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Terence McKenna smoked marijuana for 35 years heavily. He died of brain cancer. McKenna was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form o

• eidyia 12y ago
  "smoking" is an important factor here, smoking anything is bad for you. I imagine any other sort of ingesting it (marijuana) would be much less harmful
• ryanklee 12y ago
  Putting aside the anecdotal nature of your comment, it raises the question of whether, because McKenna was "worried" about a causal relation between his brain cancer and prior cannabis use, he ceased smoking post-diagnosis. If so, that would certainly complicate what I'm assuming you're implying, that McKenna's case runs counter to the [edit: findings communicated in the] HuffPo article... Edit: Also, it's significant that the treatment in the study was a "combination of radiation and two different marijuana compounds", not simply a correlation to historical cannabis use.
• nkozyra 12y ago
  I'm confused as to the relevance of this post - I'm not sure that the study indicates that smoking marijuana would, you know, prevent death via all glioma type cancers. The variables are different from top to bottom. Is this post meant to dispute the validity of pure form THC-BDS + irradiation as a effective treatment for brain tumors? If so, yeesh.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• researcher88 12y ago
  They aren't smoking it but ingesting it in a highly concentrated form. And in 1:1 ratios of THC and CBDs. There are an endless variety of strains and a lot is unknown. I recently got cancer and smoking marijuana was indispensable for dealing with treatment. And now I am using hash oil as my doctors say there is nothing I can do, no diet to eat, no exercise nor anything else I can do to reduce my chance of having the cancer come back. Nothing.
  • powertower 12y ago
    > my doctors say there is nothing I can do, no diet to eat, no exercise nor anything else I can do to reduce my chance of having the cancer come back. I'm sure there will be a difference between eating McDonalds and drinking carbonated sugar water every day, and not, to how your body will respond to new cancer cells forming and spreading. From what I've gathered, and my own experience, digestion, and healing, are on the opposite ends of the spectrum (contradictory to what common sense and common knowledge say - that you should eat more when sick). When your body is digesting food, it's a very taxing process, and the majority of your immune system is in your intestines. Animals and humans loose their appetite when sick for a reason, and gain it back quite well after the healing process takes hold. Periodic sea salt flushes, and water fasting, was known to be the best course of action for many ailments before the age of medicine, and is still used today. The biochemical changes during fasts will aid your body with taking out bad cells and damaged tissue.
• josefresco 12y ago
  Smoke anything for 35 years and you're running the risk of serious health complications. Smoking cannabis for medical reasons is nonsensical.
  • dreamweapon 12y ago
    Smoking cannabis for medical reasons is nonsensical. A lot of research has been done which leans heavily against this point of view. If you want to ignore that research or pretend that it doesn't exist (or can't easily be found), that's fine, of course.
    • josefresco 12y ago
      Care to provide a link to this research? I'm not aware of research that indicates smoking to be a viable and healthy means of consuming medication.
      • dreamweapon 12y ago
        I wasn't stating that the research says that smoking cannabis is "viable and healthy means of consuming medication." But rather that it isn't simply, as you state, "nonsensical" as form of medicine.
  • narag 12y ago
    Did they make the mice smoke?
  • codyb 12y ago
    That's probably not true. If you don't have the time, expertise, or space to legitimately cook something in it with whichever components of marijuana are utilized in the cessation of nausea or pain, and you can't afford/don't have the time to go get/are not near a place where they sell a vaporizer then smoking is your best option. And recent research has suggested a litany of positive effects for those suffering from a variety of ailments. In this case, smoking would be quite sensical not only because it will make you feel better. Stress is a known killer, symptoms such as nausea (and it's side effect known as 'not being able to eat') or pain increase stress. Ergo, it can be quite easily seen that there are many instances where a person would be quite sensical in choosing to smoke marijuana instead of continuing to suffer, negative side effects of smoking marijuana included. This of course does not go into the debate of marijuana versus addictive opiates or more "traditional" forms of medication which opens up an additional set of conversation topics, many of which conclude that marijuana is more than likely to be preferred over traditional forms of Western medication.
• Benferhat 12y ago
  McKenna is more famous for his excessive use of psychedelics. Terence McKenna: "There are only about 1,000 of these GBMs a year, so it's a rare disease. I never won anything before - why now?" Like everybody else, he suspected a lifetime of exotic drug use may have been to blame. [0] [0] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.05/mckenna_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/8.05/mckenna_pr.html
• Alex3917 12y ago
  >"So what about 35 years of daily dope smoking?" he asked. They pointed to studies suggesting that cannabis may actually shrink tumors. >"Listen," McKenna told them, "if cannabis shrinks tumors, we would not be having this conversation." That said the reason they are doing these mice trials is because there have already been several cases of it working in humans.
• driverdan 12y ago
  What's your point? Correlation is not causation.