Marijuana Kills Cancer

Unless you have been living under a rock (or watch too much TV) you have probably read or heard somewhere that marijuana kills cancer. Research into marijuana and its relationship with cancer have been going on since the 1970's.

In 1974 the national institute of health (NIH) funded a study at the Medical College of Virginia to find evidence that marijuana impaired peoples immune system. Instead the researchers discovered that marijuana slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice, lung, breast, and virus induced leukemia.

This research was quickly shut down by the drug enforcement agency and in 1976 Gerald Ford (The asshole who pardoned Nixon) banned research on cannabis for all scientists except those who worked for major pharmaceutical companies.


Then in the year 2000 researchers in Madrid, Spain injected 45 mice with brain cancer. After letting the cancer grow for 12 days the researchers then injected THC, the main cannabinoid in marijuana, directly into the brains of 15 of the cancer ridden mice. Of this 15, 9 survived significantly longer than the untreated mice, and of this 9, 3 were completely cured.


So 20% of the treated mice were completely cured of terminal brain cancer from THC alone, and 60% of the treated mice lived significantly longer than the untreated mice. Is there any cancer drug out there that even comes close to this?

In addition to this, the researchers wanted to find out if large doses of THC had any negative effects if injected into healthy mice. So they injected large doses of THC directly into their brains for 7 days straight. A quote from the researchers explains the results

"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 seven-day delivery period or for at least two months after cannabinoid treatment ended." -Source

So how does marijuana kill cancer cells?

When cells become cancerous their cellular clocks are damaged. Most cells go through a cycle where they grow, divide, then die. In cancer cells the cycle is broken and the cells do not die. When THC is injected into cancer cells, the cancer cells cycle is reactivated and cancer cells commit apoptosis, which is just a fancy word for cellular suicide. The activation of the suicide sequence in cancer cells is obviously a good way to combat cancer because THC fails to have this effect on healthy cells, killing just the cancer. Source

Then in 2007 researchers at Harvard University found that the main cannabinoid in marijuana, THC cuts lung cancer in half!

"Then, for three weeks, researchers injected standard doses of THC into mice that had been implanted with human lung cancer cells, and found that tumors were reduced in size and weight by about 50 percent in treated animals compared to a control group. There was also about a 60 percent reduction in cancer lesions on the lungs in these mice as well as a significant reduction in protein markers associated with cancer progression" Source

There have been many other studies that have similar findings, but this is all for right now, I hope you have enjoyed reading this!