One Company Hopes a Marijuana Lozenge Will Garner FDA Approval – but Will It Work?

By COURTNEY HUTCHISON
ABC News Medical Unit
Aug. 3, 2009

When most people think of swine flu, they probably don’t think of marijuana. But then again, most people aren’t Robert Melamede.

He and his company, Cannabis Science, hope to one day make marijuana available nationwide to kids and teens — as well as adults — in the form of a medicinal throat lozenge.

While medical marijuana has garnered a great deal of attention lately in helping patients deal with chronic pain, Melamede has another application in mind; he believes it can curb death risk from the swine flu.

The approach relies on the principle that the chemicals in marijuana known as cannabinoids have a dampening effect on the immune system. Melamede said doctors may be able to take advantage of this effect to curb the risk of death from the immune system overdrive that resulted in many of the deaths of young adults during the 1918 influenza pandemic — a scenario that some worry could occur once more if swine flu were to become more virulent.

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