I'm not a marijuana user, but I absolutely support the use of marijuana in the medical community. From my past reading on the subject, it is apparent that marijuana has medical benefits, and therefore should not be considered a Schedule One Controlled Substance in the U. S. Controlled Substance Act, which codifies that it has little to no medicinal use.
Today on digg.com, I saw an article that sparked my attention, and I thought I was share this with you. The results are interesting, but not all that surprising.
The article is from medicalmarijuanaprocon.org The organization promotes themself on their "About Us" tab by stating
ProCon.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public charity that has no government affiliations of any kind. Our purpose is educational. We do not express opinions on our research projects ("issue websites").
Our mission statement is:
"Promoting critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship by presenting controversial issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan primarily pro-con format."
We accomplish our mission by researching issues that we feel are complicated and important and work to present them in a balanced, comprehensive, straightforward, and primarily pro-con format for free and without advertising on the internet.
The link to their study can be found here.
I'm not going to regurgitate the results of their study in my diary, but I do recommend that you check the entirety of their article out for yourself, as it is absolutely fascinating. The premise of their article was to study the deaths from marijuana versus the deaths from 17 FDA approved drugs, 12 of which are often prescribed by physicians in lieu of cannabis.
The drugs use in the comparison that are prescribed in lieu of cannabis were the antiemetics Compazine, Reglan, Marinol, Zofran, Anzemet, Kytril and Tigan; the antispasmodics Baclofen and Zanaflex;and the antipsychotics Haldol, Lithium and Neurontin.
They also selected 5 other well known FDA approved drugs; Ritalin, Wellbutrin, Adderall, Viagra and Vioxx.
They indicated in their background section that:
We chose Jan. 1, 1997 as our starting date as it is the beginning of the first year following the Nov. 1996 approval of the first state medical marijuana laws (such as California's Proposition 215). The FDA reports we read from Sep. 13, 2005 to Oct. 14, 2005 included drug deaths "to present", which was the date each report was compiled for our request. We cut off the counting as of June 30, 2005 to provide a uniform end-date to the various reports.
On Aug. 25, 2005 the FDA sent us 12 CDs and five printed reports containing copies of their Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) report on each drug requested. These reports included all adverse events reported to the FDA, only a portion of which included deaths. We manually counted the number of deaths reported on each drug from the FDA-supplied information.
A review of the FDA Adverse Events reports also revealed some deaths where marijuana was at least a concomitant drug (a drug also used at the time of death) in some cases. On Oct. 14, 2005 we used the Freedom of Information Act to request a copy of the adverse events reported deaths for marijuana/cannabis. We received those reports on Aug. 3, 2006 in the form of three additional CDs.
The result?
The 17 FDA approved medications, from January 1st, 1997 until June 30th, 2005 were the primary suspect in 10,008. They were the secondary suspect for another 1,679 deaths.
Marijuana?
0 primary and 279 secondary.
I'll say no more. That should speak for itself. Please check out the article in its entirety.
