Corporate Cannabis

Ironically, some of the early research Guy used in developing Sativex came from America’s National Institute on Drug Abuse. “The US government has funded substantial research over the last twenty-five years,” says Guy. “But it was all designed to prove that cannabinoids were the most terrible things on earth.” He says it reminds him of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the way the goals of many American studies—cannabis is bad—are at odds with the actual research presented. They’ve come up with remarkably little to show that the effects of the drug are adverse or dangerous, he asserts. “Had they spent twenty-five years looking at ibuprofen, they could have come up with a far worse profile.”

By some estimates, 50 percent of prescribed medicines in the nineteenth century—designed to alleviate everything from migraines and menstrual cramps to the pain of childbirth—contained cannabis. Time will tell whether Bayer has latched on to the new Aspirin—whether Sativex will become the “take two and call me in the morning” drug of the twenty-first century.

Major research breakthroughs came in 1988, with the discovery of a cannabinoid receptor in the brain, and in 1992, when it was confirmed that humans, like all animals, possess endogenous cannabinoids in their bodies, in the same way that endorphins are endogenous opiates. Cannabinoids, Guy says, are “really one of the prime controllers of the body’s systems.” He compares the action of cannabis to the fine-tuning knob of a radio. Unlike modern synthetic chemical medicines, cannabinoids don’t just show a simple effect in one direction, but can modulate up or down on the health dial, returning the body’s systems to equilibrium. “We have combinations of receptors,” he says, “that some of the materials in cannabis seem to be tailor-made for.”

In fact, Guy believes there is evidence of an evolutionary link between cannabis and Homo sapiens. He argues that from the time plants and animals diverged in the primordial soup, they have remained in a co-evolutionary dance. Particularly noteworthy are the receptors humans have retained for chemicals found in opium and cannabis. He suggests that cannabinoid receptors, lying dormant for millennia, may have been reactivated when humans rediscovered cannabis 50,000 years ago, a time known as “the great leap forward,” when our ancestors developed art, language, and new tools like boats, rope, and fishhooks.

Guy’s rivals at Cannasat Pharmaceuticals in Toronto hope to build on the growing bank of scientific knowledge as to how cannabis interacts with those receptors. While Cannasat is trailing GW in the race to bring the first cannabis-based pharmaceutical to market, Cannasat’s Williams says operating in Canada gives his firm an advantage. Potentially, Cannasat could tap into Prairie Plants’ expertise and research-grade product, whereas GW had to build and operate their own growing facility. “Prairie Plant is almost there,” he says, “and that will knock two years off the fiveyear head start that GW has.”

Realistically, GW’s head start is probably more like seven years, and they began with the most genetically pure cannabis in the world, the breeding stock of a Dutch firm called Hortapharm, whereas Prairie Plant was obliged by Health Canada to grow its plants from seeds confiscated by the rcmp.

Despite the fact that many MS sufferers might want to try Sativex, Cannasat’s legal adviser, Alan Young, thinks Health Canada should delay approving the drug. He says GW has failed to look at enough strains of marijuana to guarantee that its product will substantially improve the lives of MS suffers. “The closer I looked at GW, the more distressed I was by the product,” he says. “And all my fears are substantiated by the fact that GW has not received approval from its own government. So I’ve taken the position, ‘Don’t come to Canada until you get your business in order in the UK.’ ”

Currently, patients trying to acquire medical marijuana approved by Health Canada find the process complex and bureaucratic. Approved applicants are allowed to either grow their own marijuana, have someone grow it for them in a strict one-to-one relationship, or buy their cannabis from the government. The strict regulations (patients must submit a series of applications and one or more medical declarations, as well as a photograph of themselves signed by their doctor) make cannabis far more difficult to obtain than even such sinister prescription drugs as Oxycontin, the morphine substitute better known as Hillbilly Heroin.

“People are contacting me daily from all parts of Canada, wanting to know how and where to purchase medical cannabis,” says Barb St. Jean, editor of Cannabis Health Magazine, based in Grand Forks, BC. “Their doctors tell them they will not sign the government approval forms.” Currently the Canadian Medical Association (cma) and its insurer, the Canadian Medical Protective Association, counsel members not to sign. “But some doctors,” says St. Jean, “tell their patients, ‘Just go out and buy it if you want it.’ This is insane.”

The confusion could end if Bayer is allowed to distribute Sativex in Canada, where it will be strictly labelled for the treatment of MS only. But given compelling evidence of its efficacy in treating such conditions as arthritic pain and the nausea that often accompanies chemotherapy, it’s likely that the market (and profits) will expand as “off-label prescribing” accelerates.

It’s easy to foresee a scenario like this one: a person with chronic pain asks a doctor to sign the government paperwork allowing her to grow her own cannabis, or get it shipped in a packet from Flin Flon, already ground up like oregano. The doctor says, “I’m uncomfortable with that, because in fact the cma have advised me not to sign. However, I can write you a prescription for Sativex. It’s for MS but it seems to work wonders for other chronic pain.” And in one quick step, one more patient will be using Sativex for a condition that is completely unrelated to the MS that the drug was originally designed and licenced to treat.

Eventually Sativex could be introduced into the lucrative US market. But with the war on illegal drugs going on, with much of it directed by the world’s biggest consumer of illegal drugs, America, any substance that gets you giddy is guilty until proven innocent. GW and Bayer may be able to skirt that issue by emphasizing the fact that Sativex is taken in a dose so low that there’s no high associated with it.

As Lucas points out, many patients at the Compassion Society in Victoria use the herb for chronic pain, and report that it doesn’t trigger the euphoric high that a healthy person might experience using the same amounts of cannabis. Lucas himself, who contracted hepatitis C from tainted blood at the age of twelve and now uses cannabis for pain management and appetite enhancement, acknowledges that he does experience some euphoric effects. Then he mentions an ad he saw for a pharmaceutical on television the other night. “One of the long list of possible side effects was anal leaking,” he says. “I’ll take euphoria over anal leaking any day.”

Perhaps the main selling point of Sativex, however, is that you don’t have to smoke it to get the benefits. GW’s Guy points out that Health Canada’s Flin Flon operation distributes “herbal cannabis of only reasonably under stood quality,” which they dispense in the full knowledge that patients will smoke it, “therefore exposing them to an enormous raft of carcinogens.” Guy then launches into a detailed rant about the sheer wastefulness of smoking. “We don’t burn Sativex,” he sneers. “Ninety-five percent of all the material of the joint is used to produce a heat source! Well, in this modern day and age we’ve got electricity and things like that if we want a heat source! We don’t need to burn the actual drug to create a heat source.”

Smoking, however, is exactly what many medical users want to do. And currently, compassion clubs, like Lucas’s Vancouver Island Compassion Society in Victoria, are by far the leading providers of medical marijuana. Of the 750-plus patients now registered with Health Canada, only eighty-three have opted to use Flin Flon’s finest. By contrast, Vancouver’s BC Compassion Club Society, a non-profit society dedicated to supplying cannabis, has 3,000 members. Nearly a dozen such clubs across the country serve more than 8,000. Roughly 95 percent of these patients smoke their cannabis.