FDA Approves Pot! (the chemical version)

I let this pass last week, but I've been meaning to come back to it when I got a few spare moments (which inevitably come around 10:30 p.m. at night when I'm having a glass of red wine to help me get ready for Jon Stewart's Daily Show).

While a few of the newspaper accounts about the FDA statement on medical marijuana (in response to pressure from Capitol Hill) mentioned this fact, it bears repeating: the FDA has already approved the active ingredient in pot as a drug. Unimed's Marinol (dronabinol) is the chemical THC. It's been approved to combat AIDS wasting and as an anti-nausea agent for people on chemotherapy.

Hmmm. It gives you the munchies and settles your stomach. Sounds like pot to me.

A careful reading of the FDA-approved label (reprinted here), however, provides good reason for testing whether smoking dope may have advantages over using its chemical extract. The clinical trial proving it rebuilt appetites for people suffering from AIDS wasting showed that the effects of the pill version did not kick in until two weeks after the onset of therapy. In other words, there's a trade off. You get lung cancer-causing tars with the dope, but you get the munchies a lot quicker. That's a cost-benefit analysis suitable for FDA analysis.

If I were dying of AIDS or cancer, it would seem like a reasonable trade off to me. Indeed, I spent some time this year with a friend who smoked a lot of marijuana to reduce his need for heavy narcotics as he lay dying of pancreatic cancer. It gave his family many more positive moments together during his final months than would otherwise have been the case. I doubt that would have been the case had he been taking THC as an antiemetic.