BY KATIE WILLIAMSON
kcwillia@go.olemiss.edu
Marcie Roahen was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer in November of 2011. After a grueling six months of chemotherapy, her prognosis was grim. The cancer made its way to her liver. She was not expected to live much longer.
“She started experiencing pain from her cancer that she hadn’t had before,” Sara Roahen, Marci’s daughter, said. “She started to have to take more meds, which gave her a lot of bad side effects, like dizziness and nausea.”
The Roahen family was referred to Michael Broffman at the Pine Street Foundation. This non-profit organization focuses on providing alternative treatment options to cancer patients. Broffman suggested that Marcie might benefit from medical marijuana.
“My mom was still afraid to use the marijuana,” Sara said. “She really wanted it to help her side effects, but she didn’t want to make them worse.”
Marijuana is illegal in Wisconsin and no one in the family used the drug, so it was a difficult process for Sara to finally figure out. Because of her mother’s intense discomfort, she decided to make pot brownies.
“It ended up being way, way, way too strong,” Sara said. “She ate half of a brownie before she went to bed, and in the morning she could barely talk and could only shuffle-walk.”
The inability to calculate the potency of medical marijuana is one of the many negative aspects that the research team at the University of Mississippi is trying to correct. They are working to produce a way to administer a controlled amount of TCH (Tetrahydrocannabinol), the medicinally useful chemical found in marijuana, to a patient without creating a euphoric effect.
“That’s not what my mom needed,” Sara said. “My mom was already stoned. She was already not feeling like herself.”
Since 2004, Dr. Michael Repka has been developing a way to administer THC to patients that will be controlled and effective. He along with a group of researchers have created a patch that allows the drug to be directly transmitted into the blood stream at a constant rate. This eliminates the euphoric feeling and allows a more accurate and stabilized dosage to be prescribed to a patient.
“The disadvantage of using THC orally or in a tablet is that the absorption between people is so erratic,” Repka said. “The viability is very low to begin with. Some people will get high blood levels and some people won’t get any blood levels at all.”
Medical marijuana has been shown to be effective in treating a variety of aliments such as preventing wasting syndrome of AIDS patients by stimulating their appetite, treating glaucoma or alleviating pain and discomfort for cancer patients. According to the 2011 Census Bureau there are 1,029,315 medical marijuana patients in the US.
“The problem with THC being bought in different places, mainly for smoking purposes, is that it has been able to be genetically engineered to become much more potent then what it was 10 years ago,” Repka said. “There are no regulations other than you weigh out so much, and that’s what you buy. Smoking one cigarette may be equivalent to smoking 10 before. It’s so hard to not know what dose you’re giving.”
Through research grants, Repka and his team have poured $1.52 million into this project. The effectiveness of his THC patch has been show in animal testing and will soon be used in human trials, which could be another four-year process.
“Everything we do, as we are moving on, will be through FDA standards. The drawback to that is that it is very expensive,” Repka said. “The benefit is that we are going to prove that it is safe and effective.”
There is currently no marijuana product on the market that is regulated by the FDA. Because Ole Miss is following these standards, marijuana laws should not be a consideration, according to Repka.
There is no real difference between medical marijuana and the stuff a college student would buy on the street, said Repka. Because the potency can’t be measured, you really don’t know what you are buying. It could be ineffective completely, too strong or even laced with other drugs or infected by bacteria that can form on the plant itself. “It can be a dangerous situation.”
Figuring out how to get the marijuana, how much to use, and how to use it were all things that the Roahens had to deal with. Marcie passed away in October. The pot brownies are still in the freezer. After the sobering experience, no one in the family will touch them.
“As researchers, we listen to people like that, and we hear stories like that,” Repka said. “We want to help people safely and effectively benefit from THC.”
