Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs From: [a--ld--a] at [netcom.com] (Patrick Kane) Subject: Reason: Medicinal Marijuana Date: Wed, 6 Apr 1994 13:29:11 GMT Marijuana has some very important possible medical uses. This month's issue of reason addresses the FDA's position on medicinal marijuana. An excerpt follows: -------------- Subhead: The FDA seems open to the idea of medical marijuana. A pharmaceutical company typically spends some $230 million and a decade or longer to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration for a new medicine. But Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), expects to complete the process within two years at a cost of about $500,000. To be sure, the drug he has in mind--marijuana-- s not exactly new. Encouraged by the FDA's 1992 approval of MDMA research with human subjects, Doblin asked the agency's Pilot Drug Evaluation Staff what it would take to make marijuana available by prescription. With the FDA's guidance, MAPS developed a research plan, including a large, multi-site clinical study and a series of individual trials, to test marijuana's effectiveness in treat ing AIDS wasting syndrome. In October the FDA approved a protocol for the large study, to be supervised by Donald Abrams, research director of the San Francisco Community Consortium, which coordinates AIDS research in the Bay Area. Doblin says the protocol was submitted, revised, and approved within a week. "The FDA has expedited this," he says. "The FDA is being extremely helpful." He attributes what he calls "a monumental shift at the FDA" to the waning of the drug war and the influence of Commissioner David Kessler. He says Kessler seems sympathetic to patients seeking legal access to marijuana. -------------- So begins this issue's featured article from Reason magazine. This article and others from Outside Magazine and additional publications can be viewed at no charge on The Electronic Newsstand, a service which collects articles, editorials, and table of contents from over 70 magazines and provides them to the Global Internet community. Access to The Electronic Newsstand is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via Gopher, an information navigation and retrieval technology from the University of Minnesota. For those without a local Gopher client program, The Electronic Newsstand provides a telnet account which will allow you to use a text based Gopher client to access our service. To access The Electronic Newsstand, via Local Gopher Client: Hostname: gopher.internet.com Port: 2100 via the Gopher Home Menu at U of Minn: Other Gopher and Information Servers/ North America/ USA/ General/ The Electronic Newsstand (tm) via Gopher Link Information: Name=The Electronic Newsstand Type=1 Port=2100 Path=1/ Host=gopher.internet.com via Telnet: Hostname: gopher.internet.com Loginname: enews Password: via World Wide Web: URL: gopher://gopher.internet.com/ If you have any suggestions on how we might improve this service, or need more information, please email [s--a--f] at [enews.com] --The Electronic Newsstand Staff