- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Letters posted here are associated with the following article:
The letters thread is now closed.
If you're the kind of person whose blood pressure starts to rise at the mention of the words "free trade" you would be well advised to pop a few hypertension pills before reading Oxfam's new study.
Is pharmaceutical hypertension medicine safe to use that way? I thought it was a once a day thing.
Speaking of the drug war and high blood pressure, here's a new item that just popped up on the radar:
CANNABIS MAY HELP LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE
(Source:Times of India)
20 Jun 2006
Israel
-------
New York, June 20 ( IANS ) A chemical compound found in cannabis, also known as hashish or marijuana, may help lower blood pressure, say scientists after testing it on rats.
Yehoshua Maor, a researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, has created a synthetic version of a minor cannabis constituent named cannabigerol, which has been shown to help in lowering blood pressure, reported science portal The News Medical.
Maor carried out laboratory experiments with rats and found that this novel compound reduced blood pressure when administered to rats in relatively low doses.
The additional tests carried out by him also showed that the compound brought about another beneficial effect -- relaxation of the blood vessels. The compounds produced an anti-inflammatory response.
These qualities have the potential for development of a valuable new clinical drug with a major market potential, especially for patients suffering from inflammation of the blood vessels as a result of hypertension, and others with metabolic irregularities, Maor believes.
Cardiovascular disease accounts for about one-third of all deaths in industrialised countries, and is the leading reason for visits there to physicians as well as for drug prescriptions.
http://www.mapinc.org/norml/v06/n810/a11.htm
I would like to add that cannabinoids in general have anti-inflammatory properties, except in politics, where they seem to get people quite inflamed.
It's Evo Morales, not Eva Morales. He is usually referred to as just Evo in Bolivia. "?Que dice Evo?"
i'll fix that eva-evo mistake.
