April hosts an abundance of awareness days – World Autism Awareness Day, Earth Day, and World Health Day – but declaring it National Cancer Control Month is the cherry topper in this age of disease, technology, and medicine.
It is estimated that half a million Americans lose their lives to cancer, and three times that are diagnosed with the devastating illness. The number of annual cancer deaths continues to drop, but the establishment of this month is a good reminder that more can be done to prevent, detect and treat cancer. Thus, in observance of National Cancer Control Month, United Patients Group will examine the effectiveness of cannabis-based cancer therapy and how federal laws deny this to those in need of it.
In his 2013 Presidential Proclamation, President Obama shared his re-commitment to
“progress toward effective cancer control” and that cancer research has made significant advances for patients, but why is it that marijuana is misclassified on the drug schedule as a Schedule 1 substance?
Schedule 1 substances are defined as possessing the following characteristics:
A. The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
B. The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
C. There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.
Within the last year, studies from the scientific community have found that naturally-occurring compounds in cannabis are effective in cancer cell destruction, tumor control, and healthy cell protection. In October, a scientific pair from the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute discovered that cannabidiol, a compound derived from marijuana, can help stop the growth of aggressive brain, breast, and prostate cancer cells. And more recently, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) also shared similar thought in that “cannabinoids may cause anti-tumor effects by various mechanisms”.
With reports like these, and with real-life examples of cancer patients like Cash Hyde, who
beat cancer into remission twice while using cannabis-based medicine, there is no doubt that marijuana continues to prove its worth in the medicinal world. Now is the time to challenge the presidential administration’s efforts to control cancer and ask: How will they tackle such a promise, and why do they continue to ignore the demonstrated medical benefits of cannabis in treating cancer patients?
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