This piece seems to capture the essence of things.

This piece seems to capture the essence of things. #1) Cannabis therapy can beat Stage 4 cancer. #2) Because of side effects, there's an important need for non-psychoactive "cannabinoid complex" cancer therapy,  hence, Dharmanol. #3) "The law is an a$$," as Charles Dickens once wrote.

http://www.sfweekly.com/2013-04-24/news/key-w...ce-finley/

The oil also is extremely potent. Finley says her concoction is 72 percent tetrahydracannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana that gets you stoned, and which in lab studies has shrunk tumors in rats; and 11 percent cannabidiol, or CBD, the cannabinoid in marijuana that studies suggest doesn't get you high but has anti-inflammatory and anti-anxiety properties.

All 26 of Finley's referrals had stage 4 cancers — brain tumors, colon cancers, lung cancers — which means the malignant growths had metastasized to other organs. Most had prognoses of a few months to live, some had less than six weeks.

She says that, over the last year, a "world-class oncologist" — who for now wants to remain nameless, perhaps to preserve his practice — has referred 26 people to her , a skilled East Bay marijuana grower who knows how to distill a pound of high-grade bud to an ounce of oil.

A patient's prognosis can very widely depending on the type of cancer, but the disease is a reliable killer at stage 4, meaning Finley's patients' 96 percent survival rate is unheard-of.

It may not be for everyone: Patients start with a dose as small as a grain of rice before ramping up to a full gram per day, a hit that can leave some people woozy and dizzy — uncomfortably high. (Try Dharmanol.)

Now, she says, a San Francisco oncologist refers Stage 4 cancer patients to her, many of whom are given weeks to live, and all of whom she says receive healing from an oil she makes from the cannabis plant.

.In the fall of that year — a bad time for the local marijuana movement, as the federal Justice Department began shutting down hundreds of California medical cannabis dispensaries — Aldrich went in to see a series of doctors for what she thought was a flu that just refused to go away.

After six weeks of progressively worse diagnoses — flu became bronchitis, which became pneumonia — a CT scan revealed the cause behind the "heat" she felt in the middle of her chest. A tumor, "poorly-differentiated non-small cell adenocarcinoma." In other words, stage 3 lung cancer.

Lung cancer is a killer, with nearly 70 percent of new cases resulting in deaths , according to statistics published by the National Cancer Institute. "I thought I was going to die," Aldrich says from her Marina District apartment. But she didn't. And now, she is busy telling anyone who will listen that, along with diet and chemotherapy, a concoction of highly concentrated cannabis oil eliminated her cancer in less than four months.

She was diagnosed in January 2012; by April, CT scans revealed that the tumor had shrunk by 50 percent. Her surgeon at California Pacific Medical Center removed what was left of the tumor that May. (CPMC did not return calls by press time.) She isn't "officially" cured yet — a cancer patient needs five years of cancer-free living to beat the disease — but her most-recent scan, on March 27, was all clear. Her doctors — one of whom noted the effect of "homeopathic treatments, including hemp oil" to reprogram the cancer cells to kill themselves — "are floored," she says. "They've never seen anything like it."

These survival stories are becoming more common. One of the most high-profile was the case of Montana toddler Cash Hyde, diagnosed with a brain tumor at 20 months, whose family credits cannabis oil for keeping the tumor at bay and keeping him alive — until a change in Montana state law cut off his access to oil for a few months. The tumor returned and he died in November, at age four.