The Medical Cannabis Guidebook. Mel Thomas
surrounding the use of the name “marijuana,” from here onward we will call this plant by its correct name: cannabis.
Today, there is renewed interest in the medical use of cannabis, with numerous respected doctors and scientists researching its many and varied indicators. A study sponsored by the State of California, conducted by the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research, and published in The Open Neurology Journal (September 2012), concluded that cannabis provides much-needed relief to chronic pain sufferers and that more clinical trials are desperately needed:
“The classification of marijuana as a Schedule I drug as well as the continuing controversy as to whether or not cannabis is of medical value are obstacles to medical progress in this area…”19
“Based on evidence currently available the Schedule I classification is not tenable; it is not accurate that cannabis has no medical value, or that information on safety is lacking. It is true cannabis has some abuse potential, but its profile more closely resembles drugs in Schedule III. The continuing conflict between scientific evidence and political ideology will hopefully be reconciled in a judicious manner.”
Multinational pharmaceutical companies are now growing tons of cannabis plants at secret, heavily guarded locations, in order to extract just two of the plant’s cannabinoids, mix them with alcohol, glycerin and a small amount of peppermint for flavor, and market the end product as a “mucosal” spray (which means you basically squirt it under your tongue) called Sativex.
This cannabis-based product was developed by GW Pharmaceuticals in the United Kingdom at heavily guarded farms where they grow over 20 tons of cannabis annually. This is then processed and the cannabinoids THC and CBD are extracted to be made into an alcohol-based tincture. They charge patients around $190.00 (approximately) per 10-milliliter vial, which is only enough to last the average multiple sclerosis (MS) patient 10 days.20 There are estimated to be 80,000 MS sufferers in the U.K. alone; you do the math. If patients were allowed to grow their own cannabis they could produce a generic copy of Sativex for $8 per 10 milliliters. The authors have actually proved this and demonstrated the product at cannabis conventions in both Barcelona and Valencia in 2013. There is a video taken at Spannabis in Barcelona on their website (cannabiscure.info) that verifies this.
Regardless of the enormous profits being made at the expense of sick people, cannabis buds and oil are far superior to Sativex as you benefit from the full and complex profile of cannabinoids, not just THC and CBD. In addition, patients don’t experience any ulcers, burning sensations in the mouth or the unpleasant aftertaste of alcohol that many who use Sativex complain of.
In U.S. states such as California and Colorado, cannabis can be purchased at state-sanctioned dispensaries, but according to the Controlled Substances Act, cannabis is a Schedule I drug, listed alongside dangerous narcotics. The American Chronic Pain Society says in ACPA Medications & Chronic Pain, Supplement 2007:
“Some states allow the legal use of marijuana for health purposes including pain, while the federal government continues to threaten physicians with prosecution for prescribing it.”21
There have been two rulings since 2001, United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative and Gonzales v. Raich, which have confirmed the federal government’s commitment to prosecuting buyers and sellers even in states where cannabis has been approved for medical use.22, 23 The FDA’s official stance on cannabis states:
“Marijuana has a high potential for abuse, has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and has a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.”24
Despite this fallacious statement, Sativex is licensed to Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. in the United States as a treatment for spasticity resulting from multiple sclerosis (MS), and as a possible treatment for the side effects from conventional cancer therapies.25 Furthermore, synthetic cannabinoids such as Nabilone and Cesamet are available as prescription drugs in many countries.26, 27 These synthetic copies of cannabinoids are expensive and compare poorly to cannabis plant extracts.
In April 2011, GW Pharmaceuticals entered into an exclusive license agreement for Novartis Pharma AG to commercialize Sativex in Australia, New Zealand, Asia and Africa.28 Under the agreement, GW Pharmaceuticals received an upfront payment of $5 million and is eligible for additional payments totaling $28.75 million upon the achievement of set commercial sales targets. In addition, GW Pharmaceuticals will receive royalties on all net sales.29 In 2009, the global pharmaceutical industry market was valued at $837 billion and estimated to reach $1 trillion by 2014.30
The profits for pharmaceutical companies targeting the cancer market expanded to $24 billion in 2004, with the highest growth rates occurring in the antineoplastic (cancer inhibiting) class of drugs.31 The market for these drugs was valued at around $43 billion in 2005 and $69 billion in 2010.32 Why would these multinational corporations be interested in researching and promoting a cancer treatment that can be grown for free and is difficult to effectively patent unless kept illegal?
Cannabis oil.
The following multiple-medicinal-use patent on a natural compound, which is illegal under patent statutes, was recently granted to the U.S. government by its own Patent Office:
Excerpt from U.S. Patent #6630507:33
“Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism. This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of a wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuro-protectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and HIV dementia. Non-psychoactive cannabinoids, such as cannabidiol, are particularly advantageous to use because they avoid toxicity that is encountered with psychoactive cannabinoids at high doses useful in the method of the present invention. A particular disclosed class of cannabinoids useful as neuro-protective antioxidants is formula (I) wherein the R group is independently selected from the group consisting of H, CH3, and COCH3.”
This is a complete contradiction to the U.S. government’s officially stated policy with regard to medical cannabis use and clearly demonstrates that cannabis prohibition is not about protecting health–it’s about protecting corporate wealth.
Apart from the nutritional and health benefits gained from non-psychoactive hemp seed and oils now legally available, there is overwhelming evidence that cannabis oil made from the illegal plant varieties can send many cancers into remission, particularly with regard to breast cancer. The antitumor effects of herbal cannabis and cannabis oil extracts have been well known since at least the 1970s, when the Medical College of Virginia reported on August 18, 1974, that marijuana’s psychoactive component, THC, slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36%.34 Funded by the National Institutes of Health and tasked with finding evidence that cannabis damages the immune system, the study instead found that THC slowed the growth of these three types of cancer: The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) quickly shut down the Virginia study and all further research was halted.
In 1998, a research team at Madrid’s Complutense University discovered that THC could selectively induce programmed death in brain tumor cells without negatively impacting surrounding healthy cells.35 Further studies reported in the August 15, 2004 issue of Cancer Research, the journal of