x-p: Regular Cannabis Smoking not associated with lung cancer

[RainDog]

22. Here's the "thought experiment"

If someone could take themselves out of their time and place and imagine that scientists decided to look at a plant that indigenous cultures have used for centuries based upon their claims it is useful for this or that illness, I doubt we would see the reactions cannabis as medicine gets - because they wouldn't have to deal with 70-plus years of lies about something.

We do have an example of this - willow tree bark.

Willow tree bark is, in fact, one of the most amazing plant-based medicines known. It's used to treat a variety of symptoms of different diseases (fever, aches and pains, swelling of joints, and is even recommended as a daily supplement for people with heart disease in small amounts because it thins the blood.)

Here's the list of uses. May treat: Pain, Stroke, Inflammation, Fever, Gout, Osteoarthritis, Rheumatoid arthritis, Rheumatic fever. May prevent: Pain, Heart attack, Pre-eclampsia, Transient ischemic attack, Cerebral infarction.

Not only that... but at least one doctor has talked about the use of this medicine for things like removing sweat stains from fabrics... really. To add to shampoo to treat dandruff, as a paste on skin inflammations, including bug bites. Strangely, people have also noted it can be used to help car batteries in an emergency, and can even be used as drywall filler! crazy stuff. outrageous.

Of course, willow tree bark is not recommended for hemophiliacs because of its blood thinning properties... and it's no longer actually used in the form of willow tree bark by most people- its medically efficacious component - acetylsalicylic acid, has been extracted from the plant and is available over-the-counter as aspirin.

Yet it has all these properties ascribed to it and is considered a "wonder drug" by the New York Times... that notes its potential use as a preventive medication for cancer.

The 2,000-Year-Old Wonder Drug

New reports about aspirin’s benefits in cancer prevention are just as convincing. In 2011, British researchers, analyzing data from some 25,000 patients in eight long-term studies, found that a small, 75-milligram dose of aspirin taken daily for at least five years reduced the risk of dying from common cancers by 21 percent.

In March, The Lancet published two more papers bolstering the case for this ancient drug. The first, reviewing five long-term studies involving more than 17,000 patients, found that a daily low-dose aspirin lowered the risk of getting adenocarcinomas — common malignant cancers that develop in the lungs, colon and prostate — by an average of 46 percent.

In the second, researchers at Oxford and other centers compared patients who took aspirin with those who didn’t in 51 different studies. Investigators found that the risk of dying from cancer was 37 percent lower among those taking aspirin for at least five years. In a subsection of the study group, three years of daily aspirin use reduced the risk of developing cancer by almost 25 percent when compared with the aspirin-free control group.

The data are screaming out to us. Aspirin, one of the oldest remedies on the planet, helps prevent heart disease through what is likely to be a variety of mechanisms, including keeping blood clots from forming. And experts believe it helps prevent cancer, in part, by dampening an immune response called inflammation.

Yet, write these same things about cannabis, and suddenly you are talking about snake oil, to some. Cannabis, too, is one of the oldest remedies on the planet, like aspirin. Why don't people attack articles about the medical uses of aspirin, I wonder? The Mayo Clinic notes there is good scientific evidence for some uses for cannabis, while others need more studies - but it doesn't discount those uses - it just says we need more data. This, I guess, makes the Mayo Clinic a purveyor of snake oil, as well.

People believe propaganda and they resist opposing information because it forces them to consider that they have been "bamboozled" by the agencies in this nation that were supposed to exist to protect people rather than lie to them to maintain a bigger lie.

If cannabis did not have this history associated with the repression of minorities in this nation (Latin Americans and African Americans, first and foremost), if it had not been adopted by students in the 1960s as a demonstration of the lies from the govt. (following their "beat" ancestry), who were then singled out by Nixon... people would read information about this plant and go... interesting. A medicine that has been used for thousands of years also has these uses...

When the govt. lifts the restrictions on the study of cannabis, we'll be able to get more information about medical uses, we'll have more studies - but one thing is clear - and this is that cannabis has been used as an analgesic, like aspirin, and as an antiemetic for centuries.