Ya got trouble right here in Reefer City

Joshua BenNun;1803020 said:

I don't mean the Reefer Madness kind, but the opposite: making absurd claims for the benefits of marijuana.

The grossest such myth I see purveyed here is that marijuana can cure cancer. It can't. You're risking your life if you have cancer and rely on marijuana for treatment. I'm not referring here to claims that cannabis alleviates pain, nausea and lack of appetite in cancer patients; some of those claims are reasonably well-founded, even if they haven't been supported by large, sophisticated clinical trials. I'm referring to the claim that various forms of cannabis are effective at triggering remission of the disease, and therefore that cannabis alone is sufficient medicine to pull through.

Some cancers are so indolent that they are discovered accidentally when very small, and a patient can get by for years without conventional treatment. With the detection methods now available, early findings of very small tumors create a significant pool of people who have a diagnosis of cancer but remain well for many years, even though they do not attempt treatment. If they are smoking marijuana as treatment for their cancer, it will appear to be working, but this will be an artifact of the common uncritical belief that cancer is swiftly progressive and invariably fatal. Using marijuana makes one feel better, so the marijuana must have made the disease go away. That's snake-oil reasoning. (Indeed, cannabis was a common ingredient in the patent medicines hawked in the 19th century.) If a tumor is capable of metastasizing (and you don't die of something else first), sooner or later it will metastasize, and then the chance of a complete recovery drops sharply.

I'm away of recent reports that THC has been shown in vitro to inhibit some tumor cells. That may be perfectly good science as far as it goes, but every researcher knows that in vitro and in vivo are two very different things; living systems are overwhelmingly more complex and difficult to understand (and predict) than the simple, precisely designed systems that can be set up in glassware. The inhibitory effect of THC may be confined to a few forms of cancer, or it may work only within certain genotypes (a rapidly growing recognition with respect to some conventional forms of treatment). These very preliminary reports would be the wrong basis on which to bet the farm. Cannabis proponents are fond of pointing out that the plant has been used medicinally for at least 5,000 years. True; and cancer has has been a fatal human and animal ailment for that long. If there were a straightforward relationship between cannabis use and tumor shrinkage or disappearance, it would have been noted long ago. Even more telling, regular users over many years shouldn't ever get cancer. But they do. Ironically, they tend to get lung cancer. Marijuana smoke has more carcinogens than tobacco smoke does.

I can't prove it, but I suspect that this cancer-cannabis myth owes a lot to the economic unavailability of science-based health care to so many Americans. Cancer diagnosis and treatment aren't emergency room business. Cancer has to be managed as a long-term condition, which means one needs insurance. Now there are 45 million Americans without health insurance; even under full implementation of Obamacare, between 20 and 30 million will remain uninsured. When people are too poor to get real medical care, they turn to inexpensive mythology, in the forms of nutrition (there are numberless diets claimed to "stop cancer in its tracks"), herbal remedies (cannabis is an example), faith healing, and absurd interventions such as orgone or laetrile. It's normal for people to want to hold onto any kind of hope, but however important a factor hope may be in any recovery, it isn't enough to stop a massive cell derangement proliferating throughout the body and destroying the normal functioning of tissues and organs.

But, at bottom, what supports the marijuana-cures-cancer myth and many other unproven claims for the plant is simply wishful thinking. Pot users want to believe that their favorite recreation is beneficial, or at least not harmful. They suffer the cognitive dissonance of worrying about the drug's potential health risks (including cancer) and its illegality, low social approval, and the disdain with which medicine regards it. Just as it makes it easier to hold one's (perhaps bizarre) religious or political beliefs by viewing those who do not share them as dishonest or deluded, it's easier to keep smoking pot if one believes that there is a conspiracy to spread disinformation about this "really" helpful herb. Pot users, like everyone else, suffer from confirmation bias. It is easier for them to believe the incredible anecdotal favorable claim than to review all the counterexamples or to accept that there really isn't much science proving many of the claims about marijuana.

The criminalization of marijuana has had profoundly negative effects on research and development of its potential medical benefits. And there is evidence that it helps some people with some symptoms, particularly nausea and lack of appetite. But that is a long, long way from arresting a grave progressive illness like cancer. If you or someone you know has cancer, regard pot as a mere palliative, something that might help the patient feel better. But it won't make the patient well, and it may, tragically, cause him or her not to seek treatments (which, granted, are expensive and sometimes painful or disfiguring) that might have succeeded.

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