United Press International - October 19, 2002
Michael Smith, UPI Science News

The U.S. marijuana, supplied by the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md., has been delivered to researchers in Toronto, according to infectious diseases specialist Kevin Gough of St. Michael's Hospital, the study's lead investigator.

Gough said researchers are testing the drug -- and the methods they will use to study its effects -- before enrolling the first of 32 patients. He said results of the study should be available within a year.

The study is the first in Canada to examine the effects of marijuana on patients with the human immunodeficiency virus.

"There is so little good-quality research in this area," Gough told United Press International. "What we're trying to do is to start to answer some of the questions."

The study is using marijuana grown at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, even though Canada has its own government plantation in the western city of Flin Flon, Manitoba, where the drug is grown hydroponically inside an abandoned mine.

The Canadian health ministry says its marijuana is not ready for research, however, because it is being grown from seeds seized by police, rather than from standardized seeds such as those that have been used by the NIDA for several years.

"We're now characterizing, testing, and grading the product," ministry spokesman Andrew Swift told UPI. In any case, he added, the fledgling Canadian pot crop was not ready when Gough and colleagues began designing their study.

The NIDA marijuana, on the other hand, has long been available to researchers and comes in pre-determined strengths, depending on how much it contains of the active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol or THC. For the Canadian study, the drug has 8, 4, 2, or 0 percent THC.

NIDA spokesman Steven Gust, special assistant to the director, said there are between 10 and 15 medical marijuana trials proceeding "at some stage" in the United States, all using drugs supplied by the agency's Mississippi farm.

Gust said the evidence concerning the medical use of marijuana is still scanty, but the current studies should produce more data. "In a year or two, there should be some pretty interesting studies coming out that should help improve the database," Gust told UPI.

The Canadian study is a pilot program intended to see if there is enough evidence to support a large-scale clinical trial in several cities, Gough said.

The 32 patients will be given 25-milligram pellets of marijuana -- "just enough to fit in the end of a pipe," Gough said -- in one of the four strengths. During their eight weeks in the trial, patients will use all four types, although they will not be told which they are smoking.

In many drug trials, an inactive substance is used as a control, or placebo, but patients are not told whether they are taking the test drug or the placebo. In this study, the 0-percent-THC marijuana is being tested to see if it can be used as a placebo in future studies, Gough said.

"The question is, can people tell whether they're actually receiving THC or not?" he said.

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