Dr. Gupta's About-Face on Weed
LEMON: I have a couple of sports headlines for you this Saturday afternoon. It's PGA championship weekend and so far it's all been about this guy, Jason Dufner. He tore up the course Friday, shooting a 63, which ties the all-time record score for a round at a major. Dufner led at the turn today, but has since given up the lead to Jim Furyk. Tiger Woods -- you probably don't want to ask. This is one tournament Woods is going to wish he could start all over.</s>ANNOUNCER: Fifth in the order, third baseman, number 13, Alex Rodriguez. Number 13.</s>LEMON: That's about 50 percent cheers, 50 percent jeers. Alex Rodriguez, A-Rod, back in Yankee stadium Friday for the first time in the 2013 season. It was also his first time in pinstripes since Major League Baseball handed him a long suspension on charges he used illegal drugs. Now -- performance-enhancing drugs, I should say. If any Yankees fans were on the fence about how they felt about Alex Rodriguez, he didn't do much to earn their love, going 0 for 4 at the plate. A-rod was not in the Yankees line-up for today's game. Sit tight everyone. Pay attention to this. A new CNN documentary airing this weekend may make you rethink what you thought you knew about pot. Our chief medical correspondent is, of course, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and he changed his mind after he spent almost a year investigating the impact of marijuana on the body. Sanjay is here to discuss. Sanjay, this is not the first time you and I have had this conversation. We'll talk about that. But I want to dive into more about something that you thought was bad, a bad drug for such a long time, that actually, surprisingly, you say works well as a medicine. So how so? Why did you change your mind?</s>DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, let me preface by saying, you know, for a long time we've known there's been some medicinal qualities to marijuana. For a thousand years or so, it was used as a medicine up until 1943. It was actually on the list doctors use to prescribe medicines. For the last 70 years, it has not been. For me, Don, one of the things that happened, if you look at the literature regarding medical marijuana, some 20,000 studies will pop up and you find the vast majority of them are designed to look at harm. Less than 10 percent, around 6 percent, to actually look at benefit. I realize now that painted a distorted picture and it distorted my own views on medical marijuana. I was pretty critical of it. It took sort of getting out of the country, literally looking at other countries, looking in small labs that don't get nearly enough attention, and paying attention to legitimate patients with legitimate problems for whom not only did marijuana work, it was the only thing that worked. I too easily dismissed them as high visibility malingerers who were just looking to get high. And I think once you start doing all this and really spending time investigating this, it -- in my case, changed my views.</s>LEMON: OK. Let's watch a little bit of, Sanjay, and then we'll talk more. I want people to see it.</s>CHAZ MOORE, USES MEDICAL MARIJUANA: But always have (inaudible).</s>GUPTA: Meet 19-year-old Chaz Moore. He uses many different strains of marijuana, many of them high in CBD to treat his rare disorder of the diagram.</s>MOORE: My abs would, like, lock up.</s>GUPTA: That's why he's talking this way. Almost speaking in hiccups. Like he can't catch his breath. It's called myoclonis diaphragmagmatic flutter. (on camera): This fluttering is annoying but becomes painful --</s>MOORE: Yeah.</s>GUPTA: -- pretty quickly I imagine.</s>MOORE: Yeah. Like after 15, 20 minutes is where I can start to really feel it.</s>GUPTA: He is about to show me how the marijuana works. He's been convulsing now for seven minutes. (on camera): How quickly do you expect this to work?</s>MOORE: Within, like, the first five minutes. And I'm done. That's it.</s>GUPTA (voice-over): It was actually less than a minute.</s>GUPTA: That is Chaz Moore, Don. He had been seen by lots of different doctors, was 19 years old. Has been on dozens of medications. Was even in intensive care unit for this for sometime. So you saw how well that could possibly work for him when dozens of other medications, potentially toxic medications, could not. And that's not just one person. There are hundreds of people like this. There is real science to sort of make this point.</s>LEMON: All right, is marijuana harmful or helpful? CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta cuts through the smoke on America's green rush and journeys around the world to uncover the highs and lows of "Weed," tomorrow night, 8:00 eastern. Next, major flooding across a big portion of the United States. People in 12 states are in danger of high water right now. I'll show you a wide area of the south that's already been hit and is back in the threat zone again.