Corporate Cannabis

Thanks to the Media Awareness Project this excellent piece on medical marijuana is now archived and available on-line. Award-winning Victoria-based journalist and the author Brian Preston looks at corporate interest in cannabis based medicines that deliver the healing without the smoke or the high. German pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG has already paid $60 million for the European rights and $14 million for the Canadian rights to market Sativex, a cannabis-based medicine developed in Britain by GW Pharmaceuticals. Bayer in competition with Cannasat Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Toronto want to set up shop in Canada.


...Alan Young, Cannasat's legal adviser, a loquacious Osgoode Hall law professor who has fought a decades-long battle to liberalize marijuana laws, says because cannabis-based drugs have the potential to help people in a number of critical areas yet to be discovered, it could become one of the biggest pharmaceutical sectors ever developed. "There is going to be a revolution in the next decade in treatment options," says Young, his voice rising to emphasize the point. "People are sick and tired of synthetic products that are constantly being pulled off the market for undisclosed side effects. The time is right for herbal products."


Indeed the time has always right for herbal products which have long since gone mainstream. It's just this particular herb that remains exploited - so far. But don't be fooled by their talk of protecting the public. Although it's true that cannabis is a far superior medicine to chemical alternatives, the pharma are interested in profit, not in the public health.


Let's face it, without sick people they're out of business and if someone can grow a plant as an alternative to buying commercially processed products it threatens their bottom line. They're finally figuring out an end run against legalization of the plant in order to preserve the profit margins of a bottled substitute.


The Holy Grail for corporations trying to turn pot into a legitimate medicine is the vast U.S. market, which is ruled over by politicians who still see marijuana as an unspeakable menace. Euphoria masquerading as a medicine simply won't fly in the U.S. But GW may have found a solution. It has developed a tamper-proof dispensing system for the delivery of methadone that critics say could also be used for cannabis-based medicine. It looks like a cross between an asthma inhaler and a cellphone. The doctor keys in your allowable dose, and any attempt to spray a little more cuts you off cold turkey.


Corporations see it as a way to profits; smokers call it a Big Brotherish apparatus designed to appease America's anti-pot paranoia - what they call "euphoriphobia." One such critic is Hilary Black, founder of the B.C. Compassion Club Society in Vancouver, who recently joined Cannasat. "The fact is, any pharmaceutical company using prohibition as a tool to market a product - that's wrong," says Black. "I have major ethical concerns with that."


Sativex isn't the only game in town though. Irrepressible reform activist Phillipe Lucas of the Vancouver Island Compassion Society that "also produces a cannabis spray, albeit a much simpler version, a tincture of cannabis administered via a vapourizer called Cannamist", was issued a friendly threat by the developer of Sativex himself.


There is no question that GW plans to enforce its patents on Sativex, which is a precisely dosed medicine. Warns Guy: "To protect our extensive investment, we have sought to identify and patent certain inventions throughout the growing, extraction and manufacturing process. My comments to Mr. Lucas were made as a friendly and, hopefully, helpful gesture as I did not wish him to invest a great amount of effort into obtaining approval for a product as a prescription medicine only to find that he did not have the freedom to operate in the first place."


With the corporation's deep pockets, even Lucas reluctantly admits they are likely to win in the end and the author concurs.


Eventually Sativex could be introduced into the lucrative U.S. market. But with the war on illegal drugs going on, with much of it directed by the world's biggest consumer of illegal drugs, America, any substance that gets you giddy is guilty until proven innocent. GW and Bayer may be able to skirt that issue by emphasizing the fact that Sativex is taken in a dose so low that there's no high associated with it.


... By some estimates, 50 percent of prescribed medicines in the nineteenth century- designed to alleviate everything from migraines and menstrual cramps to the pain of childbirth - contained cannabis. Time will tell whether Bayer has latched on to the new Aspirin-whether Sativex will become the "take two and call me in the morning" drug of the twenty-first century.


There's worse things that could happen. As Lucas points out in the article, it could serve a purpose as a medication for those without the means to get cannabis, or who fear the stigma of asking for it from their doctors. It would make an good addition to the medicine cabinet but I certainly don't think it should serve as a substitute for legalization of the plant. Well worth reading in full.