A top federal health agency says it recognizes that there are ample concerns among scientists about how they’ve “encountered barriers that have hampered their research” into marijuana under federal prohibition, including “complex” federal regulations and inadequate supplies of cannabis.
That’s why the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is now seeking to resolve some of those challenges by standing up a Resource Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, an official said in a blog post on Tuesday.
NIH posted a notice of funding opportunity late last month, explaining how it’s seeking an entity to operate the center through a cooperative agreement in order to “address challenges and barriers to conducting research on cannabis and its constituents.”
To help facilitate that process, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health’s (NCCIH) Patrick Still announced that the health agency will be holding a webinar on January 25 to provide potential applicants with technical assistance.
“There’s growing interest in potential therapeutic uses of cannabis and its constituents among both health care providers and the public,” Still, who is a program director for NCCIH’s Basic and Mechanistic Research branch, wrote. “Substances in cannabis have a variety of pharmacologic effects, and rigorous research is needed to understand their mechanisms of action and investigate their possible value in helping to manage health conditions.”
“However, investigators working in this field have encountered barriers that have hampered their research,” he said, pointing to feedback NCCIH received as part of a request for information last year.
“The barriers that many of them have mentioned include difficulty meeting complex federal and state regulatory requirements, problems obtaining cannabis products suitable for research, a lack of validated measures of cannabis use and exposure, and inadequate scientific infrastructure to support research studies,” Still wrote.
Hellbound and Down 