Here in CA the edibles claim on the container that they’re lab-tested to assure the given potency. I’m not totally sure I believe in the high quality of the testing, but there’s an incentive to get it right–Medmen is just one company, publicly traded, and they’re valued in the billions. The big money in legal CBD/THC is what’s going to push final legalization, and I assume the folks who run Medmen are a little more buttoned up than the smelly guy who used to promise me that I was getting “the good shit.”
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My mother used to point out that she was old enough to remember when lead was added to gasoline to improve efficiency – the oil companies charged you extra for it. And now, new cars used unleaded gas – and the oil companies charged you extra for taking the lead out. She said that if someday we all drove electric cars, she supposed the oil companies would figure out a way to charge us for that.
There is LOTS of evidence that it helps with epilepsy. And plenty more that it helps with other problems such as nausea from chemo. Should we study it more? Hmm? It’s been used as one type of drug or another for some 20,000 years.
Try to get a grant to study MJ, and what happens? The Feds are down your neck. Of course because they are in the pocket of the alcohol industry.
What needs to be done is have it properly studied.
It’s not the pit so I’ll leave my comments to you at that.
It makes no sense to dismiss concerns about safety or efficacy of a drug on the basis of society previously overlooking hazards of other drugs or products. OK?
It’s also fun to see arguments about how Big Pharma/Big Tobacco/Big Alcohol/Big Government/Big Whatever are blocking a “natural” wonder drug/supplement because it threatens their source of income, concomitant with claims about how such entities are threatening to monopolize these wonder drugs/supplements because they’re such a fabulous source of money.
Thus we got allegations that big corporations marketing artificially sweetened foods were holding up federal approval of stevia with the connivance of regulators solely to block competition. When safety concerns were overcome by evidence, stevia was duly approved and large companies started selling stevia-sweetened products, so now the altie gripe was that little stevia dealers were being pushed out by evil Big Sweetener.
If there is indeed a large number of medical conditions that can be alleviated/cured by CBD oil :dubious:, rest assured that major drug companies will find a way to profit from it, either by selling the basic supplement or tweaking it to make it more effective/long-lasting.
It may be comforting to assume that enormous conspiracies rule health care to block super-cures, but such beliefs defy logical analysis.*
*another favorite conspiracy theory is one about the scientist allegedly persecuted for discovering that a retrovirus was the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome and other maladies. Apparently Big Pharma was responsible for forcing her from her job (not research screwups or charges of wrongly appropriating university property). It strikes me that Big Pharma would love to make $$$ from selling antiretroviral drugs and thus would have no incentive to persecute Ms. Modern Galileo, but the true believers know differently.
MJ has barely been studied. But is considered ‘evil’ by many. Mostly because they are uninformed. There are KNOWN health benefits. But it is still difficult for many to get.
Alcohol also has some benefits. In the proper amount. Too much though can kill you. While too much MJ would be bad for your lungs, no one as far as I have been able to discover has gone on a wife beating binge because of it.
Lead is a KNOWN health hazard. And it was pumped into the atmosphere for decades. In the name of profit.
This evening I saw on TV where a sugar plant is using waste heat to grow marihuana. They showed us acres of plants growing under glass. The plants [they say] are no good for recreational use as they are bred to be high in cannabinoids (CBD) and low in tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).
They also showed us the harvesting where the plants were starved of water until they were dry and dead, then the leaves were separated from the stalks and sent to a pharmaceutical manufacturer for processing.
Not sure how the existence of over 6600 published research articles (according to the PubMed database) equates to “barely been studied”.
Remarkably few documented ones, despite all that research.
The problem I have is not with those who want to legalize pot for recreational use. It’s the people whose goal is legal recreational pot, while pretending it’s a medical miracle drug using wildly overhyped claims - in effect, hiding behind sick people.* It’s dishonest and exploitative.
Didja know farmers widely used arsenic as a pestkiller up until the middle of the 20th century? And yet people question medical uses for marijuana!**
*not accusing you of this.
**This kind of argument remains idiotic, though I doubt you can be convinced of that.
No, I was not missing the point. My own point stands. The product will be sold to narrower or wider limits depending on what its market will bear; depending on whether it’s economically worth it to have the narrower limits or not. Pharmaceutical regulations are just one economical factor of many. Companies making steel or chemicals crank out limits which can be narrower than those of the much more heavily-regulated pharmaceutical and alimentary industries.
As Jackmannii has already pointed out, the cannabinoid receptors, their natural ligands (marijuana), and synthetic ligands (potential drugs) have had the bollocks studied off of them, 100s of thousands of person hours. Would be millions if you counted all the bong-tards who have cogitated on this issue, but you can’t really call that research.
Big pharma put armies of scientists onto the cannabinoid receptors in the 90s, but the drug that came out of that effort (rimonabant, for obesity) was a failure (v serious psychological side-effects that were mechanism-based, rather than molecule-based). Whenever this happens it tends to cool a field and curtail future research, as it’s just too expensive to risk going after a target like that. It will rise again, I am sure, because the receptor is clearly v important - although developing CNS drugs like this will always be hugely challenging.
For Cannabidiol you have to see it in context of what the alternatives are, and they pretty much suck. We just don’t have the tools to effectively deal with chronic pain, yet - our best drugs in this area were discovered by cavemen 20,000 years ago and we haven’t made a truly significant advance since. So I can fully see why people suffering are going to want to give it a try - I mean it’s more than likely bollox, the sources will be dodgy, but even if it’s just a placebo that could be an improvement for some folk.