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Smokers May Use Marijuana Drug to Quit

Posted on: Wednesday, 12 March 2008, 15:00 CDT

Smokers trying to quit might be helped by marijuana-based medicines, researchers at The University of Nottingham in England said.

Teams of pharmacologists have been studying the marijuana-like compounds -- endocannabinoids -- that exist naturally in the body, since the mid-1990s. This led to an explosion in the number of researchers looking into the medical uses of cannabinoids and marijuana compounds, the researchers said.

The brain is full of cannabinoid receptors and so not surprisingly with diseases like depression and anxiety, there's a great deal of interest in exploiting these receptors and in doing so, developing anti-depressant compounds, David Kendall, a cellular pharmacologist, said in a statement.

So this tends to indicate that that if the link involving endocannabinoids and the reward pathway, using inhibitors, can be interrupted, it could turn down the drive to seek addictive agents like nicotine.

The findings are available via a podcast of the British Journal of Pharmacology.

Source: United Press International

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