Strong words for a UCLA School of Medicine professor!
As to the highly promising implication of his own study –that something in marijuana stops damaged cells from becoming malignant— Tashkin noted that an anti-proliferative effect of THC has been observed in cell-culture systems and animal models of brain, breast, prostate, and lung cancer. THC has been shown to promote apoptosis (damaged cells die instead of reproducing) and to counter angiogenesis (the process by which blood vessels are formed —a requirement of tumor growth). Other antioxidants in cannabis may also be involved in countering malignancy, said Tashkin.
COPD
Much of Tashkin’s talk was devoted to Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, another condition prevalent among tobacco smokers. Chronic bronchitis and emphysema are two forms of COPD, which is the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States. Air pollution and tobacco smoke are known culprits. Inhaled pathogens cause an inflammatory response, resulting in diminished lung function. COPD patients have increasing difficulty clearing the airways as they get older.
Tashkin and colleagues at UCLA conducted a major study in which they measured lung function of various cohorts over eight years and found that tobacco-only smokers had an accelerated rate of decline, but marijuana smokers –even if they smoked tobacco as well– experienced the same rate of decline as non-smokers.
“The more tobacco smoked, the greater the rate of decline,” said Tashkin. “In contrast, no matter how much marijuana was smoked, the rate of decline was similar to normal.”
Tashkin concluded that his and other studies “do not support the concept that regular smoking of marijuana leads to COPD.”
Breathe easier, everybody.
Fred Gardner is the editor of O'Shaughnessy's, a quarterly journal of the California Cannabis Research Medical Group.
Investigators from New Zealand recently got widespread media attention for a study contradicting Tashkin’s results. “Heavy cannabis users may be at greater risk of chronic lung disease –including cancer– compared to tobacco smokers,” is how BBC News summed up the New Zealanders’ findings.
The very small size of the study –79 smokers took part, 21 of whom smoked cannabis only– was not held against the authors. In fact, the small New Zealand study was given much more coverage by the corporate press than the large UCLA study that preceded it.
The New Zealand study was portrayed as the latest word on this important subject. As if scientific inquiry were some kind of tennis match and the truth just gets truthier with every volley.
Tashkin criticized the New Zealanders’ methodology in his talk at Asilomar: “There’s some cognitive dissonance associated with the interpretation of their findings. I think this has to do with the belief model among the investigators and –I wish they were here to defend themselves– the integrity of the investigators… They actually published another paper in which they mimicked the design that we used for looking at lung function.”
Tashkin spoke from the stage of an airy redwood chapel designed by Julia Morgan. He is pink-cheeked, 70ish, wears wire-rimmed spectacles. “For tobacco they found what you’d expect: a higher risk for lung cancer and a clear dose-response relationship. A 24-fold increase in the people who smoked the most… What about marijuana? If they smoked a small or moderate amount there was no increased risk, in fact slightly less than one. But if they were in the upper third of the group, then their risk was six-fold… A rather surprising finding, and one has to be cautious about interpreting the results because of the very small number of cases -- fourteen— and controls -- four.”
Tashkin said the New Zealanders employed “statistical sleight of hand.” He deemed it “completely implausible that smokers of only 365 joints of marijuana have a risk for developing lung cancer similar to that of smokers of 7,000 tobacco cigarettes… Their small sample size led to vastly inflated estimates… They had said ‘it’s ideal to do the study in New Zealand because we have a much higher prevalence of marijuana smoking.’ But 88 percent of their controls had never smoked marijuana, whereas 36% of our controls (in Los Angeles) had never smoked marijuana. Why did so few of the controls smoke marijuana? Something fishy about that!”
Editor's Note: There is a groundswell of attention in the news to marijuana's role in causing and preventing various types of cancers. Last week, AlterNet published an article from the Marijuana Policy Project about a new study finding that pot smokers have a lower risk of head and neck cancers than people who don’t smoke pot. Earlier this year, the corporate media pounced on a study suggesting that men who had been using marijuana at least once per week and who had started smoking pot prior to age 18 had an elevated risk of testicular cancer known as nonseminoma, which makes up fewer than half of one percent of all cancer cases among men.
Head, neck and testicular cancers are of course quite serious ailments to deal with, but what about cancer of the most obvious organ at risk with pot smoking, the lungs? Where's the science on that? The article below by Fred Gardner, editor of the medical marijuana research quarterly journal O'Shaughnessy's, shares the results of a major medical study the media completely ignored, and his conclusions are quite blunt on the matter: Smoking pot doesn't cause lung cancer. In fact, the study found that cigarette smokers who also smoked marijuana were at a lower risk of contracting lung cancer than tobacco-only smokers.
Smoking Marijuana Does Not Cause Lung Cancer
by Fred Gardner
One in three Americans will be afflicted with cancer, we are told by the government (as if it’s our immutable fate and somehow acceptable). Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the U.S. and lung cancer the leading killer among cancers.
You’d think it would have been very big news in June 2005 when UCLA medical school professor Donald Tashkin reported that components of marijuana smoke -- although they damage cells in respiratory tissue -- somehow prevent them from becoming malignant. In other words, something in marijuana exerts an anti-cancer effect!
Tashkin has special credibility. He was the lead investigator on studies dating back to the 1970s that identified the components in marijuana smoke that are toxic. It was Tashkin et al. who published photomicrographs showing that marijuana smoke damages cells lining the upper airways. It was the Tashkin lab’s finding that benzpyrene -- a component of tobacco smoke that plays a role in most lung cancers -- is especially prevalent in marijuana smoke. It was Tashkin’s data showing that marijuana smokers are more likely than non-smokers to cough, wheeze, and produce sputum.
Tashkin reviewed his findings in April 2008, at a conference organized by “Patients Out of Time,” a reform group devoted to educating doctors and the public (as opposed to lobbying politicians). Some 30 MDs and nurses got continuing medical education credits for attending the event, which was held at Asilomar, on the Monterey Peninsula.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse, which supported Tashkin’s marijuana-related research over the decades, readily gave him a grant in 2002 to conduct a large, population-based, case-controlled study that would prove definitively that heavy, long-term marijuana use increases the risk of lung and upper-airways cancers.
What Tashkin and his colleagues found, however, disproved their hypothesis. (Tashkin is to marijuana as a cause of lung cancer what Hans Blix was to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction -- an honest investigator who set out to find something, concluded that it wasn’t there, and reported his results.)
Tashkin’s team interviewed 1,212 cancer patients from the Los Angeles County Cancer Surveillance program, matched for age, gender, and neighborhood with 1,040 cancer-free controls. Marijuana use was measured in “joint years” (number of years smoked times number of joints per day).
It turned out that increased marijuana use did not result in higher rates of lung and pharyngeal cancer, whereas tobacco smokers were at greater risk the more they smoked. Tobacco smokers who also smoked marijuana were at slightly lower risk of getting lung cancer than tobacco-only smokers.
These findings were not deemed worthy of publication in “NIDA Notes.” Tashkin reported them at the 2005 meeting of the International Cannabinoid Research Society. They were published in the October 2006 issue of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention.
Without a press release from NIDA calling attention to its significance, the assignment editors of America had no idea that “Marijuana Use and the Risk of Lung and Upper Aerodigestive Tract Cancers: Results of a Population-Based Case-Control Study” by Mia Hashibe1, Hal Morgenstern, Yan Cui, Donald P. Tashkin, Zuo-Feng Zhang, Wendy Cozen, Thomas M. Mack and Sander Greenland was a blockbuster story.
I suggested to Eric Bailey of the L.A. Times that he write up Tashkin’s findings -- UCLA provided the local angle if the anti-cancer effect wasn’t enough. Bailey said his editors wouldn’t be interested for some time because he had just filed a marijuana-related piece. The Tashkin scoop is still there for the taking!
Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows appeared on Controversial TV at 8pm (British Summer Time) for a two hour live interview on a program called On The Edge hosted by Theo Chalmers. You could have watched this on Sky satellite channel 200, or on Freesat (across Europe) or live online at www.edgemediatv.com. Viewers in the UK could of texted in questions to 87778 with the word EDGE a space and then your message.
6) The market system is driven, in part, by scarcity. The less there is of something, the more money that can be generated in the short term. This sets up a propensity for corporations to limit availability and hence deny production abundance. It is simply against the very nature of what drives demand to create abundance. The Kimberly Diamond Mines in Africa have been documented in the past to burn diamonds in order to keep prices high. Diamonds are rare resources which take billions of years to be created. This is nothing but problematic. The world we live in should be based on the interest to generate an abundance for the world’s people, along with strategic preservation and streamlined methods to enable that abundance. This is a central reason why, as of 2010, there are over a billion people starving on the planet. It has nothing to do with an inability to produce food, and everything having to do with an inherent need to create/preserve scarcity for the sake of short term profits. Abundance, Efficiency and Sustainability are, very simply, the enemies of profit. This also applies to the quality of goods. The idea of creating something that could last, say, a lifetime with little repair, is anathema to the market system, for it reduces consumption rates, which slows growth and creates systemic repercussions (like a loss of jobs, etc.). The scarcity attribute of the market system is nothing but detrimental for these reasons, not to mention that it doesn’t even serve the role of efficient resource preservation, which is often claimed. While supply and demand dictates that the less there is of something, the more it will be valued and hence the increased value will limit consumption, reducing the possibility of “running out” --- the incentive to create scarcity, coupled with the inherent short term reward which results from scarcity driven based prices, nullfies the idea that this enables strategic preservation. We will likely never “run out” of oil, in the current market system. Rather, the prices will become so high that no one can afford it, while those corporation who own the remaining oil, will make a great deal of money off of the scarcity, regardless of the long term social ramifications. In other words, remaining scare resources, existing in such high economic value that it limits their consumption, is not to be confused with preservation that is functional and strategic. True preservation, which must be strategic, can only come from the direct management of the resource in question in reagrd to the most efficient applications of the resource in industry itself, not arbitrary, surface price relationships, absent of rational allocation.
END OF "THE PROFIT PROBLEM" - by Peter Joseph.
TOMORROW, THE LAST TWO PARTS OF "ON THE EDGE" VIDEO FROM THE VENUS PROJECT.
5) An inherent obsolescence which creates inferior products immediately due to the need to stay “competitive”. This little recognized attribute of production is another example of the waste which is created in the market system. It is bad enough that multiple companies constantly duplicate each others items in an attempt to make their variations more interesting for the sake of public consumption, but a more wasteful reality is that due to the competitive basis of the system, it is a mathematical certainty that every good produced is immediately inferior the moment it is created, due the need to cut the initial cost basis of production and hence stay “competitive” against another company... which is doing the same thing for the same reason. The old free market adage where producers “create the best possible goods at the lower possible prices” is a needlessly wasteful reality and detrimentally misleading, for it is impossible for a company to use the most efficient material or processes in the productions of anything, for it would be too expensive to maintain a competitive cost basis. They very simply cannot make the “strategically best” physically it is mathematically impossible. If they did, no one would buy it for it would be unaffordable due the values inherent in the higher quality materials and methods. Remember people buy what they can afford to. Every person on this planet has a built in limit of affordability in the monetary system, so it generates a feedback loop of constant waste via inferior production, to meet inferior demand.
In a sustainable society, goods are created to last, with the expansion and updating of certain goods built directly into the design, with recycling strategically accessed as well, limiting waste. You will notice the term “strategic best” was used in a statement above. This qualification means that goods are created with respect to state of affairs of the planetary resources, with the quality of materials used based on an equation taking into acct all relevant attributes, rates of depletion, negative retro-actions and the like. In other words, we would not use TITANIUM for every single computer enclosure made, just because it might be the empirically “strongest” materials for the job. That practice could lead to depletion. Rather, there would be a gradient of material quality which would be accessed through analysis of, again, relevant attributes, such as comparable resources, rates of natural obsolescence for a given item, statical usage in the community, etc. These properties and relationships could be access through programming, with the most strategically viable solution computed and output in real time.
4) A propensity for “Establishments”. Very simply, established corporate/financial orders have a built in tendency to stop new, socially positive advents from coming to fruition, if there is a foreshadowed loss of market share, profit and hence power. It is important to consider the basic nature of a corporation and its inherent need for self perpetuation. If a person starts a company, hires employees, creates a market and becomes profitable, what has thus been created, in part, is the means for survival for a group of people. Since each person in that group typically becomes dependent on their organization for income, a natural, protectionist propensity is created whereas anything that threatens the institution thus threatens the well being of the group/individual. This is the fabric of a “competition” mindset. While people think of free market competition as a battle between two or more companies in a given industry, they often miss the other level - which is the competition against new advents which would make them obsolete, outright. The best way to expand on this point is to simply give an example, such as the US Government and 'Big Oil' collusion to limit the expansion of the fully Electric Car (EV) in the US. This issue was well presented and sourced in the documentary called "Who Killed the Electric Car?". The bottom line here is that the need to preserve an established order for the sake of the well being of those on the pay role, leads to an inherent tendency to stifle progress. A new technology which can make a prior technology obsolete will be met with resistance unless there is a way for the market system to adsorb it in a slow fashion, allowing for a transition for the corporations (IE - the perpetuation of "Hybrid" cars in the US, as opposed to the fully electric ones which could exist now, in abundance.) There are also large amounts of evidence that the FDA has engaged in favoritism/collusion with pharmaceutical companies, to limit/stop the availability of advanced drugs which would void existing/profitable ones.
In a sustainable society, there is nothing to hold back developmental/implementation of anything, once it has been tested thoroughly. There could be no “Established Institutions”. New methods would immediately be implemented into society, with no monetary institution to thwart the change due to their self-preserving nature.
3) A disjunct, inefficient industrial complex which wastes tremendous amount of resources and energy. In the world today, with the advent of Globalization, it has become more profitable to import and export both labor and goods across the globe, than to produce locally. We import bananas from Ecuador to the US, bottled water from Fuji Japan, while western companies will go to the 3rd world to exploit cheap labor, etc. Likewise, the process of extraction, to component generation, to assembly, to distribution of a given good might cross through multiple countries for a single final product, simply due to labor and production costs / property costs. This is extreme inefficiency and only justifiable within the market system for the sake of “saving money”. In a sustainable society, the focus would be maximum efficiency. The production process is not dispersed, but made as centralized and fluid as possible, with elements moving the very least amount, saving what would be tremendous amounts of energy and labor, as compared to methods today. Food is grown locally whenever possible (which is most of the time given the flexibility of indoor agriculture technology today) while all extraction, production and distribution is logically organized to use as little labor/transport/space as possible, while producing the *best possible goods. (*see more below) In other words, the system is planned, to maximize efficiently and minimize waste.
2) The need for infinite growth. Infinite economic growth is not only mathematically unsustainable, but it is ecologically detrimental. While people can debate the theoretical nature of “capitalism” and how it is “supposed” to function, one thing is clear historically – it perpetuates/requires constant growth and consumption. The entire basis of the Market System is not the intelligent management of our mostly finite resources on this planet, but rather the perpetual extraction and consumption of them for the sake of profit and “economic growth”. In order to keep people employed, people must constantly buy and consume, regardless of the state of affairs within the environment and often regardless of product utility and basic necessity. This is the absolute reverse of what a sustainable practice would require, which is the strategic preservation and efficient use of resources.
In a sustainable society, a “steady-state” economy would be in order. This would mean that there is no pressure to consume, as labor is not linked into the feedback loop. While it is very difficult for most people today to imagine a world which does not impose the need for “labor for income”, it needs to be pointed out that the constant requirement for labor is nothing but detrimental in the modern day, especially in light of the growing efficiency of mechanization of labor across developed nations.
Here are six problematic attributes of the market system:
1) A "Corruption Generating" Incentive System. It is often said that the competitive marketplace creates the incentive to act for the sake of social progress. While this is partially true, it also generates an equal if not more pronounced amount of corruption in the form of planned obsolescence, common crime, wars, large scale financial fraud, slave labor and many other issues. Well over 90% of the people in prisons are there because of monetary related crime or nonviolent drug offenses. The majority of legislation exists in the context of monetary based crimes. Also, if one is to critically examine history and peer into the documented biographies/mentalities of the greatest scientists and inventors of our time, such as N. Tesla, A. Einstein, A. Bell, the Wright Brothers, and many others - it is found that they did not find their motivation in the prospect of monetary gain. The interest to make money must not be confused with the interest to create socially beneficial products.
In a sustainable society, human motivation would be driven by contributions to society and hence themselves – not abstractly “making money”. The system would be designed to best facilitate the needs of the population directly. Yes, this is that dangerous phenomenon we hear so much about, with the image of blood engulfing the planet Earth, denoted as “socialistic”. God forbid society might actually be 'designed' to benefit the people which live inside of it. The fact of the matter is, the profit motive incentive and hence our competition oriented system is entirely “anti-society”. It is a pure corruption. The entire point of a social organization is to facilitate and perpetuate the well-being of its citizenry. In society today, the exact opposite is true. People are told they must “earn a living” which perpetuates a form of superstition that only certain people deserve the “right of life” and others do not.
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