“Although cannabis has been used in medical treatment for thousands of years in China and India, it became illegal in most of the western world in the first half of the twentieth century. This was thanks to an early corporate conspiracy involving DuPont, William Randolph Hearst, the Mellon Bank and Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon. The major problem with hemp was its immense versatility. Most paper and nearly all plastics were made of hemp fiber, while hemp oil was a major fuel. Dupont was trying to promote their own petroleum-based plastic, Hearst his wood pulp paper factories, and Mellon his friends at Standard Oil. See The Politics of Hemp.

Recent research, mainly out of Spain and Italy (such research is  illegal in the US), reveals that treatment with a cannabis metabolite cannobidiol (CBD) has a marked effect on immune function and is useful in the treatment of breast, bowel and other metastatic cancers, diabetes, epilepsy, glaucoma, high blood pressure, chronic pain and a host of other medical conditions…

Below is a link to a groundbreaking lecture on the medical benefits of cannabis by University of California-San Francisco oncologist/AIDS specialist Donald Abrams, MD. Abrams contends that smoking cannabis actually reduces your chances of lung cancer, owing to its anti-inflammatory and immune effects.

More: http://open.salon.com/blog/stuartbramhall/2013/08/30/curing_cancer_with_cannabis