This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 18th, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What value does marijuana have as medicine?

The politics are certainly difficult, but the science is more clear, at

least the science that political institutions allow to proceed. Dr. Donald Abrams is

director of clinical programs for the OSHA Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California.

We spoke following the Cato Policy Forum, the Politics and Science of Medical Marijuana, held yesterday.

This is a medicine that's been a medicine for a lot longer than it hasn't been a medicine.

Marijuana was used first in Asia probably 3,000 thousand years ago recently marijuana was found in a tomb

flowers of a female plant really suggesting that it was there intentionally on a remains of a presumed shaman who had been

working with the substance thousands of years ago. It was brought to Western

Medicine in 1842 by William O'Shaughnessy, who worked for the British

East Indies Company, who saw the effects of cannabis in India.

And reportedly it was Queen Victoria's favorite medicine for

her menstrual cramps.

In the United States cannabis was licensed and available for physicians to prescribe up until 1942 when it was removed

from the U.S. Pharmacopoeia.

So it really has not been a drug in the United States for only, you know, 67 years, but it was a drug in the United States for only you know 67 years but it was a drug in the world for a lot longer I think

from my work in patients with cancer it's clear to me that that cannabis is the only anti-nausea drug that also increases appetite.

There is evidence from studies that we've done that cannabis is effective in relieving pain from damaged nerves, so-called peripheral

neuropathy.

We did that study in patients with HIV.

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