Free Republic

Minnesota cancer patient Daniel Hauser, medical marijuana, and the politicization of medicine. This Memorial Day weekend, FBI officials are combing Southern California and parts of Northern Mexico in search of Daniel Hauser, a 13-year-old from Sleepy Eye, Minnesota who has Hodgkin's lymphoma. Authorities believe Hauser and his mother fled to the area after a Minnesota judge ordered his parents to consent to treating him with chemotherapy on May 14. Hauser's parents claim they're part of an obscure Native American religion called Nemenhah, which eschews chemo and radiation in favor of natural remedies (though there's some indication Hauser and his parents...

Marijuana may help reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease by reducing inflammation in the brain, researchers reported yesterday. Tests on rats indicated that a compound found in marijuana stopped the loss of brain cells caused by inflammation and improved the animals' memories. The findings, presented to a meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Atlanta, may help explain some studies that suggest people who regularly smoked marijuana in the 1960s and '70s are now less likely than others the same age to develop Alzheimer's. [SNIP] ``The baby boomers are just getting old enough now that we can just see this,"...

THC, the key compound in marijuana, may also be the key to new drugs for Alzheimer's disease. That's because the marijuana compound blocks the formation of brain-clogging Alzheimer's plaques better than current Alzheimer's drugs. The finding — in test-tube studies — comes from the lab of Kim Janda, Ph.D., director of the Worm Institute of Research and Medicine at Scripps Research Institute. "While we are certainly not advocating the use of illegal drugs, these findings offer convincing evidence that THC possesses remarkable inhibitory qualities, especially when compared to [Alzheimer's drugs] currently available to patients," Janda says in a news release....