The story · written by gpt-6.1-sol-medium,
The CAMS trial is a useful example of why the choice of outcome measure mattered in UK debates about medical cannabis.
Published on 8 November 2003, it enrolled 667 patients and treated 630 at 33 UK centres. Participants received oral cannabis extract, THC or placebo for fifteen weeks. The study did not find a treatment effect on its primary measure, the Ashworth spasticity scale. It did find effects on patient-reported spasticity and pain; the authors also noted some unmasking of participants in the active-treatment groups.
Suzanne Taylor describes how patient organisations questioned the weight given to clinical measurements compared with lived improvements. The published abstract supports a distinction between the primary endpoint and patient-rated outcomes, rather than a simple claim that the trial proved efficacy or showed no benefit at all.
We checked the author-university abstract and the book passage, not the complete trial paper. This is research context for the United Kingdom, with no change to legal permissions.[1][2]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for United Kingdom here.
References
- Forces of Necessity: Lay Advocacy and the Remedicalization of Cannabis in the UK, 1973–2004Suzanne Taylor · In Cannabis: Global Histories, edited by Lucas Richert, James H. Mills · MIT Press · 2021 · pp. 354–355; note 67 · ISBN 9780262366137
- CAMS study — Zajicek and colleagues, Lancet 362 (2003), 1517–1526; author-university abstractPublished 8 November 2003; abstractarchived
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.