Dr. Donald Abrams

Dr. Donald Abrams

Tells Us How Medical Marijuana Helps AIDS Patients

Transcipt-video follows: So we did that study, and we showed that there was no damage to the level of the aids drug in the blood stream to the patients immune system or to the level of the virus in their blood stream over 21 days of smoking a government cigarette 3 times a day.

And that led us then to move on and do other research looking to see if whether or not cannabis had any medicinal benefit for patients with HIV. Particularly we were fortunate in California when we had a budget surplus that one of our state senators established a center for medicinal cannabis research at the university of California. And that center worked out a deal with NIDA so that NIDA the only legal source of marijuana for research in the country would supply investigators who had been favorably peer reviewed by the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research to do clinical trials looking at the effectiveness of smoked marijuana.

So I submitted a study to look at marijuana in patients with the painful HIV related peripheral neuropathy, which is the damage to the nerves in the hands and feet. For which we really didn’t have any treatment. Opioid analgesics don’t work well. We tried acupuncture. Most people use anti seizure medications.

And when we looked at our results the effectiveness of cannabis in that situation is comparable to the effectiveness of the drug that is most commonly used the anti seizure medications. Now do I think the government will change cannabis schedule 1 classification which means it has no accepted medical use, on the basis of a study of 25 patients smoking cannabis and 25 smoking placebo. No, I think I have been around long enough to know that’s not gonna do it.”