SUE SISLEY
Dr.
BY HEATHER DEROSE
After 10 years, Dr. Sue Sisley and her stellar team at MAPS finished the first FDA approved research of its kind with a study on the effect of smoked cannabis on veterans with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “We’re grateful that we finally got this across the finish line but disappointed that it took 10 years to complete. That’s a testament to the immense amount of government red tape that’s involved in trying to study cannabis as a medicine. The U.S. government has systematically impeded this type of efficacy research for so many decades. It shouldn’t take that long to do a simple FDA phase two trial with 80 subjects. Patients have legitimate clinical questions
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about how cannabis works or how it doesn’t work, and they deserve to have these questions potentially answered through rigorous clinical trials. But we have all these government regulatory blockades in the way, including an obvious lack of federal research funding available to study cannabis as a medicine. It’s different if you want to study cannabis as a drug of abuse, you’ll easily obtain federal government money and government (NIDA) cannabis with hardly any obstructions. If you dare say you want to study cannabis as a medicine or do drug development research looking at both safety and efficacy, you could be impeded years.”
