Doctors Seek Medicinal Use For Marijuana

President Carter's decision this week to loosen regulatory restraints covering research on the use of marijuana to control nausea in cancer patients is in part the result of a decade of pioneering research at the Medical School. Dr. Norman A. Zinberg, clinical professor of Psychiatry, said yesterday.

Ellen J. Metsky, administrative assistant to the president's health policy adviser, said yesterday research at Harvard "was instrumental in showing us illegal drugs have medical benefits."

Research at the Med School has "demythologized" marijuana through scientific study and has established the suppression of nausea in chemotherapy patients as an important medical use of the drug, Zinberg said.

In 1968, Zinberg and Andrew T. Weil '63, then a fourth-year student at the Med School, conducted the first controlled experiments in which humans used marijuana, Zinberg said.

Dr. Stephen E. Sallan, assistant professor of Medicine and an oneologist a notification by Christmas should contact the financial aid office, she added.

The new regulations also require financial aid officers to discuss the loan payment schedule with each loan recipient. the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute, said yesterday he has been studying the use of marijuana to control the side effects of chemotherapy since 1971, when a patient told him that smoking the drug before chemotherapy treatments eliminated the usual nausea.

Sallan and two other researchers were the first to demonstrate scientifically the nausea-controlling effect of marijuana in a study published in 1975 that compared patients who received THC, an oral derivative of marijuana, to those who received placebos, Sallan said.

The preliminary results of Sallan's current research comparing THC and compazine, the regularly-used anti-emetic drug, indicate the marijuana derivative is effective for many patients who do not respond to the conventional drug.

Researchers at the Medical School yesterday applauded Carter's authorization of research on the uses of illegal drugs in cancer treatment, including possible employment of heroin as a pain killer.

Dr. George P. Canellos '56, chief of medicine at the Sidney Farber Cancer Institute, said medical uses of heroin and marijuana derivatives "should be looked at.