Rimonabant anti-cannabinoid addiction treatment clinical trials
From a larger article on testing new drugs in Australia, we find news of our favorite anti-pot Rimonabant, also known as Zimulti or Acomplia, and its first trials in treating cannabis addiction:
The Langton Centre, a specialist outpatient clinic for drug and alcohol treatment attached to Sydney Hospital, initiated a study this year of a possible new drug treatment for cannabis addiction. Currently the only treatment is counselling.
The drug, Rimonabant, is a cannabis-receptor antagonist marketed in Australia as the weight loss drug Accomplia. It blocks the receptors in the brain where cannabis acts, so cannabis has a diminished or no effect when people are taking it. Twelve volunteers enrolled, all of whom are participants in rehabilitation programs run by the Ted Noffs Foundation and three government treatment clinics. Participants, whose average age was 26, were offered a daily 20-milligram tablet of Rimonabant for up to 3 months.
Dr Mark Montebello and Dr James Bell, who initiated and conducted the three-month study, knew it was fraught with difficulties. They recruited mainly people with a history of mental illness - heavy cannabis users, smoking on average 26 out of 28 days before they joined the rehabilitation programs. Although Rimonabant is available in Australia, the US Food and Drug Administration has so far refused to approve its use because of adverse side effects in clinical trials, including an increase in anxiety and depression.
Bell, an addiction medicine physician and director of the drug and alcohol program for the South Eastern Sydney Area Health Service, says there has not been a clinical trial reported anywhere of Rimonabant's potential as a treatment for cannabis addiction.
Two volunteers were hospitalised for psychiatric illness during the study, but Bell does not believe Rimonabant was the cause. Those remaining in the trial were tracked for six months, and the results, reported late last year at a conference in New Zealand, showed that most participants had a marked reduction in cannabis use (which was verified by urine tests).
Bell and Montebello are evaluating the results, which appear encouraging, and preparing them for publication. "I am not trying to talk up this drug as a treatment. Treating cannabis dependence is difficult, and while in our trial Rimonabant helped some individuals to interrupt heavy cannabis use, it also caused many side effects, and people took it mostly for short periods. I don't want mothers ringing me, hoping it's a cure for their sons. If we are to proceed to larger clinical trials, against a placebo, we would use it as a short-term initial intervention, to be followed with longer-term counselling."
Although it is used in Australia, Acomplia did not meet FDA approval for use as a weight-loss aide in the US.
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Think about it, prohibitionists know we are mostly aware that their links between schizophrenia and cannabis are an illusion, caused by the former's affinity for the latter.
This is a fake study designed to produce falsities. If they could pretend they had suppressed cannabinoids in the brain without driving people crazy (remember the counsellors were on hand not to treat cannabis use but to treat mental illness) then any new "facts" extrapolated from this type of experiment will invariably suggest a link between Schizophrenia and Cannabis use. This would be great news for Rimonabant's makers. I personally would suppose it will result in a market-driven rewriting of the symptoms, cause and treatment for a "new" schizophrenia like there has been for depression, ADD, etc, etc...
The point is, we don't know how/why it is a terrible idea. Hence the research.
I imagine negative psychiatric reactions are more due to the fact that they recruited subjects with MENTAL ILLNESS. I could have probably used this drug to be honest that one time I ate too many brownies and ended up puking on and off non-stop for 4 hours.
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