By MATT SEDENSKY, Associated Press Writer Matt Sedensky, Associated Press Writer – 42 mins ago

MIAMI – In her 88 years, Florence Siegel has learned how to relax: A glass of red wine. A crisp copy of The New York Times, if she can wrest it from her husband. Some classical music, preferably Bach. And every night like clockwork, she lifts a pipe to her lips and smokes marijuana.

Long a fixture among young people, use of the country’s most popular illicit drug is now growing among the AARP set, as the massive generation of baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s grows older.

The number of people aged 50 and older reporting marijuana use in the prior year went up from 1.9 percent to 2.9 percent from 2002 to 2008, according to surveys from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The rise was most dramatic among 55- to 59-year-olds, whose reported marijuana use more than tripled from 1.6 percent in 2002 to 5.1 percent.

Observers expect further increases as 78 million boomers born between 1945 and 1964 age. For many boomers, the drug never held the stigma it did for previous generations, and they tried it decades ago.

Some have used it ever since, while others are revisiting the habit in retirement, either for recreation or as a way to cope with the aches and pains of aging.

Siegel walks with a cane and has arthritis in her back and legs. She finds marijuana has helped her sleep better than pills ever did. And she can’t figure out why everyone her age isn’t sharing a joint, too.

“They’re missing a lot of fun and a lot of relief,” she said.

Politically, advocates for legalizing marijuana say the number of older users could represent an important shift in their decades-long push to change the laws.

“For the longest time, our political opponents were older Americans who were not familiar with marijuana and had lived through the ‘Reefer Madness’ mentality and they considered marijuana a very dangerous drug,” said Keith Stroup, the founder and lawyer of NORML, a marijuana advocacy group.

“Now, whether they resume the habit of smoking or whether they simply understand that it’s no big deal and that it shouldn’t be a crime, in large numbers they’re on our side of the issue.”

Each night, 66-year-old Stroup says he sits down to the evening news, pours himself a glass of wine and rolls a joint. He’s used the drug since he was a freshman at Georgetown, but many older adults are revisiting marijuana after years away.

“The kids are grown, they’re out of school, you’ve got time on your hands and frankly it’s a time when you can really enjoy marijuana,” Stroup said. “Food tastes better, music sounds better, sex is more enjoyable.”

The drug is credited with relieving many problems of aging: aches and pains, glaucoma, macular degeneration, and so on. Patients in 14 states enjoy medical marijuana laws, but those elsewhere buy or grow the drug illegally to ease their conditions.

Among them is Perry Parks, 67, of Rockingham, N.C., a retired Army pilot who suffered crippling pain from degenerative disc disease and arthritis. He had tried all sorts of drugs, from Vioxx to epidural steroids, but found little success. About two years ago he turned to marijuana, which he first had tried in college, and was amazed how well it worked for the pain.

“I realized I could get by without the narcotics,” Parks said, referring to prescription painkillers. “I am essentially pain free.”

But there’s also the risk that health problems already faced by older people can be exacerbated by regular marijuana use.

Older users could be at risk for falls if they become dizzy, smoking it increases the risk of heart disease and it can cause cognitive impairment, said Dr. William Dale, chief of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

He said he’d caution against using it even if a patient cites benefits.

“There are other better ways to achieve the same effects,” he said.

Pete Delany, director of applied studies at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said boomers’ drug use defied stereotypes, but is important to address.

“When you think about people who are 50 and older you don’t generally think of them as using illicit drugs — the occasional Hunter Thompson or the kind of hippie dippie guy that gets a lot of press maybe,” he said. “As a nation, it’s important to us to say, ‘It’s not just young people using drugs it’s older people using drugs.’”

In conversations, older marijuana users often say they smoke in less social settings than when they were younger, frequently preferring to enjoy the drug privately. They say the quality (and price) of the drug has increased substantially since their youth and they aren’t as paranoid about using it.

Dennis Day, a 61-year-old attorney in Columbus, Ohio, said when he used to get high, he wore dark glasses to disguise his red eyes, feared talking to people on the street and worried about encountering police. With age, he says, any drawbacks to the drug have disappeared.

“My eyes no longer turn red, I no longer get the munchies,” Day said. “The primary drawbacks to me now are legal.”

Siegel bucks the trend as someone who was well into her 50s before she tried pot for the first time. She can muster only one frustration with the drug.

“I never learned how to roll a joint,” she said. “It’s just a big nuisance. It’s much easier to fill a pipe.”

Video Interview with older gentlemen talking about marijuana, and fortune magazine – relief

By Kathleen Doheny

WebMD Health News

Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Feb. 18, 2010 — Marijuana can be a promising treatment for some specific, pain-related medical conditions, according to California researchers who presented an update of their findings Wednesday to the California Legislature and also released them to the public.

”I think the evidence is getting better and better that marijuana, or the constituents of cannabis, are useful at least in the adjunctive treatment of neuropathy,” Igor Grant, MD, executive vice-chairman of the department of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and director of the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California, tells WebMD.

”We don’t know if it’s a front-line treatment. I’m hoping the results of our studies will prompt larger-scale studies that involve a much more varied population.”

”This [report given to the Legislature] sets the stage of larger-scale studies,” he says.

Some experts who reviewed the report say some of the studies are flawed and that they worry about the long-term health effects of marijuana smoke.

Perspective: Medical Marijuana Research

Some observers speculated that the researchers presented their report to the Legislature to call attention to marijuana research because an initiative to legalize marijuana for general use is expected to be on the California ballot in November 2010.

But Grant says that’s not the case. “We sent it to the Legislature because our report was due,” he says.

The program Grant directs was launched in 1999, when the California Legislature passed (and the governor signed) SB 847. Since then, the center has completed five scientific trials, with more in progress.

Medical Marijuana: The Research Scorecard

Five studies, published in peer-reviewed medical journals, show the value of marijuana for pain-related conditions, the researchers say in the report.

* Smoked cannabis reduced pain in HIV patients. In one study, 50 patients assigned either to cannabis or placebo finished the study. Although 52% of those who smoked marijuana had a 30% or more reduction in pain intensity, just 24% of those in the placebo group did. The study is published in the journal Neurology. In another study, 28 HIV patients were assigned to either marijuana or placebo — and 46% of pot smokers compared to 18% of the placebo group reported 30% or more pain relief. That study is in Neuropsychopharmacology.

* Marijuana helped reduce pain in people suffering spinal cord injury and other conditions. In this study, 38 patients smoked either high-dose or low-dose marijuana; 32 finished all three sessions. Both doses reduced neuropathic pain from different causes. Results appear in the Journal of Pain.

* Medium doses of marijuana can reduce pain perception, another study found. Fifteen healthy volunteers smoked a low, medium, or high dose of marijuana to see if it could counteract the pain produced by an injection of capsaicin, the ”hot” ingredient in chili peppers. The higher the dose, the greater the pain relief. The study was published in Anesthesiology.

* Vaporized marijuana can be safe, other research found. In this study, 14 volunteers were assigned to get low, medium, or high doses of pot, either smoked or by vaporization delivery, on six different occasions. The vaporized method was found safe; patients preferred it to smoking. The study is in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics.

A sixth study, as yet unpublished, found marijuana better than placebo cigarettes in reducing the spasticity associated with multiple sclerosis and the pain associated with the spasticity.

Medical Marijuana Research: What’s Next?

Grant’s researchers will finish two more studies, with results expected by 2011, he says. What happens then, when the initial allocation of nearly $8.7 million, awarded back in 2000, runs out?

“We’re going to act as a kind of shell or organizational structure to help investigators apply for funding with the NIH [and others],” he says. Grant says he is expecting no more funding from cash-strapped California.

Although 14 states have legalized medical marijuana, he says, California is the only state that has ‘’stepped up to the plate” to do research.

Medical Marijuana Research: Other Opinions

The California center’s studies are flawed, says Joel Hay, PhD, professor of pharmaceutical economics and policy at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and a vocal critic of medical marijuana.

“It’s not medicine,” he says of marijuana. “It would never be approved by the FDA.

”I certainly concede that cannabinoids may have a very valuable medical role,” he says. But the danger is in the smoking of marijuana, he says, citing health effects.

Isolating the active ingredient is a better approach, he says, and has actually already been done. “If you want a cannabionoid, it’s here,” he says, referring to Marinol, available and FDA approved. The active ingredient is THC or tetrahydrocannabinol, the same as found in marijuana.

”Marijuana contains a huge variety of compounds, some of which have not even been thoroughly identified,” Hay tells WebMD. The studies, he says, are all short-term, with small groups.

Another flaw, he says, is that it’s difficult to have a true placebo when studying marijuana. “People know when they are consuming a psychoactive product,” he says.

Another flaw is that patients were allowed to continue on their pain medicine, says Kevin Weissman, PharmD, director of drug information services at Los Angeles County+University of Southern California Medical Center. That may have affected the results.

Grant counters that it was not humane to take patients off pain medicines that were providing any degree of relief.

Like Hay, Weissman says marijuana does have an analgesic effect. But he worries about the long-term effect of marijuana smoke and says research is needed to find a safer delivery system that works, such as vaporization.

Video with info about this study – short

Ex-Prosecutor: The Supposed Social Harms of Marijuana are Caused by Prohibition

(CBS) James Anthony, a former prosecutor in Oakland, is a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.

This week, the California State legislature is taking a hard look at legalizing marijuana for adult recreational use. The time has come to do so–for the sake of our children, our communities, our law enforcement agencies, the environment, and the well being of the entire state.

The myth that marijuana is individually harmful enough to be prohibited has been fully exposed. Marijuana is much safer than alcohol. It cannot even begin to compare to tobacco in toxicity. It is used by hundreds of thousands of Californians safely as medicine.

The supposed social harms of marijuana are caused by prohibition. Marijuana prohibition creates the underground market with exorbitant illicit profits that then spawns organized crime, violence, international instability, casual murder on our borders and in our cities. Creating legal markets for marijuana will end all that. Taxing and regulating will bring marijuana under control. It will end crime. It will reduce violence. It will ensure that marijuana is produced safely inside the state’s borders. It will end a great deal of unnecessary tragedy and suffering.

Marijuana prohibition was never possible or feasible anyway–all it did was build an enormous underground economy of $14 billion a year. By surfacing that economy, California can reduce its law enforcement and prison costs. And it can create a tax revenue stream from what is now completely untaxed. The current legislation will produce over a billion dollars in state revenue.

Even if the state legislature doesn’t pass this legislation, California’s voters may legalize marijuana anyway. This November, they will vote on an initiative to do just that: Tax And Regulate Cannabis 2010.

The harms of prohibition are abundantly clear: crime, violence, contempt for law enforcement, the corruption of our social fabric, and a continuation of our sad history of ever-accelerating racist over-incarceration. The solution is equally clear: control and regulate on a substance-by-substance basis, beginning with taxing and regulating marijuana in California.

Article found via CBS news

Check out reports on the debate over legalization in CBSNews.com’s special section “Marijuana Nation.”

California’s Proposition 215 legalized medical marijuana in that state 11 years ago as a treatment for pain, the side-effects of chemotherapy, and other ailments. However, the federal government still views all marijuana use as illegal, and the Supreme Court has upheld the federal Drug Enforcement Agency’s right to go after dispensaries, no matter what state laws allow.

In September, the DEA raided the California Healthcare Collective in Modesto and arrested the store’s chief financial officer, Luke Scarmazzo. “They handcuffed me and put me on my kitchen table,” Scarmazzo told 60 Minutes. “One of them … said ‘you knew I’d be coming soon.’”

Scarmazzo acknowledged that he had been earning $13,000 a month for running the dispensary but insisted “I was working a lot of hours.” Scarmazzo’s lawyer described his client’s situation as a case of “selective prosecution,” because the 26-year-old Scarmazzo is also a hiphop artist, with a widely distributed Internet video in which he appears as a high-living drug dealer, chanting “Fuck the feds.”

Complicating the legal situation, California’s pot shops have admittedly become an easy source of supply for people who just want to get high. According to 60 Minutes, the California law was originally intended to provide access only to the most needy, but in an attempt not to exclude any category of illness, it wound up with language so broad that it covers ever the vaguest complaint of pain. Now anyone with a note from their doctor can buy medical marijuana, and some doctors even advertise for patients in alternative papers.

One longtime supporter of medical marijuana, Methodist minister Scott Imler, says, “It’s just ridiculous …The purpose of Proposition 215 was not to create a new industry.” Although the centers are supposedly collectives which buy marijuana grown by members and redistribute it, it is clear that large amounts of marijuana are also entering the system from the black market, putting money into the pockets of organized crime and terrorists.

Marijuana activist Don Duncan told 60 Minutes that “there’s bound to be abuse in the system” and what is needed is better regulation. However, Scott Imler argues that effective regulation is not possible as long as the federal government refused to accept the legality of medical marijuana. Until then, “We’re going to have what we have now, which is chaos.”

The following video is from CBS’s 60 Minutes, broadcast on December 30, 2007

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/60_Minutes_California_medical_marijuana_system_1231.html

hightimes.com — With a deficit that only gets bigger and bigger by the day that President Bush is in office, and clearly the war on drugs is a failure! Why after the government’s report that came out and listed the three most addictive drugs alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine, all big money makers, and all legal. How is it not now a time for a change in this country?

Read the discussion at digg

Or is it 7 billion – who knows for sure?

Also check out this gem from the prometheus institute – don’t arrest, invest.

Pot Slows Cancer in Test Tube
Marijuana Ingredients Slow Invasion by Cervical and Lung Cancer Cells
By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Medical News
Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

Dec. 26, 2007 — THC and another marijuana-derived compound slow the spread of cervical and lung cancers, test-tube studies suggest.

The new findings add to the fast-growing number of animal and cell-culture studies showing different anticancer effects for cannabinoids, chemical compounds derived from marijuana.

Cannabinoids, and sometimes marijuana itself, are currently used to lessen the nausea and pain experienced by many cancer patients. The new findings — yet to be proven in human studies — suggest that cannabinoids may have a direct anticancer effect.

“Cannabinoids’ … potential therapeutic benefit in the treatment of highly invasive cancers should be addressed in clinical trials,” conclude Robert Ramer, PhD, and Burkhard Hinz, PhD, of the University of Rostock, Germany.

Might cannabinoids keep dangerous tumors from spreading throughout the body? Ramer and Hinz set up an experiment in which invasive cervical and lung cancer cells had make their way through a tissue-like gel. Even at very low concentrations, the marijuana compounds THC and methanandamide (MA) significantly slowed the invading cancer cells.

Doses of THC that reduce pain in cancer patients yield blood concentrations much higher than the concentrations needed to inhibit cancer invasion.

“Thus the effects of THC on cell invasion occurred at therapeutically relevant concentrations,” Ramer and Hinz note.

The researchers are quick to point out that much more study is needed to find out whether these test-tube results apply to tumor growth in animals and in humans.

Ramer and Hinz report the findings in the Jan. 2, 2008 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
View Article Sources Sources

SOURCES: Ramer, R, and Hinz, B. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Jan. 2, 2008; vol 100: pp. 59-69.