[Sativa]

History hasn't been kind to cannabis, a researcher at Dalhousie University lamented last year. The drug is one of the most used worldwide, but misconceptions about its therapeutic potential and safety continue. More research is on the way, but marijuana's true rehabilitation could come from, of all things, a new diet drug that works by deactivating the same therapeutic neural network in our bodies that marijuana activates.

Whether or not you've ever tried marijuana, whether or not you've inhaled, you have your own cannabis infrastructure, a grid of nerve receptors that changes your experience of pain, sleep and appetite. We all make our own natural cannabinoids, marijuana-like chemical compounds. "If you're hungry," says Dr. Mark Ware, a professor at McGill University's pain centre, "they're probably active in you right now."

But what if you're hungry too often, as are 95 per cent of Canada's 2.25 million Type 2 diabetics whose excess weight aggravates their disease and costs the economy one of every seven health care dollars it spends? Looking for an anti-munchies drug, researchers found the synthetic compound rimonabant, a cannabinoid blocker. (It switches off the same neural network that our own cannabinoids and marijuana turn on.) So long as you stay on it, the drug reduces appetite, blood sugar, waist size and weight (by about five per cent), while it raises HDL ("good") cholesterol. Rimonabant was approved in Europe last year. Negotiations with the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. are underway. It could be available in Canada next year.

In a dearth of effective weight-loss drugs, will there be a run on it? "It's not a bikini drug," says Dr. Josée Dubuc-Lissoir of Sanofi-Aventis, the French manufacturer. She says an education campaign will limit prescribing it to fighting diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Rimonabant will likely be as popular here as it's been in Europe, and it may well help policy-makers understand that the body's cannabinoid network holds marvellous therapeutic secrets that could still be better understood -- including the way marijuana helps the sick and dying.



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Source: Maclean's
Author: DAWN RAE DOWNTON
Contact: Macleans.ca - contactus - Contact
Copyright: 2007 Maclean's
Website: Marijuana and the munchies | Macleans.ca - Science - Health