03/24/2022
U.S. Government Repressed Ma*****na-Tumor Research
Pot Shrinks Tumors, Government Knew in ’74
Raymond Cushing, AlterNet
Originally posted May 31, 2000
The term medical ma*****na 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 ma*****na 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 Win55,212-2 a synthetic compound similar to THC.
“All the rats left untreated uniformly died 12-18 days after glioma (brain cancer) cell inoculation …
