Remember the short-lived hoopla over Canasol? From the mid 19th century medical marijuana was a mainstream medicine,
listed in U.S. pharmacopoeia, with a tincture bottled by no less than Prozac maker Eli Lilly (2002 sales: US$11 billion).
Now the British along with the Germans want to get in on the act. British-based GW Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology firm,
has for some time been conducting clinical trials of cannabis-based medicines on persons suffering from multiple
sclerosis and chronic pain. GW has inked a deal with German giant Bayer Healthcare AG (of the famed aspirin) to market
Sativex (derived from sativa, the other half of ganja’s scientific name), a cannabis-laced oral spray designed to treat
naturopathic pain and MS symptoms.
Bayer has agreed to market Sativex in the UK and Canada and has a further option for the European market.
The latter is estimated to be worth some 400 million dollars. The researchers believe that cannabis medicines
“have enormous pharmacological capabilities and a capacity to attack, in a disease like MS, an entire range of symptoms.”
This according to GW founder Geoffrey Guy. Even more telling is Guy's further comment, If it wasn’t called marijuana, there
would by now have been an entire bio-tech industry around this plant.
Has Jamaican ingenuity once again been trumped by a lack of vision and an excess of political correctness? Why wasn't research
sustained and even intensified in the wake of Canasol? And if it was, what happened to those findings? Even if it meant bringing a
giant like Bayer into the picture, no effort should have been spared to put Jamaica in the forefront of this bonanza. Could not a
Jamaican company have emerged as the new Eli Lilly of medical marijuana? Imagine the boost to the entire region from having a
world-renowned bio-tech industry built around the plant, which grows here in such abundance.
The race is still not over. Even as you read this, the pharma giants (including Lilly) are hard at work trying to cook up synthetic
versions of the 61 identified cannabinoid compounds found in the ganja plant (some researchers believe the plant to contain up to 400
different substances altogether). Talk is being made of marijuana- based treatments for everything from obesity to cancer pain and migraine
headaches (see Marketing Briefs story on Pfizer’s new drug). GW in the meantime, is taking whole extracts from the plant and recombining
them to produce treatments for specific ailments, hence Sativex.
Not only has it generated interesting new possibilities, but also it enabled the company to bring the drug to market in a relatively brisk
five years, and at a cost of roughly US$60 million. That compares to ten to fifteen years and an average US$800 million spent by the major
pharmaceutical companies. Plus, by coming up with an alternative to smoking cannabis, Sativex is a built-in palliative to UK and -hopefully
Continental Europe - drug approval bodies.
To be sure, a critical hurdle remains in the form of the powerful U.S drug control complex. While this column is firmly against recreational
use of marijuana (even in the face of widespread social acceptance), successive U.S. administrations, right up to the present one, have thrown
stupendous amounts of monetary and other resources behind the so-called war on drugs, with at best, middling results. If a physician’s grade
treatment for specific ailments can be safely manufactured from marijuana (and I stand to be corrected but this is what Canasol proved),
why not at least support ongoing trials and research.
That’s the opinion of the U.S. Institute of Medicine. In 1999, at the behest of the then drug czar’s office, the IM produced a voluminous
assessment of the medical potential of marijuana. The dominant opinion: “Research should continue into physiological effects of synthetic
and plant-derived cannabinoids”
For our own case, the concern has been on which international treaties the Government would be in breach of by decriminalizing the weed.
My recollection is that the present administration has unilaterally withdrawn from other protocols (and those concerned human rights)
when it found it expedient to do so. What's different here?
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