New York judge with cancer makes case for marijuana
A cancer-stricken judge in New York has become an unlikely voice in support of legalizing the use of medical marijuana with the admission that he smokes pot to ease the side-effects of his treatments.
Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach, who is being treated for pancreatic cancer, wrote in a New York Times article on Thursday that he had been using marijuana provided by friends at “great personal risk” to help him cope with the nausea, sleeplessness and loss of appetite from chemotherapy treatments.
“This is not a law-and-order issue; it is a medical and a human rights issue,” wrote Reichbach, 65, who has spent 21 years on the bench in Kings County Supreme Court, and continues to hear cases even as he receives cancer treatment.
In the past, admitting to taking a few puffs of marijuana has been enough to derail some judges’ careers. U.S. appeals court Judge Douglas Ginsburg saw his nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court go up in smoke in 1987 after admitting he had used marijuana several times in the 1960s and 1970s.
In 2011, a Georgia judge was removed from the bench for various infractions including publicly admitting to smoking pot regularly.
Does Marijuana Cause Cancer?
The greatest health danger of marijuana is due to smoking, like cigarettes. While THC is a relatively safe drug, smoked marijuana is hazardous. Careful scientific analyses have identified at least 6,000 of the same chemicals in marijuana smoke as are present in tobacco (Iversen, 2008). The main difference between the two is THC in marijuana and nicotine in tobacco. Otherwise, smoked marijuana and smoked tobacco are chemically very similar.
Furthermore, one of the most potent carcinogens in tobacco smoke, benzo(?)pyrene, is present in even greater amounts in marijuana smoke. As marijuana smokers frequently inhale and hold the smoke in their lungs, this increases the amount of tar deposited in the respiratory system by about a factor of four. No wonder, research shows that approximately 20% of regular pot smokers (and it only takes 3 to 4 joints a day) complain of chronic bronchitis, coughing and excess mucus (Tashkin, 2005).
A burning tobacco cigarette can be thought of as a “miniature chemical factory” (Iverson, 2008). The process of combustion creates extra chemicals on top of those already present in the plant material. Smoke consists of two components. They are minute droplets in the particulate phase and volatile gases in the vapor phase. Experienced pot smokers inhale more deeply and hold their breath longer when compared to cigarette smokers. Wu el al. (1988) compared the amount of particulate matter (tar) and carbon monoxide absorbed in volunteers who smoked both pot and tobacco. Compared to tobacco, smoking pot resulted in 5 times the amount of absorption of carbon monoxide and four to five times more tar being retained in the lungs.
New York is not among the U.S. 16 states and the District of Columbia that allow medical marijuana. Cannabis remains an illegal narcotic under federal law.
Under New York’s Code for Judicial Conduct, judges are required to “respect and comply with the law.” First-time possession of less than 25 grams of marijuana is punishable by a $100 maximum fine.
Marijuana cures cancer – US government has known since 1974
The term medical marijuana took on dramatic new meaning in February 2000 when researchers in Madrid announced they had destroyed incurable brain cancer tumors in rats by injecting them with THC, the active ingredient in cannabis.
The Madrid study marks only the second time that THC has been administered to tumor-bearing animals; the first was a Virginia investigation 26 years ago. In both studies, the THC shrank or destroyed tumors in a majority of the test subjects.
Most Americans don’t know anything about the Madrid discovery. Virtually no U.S. newspapers carried the story, which ran only once on the AP and UPI news wires, on Feb. 29.
The ominous part is that this isn’t the first time scientists have discovered that THC shrinks tumors. In 1974 researchers at the Medical College of Virginia, who had been funded by the National Institute of Health to find evidence that marijuana damages the immune system, found instead that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice - lung and breast cancer, and a virus-induced leukemia.
The DEA quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further cannabis/tumor research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on the events in his book, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes”. In 1976 President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies, who set out - unsuccessfully - to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the “high.”
The Madrid researchers reported in the March issue of “Nature Medicine” that they injected the brains of 45 rats with cancer cells, producing tumors whose presence they confirmed through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). On the 12th day they injected 15 of the rats with THC and 15 with Win-55,212-2 a synthetic compound similar to THC.
“All the rats left untreated uniformly died 12-18 days after glioma (brain cancer) cell inoculation … Cannabinoid (THC)-treated rats survived significantly longer than control rats. THC administration was ineffective in three rats, which died by days 16-18. Nine of the THC-treated rats surpassed the time of death of untreated rats, and survived up to 19-35 days. Moreover, the tumor was completely eradicated in three of the treated rats.” The rats treated with Win-55,212-2 showed similar results.
The Spanish researchers, led by Dr. Manuel Guzman of Complutense University, also irrigated healthy rats’ brains with large doses of THC for seven days, to test for harmful biochemical or neurological effects. They found none.
“Careful MRI analysis of all those tumor-free rats showed no sign of damage related to necrosis, edema, infection or trauma … We also examined other potential side effects of cannabinoid administration. In both tumor-free and tumor-bearing rats, cannabinoid administration induced no substantial change in behavioral parameters such as motor coordination or physical activity. Food and water intake as well as body weight gain were unaffected during and after cannabinoid delivery. Likewise, the general hematological profiles of cannabinoid-treated rats were normal. Thus, neither biochemical parameters nor markers of tissue damage changed substantially during the 7-day delivery period or for at least 2 months after cannabinoid treatment ended.”
While Reichbach’s editorial amounts to an admission he broke the law, his story is more likely to elicit admiration than condemnation, judicial ethics experts said.