The History of Cannabis

It’s been used by human beings since the dawn of time. Early man’s diet undoubtedly included cannabis, since it grew prolifically in Africa and Asia and was highly nourishing due to its protein and omega 3 content. Marijuana may well have been the first cultivated plant. There’s speculation that Stone Age man may have used the wild herb to speed up his language skills, the use of new tools, new materials, cave art, and musical instruments. What created this sudden improvement? Some scientists proposed that marijuana could have opened the door to greater consciousness in Mesolithic man.

Cannabis Oil and Brain Function

New research suggests that the early humans who regularly consumed cannabis may have enhanced their brain functions and might have possibly triggered a great leap forward. But that’s all conjecture, what we do know is that cannabis is still inspiring new discoveries and a deeper understanding of the nature of health and disease.

Cannabinoids kill cancer cells

This group of chemicals has significant anti-tumor properties. Cannabinoids kill cancer cells. In many cases, they have anti-tumor properties. There’s nothing else that impacts on so many of our illnesses.

We know that it kills cancer cells without hurting the non-transformed cells.

Cannabis treats a host of ailments without side effects

In recent years, the hemp plant has been proven to be anti-inflammatory, anti-spasmodic, and anti-bacterial. It can treat depression, traumatic stress syndrome, chronic pain, glaucoma, migraines, multiple sclerosis, Tourettes, nausea, and a host of other ailments without the unwanted side effects of pharmaceutical drugs. Historical evidence shows that the holy anointing oil used by Old Testament Hebrews contained cannabis extract. The early Christians used cannabis as part of their baptismal process. In the eighteen hundreds, medical journals published more than 100 articles on the therapeutic use of the drug, then known as Cannabis Indica or Indian Hemp.

Cannabis was often prescribed by doctors

Cannabis was often prescribed by doctors and was part of every medical bag right through the early part of the century. It was a popular treatment for labor pains, asthma, rheumatism, and nervous disorders. It was even given to cranky babies to get them to stop crying. Queen Victoria, who lent her name to the repressive Victorian era, was also a bit of a pothead. The queen found that cannabis was the only remedy that helped her painful menstrual cramps. Britannia could rule the waves a lot easier when she was high.

Doctors prohibited from prescribing Cannabis

But then the dark days for pot began in the early part of the 20th century, with the advent of chemically created drugs and an emerging profit-driven assembly line medical system. The new order didn’t want competition, and cannabis was still preferred by many patients and doctors to the new miracle drugs, which were composed mainly of unnatural toxic substances. After lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry and fear-mongering misinformation by their donation-dependent allies in Congress, a federal law was passed in 1937 that prohibited doctors from prescribing pot in any circumstances under threat of prosecution, even though it was strongly opposed by the American Medical Association of its day.

All cannabis products were removed from the U.S. Pharmacopeia and the National Formulary by 1942. After alcohol was re-legalized, rather than go out of business, the massive bureaucracy of prohibition turned its operation to marijuana eradication.

It was Harry Anslinger, who was a racist, who was the head of the Federal Narcotics Bureau. He had been a prohibitionist. And then when prohibition ended, they gave him a new job. And he was in every president’s government since Roosevelt to Kennedy. Harry Anslinger was concerned that the use of marijuana by black and Latino jazz musicians was going to lead to increased crime and increased mental illness in the United States.

The Treasury Department intends to pursue relentless warfare against the despicable dope-peddling vulture who preys on the weakness of his fellow man.

The end of the war on cannabis 

This war on cannabis lasted until just a few years ago when states started passing their own medical marijuana initiatives in order to once again provide pot safely to patients. California was the first U.S. state to pass a medical marijuana law in 1996. The intent was to give relief to patients suffering from chronic pain, AIDS, cancer, and other illnesses. Since 1996, 13 other American states have passed similar compassionate use laws, 12 more have ballot measures or legislation pending.

Less cancers in cannabis users

Although cannabis smoke has been shown to have precancerous effects in animal tissue, countless studies have failed to find a link between cannabis smoking and cancer and in fact, have shown that heavy marijuana users have considerably fewer cancers than the general population.

Dr. Donald Taskin is a very good researcher at UCLA. He is a pulmonologist. His research demonstrated that the incidence of lung cancer in people who smoked cannabis was less than the incidence of lung cancer in people who smoked nothing at all.

We actually succeeded in studying 600, about 600 lung cancer cases, about 600 head and neck cancer cases. And we, the bottom line is, we failed to find any positive association between marijuana, even heavy marijuana use, which we define as more than 10 years. Even if you look at more than 60 years of joint years – a joint year is a joint a day, times the number of joints smoked, we could not see an association. So I think it’s really essentially a negative study. We failed to find any positive association with cancer.

Is it possible that the tar and smoked pot could be causing malignancies while the chemical constituents in pot are curing them at the same time? Although there’s some concern that marijuana can exacerbate schizophrenia and psychosis in a few patients already suffering from these diseases, recent extensive studies in the UK have failed to support a causal relationship between marijuana and mental disorders.  

Cannabis Oil South Africa

The Constitutional Court also failed to find compelling evidence with their ruling in Johannesburg that cannabis oil in South Africa causes any appreciable harm.

Self medicating with Cannabis Oil

Many of the people who are sort of phobic about marijuana say that it leads to schizophrenia. And I think what we really know is that’s not the case, that, that adolescents who seem to have a bit of a thought disorder, perhaps pre-schizophrenia, find that smoking marijuana helps their thought disorder. And therefore, you have more people who are schizophrenic who found that they can self-medicate with marijuana and they smoke marijuana. It’s not that marijuana is causing the schizophrenia that these people have discovered this as a potential therapy for their disorder.

Cannabinoids – THC oil

It was only in the 1960s that fat soluble THC was isolated from pot plants and declared the substance that got us high.

These substances in the cannabis plant, which are active, are kind of oily, fatty-like, lipid-like, and they’re hard to work with. So it has been very hard for chemists to get a handle on these kind of substances. Therefore, it took until 1964 for Raphael Mechoulam and his colleague Edri to discover the active compound in the cannabis plant, which they called then Delta Nine Tetrahydrocannabinol or as we know it, THC oil.

That compound that we isolated in 1964, tetrahydrocannabinol THC, has been looked into in great depth, and indeed for the next 20 years, people got to know a lot about the chemistry, a lot about the clinical effects and a lot about the biochemistry of THC. One thing was still unknown 20 years later, I mean I’m speaking from 1964 ’till the mid 80s. Nothing was known about the mechanism.

How does THC act in the body?

Cannabis can affect memory and movement, but only temporarily. Though there have been reports of pott’s negative effects on the heart and cardiovascular system, they are rare and not scientifically substantiated.

Cannabis Oil is low risk

Research has also shown that past claims of brain damage from cannabis failed to hold up under scientific scrutiny. All in all, cannabis is very low risk. The long history of the human use of cannabis also attests to its safety. Nearly 5000 years without a single documented death,

…A few different types of edibles right now we’ve got the ice cream. Ice cream…

Cannabis oil edibles

Medical marijuana dispensaries across America, are now offering an impressive array of cannabis enhanced foods, which makes it easier to over-medicate with marijuana edibles. But even so, they are never toxic or lethal and the symptoms will disappear within a few hours,

…made with more Indica hybrid, and those go by dosage, the green label or single strength, the red or triple. See, when I’ve eaten, eaten stuff before, it just kind of made me tired. I wonder if you wouldn’t need much of it. You wouldn’t eat a whole one? No way.

You would need a whole knowing.

Have you tried this? I have. I had one little bite.

Well, you can eat four cookies, you can eat six cookies. I mean, what’s that? You’re going to end up falling asleep. You can’t O.D. from. It’s impossible. You’re not going to die from it. That’s not going to happen I’ve tried.

For marijuana to prove fatal, you’d have to smoke 1500 pounds within 15 minutes and any resulting death would likely be from asphyxiation.

Cannabinoids have a significant effect on almost all cancers

Dozens of major studies have been published in the last few years that indicate that the chemicals in cannabis, in the lab, and in animals have a significant effect on fighting almost all major cancers, including brain, breast, prostate, lung, thyroid, colon, skin, pituitary melanoma and leukemia cancers. They do this by promoting the death of cancer cells that have forgotten how to die, as well as a reduction in their crucial blood supply while leaving healthy cells untouched.

Endocannabinoids’ effect on cancer and the endocannabinoid system

But why, you may wonder, would cannabis have any effect on cancer? The answer can be explained in one word: endocannabinoids. Amazing as it sounds, we’re all born with a form of cannabis already in our bodies. It’s called the endocannabinoid system. The endocannabinoid system, or ECS, influences multiple physiological processes. This intricate system modulates energy intake as well as nutrient transport, metabolism, and storage. A completely natural collection of compounds, endocannabinoids are our body’s own form of marijuana and are involved in most of our cells and structures.

What do endocannabinoids do?

Endocannabinoids control a variety of functions in the nervous system, heart, reproductive and immune systems. Endocannabinoid messengers help the cells communicate. Typically, they protect our good cells while killing the bad ones like cancer cells. In all animals, the nervous system is made of the same components, large numbers of nerve cells carrying electrical signals. And wherever the cells meet, these signals are passed to a receptor in the next cell by a chemical messenger called a neurotransmitter. Inside the brain, there are different types of neurotransmitters, including dopamine and serotonin.

All animals from rodents to fish to elephants to humans, have inherited this basic structure. But hundreds of millions of years ago, the sea squirt and other primitive invertebrates evolved an innovation to this system.

What happened was the nervous system acquired a new chemical, a chemical if you like that had a new flavor and new type of chemical. And it’s this chemical that is related in structure, a similar shape, to the chemical that’s found in cannabis.

Because of this similarity, these new signals came to be known as cannabinoids. It was inevitable that eventually, cannabis would meet its perfect partner: Us. Whether you like it or not, each and every one of us is fundamentally wired to respond to cannabis.

Now, receptors are not built in our brain or anywhere in our body, of course, animal bodies, because there is a plant out there that will produce a compound that acts on them. That just doesn’t work that way. Receptors are found in our bodies because we produce compounds that will activate those receptors. So obviously we thought that there should be endogenous compounds which act on those receptors. The fact that there is a plant compound tetrahydrocannabinol, the THC, which acts on those receptors, is just a quirk of nature.

Endocannabinoid receptors – THC and the brain

After scientists discovered THC, they found that it could bind to specific receptors in the brain and the area around it, and that this interaction created a cascade of biological processes leading to the well-known high.

What does it feel like? That looks very enjoyable.

My God, it’s fun. It was amazing. Amazing.

The detrimental effects of blocking endocannabinoid receptors

If you block the endocannabinoids artificially in mice, they tend to grow tumors and they also get depressed. A few years ago, some brilliant entrepreneurs came up with the idea of blocking the endocannabinoids in our bodies to create a new diet drug. The theory being, if cannabis gives people the munchies, then blocking the endocannabinoids would make them lose their appetites. The drug they developed, Rimonabant, did indeed reduce appetite by blocking the endocannabinoid receptors. But data from clinical trials showed that Rimonabant users suffered depression, anxiety, insomnia, and aggressive impulses at twice the rate of subjects given a placebo.

Well Sanofi-Aventis, the company that had developed and was marketing this agent, did not study people with a history of psychiatric illness or depression before they applied for approval. That was probably a mistake. The AMA did approve it and the drugs have been on the market in Europe for a year, a year and a half by now. And I’ve sort of said if it was any real problem with this, that was more than just theoretical, we would know. Well, it turns out we do know and they’ve suggested now that the risk for this agent outweighs the benefit.

Endocannabinoids are mood regulators

In one study, there were five suicides among Rimonabant users because, as they discovered, endocannabinoids are also mood regulators with the capacity to make us feel euphoric or when blocked, depressed. Rimonabant was finally withdrawn from the market in 2008. Researchers at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas reported that mice and Rimonabant developed potentially cancerous polyps at a far higher rate than controls, confirming that endocannabinoids are not only mood regulators but tumor regulators as well.

My good Italian friend Demarzo summarized the activity, which is really a summary, says well, what do the endocannabinoids do? They relax us, help us eat, sleep, forget and protect, not remember, forget, and don’t think that forgetting is less important than recalling. We should have a system to forget otherwise, well, if you wish, we can burst. If you go down a mall and see a thousand faces. Do you want to remember all of them? Of course not.

Endocannabinoids restrain cancerous tumorous

What’s especially fascinating is that while significant numbers of endocannabinoids are not normally found in breast and prostate cells, the homes for the two leading forms of cancer, it appears that large quantities show up only after normal cells begin to progress toward a state of uncontrolled growth in a desperate attempt to restrain the tumorous invaders. The endocannabinoids already in our bodies did an efficient job for hundreds of thousands of years, working as tumor regulators, free radical scavengers, and anti-inflammatory agents. But then, once we entered the Industrial Age with all its pollution and chemical doctoring of food, the endocannabinoids became overwhelmed and couldn’t keep up with the task of keeping us healthy and protected from toxins.

Better public health helped us live longer, but unfortunately, human beings became inundated with the free radicals our bodies produced naturally by simply being alive, along with an unprecedented avalanche of carcinogens and contaminants, including pharmaceutical drugs. The endocannabinoids needed help. Enter cannabis. When marijuana is consumed and broken down into a collection of cannabinoid molecules, the THC and its sisters seek out and bind with the endocannabinoid receptors already inside us. Together, they give the body more ammunition against all of the diseases of modern times.

Where are cannabinoid receptors?

And let me show you what you have. So this is an image from our subject from today.

The receptors are highlighted in what color?

In bright red. Well, any color that you see there are receptors and red is the really dense area. You can see there’s a lot of red and yellow. Green and blue are where they’re really not dense areas where there are not many receptors in our brain.

So they really are everywhere.

Yes. Yes. In fact, they’re the densest receptors, one of the densest receptors in the brain, most populated throughout the entire brain, right into the brain. Look how hot that is right in the brain. But there are also cannabinoid receptors in the liver. Also, look at the bone marrow, the vertebral column, the ribs.

So how do you think what we’re seeing here in this image, how does that relate to the experience of using cannabis? Well, look at the amount of cannabinoid receptors in the brain. A lot of them, a lot of the effects of cannabis use are in the brain. Euphoria. As an anxiolytic. It dissolves your anxiety or it can even cause your anxiety. So cannabis abusers or cannabis users talk about having this high, this euphoria that’s probably from some of the deep structures in the brain.

Cannabis is effective against a variety of diseases including diabetes and cancer

Scientists are now experimenting to see which parts of the pot plant, including its cannabinoids and other biological compounds, might be the most effective against a variety of diseases, including diabetes and cancer. Despite all the difficulties, there’s a group of doctors in the U.S. and abroad who have been advancing the research on the medical use of cannabis with highly impressive and sometimes revolutionary discoveries. In a scholarly cancer review article published in 2009, there were over four hundred and twenty-one chemical compounds identified in the cannabis plant.

And within this group of natural substances, there are many chemicals that have significant anti-tumor properties at low enough doses to where they would be effective cancer treatments. That’s an important part of this. It’s one thing to be able to kill a cancer cell, but could you really survive such a treatment?

A botanist from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs branch, Robert Melamed, who has written an article comparing the carcinogenic effect of cannabis with tobacco in explaining why he thinks that cannabis has the anti-cancer effect for lung cancer.

Cannabis oil panacea

There’s nothing else that impacts on so many of our illnesses. You see, when I talk about these age-related illnesses, we’re all aging, but we don’t all come down with cardiovascular disease. We don’t all come down with autoimmune disease. We don’t all come down with cognitive dysfunction. We don’t all come down with cancer. But the chances are we’re going to come down with one of them. All right. And here we have this one drug that’s able to help us holistically with our biochemistry to restore balance. You know cannabinoids kill cancer cells. In many cases, people are not aware of that. They think cancer, cannabis, anti-nausea, it’s way beyond.

Marijuana seeks out cancerous cells and kills them

There are also studies taking look at other organ systems that have found that marijuana seeks out the cancerous cells and preferentially kills them over the healthy cells.

There’s a wealth of laboratory evidence that these anti-tumor properties kill cancer cells in a variety of ways. There are multiple mechanisms of action identified by which cannabis kills cancer cells and they’re divided into various categories. And among these are anti-proliferative effects. Normally, that’s, that’s one of the hallmarks of a cancer cell, is that it just keeps reproducing. So if you stop the reproduction, that’s an anti-proliferative effect. There are anti-angiogenesis effects. And this means that the cannabinoids will stop the tumor from being able to elaborate or grow new blood vessels to support the growth of the tumor.

There are anti-metastatic effects, and that is simple enough to mean that the cannabinoids block the ability of the cancer cells to spread into other tissues. And there’s another effect that has a wild name: apoptotic effect. Apoptosis refers to the ability of cannabinoids to speed the death of the abnormal cells. That’s something that is especially important in cancer because you’re able to hasten the death of this cell without disturbing the normal cells around it.

Seth Research Laboratories in California have recently demonstrated that in some tumors, cancer cells are killed by marijuana while the other healthy cells are left untouched. Cells that stop moving and become still white dots are dead cancer cells. The ability of cannabinoids to kill bad cells while protecting healthy ones is particularly important when we’re talking about brain cancer. Because of the so-called blood-brain barrier, the brain has to be sheltered from outside influences that might hitch a ride on the bloodstream and cause havoc.

What is exciting and unique about cannabinoids is that they can pass through the blood-brain barrier because of their slippery, oily, fat-loving nature. Cannabinoids get right into the brain’s cancer cells by moving easily through the cells membranes, which are also composed of lipids. The evidence is piling up in mice-infested labs that the endocannabinoid system, when stimulated by cannabinoids, has an anti-tumor effect and can instruct cancer cells to commit suicide.

Cannabinoids protect nerves

This was done by Manuel Guzman’s group within the past less than 10 years. And what they showed there was that originally that THC when injected into a brain tumor in mice and rats, a significant number of those animals the tumor would regress and disappear so that you actually had survival of rats that would otherwise die. And they examined all the surrounding nerve tissue and that was all fine because remember, once again, cannabinoids protect nerves.

Dr. Manuel Guzman is a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology in Madrid, Spain, and is known for his groundbreaking studies on medical cannabis.

Why don’t doctors know about cannabis oil and cancer?

If cannabis might be the miracle cancer cure that everybody’s been searching for, then why don’t doctors everywhere know about it?

People have a hard time believing that cannabis oil can have all of these fantastic effects that are described. But what we’re doing is we’re just stimulating a natural system that’s already there. This has been developing for hundreds of millions of years. The early invertebrates, the sea squirts, the Hydra, there are primitive endocannabinoid systems in those organisms. Back, dating back six seven hundred million years ago. The cannabis plant came along maybe 50 or 60 million years ago.

Funding research for cannabis oil 

Why aren’t billions in funds being directed toward cannabinoid research by the organizations that raise money for cancer therapies?

Talking about medical research that, you know, it’s really a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I’m thrilled that there’s really more research taking place now than at any time in history when it comes to the therapeutic use of cannabis and specifically the cannabinoids, the components in cannabis. You know, unfortunately, a lot of that research is still relegated to taking place overseas. We see a little bit now finally taking place in this country. But really, the United States remains fairly well behind the curve when it comes to cutting-edge medical cannabis research.

It’s very difficult to do research with cannabis, the plant product, because, you know, it’s restricted in what research we can do with it.

Research on this area is in its infancy. And that is because the United States government has discouraged that kind of research both in the United States and elsewhere.

It’s only an aromatic herb, yet almost every government in the world restricts or bans its use. In many countries, cannabis suppliers and even users can still be put in jail for life or even executed.

It’s illegal in America. I mean, I think there are treaties that prevent anybody from accepting marijuana as a medicine now. Recently, Canada, Spain and the Netherlands have sort of broken from these treaties. But I think these things are bigger than just any single country’s politics.

Despite these initiatives, we want to make clear that federal law still applies and federal officials will continue to apply the law, and DEA officials will review cases as they have to determine whether to revoke the registration of any physician who recommends or prescribes so-called Schedule One controlled substances.

Cannabis in corporate

Why does the corporate media continue to connect marijuana only with gangs, violent drug dealers and society’s losers, and not the growing numbers of doctors and scientists who are discovering its benefits? It is true that for those who use it regularly, pot can change your way of thinking and it can make people question why they should continue to do things that aren’t making them happy.

I like smoking marijuana. It calms me down. I just feel totally at ease. Everybody knows me. Smoke a little marijuana, Tom, you’ll be great. Everything’s gonna be fine, you know? Corporate world made me stressed, extremely stressed. Totally stressed. I’m so happy I’m out of the corporate world, it’s amazing.

In essence, grass can make you feel that the past and the future are not as important as the present. It has the potential to alter the very nature of consciousness by opening up the mind to unpredictable possibilities. That doesn’t sit well with those who insist on remaining in control.

Alcohol, cannabis and prohibition

It’s a very simple reality. Marijuana leads to doing worse things. That’s just a fact. I don’t care what anybody says, what the debate is.

We’ve heard that for years, that it’s a gateway drug. What do you say to that, Congressman Paul?

Well, I think that’s silly. Probably the most addictive drug in the country and the world is alcohol. So if you’re a consistent person, you think the government should be regulating personal behavior, you have to be for prohibition of alcohol. And when you look back and throughout history and what happened to that, that was a total disaster. It created the Al Capones. I mean, look at it, total disaster that’s happened with medical marijuana. Anybody in the United States can go to California and go find a doctor and buy marijuana. And simply, marijuana is not a medicine.

Growing cannabis overseas

Cannabis is a natural substance and therefore can’t be patented. Anyone with a green thumb can grow it. And so its production could be in the hands of the people, not the corporations that run a 200 billion dollar a year cancer business. It may not be a coincidence that pharmaceutical companies are silently preparing for what could easily become a total revolution in the curing habits of the world’s population. GW Pharmaceuticals, a company that specializes in the study and commercialization of cannabinoids, has already established a full-cycle facility in an undisclosed location in the south of England, where they oversee the cultivation of the plant right to the finished medical product.

Marijuana growing areas.

This facility grows 30 to 60000 plants every year. Once the marijuana is ready for processing, it undergoes the same exact treatment for extraction and refinement that is forbidden to regular citizens around the world.

Amazingly, GW Pharmaceuticals is a company that has six greenhouses in a secret location in the south of England and each greenhouse has different strains of marijuana and each greenhouse has ten thousand plants. And each of the plants is a clone of the other. So they’ve standardized this stuff. Now their product was approved for sale in Canada for treatment of multiple sclerosis, muscle spasm,s and the pain related to that.

And this is a spray.

This is an under the tongue spray. And the reason they went with the spray was they felt that they would have a hard time getting by the regulators if they had people smoke it.

And the United States, things are moving fast as well.

CBD is effective at treating aggressive breast cancer

Breast cancer kills more than forty-one thousand American women every year. Researchers in the San Francisco lab are working to shrink that number. And they’re doing it with an unusual weapon, marijuana, or at least a compound from it.

What we found is that this compound called cannabidiol (CBD oil), was particularly effective at inhibiting aggressive breast cancers.

I have a lot of faith in pharmaceutical companies and their ability to make money. And I think that if you take a look at what’s going on now, first off, you’ve got an awful lot of basic science that’s going on in regards to cannabis and cannabinoids. And some of this research is being paid for by pharmaceutical companies.

We know that this compound extracted from cannabis is non-toxic in patients because it has already been used for different kinds of diseases.

The benefits may not stop there. Scientists say the cannabis compound may fight other aggressive cancers, including prostate cancer. The next step, animal studies, then clinical trials. So it may be several years before patients may benefit from a cannabis cancer product.

About the compounds in cannabis

Cannabis contains 421 chemicals, more than 60 of which are cannabinoids. Cannabinoids are a unique class of compounds not found anywhere else in nature. A colorful plant with antioxidant activity, cannabis is subject to few predators and has even been utilized as an insect repellent.

It’s quite an amazing spectrum of compounds that are in that plant. And what’s so unique and incredible about them is they are touching on this incredible system that pervades all of us and regulates everything from, I tell people, cradle to grave because it’s in mothers’ milk.

Another stress to which pot plants are subject results from their daily exposure to the radiation produced by ultraviolet sunlight. This has created certain unique defenses in cannabis.

Why would this plant have evolved THC, the psychoactive compound? What was the reason for the cannabis plant?

I consider that the accumulation of THC gives a lot of privilege to cannabis, for example, this plant, very resistant to ultraviolet. Extremely.

So it’s like a defense against ultraviolet light at this altitude.

THC and free radicals

The same chemical that protects the plant may well have a preventative anti-cancer effect inside the human body, since THC and other cannabinoids are scavengers of disease-causing free radicals.

What our cannabinoid system is evolved to do over many hundreds of millions of years has been to protect us from those kinds of imbalances, to restore the kind of health that we need. And because of our environment in particular and because we are living longer, we need to be able to adapt very rapidly today. And we can’t do that on an evolutionary scale. The way for us to do that as people, as intelligent people, is to make sure we’re eating good diets stay away from toxins and eat these essential fatty acids, and when necessary, consume cannabinoids.

Modern medicine under the pharmaceutical-based paradigm has been looking for targeted therapies. So instead of looking for a medicine that can treat nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, depression, pain, anxiety, we look for something that can block, you know, this enzyme inside the cells membrane. And so, that’s, you know, what we’re taught is medicine. The other things are considered snake oil, anything that can do that many things that effectively, makes people a little bit leery.

Four cannabinoid compounds in reasearch

There are four cannabinoid compounds that are of the most interest to scientists doing medical research.

Delta nine Tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, is the principal psychoactive ingredient that creates euphoria in the smoker. THC exerts a wide spectrum of biological effects by mimicking the body’s own natural endocannabinoids.

If you look in the microscope, you’ll see sort of some glistening golf-ball-like structures. And those are the glandular trichomes in the inflorescence of the plant, which contain all the chemicals that are interesting for making medicine.

Cannabis treats glioblastoma multiforme brain tumors

Probably one of the most fascinating cases is a gentleman with the glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor, a very deadly tumor.

This tumor from diagnosis, untreated, the average survival is just three months. Fully treated with radiation surgery and chemotherapy is about 12 months. So this gentleman is a middle-aged man who began using cannabis at the time of his diagnosis. He’s been very consistent in using cannabis on a daily, multiple-time-daily basis now for seven years without any signs of recurrence.

Faced with this rapidly changing scenario, the Drug Enforcement Administration is trying to modify its official position to allow pharmaceutical companies to market THC without appearing to contradict all the negative information on marijuana they’ve been propagating for decades.

All available research has concluded that marijuana is dangerous to our health.

The DEA now recognizes the medical qualities of THC while trying to shift the blame for the prohibition of marijuana to the possible damage caused by the smoke.

How about the pill form that’s legalized already? The pill form is legal for two or three things – nausea and vomiting of chemotherapy, AIDS wasting, and also for certain kinds of neuropathic pain.

The holy grail for the pharmaceutical industry and really for the federal government, too, is to find the next billion-dollar pharmaceutical, the next billion-dollar drug. And the pharmaceutical industry now knows that these drugs are going to be cannabinoids. They know that medicinal qualities are there to cure all kinds of medical problems. But I can tell you that the whole plant is uniquely effective. I’ve yet to find a person in my practice who prefers the prescription pure THC over the natural plant.

That just is unheard of in the patients.

Cannabidiol CBD effects on the human body

Cannabidiol, also known as CBD, is a nonpsychoactive component of cannabis that gives the sedative effect to the high experienced. Among its numerous functions, CBD has been shown to have anti-inflammatory and analgesic effects. It helps fight diabetes, bacterial infections, and malignant tumors. This compound is also a nerve protectant and has well-documented antipsychotic and anxiety-reducing effects.

There’s quite a lot of CBD in that particular one as well. Cannabidiol, which is another cannabinoid, a nonpsychoactive cannabinoid, which we think is actually a very important component of the medicine. We’re fascinated by this stuff, which, you know, has tremendous potential as an anti-inflammatory, but also, not surprisingly, as an antipsychotic.

CBD could be a treatment for psychosis

So hold on, are you telling me that CBD could be a treatment for psychosis? Isn’t that ironic? With all the sort of tremendous publicity around the link with cannabis smoking and the potential of increasing risk of psychosis? Here we have a component of the plant, which itself is antipsychotic.

The cannabis plant has been bred for decades to maximize the amount of THC. That gives the plant the strongest psychoactive effect for the least amount of product. Now, in doing this, we’ve bred the other cannabinoids out of the plant or down to minuscule amounts. And each of those cannabinoids that have been bred down to minuscule amounts has its own medicinal quality or medicinal properties. So we’ve lost a lot of those other properties. I and a group of doctors have been asking growers to bring back CBD into the plant because cannabidiol, along with some of these other minor cannabinoids such as cannabidiol and cannabichromene, have shown to have a lot of anti-cancer properties.

Tetrahydrocannabivarin THCV effect on the human body

Tetrahydrocannabivarin or THCV has been found in significant amounts, mostly in South African and some Thai strains of grass. High concentrations of THCV will make the high come on quicker but last for less time. This chemical compound may eventually prove to be a useful treatment for Type Two diabetes. THCV has been shown to have a protective, preventative effect against malignant tumors. Cannabichromene, or CBC, is a low-level cannabinoid. The little research has been done, scientists believe CBC may have an antidepressant effect, as well as the ability to reduce inflammation.

CBC strongly inhibits tumor growth in leukemia and breast cancer. Faced with all these new discoveries, one is brought to question what stops marijuana from being legalized for medical use all across the country. And it’s not only doctors calling for legalization.

Lagalise marijuana

I was opposed to the medical marijuana initiative because it created a morphadigme. You’ve got marijuana that’s legal and you’ve got marijuana that’s illegal. And therefore you’ve got a built-in problem is how do you determine who’s legal and who isn’t? And of course, with it being illegal, it’s a built-in government price support. So as long as it’s illegal, there’s going to be money in it. If it was decriminalized, you know, everybody could grow in their backyard. Nobody could go by ripping them off at gunpoint or any other thing because it wouldn’t be worth anything.

We wouldn’t have to worry about people that were illegally transporting marijuana. We would know you would have a license from the state. We made contact with you coming down highway 101, for example, with a truckload of marijuana. If we were to stop you for a minor traffic violation and detect the odor of marijuana, you could simply produce credentials indicating that you have a right to do this, that you’re sanctioned by the state to make this happen. You’re licensed by the state, that would be very, very beneficial for law enforcement.

After becoming a permanent fixture of the urban panorama in California, Oregon is beginning to open the first public venues for medical marijuana smokers.

Cannabis cafe’s

We’re at the Cannabis cafe’ today. This is a place where cardholders can come and medicate out of public view. So I have patients that are in stage five of cancer. We have people that were using AIDS medicines, the cocktails that are sold. They just destroy your organs and everything else. People were expecting them to die. Their families were just ready for them to go away. But then they started using medical marijuana and their appetites came back, they left some of those pharmaceuticals that were so harsh. Many times I’ve gotten calls from people who are OHSU or at the Veterans Administration Hospital here in Portland, and they couldn’t medicate out of public view. They had gone through procedures for four to six hours. And because of that, they needed a place to use their medicine. They had to go to an alley, they had to go to the back seat of their car. That was unsafe. And so we created this place for them, for us, a niche where we could use our medicine out of public view and enjoy each other. We’re social creatures. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But at the federal level, they’re still clinging to a more archaic view.

Is there a better way, and some people have suggested looking into a system of, that might be effective in stemming the tide of drugs from Mexico and then the border wars and the immigration problems from Mexico. Have you considered this as a possibility? I think anybody who looks at this problem considers it. And ultimately, when you look at it, rejects it. Let me ask you about many people.

I’m sorry, but there are too many individuals, both parents and I and others who have lost their lives to drugs to get a ready answer that it should be legalized

Name me a couple of parents who’ve lost their lives to marijuana. Can’t. Exactly. You can’t. Because that hadn’t happened and there hadn’t been a way because that’s been a constant thing in America since Harry Anslinger, because African-Americans used it and saw it as something that was crippling and gave it to the Latin Americans and put an ethnic tone to it.

When have we? Don’t we? Is there some time we’re going to see that we ought to prioritize meth, crack cocaine, and heroin and deal with the drugs that the American culture is really being affected by and lives are being lost?

That’s not to say that we can’t use cannabis as medicine, but as a plant, its quality, its purity, its strength, its consistency. It’s difficult to regulate. And because of that, it’s not ever likely to be reinstated into the pharmacopeia. I think the greatest hurdle is that we need to get Congress to remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act. It’s just absurd that cannabis is still there. It has enormous medicinal value. It’s not addictive. It doesn’t have a significant withdrawal syndrome and it certainly is not really a menace to society.

The anti-cancer effect of marijuana known for years

The anti-cancer qualities of marijuana appear to have been known to the U.S. government for over 30 years. In a 1974/75 Medical College of Virginia study, led by Dr. Albert Munsen, they’ve discovered that THC slowed the growth of three kinds of cancer: lung, breast, and virus-induced leukemia. The Virginia study was shut down and all further cannabis tumor research was abandoned.

Just as I said, the number of times that all of the available literature on marijuana, the safety and effectiveness, has been reviewed by the government-appointed bodies and have come back with the same conclusion that it’s safe and it’s, you know, useful and that that information gets ignored.

The problem remains, though, that nobody in Congress wants to be labeled soft on drugs. But as the states begin to legalize or continue to legalize the medicinal use of cannabis, I believe there will be a tipping point where the nation will be ready to change the law and allow people their right to use cannabis freely.