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Is It A DRUG Or Is It NOT?


By Ray Larsen
Exclusive to Rense.com
4-26-17

 

As a Cannabis industry worker, I do a lot of reading of Cannabis centric websites and magazines. One thing that really gets to me is the constant misuse of the word DRUG when we are talking about Cannabis. The word DRUG seems to have a negative connotation for most people. Otherwise talented, professional writers are making this mistake way too often, especially in articles intended for general audiences.

Cocaine is a drug. It is extracted from the leaves of the coca plant, which is not a drug. Nicotine is a drug, tobacco is a plant. Opium is extracted from the poppy flower, also just a plant. Cannabis is a plant, when properly grown, harvested and cured, becomes an excellent herbal medicine. Extracts from the Cannabis plant are indeed drugs, just like cocaine, nicotine and opium. THC, is the main psychoactive molecule typically extracted from Cannabis plants. This can be done using a variety of methods.

One very common method uses melted butter. The oils in butter dissolve the THC from the plant material. After a day or so soaking in the warm butter, the plant material is filtered out using cheesecloth or a similar filter medium. The result is Budder, very useful to the Cannabis Chef. Cooking with Cannabis is a rapidly expanding field with tons of recipes, instructions, etc. easily found on the Internet. Budder really isn't concentrated enough to be considered a drug.

Retail shops and Dispensaries sell a variety of concentrates, wax, shatter and distillate are common forms that come to mind. These concentrates are made in extraction labs using several types of solvents. Butane or propane works well, but this is very dangerous to do at home. Even the pros in the labs have had accidental explosions. There have been so many explosions that Colorado law regards home butane extraction as a felony! In addition to the danger of explosions, the residual butane is difficult to remove from the final product. Vacuum ovens are used in the labs to remove the butane, but they don't get it all.

Those issues led to the increasing popularity of CO2 as a solvent. As we all know, CO2 exists as a gas or a solid, like dry ice. It's one of those strange molecules that has no liquid form at normal temperatures and pressures. To make it into an effective liquid solvent, extraction labs compress and heat the gas into a form called "supercritical." It is then ran through a tube stuffed with plant material. Out the other end comes the magical oil with THC concentrations upwards of 60-70 percent. The latest rage is molecular distillation, yielding 90 percent or more pure THC. Of course, this is a drug and some patients need this level of concentration to properly treat their condition.

The equipment used to extract using Butane or CO2 is incredibly expensive. Demand exceeds supply, so there are waiting lists, some 6 months or longer. As a temp, I've only worked at one lab, so far. They had 3 PhD chemists on staff and about $2M in state of the art equipment. This area is ripe for expansion, new investment and innovation are needed to increase capacity and reduce costs. Prices for concentrates are way too high. Many legit medical patients can't afford the high dose medicine they need. Health insurance won't cover it, unless you happen to live in Germany, where it will be covered in the near future. Go figure.

There are other methods of extraction, like ice water makes bubble hash, strange, but true. Another, easy to do at home method uses heat and pressure, no solvent needed. Simply obtain a good quality electric hair straightener, the wider the better, and a C-clamp. Place the plant material on one side of the heated plates, squeeze the plates together, adjusting the C-clamp to get more pressure, being careful not to crack plastic housing. Lay it inside a glass baking dish, far away from any flammable materials. Now is the time (drumroll) to plug it in. After a day or so, depending on the temperature, you should see some oil accumulating on the glass.

CBD is a popular miracle molecule from the Cannabis plant. It's medical applications are many, easy to find on the Internet. To produce CBD oil, we start with plants genetically predisposed to produce CBD instead of THC. These strains are naturally low in THC. There are a few states where CBD oil is the only legal treatment allowed. For purity reasons, most industrial scale CBD extraction uses CO2 as the solvent. Orally administered CBD prevents so many health problems that I think it should be taken like a Vitamin!

Pro football players risk traumatic brain injuries every time they play the game. Use of prescribed opioid based pain medications is a major issue among players and has been for a long time. Lately, many have realized that Cannabis can be used for pain relief and as a neuroprotective, lessening the effects of such neurological injuries.

Doctors for Cannabis Regulation sent a letter to the NFL saying, "Cannabis deserves the serious attention of your medical staff as a viable pain management alternative and potential neuroprotectant." The NFL, though still punishing players for Cannabis use, appears to be listening. Major policy changes are in the works. Guess we'll see if the powers that be really do care about the health of their well paid men on the gridiron.

Isolation of compounds seems to be the plan of Big Pharma, making prescribeable, marketable drugs. Marinol, a synthetic form of THC from AbbVie, has been around for a long time. More recently, GH Pharmaceuticals has come out with Epidiolex, a plant derived CBD based medication, now proven to greatly reduce epileptic seizures. They are going to make a lot of money. This is the opposite of whole plant medicine, to be discussed in a future article.

In isolation, THC or CBD medications are useful in Cancer treatment. However, the synergistic effect of combining them is far more useful. Canadian medical pioneer, Rick Simpson, had this figured out 20 years ago. Only recently has the Canadian government become receptive to what Rick tried to teach them so long ago.

In addition to THC and CBD, the Cannabis plant produces plenty of other medically useful molecules. Head growers are working to breed new strains that produce useful quantities of these substances so that more research can be done. We are just "scratching the surface" regarding the medical applications of this beautiful God given plant of many miracles.