Smoking Marijuana May Have Healthy Effects, Panel Reports

WASHINGTON —  Evidence shows that smoking marijuana can have healthy effects and further studies should be made into its medical value, says a report to the National Institutes of Health released Friday.

The report was cautiously written, stressing the largely anecdotal nature of the evidence, but it provided some encouragement for groups campaigning for the plant, which is banned as a drug, to be legalized for medical purposes.

The NIH said in an accompanying statement that it was prepared to fund research into the subject.

The study said the eight private doctors and nurses on the committee that made the report had “varying degrees of enthusiasm” about whether to pursue marijuana for use in a number of cases, including glaucoma, nausea during cancer treatment, pain, poor appetite and neurological disorders.

But it quoted the conclusion of professor William Beaver of Georgetown University that “for at least some potential indications marijuana looks promising enough to recommend that there be new controlled studies done.”

Under U.S. law, marijuana is illegal and has no approved clinical use. But a debate about its potential medicinal use has grown since November, when voters in Arizona and California approved initiatives making it available to patients.

The Clinton administration says it will penalize doctors who incorporate marijuana in their practices.

The report said a key issue was whether smoked marijuana “offers therapeutic advantages over the currently available oral form of its most active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (known as THC), for a wide variety of conditions.”

It noted that the effects of receiving THC from smoking marijuana differed from those when it is taken orally and that “there may anyway be other compounds in the leaf that have useful therapeutic properties.” The group said adverse effects of smoking marijuana must be taken into account.

The report drew immediate fire from critics who consider the campaign for authorizing marijuana use for health purposes a trick to legalize it as a drug.