The Sativex scam

The Vancouver Sun posted a Sativex commercial the other day disguised as a news article making the ridiculous claim that the product doesn't get you high. I've heard exactly the opposite through the grapevine. The Sun story opens with this claim.

Evelyn Bruce has tried smoking marijuana and she's also had it in synthetic, liquid form, but now the 60-year-old Fraser Valley woman is happy to have a new option to reduce the pain plaguing the multiple sclerosis sufferer: a peppermint-flavoured mouth spray containing pulverized marijuana.

It contains THC, pulverized marijuana, come on - of course it gets you high. It's just a different high from smoking it. It's like eating a brownie. But what really strikes me about the article is this.

The spray, which costs $124.95 per vial (51 sprays per vial) numbs the pain but not the brain.

You're supposed to use it five times a day. That's a lot more expensive a delivery system than growing a few plants on your own. It's not an issue in Canada with socialized medicine, but the uninsured in the US couldn't even afford it.

It's an obvious plan by the pharma corps to make money by demonizing the natural plant and suggesting their chemically refined medicine is somehow more pure. Note this language.

Marketed in Canada by Bayer HealthCare, it was pioneered and is manufactured in England by GW Pharmaceuticals, which had the mandate to develop a non-smoked cannabis-based prescription medicine. The spray is made from a purified plant species called Cannabis sativa L.

Are they joking? Sativa has been around forever. What they're saying is they developed a strain of C.Sativa that breeds consistent levels of THC and they're turning it into the pharmaceutical equivalent of hash oil. Put it a bottle with a fancy government certified label and the pharmas make a ton of money while the consumers who gave cannabis credibility as a medicine in the first place, will still be going to jail if they prefer to grow their own strains.

I'll be glad if sick people get some relief from this product, but this is still a threat to policy reform.