KEYWORDS: Cannabis, Hemp, Marijuana, History, Legalization, Patenting, Pharmaceutical industry

Cannabinoid Deficiency and Its Impact on Human Health and Disease, Part 1

By Jonn Desnoes, OMD, MD, PhD and Sandra Kischuk, MSMIS, MCPM

Introduction

If you had mentioned “cannabis” in a room of people two decades ago, you would have seen an immediate, violent schism between those who believed it was the gateway to opiate hell and depravity and those who felt it was a safer and gentler alternative to alcohol. Today, science is beginning to understand that there are many “layers” to the issue of marijuana use.

In this paper, we will attempt to start a dialog, a discussion which has been too long in coming. We will explore the available information (and even more misinformation), dispel the myths, and examine the role this plant can play in promoting health. Our ultimate goal is to clarify waters that have been long muddied by political, financial, and economic concerns totally unrelated to and unconcerned with the real properties of this “humble herb.”

Laws against the use of marijuana are perhaps one last vestige of our puritanical heritage. (If it feels good; it is bad/immoral. Suffering is noble.) With the knowledge that we have today, continuing to insist people suffer and die unnecessarily through legally restricting access to hemp products and their curative or at least palliative properties is tantamount to intentional cruelty.

Cannabis, hemp, marijuana, or whatever name by which you know it is the most maligned, commonly referenced, commonly grown, and diversely used plant today—and has been throughout the history of the world. Take any culture where hemp has been available, either as a cultured crop or as an imported product, and go back in history as far as written records allow. You will find cannabis has been used as food, medicine, rope, fabric, oil, livestock feed, and currency. Today, in our chemical age, cannabis can be used for the following:

To provide a quickly renewable and sustainable source for paper pulp;

To make engineered building products (fiberboard, pressboard, and hempcrete, which is stronger, lighter, and more environmentally friendly than regular concrete);

To make plastics;

As a source for biofuel.¹

In addition, growing hemp can provide bioremediation for contaminated soils (including radiation cleanup).¹

Nutritionally, hemp seed is about 25 percent protein and higher in omega-3s than walnuts. It is a good source of iron and calcium and can be made into iced tea, brewed into beer, fermented into wine, distilled into other alcoholic beverages, or made into hemp milk.¹

For the purpose of simplicity, rather than using the various botanical, common, and colloquial names for the hemp plant (cannabis, marijuana, “weed,” hashish, tampi, ganja, etc.) we will use the term cannabis (its Latin name) to refer to those components that are used medicinally and hemp when we are discussing the fiber. We will also be talking about cannabinoids, which are the family of chemicals/biochemicals that occur naturally and almost exclusively in the hemp plant, and a few minor players with one important exception . . . but we will get to that later.

The Ancient and Not So Ancient History of Cannabis

Cannabis has been widely distributed for millennia. References to the plant show up on ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets and in Egyptian hieroglyphics on palace and tomb walls. The earliest known woven hemp fabric was found in Northern China and dates back to 7000 BC. The Chinese emperor, herbalist, and writer, Chen-Nung, wrote about the medicinal use of hemp 5,000 years ago.²

Dating back to 600 BC, the Zend-Avesta, a sacred book of the Zoroastrian³ faith in India, mentions hemp’s intoxicating properties. In Africa, hemp was used medicinally for dysentery, fevers, snake bite, and to ease the discomfort of childbirth.²

In the early part of England’s Age of Exploration (15th through 17th centuries), England’s sailing ships needed hemp for rope and sails. To meet this need, Henry VIII (1491 to 1547) required landowners to grow a quarter acre of hemp for every sixty acres of cropland.² As England expanded colonization, it found new places to grow hemp.

The British began cultivating hemp in its Canadian colonies in 1606. The colony of Virginia started cultivating hemp in 1611. As early as 1632, the Pilgrims grew hemp in New England after learning about it from Native Americans.²

In 1619, America’s first marijuana law was imposed on Jamestown Colony, Virginia, by King James I, who decreed that every colonist was required to grow 100 hemp plants for fiber for English export.⁴ The colonists were forbidden to spin or weave hemp and were told to buy the “finished product” of their agricultural labor, fabric . . . from England. Over the next 200 years, other laws were enacted to enforce the growing of hemp.⁴ These demands increased hemp production throughout Virginia and Maryland, but England saw little of it. New England merchants were a ready market for any hemp that was available. Hemp served as legal tender at the time and was an acceptable means of exchange for paying taxes.⁴

Our Founding Fathers considered hemp to be economically important to the new country; it was one of the three main crops George Washington grew at Mount Vernon.⁵ He was a hemp enthusiast and wrote, “Patriotic farmers should make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere.”⁶ Thomas Jefferson commented, “Hemp is of the first necessity to the wealth and protection of the country.”⁶

The United States Census of 1850, which recorded information about people and their occupations, listed 8,327 hemp farms with a minimum of 2,000 acres, which provided hemp for the nation’s production of cloth, canvas, and the cords used to bale cotton.⁷

Cannabis as Medicine: Early Research

In 1833, William O’Shaughnessy, an Irish physician, joined the British East India Company and took a position as professor of chemistry at the Medical College and Hospital, Kolkata (Calcutta). A member of the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta, O’Shaughnessy observed the use of cannabis in Indian folk medicine.⁸ In 1839, he published the first of his articles on the use of cannabis, A Case of Tetanus, Cured by a Preparation of Hemp (the Cannabis indica).⁹ That same year, he also published an article with a broader focus, “On the preparations of the Indian Hemp or Gunjah,” which discussed the benefits of cannabis for the treatment of “rabies, rheumatism, epilepsy, and tetanus.”²

Although there is no cure for tetanus (except waiting until the effects of the toxin wear off),¹⁰ O’Shaughnessy discovered that cannabis relieved the wrenching spasticity (which can break bones and lock the jaw in a closed position [lockjaw is a common name for tetanus]), eliminated the excruciating pain, and increased the likelihood of survival (tetanus victims can die within four days of the onset of the disease). He found cannabis effective for relieving rheumatoid arthritis pain and controlling seizures, and conducted extensive research to find new applications. After he returned to England in 1841, he popularized its use there and introduced Cannabis indica to the Western world. American pharmacies started offering cannabis preparations in the 1850s.⁸

Pivotal Times

We are at a time in our history that can be compared to that when doctors and British seamen discovered the cause of scurvy, a disease with symptoms which include fatigue, spongy gums, skin spots, and bleeding from the mucus membranes followed by tooth loss, jaundice, neuropathy, and death by hemorrhage.¹¹ (Could it be that many cases of the “plague” were simply extreme manifestations of scurvy?)

Scurvy is an ancient and ubiquitous disease. The classical Greek physician Hippocrates (c. 460 BCE–c. 380) wrote about its symptoms. Even before the Age of Exploration (early 15th century and until the early 17th century), a time when Europeans sailed across the oceans to find new trading partners, commodities, and trade routes, native cultures around the world had developed various herbal cures for the condition.¹¹

Early evidence from the voyages of Vasco da Gama and James Lancaster suggested that citrus fruit cured scurvy, but the information was not widely disseminated nor applied. Ignorance of this meant that long distance voyages and a consequent lack of fresh food led to endemic and often fatal scurvy in both sailors and passengers.¹¹

In 1753, James Lind, a Scottish surgeon in the Royal Navy published his book, A Treatise of the Scurvy, promoting the idea that citrus fruit was an effective treatment for the disease. At the time, the words “lime” and “lemon” were both used to describe any citrus fruit. Sadly, Lind’s findings did not agree with the era’s prevailing medical theory and were not applied until 40 years later.¹¹

It was not until the early 19th century that lemons, a European import, and, later, British-colonies-grown limes were added to sailors’ daily rations. (Unfortunately, the vitamin C level in limes was too low for them to be effective in preventing scurvy.) Nonetheless, limey became a nickname for British sailors.^{11, 12} Scurvy remained a risk during long voyages and in wartime until the middle of the 20th century.¹¹

Interestingly, two weeks of high vitamin C (ascorbic acid) supplementation is enough to cure scurvy, but people back then were ignorant of that fact. In the same way, ignorance of the benefits of cannabis exacerbated by unbridled self-interest has led to decades of unquantifiable and unnecessary suffering. As of September 2016, the United States government still held that cannabis was an illegal drug, while half of the states in the country and the District of Columbia, the seat of the Federal government, have legalized it in one form or another.¹³

The Danger of Federal Legalization

The US government continues to drag its feet on legalizing cannabis, ostensibly for concerns about its dangers. More likely, the concern is that Big Pharma, hand in hand with Congress, has not yet figured out how to lock out the “little guy” and appropriate something that has already started to slip past their fingers. When, in recent history, have we ever had a prescription medicine that is not manufactured by a drug company, not required to meet production standards, not standardized in dose or strength, and not dispensed through a chain of corner pharmacies? This precedent has to be terrifying to Big Pharma.

Cannabis is something different. It’s a plant. Unpatentable—not because you can’t patent plants. You can.

A plant patent is granted by the Government to an inventor (or the inventor’s heirs or assigns) who has invented or discovered and asexually reproduced a distinct and new variety of plant, other than a tuber, propagated plant, or a plant found in an uncultivated state.¹⁴

The cannabis we have today is unpatentable because the plant is illegal at the federal level.

Although legalizing cannabis at the federal level sounds desirable, the end result may not be what we would like to envision: easy access to an affordable, effective medication for some of the worst diseases in our county. Universal, minimally restricted legalization at the state level, tempered with a true sense of fairness and compassion, would be ideal. Federal legalization bears with it a terrible risk. Why?

Legalizing cannabis at the federal level will open up the potential for patenting different strains. Monsanto and Big Pharma have the legal clout to push patents through, regardless of who actually develops the seed. Even if the “little guy” gets his patent, these companies have enough money to make it tempting to “sell out.” And, as we have seen in the cases where doctors practicing alternative medicine get too strong a following, the government has a good number of ways to crush people and activities it is otherwise having difficulty in controlling.

Once all the various cannabis strains we have today have been “reallocated,” once the patents have been “reassigned,” and once Big Pharma has appropriated every kind of cannabis with any medicinal value, developing new strains will be in the hands of those who have stolen and now own the patents on the existing genetic strains. Any attempts to develop new strains independently will only work if enough individuals manage to reserve their own stocks of seed before the takeover, seeds that will never bear Monsanto’s genetic markers.

A video on Netflix, GMO OMG,¹⁵ explored the risk of GMOs and presented this following information, which gives readers some idea of the interlock of big agrochemical industry and the risks to our seed inheritance:

Monsanto and the other major agrochemical companies are also the world’s biggest seed companies. The top three companies control 53 percent of the worldwide proprietary seed market.¹⁵

I would hate to have to figure out how to genetically engineer cannabis to be Round-up resistant. I would hate it even more if Monsanto used such a strategy to corner the cannabis seed market as they have done with corn—suing small farmers who replant seed because the seedsaving farmer’s crop has been genetically damaged by pollen “blowover” from the Monsanto seed planted the next farm over. Monsanto argues that it does not go after farmers whose crops have trace amounts of Monsanto genetic material. But what if you are the small hemp farmer living next door to a big Monsanto-friendly hemp farmer and you save your seeds year after year? Eventually, your hemp is going to have a pretty high proportion of Monsanto genes. What then?

An example: The small cannabis farmer nurtures his crop. His big neighbor with Monsanto’s Round-up-resistant cannabis seed sprays Round-up to kill the weeds around his plants (even though that would hardly be necessary because cannabis grows vigorously enough that other “weeds” are seldom much of a problem). Blowover from the Round-up spraying damages the small farmer’s crop.

The next growing season, the small farmer plants some of the seeds he has saved from his surviving plants . . . which due to pollen blowover come up bearing some of the Monsanto genes. Not a lot, but each year the proportion of Monsanto genes will increase, (especially if his neighbor is still spraying Round-up since plants with blowover Monsanto genetics will more likely survive the toxic assault). And eventually? The small farmer will get sued.

There is a BIG problem when Big Pharma has too much control. Drug costs escalate faster than any other marketplace commodity. Beyond all reason.

Sodium oxybate is a prescription medication used for patients who suffer from narcolepsy, cataplexy, and excessive daytime sleepiness. Gamma hydroxybutyrate sodium (GHB) used to be a sleep aid people could pick up in health food stores—at a cost that would not kill the wallet (maybe five or ten dollars a month). Because of concerns that it was being abused as a date rape drug, the FDA forced it off retail store shelves and gave the rights to distribute it as a pharmaceutical drug to one company. Since it has become a Schedule 1 “controlled substance” available as a Schedule 3 drug (Xyrem) from one provider, the price has gone up every year. Eight years ago, the price was $3,500 a month. As of summer 2016, the price was $10,000. By September, $12,500 a month—and higher again by the end of the year.

The ingredients to make GHB are inexpensive, and production is not complicated. However, because GHB is a Schedule 1 drug, people who possess, manufacture, or sell GHB or its precursors can be imprisoned for up to 20 years.¹⁶

The Politics of Cannabis

BLOCK QUOTE- NO SHADING NEEDED

Cannabis and cannabinoids have been considered illegal for fewer than a hundred years, a minute period of time compared to the nine millennia for which we have evidence of its use by man. For the better part of human history, people have freely grown and used this plant to supply them with food, cloth, cordage, and medicine. Unfortunately, the United States government’s policy regarding cannabis has affected the legality of hemp in almost every nation of the world.¹⁷

Peter Guither. Why is Marijuana Illegal

In 1930, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was established as a new division of the treasury department. The new director, Harry J. Anslinger, was an ambitious man. When he perceived that the scope of his position, which was to control illegally-used cocaine and opiates, did not meet his personal objectives for power, he chose to take advantage of his new position “to define both the problem and the solution.”¹⁷ Cannabis was used far more broadly than were cocaine or the opiates. Adding cannabis to his job description guaranteed that the organization beneath him would have to be substantial and visible. The fact that cannabis was used to a greater extent by more-or-less disenfranchised factions of the population (blacks, Mexicans, Latin Americans, musicians, political dissidents) made it even easier to gain support in targeting cannabis as an “enemy of the state.” ¹⁷

In 1933, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution repealed the 18th Amendment, ending prohibition. Four years later, the United States passed the first law in the world to outlaw cannabis, the United States Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. The American Medical Association completely opposed passage of the Act because it would place onerous demands on physicians, requiring them to pay a tax for prescribing cannabis, utilize special order forms to get it, and keep detailed records of its use. The AMA knew cannabis had value for the treatment of a number of conditions, held that objective evidence proving cannabis was harmful was insufficient, and expressed concern that the Act would obstruct subsequent research into its medicinal value. ¹⁷

A Corrupt Legislative Process DELETE SHADING

Anslinger conducted two years of preliminary legislative meetings in secret. By the time the bill was presented to Congress, earlier pro-cannabis comments made by Dr. William C. Woodward, Legislative Council of the American Medical Association, were corrupted in such a way as to make it appear that the AMA was in full support of the law. Dr. William C. Woodward spoke to the committee on May 4, 1937, expressing his displeasure with the legislative process and the misinformation upon which it was based. A partial transcript, as recorded in the Shaffer Library of Drug Policy, follows:

Dr. Woodward: Unfortunately, I had no knowledge that such a bill as this was proposed until after it had been introduced. Before proceeding further, I would like to call your attention to a matter in the record wherein the American Medical Association is apparently quoted as being in favor of legislation of this character….

We are told that the use of marihuana causes crime.

But yet no one has been produced from the Bureau of Prisons to show the number of prisoners who have been found addicted to the marihuana habit. An informed inquiry shows that the Bureau of Prisons has no evidence on that point.

You have been told that school children are great users of marihuana cigarettes. No one has been summoned from the Children’s Bureau to show the nature and extent of the habit, among children.

Inquiry of the Children’s Bureau shows that they have had no occasion to investigate it and know nothing particularly of it.

Inquiry of the Office of Education . . . and they certainly should know something of the prevalence of the habit among the school children of the country, if there is a prevalent habit . . . indicates that they have had no occasion to investigate and know nothing of it.

Moreover, there is in the Treasury Department itself, the Public Health Service, with its Division of Mental Hygiene. The Division of Mental Hygiene was, in the first place, the Division of Narcotics. It was converted into the Division of Mental Hygiene, I think, about 1930. That particular Bureau has control at the present time of the narcotics farms that were created about 1929 or 1930 and came into operation a few years later. No one has been summoned from that Bureau to give evidence on that point.

Informal inquiry by me indicates that they have had no record of any marihuana or Cannabis addicts who have ever been committed to those farms.

The Bureau of Public Health Service has also a Division of Pharmacology. If you desire evidence as to the pharmacology of Cannabis, that obviously is the place where you can get direct and primary evidence, rather than the indirect hearsay evidence.

But we must admit that there is this slight addiction with possibly and probably, I will admit, a tendency toward an increase.

So that we have to raise the question at the present time as to the adequacy or the inadequacy of our present machinery and our present laws, to meet the situation. Those laws are, of course, of two kinds, the Federal laws and the State laws.

As to the State laws, you have been told that every State has a marihuana or Cannabis law of some kind.

My own inquiry indicated that there are two States that had not; but at least 46 States have laws of their own, and the District of Columbia, contrary to what has been told you, has a law that has been in force since 1906 and even at an earlier date.

The District of Columbia law, insofar as it relates to Cannabis, is a part of an act passed by Congress in 1906 entitled “An act to regulate the practice of pharmacy and the sale of poisons in the District of Columbia, and for other purposes,” approved May 17, 1906, and originally published as 34 Statutes, 175, which is now to be found in the District Code, section 191 and following.

It limits the sale of Cannabis, its derivatives and its preparations to pharmacists and persons who are authorized assistants to pharmacists.

And in the case of sales by pharmacists and their authorized assistants, there must be either a prescription from an authorized physician, or there must be due inquiry and a proper record made so as to assure the proper use of the drug.

No one, whether a pharmacist or not, under this law, has any right to sell any preparation of Cannabis indica to any person under 18 years of age except on the written order of an adult. The penalties are rather heavy and the direct duty of enforcing the law is placed on the major and superintendent of police and the corporation counsel of the District of Columbia.

More interesting possibly is the Federal law relating to the matter. You have been told, I believe, that there is no Federal law. The Federal law is a very direct and positive law and I shall be glad to indicate what seems to me to be the basic principle of it.

To go back, if you will, to about 1929 or 1930, when a bill was before Congress proposing to require every physician in the United States who desired to prescribe or dispense narcotic drugs to obtain a Federal permit before he did so. The medical profession objected to any such Federal control, even if it had been possible. It was not only impracticable, because of the size of the country and the number of physicians, but clearly, I think, most of us will admit, a law of that kind is clearly beyond the power of Congress.

At that time there was incorporated in the act this provision:

‘The Secretary of the Treasury shall cooperate with the several States in the suppression of the abuse of narcotic drugs in their respective jurisdictions and to that end he is authorized (1) to cooperate in the drafting of such legislation as may be needed, if any, to effect the end named, and (2) to arrange for the exchange of information concerning the use and abuse of narcotic drugs in said States and for cooperation in the institution and prosecution of cases in the courts of the United States and before the licensing boards and courts of the several States.

The Secretary of the Treasury is hereby authorized to make such regulations as may be necessary to carry this section into effect.’

Mr. Vinson: What statute is that?

Dr. Woodward: That is the United States Code, 1934 edition, title 21, section 198. It is the statute of June 14, 1930.

Mr. Vinson: To what does it refer?

Dr. Woodward: To the statute that created the present Bureau of Narcotics. If there is at the present time any weakness in our State laws relating to Cannabis or to marihuana, a fair share of the blame, if not all of it, rests on the Secretary of the Treasury and his assistants who have had this duty imposed upon them for 6 and more years.¹⁸

With a boatload of inflammatory articles from William Randolf Hearst’s yellow journalism publications, Harry J. Anslinger railroaded the bill through Congress in almost record time, with passage on October 1, 1937.¹⁷

The United States Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was not so much a reaction to the true dangers of the drug as it was the product of a corrupt and insidious agenda, which included the following:

• Racism – Marijuana was more heavily used by the black population, Mexicans, and Latin Americans, so the law was a tool designed to penalize these groups of people.

• Fear – Marijuana was linked with violent behavior and the fear that marijuana users (see Racism) would hang around school yards, expose (white) children to marijuana, and the children would be enslaved by the drug. Or that marijuana users (see Racism) would become crazed by marijuana, rape (white) women, and go on murderous rampages.

• Protection of Corporate Profits – Marijuana was effective for many conditions and impinged on the corporate profits of the pharmaceutical companies.

• Yellow Journalism – William Randolf Hearst was friends with DuPont, who had just developed nylon, which competed with hemp. Hearst published extensive diatribes against marijuana, salacious fabrications designed to terrify and titillate his audiences (see Racism and Fear).

• Ignorant, Incompetent, and/or Corrupt Legislators – Those who wanted to appear to be tough on crime did so by passing this rigorous drug legislation.

• Personal Career Advancement – Harry J. Anslinger, newly-named director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, used the opportunity “to define both the problem and the solution,” adding the more widely used cannabis to build the scope of his agency’s responsibilities.

• Greed – The lurid stories William Randolf Hearst invented about the dangers of cannabis sold newspapers, made him rich, and forced cannabis underground for the better part of a century.¹⁷ These stories and the passage of this law also protected the interests of his good friend DuPont and the profits of the pharmaceutical companies.

At the 1936 Convention for the Suppression of the Illicit Traffic in Dangerous Drugs, the American government tried to get participating countries to criminalize the non-medical and non-scientific “cultivation, production, manufacture, and distribution” of opium, coca . . . and cannabis. The majority of the countries present wanted to keep the focus on illicit trafficking. When the final version of the agreement only called upon the countries to severely punish drug traffickers, the US refused to sign it. In short time, the US exerted enough political and financial pressure to push through its agenda, establishing cannabis as a deadly narcotic drug.¹⁹

More recently, the Controlled Substances Act established federal US drug policy regulating “the manufacture, importation, possession, use and distribution of certain substances.”²⁰ Passed by the 91st United States Congress as Title II of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, the statute was signed into law by President Richard Nixon.²⁰

As defined by this statute, a Schedule 1 drug is the following:

A drug or other substance that has a high potential for abuse.

A drug or other substance that has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.

A drug or other substance which is unsafe for use under medical supervision.²¹

It is illegal to write prescriptions for Schedule 1 drugs.²¹

Cannabis and its medicinal compounds have often been perceived as a threat to “organized” medicine, as have other non-toxic healing modalities such as homeopathy. Classifying cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act was highly effective in making cannabis unavailable for pharmacological applications or even research.

References

McDermott, M. Perfect Plant? 7 Great Uses for Industrial Hemp. Treehugger: Sustainability made simple. April 20, 2010.

Hemp history. Global Hemp: Portal to the Hemp Community. April 1, 2017.

1. Zoroastrianism. Wikipedia. Accessed Sep 14, 2016.

• Abel EL. Marijuana – The First Twelve Thousand Years. http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/history/first12000/4.htm. 1980.

  Washington G. The Writings of George Washington, Volume 33, page 270. (Library of Congress), 1794.

  Gennet, R. On Role Models and their Bongs. The Huffington Post. Updated May 25, 2011.

  Course Title: ENGL 2000. Course Hero Online Learning Resources. Texas A&M. https://www.coursehero.com/file/p1a10pc/The-United-States-Census-of-1850-counted-8327-hemp-plantations-minimum-2000/. Accessed Sep 18, 2016.

  William Brooke O’Shaughnessy. Wikipedia. 12 February 12, 2017.

  O’Shaughnessy, WB. (1839) A Case of Tetanus, Cured by a Preparation of Hemp (the Cannabis indica.). Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society of Bengal 8, 1838-40, 462-469. http://www.lycaeum.org//~sputnik/Ludlow/Texts/gunjah.html. Accessed Mar 31, 2017.

  Tetanus. Wikipedia. Accessed Sep 15, 2016.

  Scurvy. Wikipedia. Accessed Mar 31, 2017.

  Limey. Wikipedia. Accessed Mar 31, 2017.

2. Medical cannabis in the United States. Wikipedia. Accessed Mar 31, 2017.

• What is a plant patent? General Information About 35 U.S.C. 161 Plant Patents. United States Patent and Trademark Office. Feb 20, 2015. http://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/patent-basics/types-patent-applications/general-information-about-35-usc-161#heading-1. Accessed Sep 22, 2016.

  GMO OMG. Kunau JA, Seifert J, producers. GMOFilm.com, ©2013 Compeller Pictures.

  What are the current GHB Laws? Project GHB. http://www.projectghb.org/content/what-are-current-ghb-laws. Accessed Apr 1, 2017.

  Guither P. Why is Marijuana Illegal? Drug WarRant.com. 2017. Accessed Mar 31, 2017.

  Committee Proceedings, Taxation of Marihuana. Tuesday, May 4, 1937. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, Washington, D.C. Drug Library.org. http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/taxact/woodward.htm. Accessed Sep 21, 2016.

3. Convention on the Suppression of the Illicit Traffic in Illegal Drugs. Wikipedia. Accessed Mar 31, 2017.

• Controlled Substances Act. Wikipedia. Accessed March 31, 2017.

  Removal of cannabis from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. Wikipedia. Accessed Mar 31, 2017.

BIOS

Sir Jonn Desnoes, OMD, MD, PhD, is a physician, board-certified homeopath, former nationally syndicated radio talk show host, writer, researcher, and medical missionary. He was knighted for his humanitarian work as a medical missionary.

Jonn became interested in the study of cannabis and its health-restoring properties when a friend gave him a bottle of CBD hemp oil. He had suffered with intractable back pain for years as a result of multiple sports injuries incurred over 30 years as an athlete. Within 20 minutes of taking the CBD oil, his excruciating pain stopped. He has found that, as long as he continues to take the oil, he is virtually pain-free.

Sandra Kischuk, BSBA, MSMIS, MCPM, is a writer, editor, life coach, Toastmaster, and master gardener. Author of Fighting the Dragon: How I Beat Multiple Sclerosis, Sandra’s writing interests include fiction, non-fiction, poetry, scripts, and other people’s résumés. She has written web content for physicians, informational/marketing literature for attorneys, and continuing education courses for dental professionals, and edited professional communications and doctoral theses on subjects as diverse as religion, education, engineering, and psychology.