Colorado Springs-based Cannabis Science has released a statement, supporting the V.A.'s decision:
"We see this announcement as a validation of our strategy of focusing on helping disabled vets suffering from PTSD, chronic pain, and other problems," says CEO Dr. Robert Melamede. "Nonetheless, it is shocking to think that disabled veterans in states without medical marijuana laws can still be denied 'access to prescribed pain medications in a Veterans Affairs facility.' ...good medicine and basic human decency do not change from state to state."
From a July 23rd New York Times article on this subject:
“In those states where medical marijuana is legal, the patient will need to make a choice as to which medication they choose to use for their chronic pain,” Ms. Korogi wrote. “However, it is not medically appropriate to expect that a V.A. physician will prescribe narcotics while the patient is taking marijuana.”
This is an unusual position for a doctor to take in this present era, based upon what I've seen among psychiatrists. Doctors routinely prescribe a combination of drugs to treat various manifestations of illnesses. I'm not condoning or condemning the practice - just noting this reality.
However, if cannabis can move patients from narcotics, simply considering the problems with addiction and side-effects and potential for harm, the move away from narcotic drugs might be another benefit of patient access to cannabis, as this link to recent studies shows with another substance.
This blog further notes (tho the quote is not linked or given a citation):
According to Raphael Mechoulam, Ph.D., an internationally respected expert on neuroscience aspects of marijuana explains: “Not only is it important for its pain-relieving abilities, it is also essential for PTSD patients because it can help to reduce the association between stressful stimuli in their lives and traumatic memories from wartime. While healthy people eventually do not associate the past events with stimuli in the present, PTSD patients are tortured by never-ending associations with the past, creating intense and constant reminders of the trauma they suffered.”
They, in fact, re-experience this trauma with the same levels of emotional pain. The Vets aren't drama queens - they are, recent research suggests, experiencing a physical illness (trauma to the hippocampus.)
Douglas Bremer, at the Yale School of Medicine, describes the damage in this way:
Childhood abuse and other extreme stressors can have lasting effects on brain areas involved in memory and emotion. The hippocampus is a brain area involved in learning and memory that is particularly sensitive to stress. 8,9 As reviewed in greater detail by Bruce McEwen in other Cyberounds high levels of glucocorticoids (cortisol in the human) released during stress were associated with damage to neurons in the CA3 region of the hippocampus, and a loss of neurons and dendritic branching. 10,11,12 Glucocorticoids disrupt cellular metabolism and increase the vulnerability of hippocampal neurons to excitatory amino acids like glutamate. 13 Other neurochemical systems interact with glucocorticoids to mediate the effects of stress on memory and the hippocampus, including serotonin14 and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). 15,16 Stress also results in deficits in new learning that are secondary to damage to the hippocampus. 17,18 Exciting recent research has shown that the hippocampus has the capacity to regenerate neurons and that stress inhibits neurogenesis in the hippocampus.
Interestingly, cannabinoids have also shown recent promise in research related to neurogenesis and the reduction of inflammation for the treatment of Alzheimer's.
(The blog above goes on to make recommendations for Veterans based upon pain-reducing properties of one strain of cannabis versus another.)
An earlier link to a Time Magazine Wellness Blog provides information on the way in which cannabis helped with stress and trauma:
the marijuana-like compound had made extreme stress more like ordinary stress—and this could also be seen in terms of reductions in a key stress hormone in their brains.
Importantly, it didn't matter if the rats were given the drug before or after they experienced the stress. This suggests that this drug might work either before or after someone has suffered a traumatic event. It also shows that the drug doesn't erase memory—instead, it softens it and makes traumatic memory more like ordinary memory.
PTSD triggers the same or elevated level of stress response to memory as it did in the "past present," while the cannabis synthetic, in the experiment noted here, regulated the expression of this stress response - or, specifically, the release of stress hormones.
Unlike the blog post from "mypot," the Time-linked study indicates that memory isn't eliminated. It is merely put into perspective. Studies on the effect of THC noted above indicate cannabis therapy may create neurogenesis in the hippocampus as well. This might well explain the capacity to soften trauma after the fact, but this is speculation from me on this point.
The capacity to allow a "healing space" was also recently noted in studies of MDMA (commonly known as ecstasy.)
Let us hope that prejudice created by years of propaganda from the war on drugs, including the scheduling of cannabis itself, will not interfere with possible treatments for devastating illnesses.
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