Posts Tagged ‘pharmaceutical’
Cannabis Advocates Really Need To Stop Accusing Doctors of Being Bribed By Pharmaceutical Companies.
There may well be some doctors who are corrupt and there are still, despite much improvement, serious questions over the relationship between pharma companies and doctors but the idea that every member of the Faculty of Pain Medicine who signed that letter to the Times is taking bribes is ridiculous.
The real reason is ignorance and that’s not an attack on doctors, it’s a reason. They have been subject to the same relentless torrent of reefer madness propaganda from government and media as the rest of society. They have been prevented even from learning about the endocannabinoid system by the authoritarian policy of prohibition and any doctor in the UK who has any experience of cannabis as medicine will have been in breach of professional ethics as well as the law.
CLEAR has been working with some of the very few enlightened doctors since way before the cause of cannabis as medicine became fashionable. Working with members, their MPs and doctors, we have organised lobbying of ministers and MPs over more than the past 10 years. In several instances we had doctors, both GPs and consultants, contact the Home Office to enquire about obtaining a licence for a specific patient. In at least three instances these doctors were then contacted by Home Office officials who warned them off using threats and intimidation. Shocking but completely true.
It is and it always has been government – stupid, prejudiced, bigoted and self-opinionated politicians – who have prevented access to cannabis, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. This means that there has been no education at all and doctors are as poorly informed as everyone else. They’re also, and understandably, worried, even scared. They don’t understand cannabis, many will not even have heard of the endocannabinoid system and they are concerned about being sued, professionally disgraced, losing their job and now of being swamped by patients demanding cannabis about which they know nothing.
Of course, it was thoroughly stupid to assert in the letter that “the evidence suggests that the prescribing of cannabis (containing the psychoactive and addictive tetrahydrocannabinol component) will provide little or no long-term benefit in improving pain and may be associated with significant long-term adverse cognitive and mental-health detriment.”
There is no reasonable interpretation of the evidence that supports this. THC can be addictive in a very modest sense but the withdrawal symptoms and negative effects are trivial compared to those from opioids which doctors prescribe readily and frequently. There is excellent evidence from many sources that cannabis containing THC and CBD benefits pain and while there may be some cognitive and mental health effects, to suggest they are significant or even come remotely close to those from opioids is false and in opposition to the evidence.
I repeat, doctors aren’t saying this because they are bribed by pharmaceutical companies, it’s because they have no idea what they are talking about.
The urgent requirement now is medical education. It is amazing how radical the new regulations are and many people still don’t seem to realise how far the government has gone. They go much further than we at CLEAR had even dared to dream and the definition of cannabis-derived medicinal product (CDMP) is very broad. When we were consulted on it by the Department of Health and MHRA we never thought they would accept all our recommendations. They enable the prescription of every form of cannabis, including flower, oil and concentrate, provided they meet quality standards.
So the problem with the law is gone. Literally, it is all over. It is absolute and total victory. Now two big problems remain. Education is the first but this is being addressed. NICE has acted commendably fast to start recruiting a panel to advise on prescribing guidelines and Professor Mike Barnes, CLEAR’s scientific and medical advisor has already developed a series of introductory online training modules. Early in November his Medical Cannabis Clinicians Society launches and this will be an important forum for the future.
The second big problem is supply. Where are the CDMPs to come from? Sativex falls into the definition and this was GW Pharma’s big opportunity to act responsibly and imaginatively. The possibility still exists that it will substantially reduce the absurd, rip-off price that it has been charging for Sativex since 2010. If it had the imagination it could very easily turn over some of its production to unlicensed CDMPs for which there is now a ready market. I fear that it is wedded to licensed products only, hugely expensive and, in my judgement, unnecessary clinical trials and very high prices for its end products. If so, then I will be selling my shares. I admire the company for its courage, innovation and high standards but if it does not seize this opportunity then I believe it is failing in its duty to shareholders and also to Britain, which let’s remember has gifted it a privileged and unique opportunity in the world. Fail now to provide for the needs of UK patients and that amounts to betrayal.
So for now the only possible sources of supply that meet the definition will be Bedrocan in the Netherlands and some of the Canadian licensed producers. US companies cannot export. Neither can the Israeli companies and they would also face a thoroughly deserved boycott of their products even if Netanyahu was to issue export licences. Bedrocan can barely meet demand from its existing customers and there is talk of it having difficulties with a ceiling on its export licenses. Only some Canadian producers meet the required GMP quality standards and they too are facing shortages as they also supply the recently legalised recreational market which is seriously short of product.
So the Home Office has to act and start issuing domestic production licences and it has to do so immediately. Whether it will, remains to be seen. Its drugs licensing department is a shambles, staffed by officials who do not even understand the law they are supposed to administrate, who regularly give different, contradictory answers on different days and exceed their lawful authority as a matter of course. If there is a ‘hostile environment’ for immigration in the Home Office, for drugs licensing and cannabis production it has been hostile but also aggressive, paranoid and stupid ever since the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.
The urgent need is for prospective British cannabis producers to mobilise their MPs and for immediate pressure to be brought on the Home Office at the highest level. Sajid Javid has shown he can act decisively. Expanding domestic cannabis production is the inevitable next step in what he has already achieved. He must act now.
So the future in the UK for those who need cannabis as medicine is brighter than could ever have been imagined. The next steps are challenging but nowhere near as difficult as the campaign to reform the law that CLEAR has fought for nearly 20 years. Don’t blame doctors, continue to blame the government and hold their feet to the fire until they act on medical education and cannabis production as they must.
Let’s Nail the Home Office’s Latest Smokescreen About Medical Cannabis
As the evidence and support for legal access to cannabis for medical use grows, so the Home Office adjusts and reframes its arguments in denial.
This should come as no surprise. The ‘hostile environment’ revealed by the Windrush scandal runs through the Home Office like a stick of rock. The culture of this department is defined by Theresa May and it reflects her character and personality. It is secretive, demands total control and micro management of everything it touches and whenever it is challenged it finds another excuse to maintain its iron rule. It is institutionally dishonest.
A Home Office spokeswoman said:
“We recognise that people with chronic pain and debilitating illnesses are looking to alleviate their symptoms. However, it is important that medicines are thoroughly tested to ensure they meet rigorous standards before being placed on the market, so doctors and patients are assured of their efficacy and safety.”
The truth is rather different. In every jurisdiction throughout the world where medicinal cannabis has been legally regulated, it is through a special system outside pharmaceutical medicines regulation. You cannot regulate a 500 molecule plant-based medicine in the same way as a single molecule synthesised in a lab.
Regulation by the MHRA is the final excuse, the last obstacle to a revolution in healthcare in the UK. We need an ‘Office of Medicinal Cannabis’ as there is in the Netherlands, or ‘Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations’ as administered by Health Canada. Colorado has its ‘Medical Marijuana Registry Program’ and other US states have similar arrangements. Israel’s Ministry of Health has its ‘Medical Cannabis Unit’. In Australia, its equivalent of the MHRA, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, has established its own set of medical cannabis regulations.
Every other government that has recognised the enormous benefit that medicinal cannabis offers has come to the same conclusion: cannabis is a special case. It is far more complex but much, much safer than pharmaceutical products.
So next time you hear this, the last, lame excuse from a government ideologically opposed to this long overdue reform, treat it and them with the contempt they deserve. They prefer that people should continue in pain, suffering and disability than that they should do what science and medicine says is right.
An Appeal To Andrew Lansley
Dear Mr Lansley,
Medicinal Cannabis
I am writing to you about the urgent necessity to permit the prescribing of medicinal cannabis by doctors.
Please do not refer me to the Home Office. Its intransigent position on the subject amounts to a scandalous denial of science and cruel mistreatment of hundreds of thousands of British citizens. This is a health issue which requires your attention and care for those in pain and suffering.
There is now an overwhelming body of peer reviewed, published research that proves beyond doubt the efficacy of medicinal cannabis for the treatment of many conditions. Britain is becoming increasingly isolated as a place where patients are denied access to the medicine they need. Utterly absurd is that patients from the EU can bring medicinal cannabis into Britain under the protection of the Schengen Agreement but British residents risk prison for using exactly the same substance.
Every country in Europe except France and Britain now has some form of medicinal cannabis provision. 15 US states now permit medical marijuana on a doctor’s recommendation and Israel has a fast expanding programme. There are huge cost savings and benefits to be gained and enormous reductions in harm from side effects of poisonous pharmaceutical products.
There are already many instances in Britain where MS patients have been refused Sativex on cost grounds and so have been forced into illegal purchase or cultivation and have then been prosecuted as criminals. This is a shame and disgrace on our nation and I appeal to you to take steps to end it.
Perhaps you do not realise the transformational effect that medicinal cannabis can have on some people’s lives? Almost miraculous results are being achieved, particularly with MS, Crohn’s and fibromyalgia. People who would otherwise be trapped by pain and disability are able to lead productive lives with the help of medicinal cannabis.
Please Mr Lansley, will you arrange to meet me and a delegation of people whose lives are literally saved by the use of medicinal cannabis? This cruel and demeaning policy cannot be allowed to continue in the face of overwhelming evidence. Safe, high quality, standardised dose cannabis is now available from Bedrocan in Holland, the Dutch government’s supplier and is exported all over Europe to fill doctors’ prescriptions. How much longer must British citizens wait?
Co-ordinated action is already underway for dozens of patients to take the Home Office to judicial review for its refusal to grant import licenses for Bedrocan. This is at huge cost in public money and people’s lives. You could take steps to end this suffering now. You could enable the NHS to start making huge cost savings immediately. This issue is not going away.
CLEAR is a new team of committed professionals that is determined to bring this issue to the top of the political agenda. Please arrange to meet me and learn at first hand how much good you could do by a change of policy that is, in any case, inevitable. Don’t make those people in pain and suffering wait any longer.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Reynolds
Send a copy of this letter to your MP. Download and print here.
Who Is Secretly Working To Keep Pot Illegal – Big Pharma?

This is an extract from an article by Steven Kotler, a science writer who lives in New Mexico. The full article can be read here.
In 2009, the global pharmaceutical market was worth $837 billion—and it’s on track to top $1 trillion by 2014. This is a lot of money to spread around, so when it comes to lobbying efforts, very few have this group’s clout. Mostly, Big Pharma gets what Big Pharma wants. And one thing it wants is for marijuana to remain illegal.
It’s not hard to figure out why. You can’t patent a plant—and that’s a big problem for pharmaceutical companies when it comes to medical marijuana.
Why?
Imagine a wonder drug able to provide much-needed relief from dozens and dozens of conditions. Imagine it’s cheap, easy to grow, easy to dispense, easy to ingest and, over millennia of “product testing,” has produced no fatalities and few side effects—except for the fact that it “reportedly” makes you feel really, really good. That would be quite a drug. Knowing all this, it’s easy to see why the pharmaceutical industry worries about competition from marijuana.
And besides its palliative prowess, researchers consistently find that patients prefer smoking marijuana to taking prescription drugs. In another study run by Reiman, 66 percent of her patients used cannabis as a substitute for prescription drugs; 68 percent used it instead of prescription drugs to treat a chronic condition and 85 percent reported that cannabis had fewer side effects than other medicines.
Early on, the pharmaceutical industry fought back by spending money on anti-pot efforts, but the same NORML investigation that fingered the alcohol and tobacco industries as heavy backers of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America found that Big Pharma was doing so as well. “They were so embarrassed by that revelation” says MAPS founder Rick Doblin, “that they mostly stopped spending money on anti-marijuana lobbying efforts.”
Since then, the pharmaceutical industry has shifted its focus to developing alternatives to medical cannabis, often taking the traditional reductionist approach. Specifically, these days, if a pharmaceutical company wants to turn a plant into a medicine they isolate the most active ingredient and make what’s known as a “single-compound drug.” Morphine, for example, is really just the chemical core of the poppy plant. This too has been tried with marijuana. Out of the 400 chemicals in marijuana, 80 of them belong to a class called “cannabinoids.” Out of those 80 cannabinoids, a number of pharmaceutical companies have tried reducing marijuana to only one: THC. But the results have been unsatisfactory.
“There are certain cases,” says Doblin, “where the single-compound formula works wonders. But it’s just not true in every case. The pharmaceutical industry keeps claiming they’re not worried about medical marijuana because they make a better product, but when you reduce cannabis to just THC, you lose efficacy and gain side effects.”
The Cannabis Campaign In 2011
I believe that we can make real progress this year towards ending the prohibition of cannabis.
What we have to do, each and every one of us, individually, is take responsibility.
We have to stop complaining and start campaigning.
However just our cause, however unjust our opposition, no one is going to give us the right to cannabis. We are going to have to take it. Take it back from those who took it away from us.
Many of us can point to years and years of fighting for the cause but it is never enough! We have to keep on. We have to welcome new campaigners and encourage them, not take the view that we’ve seen it all before, done it ourselves and why aren’t we getting the credit? We have to welcome our fellow citizens to the war against prohibition, support them, bolster their confidence, build them up, not knock them down.
If the millions of people in Britain who use cannabis were to join together and be counted, we could make change happen! I don’t know whether there are two million of us or ten million. That’s how widely the estimates vary. The Home Office used to say six millon use cannabis regularly. I don’t know. What I do know is that it is an outrage to democracy and justice that we are denied legal and properly regulated access to cannabis, whether we use it for medicine, relaxation or spiritual fulfilment.
We don’t all have to be campaigners but we do all have to be counted. If we want change, we have to be prepared, at least, to sign petitions, to write the occasional letter, to put our heads above the parapet. It’s so easy nowadays. It can all be done online in the blink of an eye but more of us need to do it and keep doing it until politicians understand that they can bully us into silence no longer.
One of the problems of the online world, of Facebook, the forums and blogs, is that we’re just preaching to the converted all the time. We may feel that we’re getting our message across but it’s to the same people over and over again. When you see the disgusting response that Bob Ainsworth had to his brave initiative just before Christmas, when you see James Brokenshire smugly trotting out his prohibitionist agenda, when you see Cameron and his poodle backtracking on all their enlightened and liberal ideas, then you realise that the forces of darkness are set against us. The war on drugs, which Brokenshire fights so enthusiastically, is another Vietnam. It can never be won because it is, in fact, a war on democracy but there will be many casualties along the way. Brokenshire counts the high level of adulteration of drugs on the street as a measure of success. This is the sort of thinking that we are up against. It is perverted. It is evil. It denies truth and science and justice.
It denies people in constant pain and suffering access to the medicine that they need. Even if a doctor has prescribed cannabis, ignorant, professional political oiks who have never done a day’s real work in in their lives, think they know best. Instead they force people towards expensive pharmaceutical products with horrendous side effects but huge profits for their co-conspirators in the corrupt world of Big Pharma and its self-important regulators. As was seen so clearly in America in the last century, prohibition is fundamentally immoral and self-defeating yet our cowardly politicians hide behind it, preferring inaction, oppression and lies to the truth.
So I have asked myself, what can we do to break this stranglehold that politicians have on the truth? How can we counter the crass and appalling propaganda that the Daily Mail puts out? Why does the media love the story of Debra Bell, the mother who blames cannabis for her delinquent and dishonest son? Why is the truth about cannabis so rarely told? Where is the voice of the millions who know the truth?
I return to the divisions there are within our cause. Just as in California, where the growers sabotaged Proposition 19, so we have our own subversive and destructive elements. We have a breakaway group here, an independent campaigner there. We have medicinal users who are eloquent and persuasive on their own account but will not work with others. We have hugely courageous individuals who have campaigned and put their freedom on the line but will not reconcile themselves to co-operation. We have to cut through this. We have to unite, to generate a momentum that means we cannot be ignored.
That is why, just before Christmas, I decided to join the Legalise Cannabis Alliance. I was a member of the original Legalise Cannabis Campaign and I saw how the LCA made strenuous efforts, particularly around the 2005 general election. I believe it was right and effective to put forward our views on the political stage. This is what we must do again.
The LCA is to re-register as a political party and, in due course, I hope to stand as a parliamentary candidate. Realistically, I don’t expect to be elected but I do expect to make our voice heard. I expect our opinions and our views to be respected and given proper consideration. When the Daily Mail or the BBC turns to Debra Bell for comment, I expect them to turn to us as well. When Mrs Bell is on the TV sofa, I want to be alongside her. I want the opportunity to speak the truth in the face of propaganda. If they want to put up eminent professors and doctors as well then I encourage it. Science and independent reason is on our side. The intellectual and scientific debate has been won many times over. Now we must win the political battle and the truth is our strongest weapon. All we have to do is shine the light on it so that the scare stories, the hysteria and the propaganda shrink back into the shadows.
We will be a single issue party with a commitment to de-register once we have achieved our aims. I urge you all to join the LCA. I’m going to do everything I can to make it easier to join. Possibly we need to make it cheaper. Certainly we need to do everything we can to encourage as many people as possible to stand up and be counted. We need to be able to accept card payments, operate direct debits. We need as many as possible to join whether or not they use cannabis. We need to reform the law, regulate supply and distribution and realise the huge benefits as a medicine, as a gentle pleasure and as a new source of billions in tax revenue. That’s the way forward. Reform, regulate and realise.
One of the most repulsive images I saw last year was the fat, conceited Simon Heffer chortling into his glass of wine and saying that we need to “get nasty” in the war on drugs. Well I’ve got news for the pompous, hypocritical boozer and for James Brokenshire and his cronies, nobody’s going to be getting nasty from this side. We’re just going to tell the truth. And we’re going to keep on telling the truth until it drowns out their lies. We’re going to tell the truth again and again and again until we get the right to our drug of choice, to the plant that creates peace not violence, to the plant that heals that doesn’t kill, to the plant that we have a right to use and enjoy as we please.
Big Pharma Plugs Weed
The news that Sativex, a whole plant extract of cannabis, was approved as a medicine in the UK was welcome, of course.
But £125 for 10 ml, two teaspoons – please!
According to Sativex’ prescribing information, each 1 ml contains 27mg of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), that’s the magical ingredient. So in each spray that’s £125 for 270mg of THC.
At today’s extortionate street price of £10 per gram, good weed contains about 12% THC. So that’s £10 for 120mg of THC.
At Big Pharma prices you get stoned for 46p/mg. On the street you get high for 8p/mg.
Draw your own conclusions but please, do check my figures. Let me know if you disagree.