Historical Uses

In the mid-1970s, the inability to control nausea and vomiting among chemotherapy patients encouraged oncologists to explore the use of cannabis and its derivatives. In 1975, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that THC effectively reduced vomiting during treatments within a study group of patients receiving seven different antitumor drugs.110 This study was prompted by anecdotal accounts that smoking cannabis had reduced nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy. By the mid-1990s, the Federal Drug Administration approved THC that was synthesized, as opposed to extracted from cannabis, as an approved prescription medicine to treat nausea and vomiting in patients undergoing chemotherapy. A purely synthetic cannabinoid, nabilone, was also developed and is sold as Cesamet.