Welcome to my blog which this week which this week has been distracted by a friend, a cancer sufferer, who mentioned who said he'd asked his doctor for the drug, sativex, and been given short shrift.Maybe it would have been different if he had lived in Manchester because in the last couple of weeks, Sativex, a drug produced by GW Pharmaceuticals who are ‘sponsoring’ trials in two hospitals in Manchester, has received plenty of publicity as a potential palliative pain preventative for cancer sufferers.
Sativex® is composed primarily of two cannabinoids: CBD (cannabidiol,) and THC (delta 9 tetrahydrocannabinol). Sativex® is administered as a metered dose oro-mucosal spray each 100μL spray contains 2.7mg THC and 2.5mg CBD.
GW Pharmaceuticals have been attempting to produce marijuana based medicines since 1999 and Sativex is already widely proscribed to Multiple Sclerosis although the evidence for its success seems, at first sight, unconvincing. According to the MS Society’s leaflet on Sativex:
The way cannabinoids work is not fully understood as yet, but discovery of the endocannabinoid system – a natural system found in the human body through which cannabinoids are able to exert their effects – has provided some insight.
The endocannabinoid system is thought to work in a similar way to the opioid system – the system that controls pain. Some pain-killing medicines exert their effects on opioid receptors to provide relief from pain. In a similar way, cannabinoids exert their effects on cannabinoid receptors that are part of the endocannabinoid system.
Receptors are protein molecules in or on the surface of cells to which a substance (such as a drug) can bind, causing a change in cell behaviour or activity. The specific receptors that the active ingredients of Sativex (THC and CBD) exert their effects upon are the CB1 receptor and the CB2 receptor. CB1 receptors are thought to exert their effects in the brain while CB2 receptors are thought to exert their effects on immune cells.
There’s a lot of ‘it is thought’ about this and one can only imagine that a very persuasive voice, or a very desperate situation, has allowed this through as ‘evidence-based’ medicine. Personally I’m all in favour of the trials, not least because I have a friend who may benefit, but I am disturbed, and perhaps irritated, by governmental obfuscation concerning drugs, especially cannabis. How is it, for example, that GM Pharmaceuticals can don white coats and grow forests of marijuana secretly in the English countryside, while a pensioner who bakes some hash cake to self-medicate or a middle-aged depressive who smokes weed to cheer himself up will find themselves prosecuted or imprisoned? And why is that drinking alcohol (which is rarely recommended as a healing drug) is fine for Prime Ministers, sport people and ‘responsible’ drinkers when puffing on your marijuana joint is a criminal offence?
Cannabis has been used as a medicine since time immemorial in China, the Middle East, and probably everywhere it has grown.
AIDS Wasting Syndrome
Arthritis
Brain Injury/Stroke
Multiple Sclerosis
Nausea associated with cancer Chemotherapy
Anti-Tumour Effects
Asthma
Epilepsy
Glaucoma
Schizophrenia
Migraine
Eating Disorders
General Pain
Are just some of the conditions that reputedly benefit from cannabis. If the smooth talkers at GM Pharmaceuticals play their cards right, the entire NHS could be at their mercy. Of course for most of our 15,000 year relationship with the plants around us, the general populace hasn’t needed the sanction of government to help itself to herbs and plants considered healing. Will there be a time when the application of a dock leaf to a nettle sting will have to be applied by an oral spray, Extract of Dock, administered only by a recognized government sponsored professional?
The Sativex publicity is keen to declare that Sativex “does not get users high” and patients do not experience the “euphoria associated with illegal recreational use of cannabis”. Now, I’m no scientist (although I am a Master of Science) and I have observed in other writers the tendency to run with a ‘scientific fact’ as long as it appears to support their worldview, so my brief look at the figures does not mean a lot, but it seems to be that 2.7mg THC and 2.5mg CBD is equivalent to approximately 1gram of marijuana. Depending on the strength of the marijuana, and on how accustomed you are to it, and on a host of other minor circumstances, 1 gram of cannabis would get you ‘stoned’ if not ‘high’, In fact, according to a number of sources that I’ve just checked, particularly Peter Reynolds http://clear-uk.org/the-sativex-scam-part-2-5/, it does indeed get you high. My problem with this is, why is getting high considered to be a bad thing? Isn’t the getting high bit essential to the healing? Is it not the case that whatever happens in the brain, and in the whole body (and in our consciousness if we have one) when we get high, is what is required molecularly to relieve the distress we’re in?
Candice Pert, neuroscientist and pharmacologist, has claimed that short chains of amino acids called peptides, and their receptors, are the "biochemical correlate of emotion." Peptides are found in the brain, but also in the stomach, muscles, glands and all the major organs. Her conclusion is that peptides in these other organs have memories – what she calls “the unconscious mind”. Since reaching these conclusions she has promulgated notions such as ‘change your mind, change your life,’ on the premise that, to paraphrase, that getting high, though not necessarily through drugs, is good for you. Surely it can’t be bad for you, so what’s the government’s problem? I guess it’s got to be power or money or both.
Meanwhile in California, and other states, we have some sort of compromise; medical marijuana available on prescription. Presumably this is the way forward. Or rather, the way we’re going to go in the long run unless GM Pharmaceuticals and their ilk can seize the supplies and monopolize the market with their potions. It could be, of course, that the government have foreseen a problem I have often wondered about, viz. how to please a generation of pensioners when we stick them in homes and deprive them of the one drug they’ve been medicating themselves with for the previous fifty years. Give them pot!
Or MDMA. I’m not joking. A variation of Ecstasy is being tested on blood cancers and early study showed all leukaemias, lymphoma and myeloma cells could be killed in a test tube. My brother has lymphoma.
Or LSD. Still not joking. Stanislav Grof did some pioneering work with the dying, giving them LSD, back in the mid-sixties. His results were interesting but the tests had to be abandoned owing to the bad publicity LSD received from the media of the day.
My point? I don’t know yet but I don’t like the idea of David Cameron and his champaign boozing, cocaine taking friends to be in charge of anything, maybe least of all of the THC supply of the dire and desperate.
No comments:
Post a Comment