The more I learn about the well-known efficacy of cannabis, the angrier I get at its suppression and over-regulation.
Last night's episode featured a woman whose daughter has suffered repeated seizures daily, which no pharmaceutical medicine was able to stop. Her country allowed the daughter to receive cannabis treatment, which she takes through a vaporizer. This medicine prevents most seizures and has the power to stop any seizure that does come up. Yet it's illegal to leave the house with the vaporizer. So the daughter has horrible seizures whenever she tries to be away from the house. The mother commented on the sad irony that she is able to take morphine and other drugs that have "street value" away from the house, but medical marijuana, which is altogether safer and more effective for her purposes, is restricted.
It all points to hegemony by Big Pharma. We may not have whole-plant cures. And it's bizarre to me to see how indoctrinated people have become, where we believe that ONLY pharmaceutical medicine holds the promise for curing things like cancer. It's not that whole plants have been tested and rejected as insufficient. The issue is that complete plants are more potent, and they pose a threat to disease and Big Pharma alike.
The documentary argues that with cannabis, the isolation of certain components, for production of medications like Marisol, has proven grossly ineffective, compared to whole-plant treatments.
The US government holds a patent for cannabis:
www.google.com/patents/US6630507Nobel laureate Julian Axelrod filed for that patent on behalf of the National Institutes of Health. Of course, they cannot actually patent a plant, so they focus on that which is patent-able (ie profitable). For the sake of humanity we need to increase our awareness of how profit-driven, and not science-driven, these "advancements" in medicine are.
What's really mind-blowing and infuriating is, we're living in an age where ironically, opioid substances have more mainstream acceptance than the comparatively harmless cannabis. Heroin is obviously worse than pot, but this mentality doesn't transfer over to America's sense of medical ethics...we're mired in a legalistic moral code, where people still believe that if Oxycontin and Fentanyl are legal and prescribed by doctors, they are a morally superior choice to marijuana, which is illegal in many places. Yet the psychological effect of those prescription painkillers is much more striking and serious than getting high on pot.
While the drug overdose death rate is soaring and reaching epidemic proportions, owing in part to the highly addictive and personality-changing quality of prescription opioid drugs, deaths attributable to marijuana use are presumably so negligible that they aren't even worth counting.
www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/health/deaths-drug-overdose-cdc.htmlAnd while the establishment claims to be alarmed over that, and they MUST be, at the same time there is inexcusable hyper-vigilance directed at medical marijuana, which offers a safer alternative for the treatment of pain.
For the most part, I stand with this:
"Medical cannabis is unlikely to prove a replacement for opioids in all medical situations. For example, prescribing opioids is relatively uncontroversial in end-of-life care and in treatment of acute pain from cancer, major surgery or broken bones. But for pain not caused by cancer, medical cannabis may prove a better candidate in the long run. Even the most severe critics, Bachhuber says, would accept that medical cannabis is safer than opioids when it comes to the risk of fatal overdose."
www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-medical-cannabis-break-the-painkiller-epidemic/It's been proven that medical marijuana has reversed cancer even in "end-of-life" situations so it's clearly the better choice for pain relief at that time, as there's a chance it could reverse the disease altogether (it has before...why can't it do so again? Why is "spontaneous remission" always the more believable explanation?)
And I disagree about prescribing dangerous opioid drugs for broken bones. Seriously, so many people are dying because of opioid drugs. Who would ever choose to stave off pain from a broken bone, at the eventual cost of their lives? I sympathize with the pain but with an acute condition like a broken bone, the pain is likely to be transient. Heck, in wars in old times past, they'd amputate legs with whiskey as the main painkiller, and recovery was probably faster, with fewer resulting deaths than in modern times.
