White House Rejects Cannabis Research and Promotes More Propaganda
The White House Drug Policy blog just released an article about recent medical research from the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand (MRINZ). The institute has just concluded a study where they found that one joint a day apparently causes more cancer than a pack of cigarettes a day.
The lung cancer study was conducted on 79 patients in New Zealand. The risk of the disease rose 8% for each year of smoking one joint a day, and 7% for each year of smoking a packet of cigarettes a day.
Researchers at the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand admitted it was a small study, but said nonetheless “it shows clearly that long-term cannabis smoking increases lung cancer risk”. (emphasis added)
The funny thing about it is that this is a direct contradiction to a larger, more through study conducted a few years ago.Dr. Donald Tashkin of UCLA and his research team concluded:
The new findings “were against our expectations,” said Donald Tashkin of the University of California at Los Angeles, a pulmonologist who has studied marijuana for 30 years.
“We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use,” he said. “What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect.”
And this is coming from the largest case-control study ever done, involving over 2,000 people. Not only that, but in the original study, the difference in risk was 1%! Another thing I found very interesting was where the MRINZ gets its money from. Well, a quick check of their Project Grants page gives away some very interesting names.
AstraZeneca - major pharmacuetical company and makers of controversial drug, Seroquel
GlaxoSmithKline - major pharmacuetical company, makers of the very dangerous Paxil, and well-known industry bullies
Novartis - huge pharmacuetical company, makers of Ritalin and Trileptal, and previous owners of Gerber (?)
Yeah - so now this whole deal makes sense.
(via Drug WarRant)
Update: Found some more interesting details on this study. Turns out that it was even less important than I thought. The amount of people that they list in the MRINZ study is 79. But that was the entire group.
Cannabis smoking was not associated with a significantly increased risk of lung cancer [except for] those with the highest tertile of use.
The tertile group? 14 people and 4 controls. That’s insane - that’s not a study, that’s a flawed inference.
Tags: AstraZeneca, cannabis, drug war, drugs, GlaxoSmithKline, health, lies, MRINZ, Novartis, politics, prohibition, science, studyRelated articles
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