Is Marinol better medicine than marijuana?
“The approval of Marinol by the FDA in 1985 showed that synthetic THC was judged by the legal process used to approve medicines to be a safe and effective medicine for the treatment of nausea and vomiting. That is not the same thing as approving ‘marijuana’ as a ‘medicine.’ There is no possibility of approval of any plant as a medicine to treat any illness, now or ever because the chemicals in whole plants (to say nothing of smoked plants which are composed of many, many more chemicals) could be approved as a medicine. Plants are unstable mixtures of different chemicals which cannot be used directly to provide a ‘dose’ of a specific chemical to be used as a medical treatment.To think that the approval of Marinol by the FDA meant that marijuana was approved by the FDA as a medicine is to misunderstand both what medicines are and the value of the modern approval process for specific chemicals to be used as medicines.” Jan. 12, 2002 – Robert L.
