January 28, 2012

from PreventDisease Website

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In 2003, the U.S. Government as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services filed for, and was awarded a patent on cannabinoids.

 

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.

Surely no member of the vegetable kingdom has ever been more misunderstood than hemp. For too many years, emotion-not reason-has guided our policy toward this crop.

 

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.

Botanically, the genus Cannabis is composed of several variants.

 

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:

  • THC, which is the psychoactive ingredient of Cannabis

  • CBD, which is an anti-psychoactive ingredient

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:
 

 

 

 

Rick Simpson tell us about his goal to help people heal themselves using hemp oil to cure cancer and other diseases.

 

We also hear many testimonies of the positive effects of hemp oil and we get a glimpse of the struggle to fight the system that constantly tries to stop this natural medicine.
 

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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