I have begun to believe my mind is full of tiny little topics that act like pimples.

No one can predict the order they start to fester in, or when they’ll get ripe and burst.

Monday, 21 July 2014

The Unsung Hero of Medical Marijuana




A Tribute to a Cannabis Hero


What One Man Has Done For All of Us

 Dr. Raphael Mechoulam 

 

As it now stands the CMA (Canadian Medical Association) would rather the following interview be kept secret?

Why?

To acknowledge this man’s brilliant and positive findings re Cannabis; is to expose
their President: Dr. Louis Hugo Francescutti;
to be an
IGNORANT ASSHOLE IN TOTAL DENIAL OF THE TRUTH

He has publicly declared that Cannabis has no validated curative powers and has advised all his members to refuse to help any applicant for Medical Marijuana.

Cannabis not only cures Cancer but has multiple benefits in the treatment of manifold illnesses and disabilities! Unfortunately for all members of the misnamed AMC (Association of Medical Corporations) this would result in a terrible business disruption and loss of profits.
On his website http://www.drlou.ca/ , Dr. Lou, as he prefers to be called, shows himself as an arrogant, egotistical, narcissist only interested in promoting himself as “God’s gift to Humanity”. If you should doubt this statement go to his website and be inflicted by an onslaught of self praising adjectives that demonstrate the fact. The man has no humility at all,

Dr. Lou made his “Denial of Benefit” statement following this CNN interview of Dr. Raphael Mechoulam by Dr. Sanjay Gupta in early March. It is in effect a justification and support of Dr. Gupta’s change of opinion as declared in his earlier CNN documentary Weed.

Dr. Lou had to be aware of both of these positive reports and his “Denial of Benefit” is a total crock of shit! He should be removed from any position or role in deciding the future of Medical Marijuana, but for the time being we are stuck with the arsehole.

Read on and see what he is missing with his blinders on:

Medical Marijuana and 'The Entourage Effect'

By Dr. Sanjay Gupta,
CNN chief medical correspondent
Tue March 11, 2014

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Scientist Raphael Mechoulam has made studying marijuana his life's work
  • There are more than 480 natural components in the cannabis plant
  • "The entourage effect" means those components may work best together
 In the early 1960s, a young postdoctoral student stumbled onto something that puzzled him.
After reading the literature on cannabis, he was surprised to see that while the active compound in morphine had been isolated from opium poppies 100 years before and cocaine isolated from coca leaves around the same time, the active component of marijuana was still unknown.
This simple observation launched his life's work.
That young Israeli researcher, Raphael Mechoulam, is now a heavily decorated scientist, recently nominated for the prestigious Rothschild Prize. More than 50 years ago, however, he had trouble starting his scientific journey.
For starters, he needed cannabis to study and didn't know how to obtain it. Eventually, he obtained his research supply from friends in the police department. The young scientist was in a hurry, and didn't want to wait to cut through the red tape required by Israel's Health Ministry.
"Yes, I broke the law," he told me when I met with him in Tel Aviv last year, "but I apologized and explained what I was trying to do."
It's a good thing the Israeli government didn't stall his progress, because Mechoulam was moving at breakneck speed.
By 1963, he determined the structure of cannabidiol (CBD), an important component of marijuana. A year later, he became the first person to isolate delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Over the ensuing decades, Mechoulam and his team continued to isolate numerous compounds from the cannabis plant.
Their work also went a long way toward illuminating how the drug works in the brain. When Mechoulam's team identified the first known endogenous cannabinoid, a chemical actually made by the brain itself, he named it "anandamide." In the Sanskrit language, ananda means "supreme bliss," which gives us some insight into what Mechoulam thinks of cannabinoids overall.
It was halfway through our long afternoon discussion that Mechoulam, now 83, pulled out a paper he had written in 1999, describing something known as "the entourage effect."
Think of it like this: There are more than 480 natural components found within the cannabis plant, of which 66 have been classified as "cannabinoids." Those are chemicals unique to the plant, including delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiols. There are, however, many more, including:
-- Cannabigerols (CBG);
-- Cannabichromenes (CBC);
-- other Cannabidiols (CBD);
-- other Tetrahydrocannabinols (THC);
-- Cannabinol (CBN) and cannabinodiol (CBDL);
-- other cannabinoids (such as cannabicyclol (CBL), cannabielsoin (CBE), cannabitriol (CBT) and other miscellaneous types).
Other constituents of the cannabis plant are: nitrogenous compounds (27 known), amino acids (18), proteins (3), glycoproteins (6), enzymes (2), sugars and related compounds (34), hydrocarbons (50), simple alcohols (7), aldehydes (13), ketones (13), simple acids (21), fatty acids (22), simple esters (12), lactones (1), steroids (11), terpenes (120), non-cannabinoid phenols (25), flavonoids (21), vitamins (1), pigments (2), and other elements (9).
Here is the important point. Mechoulam, along with many others, said he believes all these components of the cannabis plant likely exert some therapeutic effect, more than any single compound alone.
While science has not yet shown the exact role or mechanism for all these various compounds, evidence is mounting that these compounds work better together than in isolation: That is the "entourage effect."
Take the case of Marinol, which is pure, synthetic THC. When the drug became available in the mid-1980s, scientists thought it would have the same effect as the whole cannabis plant. But it soon became clear that most patients preferred using the whole plant to taking Marinol.
Researchers began to realize that other components, such as CBD, might have a larger role than previously realized.
To better understand the concept of the entourage effect, I traveled to the secret labs of GW Pharmaceuticals, outside London. In developing Sativex, a cannabis-based drug to treat multiple sclerosis, the company's chairman, Dr. Geoffrey Guy, told me the company ran into some of the same obstacles that Marinol faced.
More than a decade of experiments revealed that a whole plant extract, bred to contain roughly the same amounts of THC and CBD in addition to the other components in the plant, was more effective in reducing the pain and spasms of MS than a medication made of a single compound.
It could be that multiple individual compounds play a role, or it could be due to their interaction in the body; it could also be combination of both, Guy said.
Now, maybe this all sounds obvious. After all, eating real fruits, vegetables and other plants provides better nutrition than just taking vitamin pills with one nutrient or mineral in each. Science is showing us that we can likely say the same about cannabis.
As we move forward with creating medicines, like Charlotte's Web, for the patients who can benefit from cannabis -- this is an important point to keep in mind.
Unlike other drugs that may work well as single compounds, synthesized in a lab, cannabis may offer its most profound benefit as a whole plant, if we let the entourage effect flower, as Mechoulam suggested more than a decade ago.
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That, I think, establishes the fact that Dr. Lou is practicing Politics not Medicine. I thought Stephen Harper was a scum sucking bottom feeder but this guy is even lower and feeding off Harper’s crap.

I’ve gotta quit here!
I’m feeling NAUSEOUS just thinking about it!
Yuk!

Blaine Barrett

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