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The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has once again rejected attempts to reschedule cannabis and allow medical cannabis federally:
The Obama administration has denied a bid by two Democratic governors to reconsider how it treats marijuana under federal drug control laws, keeping the drug for now, at least, in the most restrictive category for U.S. law enforcement purposes. Drug Enforcement Administration chief Chuck Rosenberg says the decision is rooted in science. Rosenberg gave "enormous weight" to conclusions by the Food and Drug Administration that marijuana has "no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States," and by some measures, it remains highly vulnerable to abuse as the most commonly used illicit drug across the nation.
"This decision isn't based on danger. This decision is based on whether marijuana, as determined by the FDA, is a safe and effective medicine," he said, "and it's not." Marijuana is considered a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, alongside heroin and LSD, while other, highly addictive substances including oxycodone and methamphetamine are regulated differently under Schedule II of the law. But marijuana's designation has nothing to do with danger, Rosenberg said.
The Post article notes:
In the words of a 2015 Brookings Institution report, a move to Schedule II "would signal to the medical community that [the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health] are ready to take medical marijuana research seriously, and help overcome a government-sponsored chilling effect on research that manifests in direct and indirect ways."
However, the DEA will expand the number of locations federally licensed to grow cannabis for research from the current total of... 1: the University of Mississippi.
Related: Compassionate Investigational New Drug program
(Score: 5, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Friday August 12 2016, @02:48PM
Every pharmaceutical on the market is the best fit to the worst copy of a natural molecule.
Why? Because you cannot patent natural molecules , there is a perverse incentive to produce molecules that can *only* be synthesized artificially, with unknown binding effects...
Ever wondered where the side effects come from? In order for a medication to work it needs to be in a high enough concentration to "bind" where it needs to (quotes since it can of course be allosteric...). And since the molecule is not natural it can stick so many other places than were avoided by 3 billion years of natural selection might require. Oh, and your liver may be need as a substrate so make sure you aren't using it for any other purpose.
A rational government policy would be to have every molecule legal and pass the liability on the sellers.
Designing drugs is *hard* - designing effective ones *harder*. We should be looking at the natural molecules first...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @03:28PM
We should be looking at the natural molecules first...
People already have and they still are, but the low-hanging fruit is already taken. Natural products also have the problem of often not being a single molecule, which complicates dosing and manufacture.
As for side effects, evolution takes advantage of things that work well enough and do not select for something without pressure. Proteins are all made of the same building blocks and structure can be conserved even with divergent sequences, so perfect specificity at incredibly high concentrations (including metabolic break-down products) is not an easy problem to solve.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday August 12 2016, @04:49PM
The dirty secret is that for drugs with a high therapeutic index, exact dosing is unimportant. As for manufacture, even people who are stoned most of the time manage to 'manufacture' marijuana successfully. That's the problem for the pharmaceutical industry. You can't charge a thousand dollars/script that way.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fishybell on Friday August 12 2016, @04:56PM
So where's my immunity to snake venom, arsenic, death cap mushrooms, etc? Your post makes the assumption that "natural is always okay," and that's just not true. It's perfectly natural to be eaten by a wolf, killed by a snake, and drown in the ocean. Natural is often the exact opposite of safe: it's survival of the fittest.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by opinionated_science on Saturday August 13 2016, @06:30PM
Your post makes the assumption that "natural is always okay,"
To be clear I did NOT say "natural is safe". I pointed out that the natural molecules have a ~3 billion year adapted biochemical binding/transport/enzymatic/$biology characteristics - sometimes, it is well characterised enough we can make a functional analog. My point is safety is *not* an issue - the ability to patent a molecule IS.
Artificial molecules can have exquisitely precise function evaluated in the "lab", but ultimately the data collected from humans is vastly less precise. The assays used to evaluate pharmacological efficacy are very limited, because it is expensive. There are improving attempts to apply assays to whole cells and tissues, but this is very much research...
Hence, the same evolution that makes snake venom or mushrooms poisonous, there is the possibility that mutations might exist to survive such compounds - and that's what the data shows.
Survival of the fittest is often mis-interpreted , largely because when Darwin first published OTOOSANS the focus was explaining the focus record and the mechanism of adaption via descent and retention of beneficial traits.
"fittest" only means you won the race, after you ran it!!!! - not that it can be predicted in advance. Sure, many things appear to be correlated with reproductive fitness, often to quite extreme limits (see the finches Darwin studied...).
At the hear of my /rant, is that the movement to have ALL trials published, needs to get some traction - but the comparison with the amount of public funds used for the aggressive criminalisation of something you can grow in your garden is farce.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @07:20PM
Every pharmaceutical on the market is the best fit to the worst copy of a natural molecule.
I'll trust a man-made concrete bridge over a natural log which falls over a river.
I'll trust a man-made natural gas, solar, nuclear, or even a (ugh) coal power plant over a natural lightning storm.
I'll trust a man-made house over a natural cave.
Why should drugs be any different?
(Also, as other have noted, spider venom, nightshade, poison oak, and bubonic plague are also all natural and organic.)
(Score: 1) by mobydisk on Friday August 12 2016, @07:27PM
The basic idea you present is that drugs only exist because drug companies are evil, and every medication on earth has a natural alternative that is safer and more effective. This sums up modern medical pseudo-science very well. It is this kind of stupidity that makes people buy organic foods then wonder why they are sick from pesticides. (FYI: Organic foods have higher levels of pesticides than non-organic foods.) That is why people who decide to drink water from streams get arsenic and lead poisoning. (Hint: Those poisons are natural, and our modern water treatment plants remove it.)
produce molecules that can *only* be synthesized artificially, with unknown binding effects...
Actually, it is the other way around. We look into the binding effects of the natural molecule, then use that information to find other molecules that bind in the same or similar ways. In the end, we know more about the binding of the artificial molecules than the natural ones, because we do a lot more testing on them.
Humans started out using natural medicines. We took things from nature around us. Then we started to ask "Well, I think this tree bark helps with headaches, but it doesn't work all the time, and it takes a lot. Can I make it better?" So we try to concentrate it down, and improve it. But now we would need to chop down a forest for it to work, so we asked "what is in this bark that makes it cure headaches?" 100 years go by, and we discover acetylsalicylic acid is the cause. Well hey, I can create that from exposing fly vomit to ultraviolet light (I made that up - ex: some kinda industrial process). Great, now I have mass-produced Aspirin.
Ever wondered where the side effects come from?... avoided by 3 billion years of natural selection
This section is nonsense.
Natural medicines have side-effects too. Often we engineer drugs in an attempt to reduce the side-effects that the natural medicines. There is nothing special about a "natural" molecule that it will not bind to other receptor sites. Nature didn't naturally select perfect medicines for us.
A rational government policy would be to have every molecule legal and pass the liability on the sellers.
That is how things used to be. But we kinda got tired of the population getting poisoned slowly over a period of decades, then requiring dead people to sue defunct corporations. That's not very effective. Instead, we require testing. The big hole here is that we don't require natural molecules to be tested. So people take natural medicines that either don't work, or have worse side-effects than the industrial version.
Designing drugs is *hard* - designing effective ones *harder*. We should be looking at the natural molecules first...
That is what we do by definition. Whatever you start with is, obviously, the natural molecule. Then you refine from there. Nifty tidbit: Lots of the natural molecules we start with are the ones our body manufactures for itself!
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Friday August 12 2016, @08:22PM
I design pharmaceutical compounds for a profession. We can design anything - we can synthesis much less. Hence, all compounds that make it to market are only optimised from libraries of stuff we *can* make to a) not kill you (quickly) b) do what they say c) be better than something already sold.
Sure, you can overdose on many and probably ANY natural compounds. But Biology is all carried out at the nanoscale - our bodies do not get 1mM of $COMPOUND by flooding the body. Many processes are exquisitely timed to make ONE copy, for ONE reaction.
This is, ironically, why cancer is so hard to kill - the cells continually evolve and so unless a drug is %100 effective, the next generation will just promote a mutation to avoid
If natural molecules were tested the same way as pharms are there might be less of a perverse incentive to "develop and sell whatever we can, for as much as we can". That's fine for a company selling widgets, not so much when your health may depend on it. /rant