Insys Therapeutics Inc. (fka INSYQ)

[terry hallinan]

Syndros is a better drug

Sorry, Wolf, THC has been found worthless for treating extreme pain in any formulation:

Marijuana works on some of the same areas of the brain as opioids–those that perceive pain. The active ingredients may help cancer-related pain. They can also be helpful in some pain related to multiple sclerosis and in HIV and AIDS.

Prescription opioids are absorbed into our blood vessels. Once in the vessels of the brain, transporters help these compounds to travel to their target cells where they bind to specific receptors. That binding leads to pain relief and other positive feelings.

But the brain picks up the increased binding of these receptors. After a few weeks, it starts to remove opioid receptors to lower the signal and decrease receptor binding to where it was before. The opioids are in the blood, but they’re not affecting the brain as much as they did before. That means the same dose of medication has less of an effect and more is needed to treat the same pain. This phenomenon is called tolerance.

If you have pain for a short time, like after surgery, opioids work pretty well. Postsurgical pain gets better fast enough that the body doesn’t have time to adapt to the opioids you’re taking. If you take opioids for a long time, like for chronic low back pain, you might notice that the medication doesn’t work as well as you expect it to as the weeks and months progress.

While it might sounds similar, tolerance is not the same as addiction. An addiction occurs when a person develops a psychological dependence on the drug. While they might need more and more for the same high, it’s the psychological need for the drug that makes them an addict, not the tolerance they develop for the drug. The problem is that tolerance drives addicts to take even higher doses to satisfy their emotional hunger for the high. Eventually, the amount of drug in the blood can become high enough to cause other side effects. This can eventually lead to a lethal drug overdose.

http://www.doctoroz.com/article/marijuana-effective-opiates-treating-pain

This is a rather nice explanation of the difference between cannabinoid treatment of pain vs. opioids despite coming from the Dr. Oz website. It is not authored by Dr. Oz.

I was looking for a failed clinical trial of maryjane pain treatment but this is much clearer IMO.

Best, Terry