January 28, 2012 from PreventDisease Website
The reason? Because research into
cannabinoids allowed
pharmaceutical companies to acquire practical knowledge on one of
the most powerful antioxidants and neuroprotectants known to the
natural world:
Clearing the Smoke, reveals how cannabis acts on the brain and in the body
to treat nausea, pain, epilepsy and potentially even
cancer.
The U.S. Patent 6630507 was specifically initiated when researchers found that cannabinoids had specific antioxidant properties making them useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.
The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and HIV dementia.
Non-psychoactive cannabinoids, such as
cannabidiol, are
particularly advantageous to use because they avoid toxicity that is
encountered with psychoactive cannabinoids at high doses useful in
the method of the present invention.
And nowhere have emotions run
hotter than in the debate over the distinction between industrial
hemp and marijuana. This paper is intended to inform that debate by
offering scientific evidence, so that farmers, policymakers,
manufacturers, and the general public can distinguish between myth
and reality.
Although there has been a long-standing debate among taxonomists about how to classify these variants into species, applied plant breeders generally embrace a biochemical method to classify variants along utilitarian lines. Cannabis is the only plant genus that contains the unique class of molecular compounds called cannabinoids.
Many cannabinoids have been identified, but two preponderate: One type of Cannabis is high in the psychoactive cannabinoid, THC, and low in the anti-psychoactive cannabinoid, CBD. This type is popularly known as marijuana.
Another type is high in CBD and low in THC.
Variants of this type are called Industrial Hemp. In the United States, the debate about the relationship between hemp and marijuana has been diminished by the dissemination of many statements that have little scientific support.
This report examines in detail ten of
the most pervasive and pernicious of these myths:
Hemp oil is an increasingly popular product, used for an expanding variety of purposes.
The washed Industrial Hemp seed contains no THC at all. The tiny amounts of THC contained in Industrial Hemp are in the glands of the plant itself. Sometimes, in the manufacturing process, some THC- and CBD-containing resin sticks to the seed, resulting in traces of THC in the oil that is produced.
The concentration of these cannabinoids in the oil is infinitesimal. No one can get high from using Industrial Hemp oil. The market for Industrial Hemp products is growing rapidly.
But even
if it were not, when has a crop ever been outlawed simply because
government agencies thought it would be unprofitable to grow?
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