Between 2000 and 2018, $1.56 billion was poured into the problem, according to a new analysis of cannabis research funding in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The largest funder, the United States, raised just over $1 billion for him.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has spent far more money studying cannabis abuse and its adverse effects than it does use cannabis and cannabis-derived chemicals as therapeutic agents.
Regulatory Barriers To Research On Cannabis And Cannabinoids.
Government budgets are a political statement of what we value as a society,” says Daniel Marinson, a cannabis policy researcher at Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg.
It’s heading towards substance abuse and possibly cannabis use disorders as opposed to medical purposes – which tells us something.” “It’s out on the street,” says Daniela Vergara, who studies cannabis genomics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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However, total funding for cannabis research in the United States has risen steadily from less than $30.2 million in 2000 to more than $143 million in 2018, with funding for research into medical cannabis treatments increasing. but not as fast as damage research funding.
This analysis is based on a database compiled by Jim Hudson, a consultant for medical research organizations and government agencies, that collects publicly available grant data from 50 funders, including public agencies in the United States and elsewhere.
Charities such as the National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Osteoarthritis Association. Based on his own reading of his 3,269 grants containing keywords related to cannabis, Hudson classified each into a category that reflected its research focus.
Canada spent $32.2 million and the UK $40 million, compared to $1.49 billion spent by the US over 19 years. British spending was similarly dominated by research into the harmful effects of cannabis, while Canadian funding focused on the endocannabinoid system.
Key Barriers To Cannabis Research.
The tool Hudson has developed to access and organize public grants data will eventually be used for cancer research funding advisory work, but with a much smaller cannabis space, it’s a bite-sized test.
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Limited funding for treatment research is part of the vicious cycle, Marinson says. The Drug Enforcement Administration lists marijuana as a Schedule I drug.
This means a high potential for abuse and no evidence of medical benefit, but limited research makes it difficult to meet the threshold required to prove medical benefit. “It’s hard to break,” Marinson says. Putting marijuana on the Schedule II less restrictive list alongside drugs like oxycodone seemed “inevitable” more than a decade ago.
