illegal substances: What kind of world is it where dying cancer patients are compared to habitual criminals?