On the miracle of Dharmanol. Four recent GoldNApel essays from FB discussing the astonishing properties of Dharmanol, exclusively licensed to SKTO, in reply to specfic questions.
GoldNApel 10-17-13
Q: Will Dharmanol will be effective against other conditions where cannabis medicine has been shown to be of benefit.
A. That's the beauty of cannabis medicine. It works so well on so many things. And the research is there to prove it. I don't know of single study that was done to question another researcher's work that found any fault. Even government studies designed to prove that cannabis causes cancer turned up the opposite results. (Google Dr. Donald Tashkin UCLA).
Dharmanol in small doses works mostly by "tuning up" the body's own endo-cannabinoid system, which regulates and controlls many other internal systems. Cannabinoid medicine in larger doses works in several different manners. Malignant cells are killed while adjacent healthy cells are strengthened. Healthy cells are induced to die on schedule (apoptosis), and the rate that cancer spreads (metastasizes) is greatly limited.
Cannabis in huge doses works as a direct poison to the malignant cells. rats that had been implanted with incurable - in humans - brain cancer tumors had their cancer eliminated completely by direct irrigation with THC. Every rat in a large group recovered after they woke up!
But, in general, we believe that, in most cases, Dharmanol-based medicines will have the same medicinal efficacy as other cannabis medicines, in similar doses, against similar medical conditions. We are working hard on developing a line of condition-specific natural treatments containing non-psychoactive phyto-cannabinoids, and other elements of cannabis/hemp, in conjunction with other natural herbs and supplements.
PS. I should add the obvious. There are conditions where the direct effects of THC are the sought after medicinal effect. For example, pain control. Anxiety relief in some circumstances. Inducement of sleep in insomnia. Inducement of munchies, perhaps, in anorexia or wasting syndrome? That will take some thought and testing.
GoldNApel 10-25-13
Q. Could you give us the short version on treating cancer with cannabis and Dharmanol in particular?
A. Cannabis medicine has been shown in quality research to fight cancer with many different mechanisms. Some of these are:
1) Small doses of cannabinoids, on a regular basis, stimulate the body’s own endocannabinoid system, which, in turn, activates many of the body’s own disease-fighting mechanisms.
2) Cannabinoid therapy creates an appetite in advanced cancer patients who are battling wasting syndrome, and cannot otherwise eat.
3) Cannabinoid medicine promotes a process called apoptosis, which is the normal programmed death of a healthy cell, as opposed to continuing to live past when it should and becoming malignant.
4) Cannabinoids greatly inhibit the spreading of cancer from one organ to another.
5) When cannabinoids are used to treat malignant cell growth that is adjacent to healthy tissue, the bad cells are killed while the healthy cells are strengthened.
6) Cannabinoid therapy treats pain and nausea associated with the disease, and the side effects of the conventional treatments that are currently employed.
7) Cannabinoid therapy increased the lifespan of lab rats implanted with tumors by 36% in the first US Govt. funded research in 1975. This was opposed to the control group of rats that received no treatment, but were implanted with the same cancers.
The great bulk of the research done to date has used doses somewhat equivalent to those used in humans. The gram of oil daily recommended in Simpson therapy is a huge dose, equivalent to about 100 marijuana joints in psychoactivity, and is the most cannabis that most humans can tolerate. Even so, this dose is far less than one one-thousandth of the LD-50 (lethal dose).
The Dharmanol™ line of all-natural nutritional supplements now being developed is centered around a proprietary technology developed by Berkeley Bio that extracts and stabilizes the entire array of cannabinoids in marijuana/hemp in their non-psychoactive form. This allows a patient who cannot tolerate Simpson therapy to take the required gram of cannabinoids daily, with no psychoactive effects.
Perhaps more exciting is the fact that with this new technology one can consume many times the recommended Simpson dose of cannabinoids, also with no psychoactivity. The overwhelmingly positive anecdotal evidence we have seen as a result of Mr. Simpson’s videos on the internet has come from using a very tiny dose of cannabinoids (compared to the amounts that can cause any physiological harm.)
While I will never use the word “cure” until we have double-blind placebo-controlled tests, I thoroughly believe that the science has already shown that tiny doses are effective, many of the mechanisms are dosage-dependent, cannabis is the safest therapeutically-active drug known to man, and the mega-doses now possible with Dharmanol™-based cannabinoid products could show spectacular results.
GoldNApel 10-17-2013
Q. CBD suppresses metastasis (invasive spreading) in cancer. Does Dharmanol™ work the same way?
A. Although Dr. Apel has a far greater understanding of the inner workings of the molecules than I, I think I can answer your questions here.
Dr. McAllister and his crew have done spectacular work with CBD, and vast amounts of research shows that the inhibition of the spreading of cancer is one of the chief attributes of the molecule.
Dr. McAllister and his group have been working with CBD almost exclusively, as have many other researchers in the field who have decided that the chances to actually be allowed to do research on cannabis were greatly increased if they concentrated on the non-psychoactives.
Demonstrating a significant inhibition of the metastasizing of breast cancer to the lungs was one of the positive results of the very first scientific studies on cannabis in the modern era. In 1975, the NIDA funded Munson and his crew at the Univ. of Virginia Medical Center to try to prove that marijuana caused cancer.
They proved just the opposite, in lab animals and in glass, and the phenomenal results of their study did not usher in a new era of cancer research, as we would expect; the results were buried, their funding withdrawn, and no future studies were allowed for twenty years. Some claim that the government actually contacted universities who had done a few studies and asked that the research be destroyed.
It took the small group led by Manuel Guzman at the University of Madrid to revive the experiments, and restart the modern scientific research, and, shortly thereafter, their efforts were joined by many other researchers around the world and the first experiments showing the efficacy of cannabinoid medicine were confirmed again and again. Recently, Harvard validated the tumor-fighting properties of cannabis medicine.
All of the politics have forced many researchers to focus on the non-psychoactives, that is why we have so much research on CBD. Also, medical research traditionally utilizes isolated and purified single-molecule medicines for study, as opposed to a blend of similar compounds such as the entire array of cannabinoids and related compounds found in marijuana and hemp.
Because of these two factors, many people attribute specific actions of cannabinoid medicine to specific molecules. THC does that, CBD does this, CBN does something altogether different, etc. While there is certainly a lot of truth in the specific actions of the different cannabinoids against various medical conditions, the ultimate benefit in treating the great majority of conditions that cannabis works well against comes from what we refer to as “whole-plant” medicine.
There are a number of different figures quoted for the number of chemical compounds that may have medicinal benefit in the cannabis plant. I like the number 421. I figure they counted one of them twice. All the anecdotal evidence, as well as some of the scientific research, shows that cannabis medicine works better as a whole-plant preparation, providing the widest array of cannabinoids, terpenes, etc. that the plant has to offer in the medicine.
The exception to this is when psychoactive THC causes unwanted side effects that limit the amount of medicine that a patient can consume. In this case, it is helpful to eliminate the THC, as is the case with medicines focused on the delivery of pure CBD, or consume the THC in it’s carboxylate (non-psychoactive) form, as happens when one juices fresh cannabis plants, or uses Dharmanol™.
Berkeley Bio did not pioneer the use of the carboxylates in cannabis medicine. That honor belongs to Dr. William Courtney of Willits, CA. Another true hero of the movement, Dr. Courtney has been treating patients with fresh cannabis juice for years, and his wonderful results can be seen on a number of videos on YouTube.
The biggest drawback to Dr. Courtney’s work is that a patient must maintain forty to eighty living cannabis plants to get enough juice for the daily treatment. That isn’t that hard to do in Willits, California – the heart of the Emerald Triangle – but it can be impossible for someone who is not deeply immersed in the culture, or lives in another part of the country.
Dr. Apel’s new technology has allowed us to medicinalize the carboxylates, so they can be taken in tablet form, far more convenient than maintaining forty to eighty live cannabis plants. We have been able to extract and stabilize certain components of hemp/cannabis yielding an oil with about 60% mixed cannabinoids and less than 0.2% (point 2 percent) THC. When this concentrate is tableted with 5 mg. of mixed cannabinoids, the amount of THC will be well below that in many of the health food products found on US shelves today.
Along with the 5 mg. of mixed cannabinoid carboxylates, each Dharmanol™ tablet also contains 5 mg. CBD, for a total of 10 mg. of mixed phyto-cannabinoids. Also included is a steam-extracted mixture of a wide array of terpenes and terpenoids, taken from a number of different strains of cannabis.
The medicinal activity of the cannabinoids is enhanced by the naturally-occuring terpenes and terpenoids in the plant. These are the molecules that are responsible for the taste and smell, and they vary greatly from plant to plant. There is the wonderful sweet smell of the strains called “pineapple”, the aroma of blueberry cannabis can be indistinguishable from that of the actual berry, and at the whole opposite end of the spectrum is the aptly named “Skunk #1”, winner of the very first High Times Cannabis Cup, and the marijuana which, in my opinion, provides the happiest high of all.
Certain terpenes and terpenoids found in the cannabis plant, as well as many other plants, have been tested for their medicinal efficacy. And, guess what? The medicinal efficacy of the ones found in cannabis is very, very promising. (Pardon my personal opinion here and let me again note that I will never claim cure until we have double-blind placebo-controlled proof, but I gotta ask myself: “Is there ANY part of this plant that doesn’t fight disease in every possible way it can?” I can’t find one.)
The overall purpose of the Dharmanol™ technology, and the low-dose tablets in particular, is to combine many of the healing factors of the kind herb together into one medicine – a medicine which allows the patient to benefit from phyto-cannabinoid therapy stimulation of the internal cannabinoid receptors on a regular basis, with no THC psychoactivity.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is high dose cannabis therapy with Dharmanol™. The removal of the psychoactivity from larger doses allows consumption of doses far in excess of those recommended by Mr. Simpson. We have been working on appropriate delivery systems for whole-plant extracts and today announced Mary Ann’s Canna-Loz™ product, which makes the recommended gram each day regimen far more palatable. Shortly the Canna-Loz™ will be available in most of the dispensaries that carry YAK edibles, and the lozenges will supplement the Organakoil that the Care and Hospice Program has been supplying to patients in need for several years.
Mary Ann has always been the heart of the Care and Hospice Program, (even back when it was Dharma Patient’s Cooperative, Inc.) making sure that new patients were able to legally begin treatment as soon as they applied for help. She was also responsible for the interface between the patients, their caregivers, the doctors, etc. She has taken it as her personal mission to see that all the patients in the program are taken care of in the best possible manner, as soon as possible.
The absolute yuckiness (excuse the medical term and no puns, please) of taking cannabis rubbed on the gums is overwhelming, especially to a patient who is frail and has trouble keeping down food and fighting nausea. The relief of being able to slowly let a lozenge dissolve in the mouth is a great improvement.
And while Mary Ann had been working on this for a few months, it was recent events that caused us to bring it out now. Recently a friend of Liani’s had her 22 month-old son diagnosed with a brain tumor. There were numerous MRI’s, numerous doctors were consulted, and chemo was insisted upon by all, even though the doctors said the treatment would ruin the child’s quality of life, and would probably make little difference in treating the cancer.
Mom refused, went and got her own caregiver card, found the right private doctor to OK things, and started treating the child with Organakoil, and other cannabis products. The child responded well, but hated the oil. Mary Ann made a special batch of lozenges and the child was able to chew on a thin slice, which he liked. I will try to get Mary Ann and Liani to write a bit on this; it is a fascinating story. But suffice it to say here that, the cancer is gone, and the kid is doing great.
GoldNApel 10-17-2013
Q. Does Dharmanol contain THC?
To answer your question, Dharmanol does contain some active THC. It also contains a full spectrum of all the other cannabinoids contained in the source material. The big difference here is that the great bulk of the THC has been preserved (extracted and stabilized) in its non-psychoactive form as THCA. It will not get one "high".
While the total cannabinoids in each tablet is 10 mg., the amount of psychoactive THC in Dharmanol is less than that found in many hemp products that can be purchased at the health food or nutrition store.
The laws and regulations on THC in hemp-based health products are as convoluted as other parts of cannabis law. Right after the turn of the century, the DEA made a high-handed proclamation that no hemp products could exist in the US if they had any amounts of THC.
Thankfully, they were sued by a hemp advocacy group, led by David Bronner, son of Dr. Bronner of soap and health food fame, and the hemp forces won in around 2006. The court basically told the DEA to keep their hands off hemp-based products that were not meant to get someone high. And this is the situation we work under today, and why we have hemp-based beer, salad dressing made from hemp oil, and a myriad of similar products.
GoldNApel 10-12-2013
Q. Why not wait until there are clinical trials?
I think there is an obvious two-fold answer: People are dying and a huge body of research shows that concentrated cannabis medicine may save their lives.
Clinical trials are an important part of medicine. Almost all pharmaceutical medicines have very close ratios between the effective dose and the LD-50 (lethal dose). Pharmaceuticals are, in a word, dangerous. Also pharmaceutical drugs can have bad effects that show up years later, or even in the next generation or in an unborn child. Vast amounts of testing are needed before a new pharmaceutical can and should be brought to market; in many cases I am for far more stringent testing than what we have now.
That's not to say that all herbal or natural drugs are safe. But, when judged by the best yardstick for safety that I can imagine - the ratio between effective dose and lethal dose - cannabis is the safest and most tested medicine on the face of the earth.
It has been used for thousands of years and never killed a single person. The most powerful governments have been trying to prove its dangers for fifty years, spent fortunes trying to do so, and have found no negative effects on the body.
So while I am a huge believer in the value of clinical testing to determine the safety of new pharmaceuticals, I am hesitant to withhold our new medicine from those who need it just to repeat safety testing on the safest and most-tested herbal medicine on the face of the earth. But, rest assured, clinical trials will be initiated in a timely manner on all of the Dharmanol products.
GoldNApel 10-17-13
Q: Will Dharmanol will be effective against other conditions where cannabis medicine has been shown to be of benefit.
A. That's the beauty of cannabis medicine. It works so well on so many things. And the research is there to prove it. I don't know of single study that was done to question another researcher's work that found any fault. Even government studies designed to prove that cannabis causes cancer turned up the opposite results. (Google Dr. Donald Tashkin UCLA).
Dharmanol in small doses works mostly by "tuning up" the body's own endo-cannabinoid system, which regulates and controlls many other internal systems. Cannabinoid medicine in larger doses works in several different manners. Malignant cells are killed while adjacent healthy cells are strengthened. Healthy cells are induced to die on schedule (apoptosis), and the rate that cancer spreads (metastasizes) is greatly limited.
Cannabis in huge doses works as a direct poison to the malignant cells. rats that had been implanted with incurable - in humans - brain cancer tumors had their cancer eliminated completely by direct irrigation with THC. Every rat in a large group recovered after they woke up!
But, in general, we believe that, in most cases, Dharmanol-based medicines will have the same medicinal efficacy as other cannabis medicines, in similar doses, against similar medical conditions. We are working hard on developing a line of condition-specific natural treatments containing non-psychoactive phyto-cannabinoids, and other elements of cannabis/hemp, in conjunction with other natural herbs and supplements.
PS. I should add the obvious. There are conditions where the direct effects of THC are the sought after medicinal effect. For example, pain control. Anxiety relief in some circumstances. Inducement of sleep in insomnia. Inducement of munchies, perhaps, in anorexia or wasting syndrome? That will take some thought and testing.
GoldNApel 10-25-13
Q. Could you give us the short version on treating cancer with cannabis and Dharmanol in particular?
A. Cannabis medicine has been shown in quality research to fight cancer with many different mechanisms. Some of these are:
1) Small doses of cannabinoids, on a regular basis, stimulate the body’s own endocannabinoid system, which, in turn, activates many of the body’s own disease-fighting mechanisms.
2) Cannabinoid therapy creates an appetite in advanced cancer patients who are battling wasting syndrome, and cannot otherwise eat.
3) Cannabinoid medicine promotes a process called apoptosis, which is the normal programmed death of a healthy cell, as opposed to continuing to live past when it should and becoming malignant.
4) Cannabinoids greatly inhibit the spreading of cancer from one organ to another.
5) When cannabinoids are used to treat malignant cell growth that is adjacent to healthy tissue, the bad cells are killed while the healthy cells are strengthened.
6) Cannabinoid therapy treats pain and nausea associated with the disease, and the side effects of the conventional treatments that are currently employed.
7) Cannabinoid therapy increased the lifespan of lab rats implanted with tumors by 36% in the first US Govt. funded research in 1975. This was opposed to the control group of rats that received no treatment, but were implanted with the same cancers.
The great bulk of the research done to date has used doses somewhat equivalent to those used in humans. The gram of oil daily recommended in Simpson therapy is a huge dose, equivalent to about 100 marijuana joints in psychoactivity, and is the most cannabis that most humans can tolerate. Even so, this dose is far less than one one-thousandth of the LD-50 (lethal dose).
The Dharmanol™ line of all-natural nutritional supplements now being developed is centered around a proprietary technology developed by Berkeley Bio that extracts and stabilizes the entire array of cannabinoids in marijuana/hemp in their non-psychoactive form. This allows a patient who cannot tolerate Simpson therapy to take the required gram of cannabinoids daily, with no psychoactive effects.
Perhaps more exciting is the fact that with this new technology one can consume many times the recommended Simpson dose of cannabinoids, also with no psychoactivity. The overwhelmingly positive anecdotal evidence we have seen as a result of Mr. Simpson’s videos on the internet has come from using a very tiny dose of cannabinoids (compared to the amounts that can cause any physiological harm.)
While I will never use the word “cure” until we have double-blind placebo-controlled tests, I thoroughly believe that the science has already shown that tiny doses are effective, many of the mechanisms are dosage-dependent, cannabis is the safest therapeutically-active drug known to man, and the mega-doses now possible with Dharmanol™-based cannabinoid products could show spectacular results.
GoldNApel 10-17-2013
Q. CBD suppresses metastasis (invasive spreading) in cancer. Does Dharmanol™ work the same way?
A. Although Dr. Apel has a far greater understanding of the inner workings of the molecules than I, I think I can answer your questions here.
Dr. McAllister and his crew have done spectacular work with CBD, and vast amounts of research shows that the inhibition of the spreading of cancer is one of the chief attributes of the molecule.
Dr. McAllister and his group have been working with CBD almost exclusively, as have many other researchers in the field who have decided that the chances to actually be allowed to do research on cannabis were greatly increased if they concentrated on the non-psychoactives.
Demonstrating a significant inhibition of the metastasizing of breast cancer to the lungs was one of the positive results of the very first scientific studies on cannabis in the modern era. In 1975, the NIDA funded Munson and his crew at the Univ. of Virginia Medical Center to try to prove that marijuana caused cancer.
They proved just the opposite, in lab animals and in glass, and the phenomenal results of their study did not usher in a new era of cancer research, as we would expect; the results were buried, their funding withdrawn, and no future studies were allowed for twenty years. Some claim that the government actually contacted universities who had done a few studies and asked that the research be destroyed.
It took the small group led by Manuel Guzman at the University of Madrid to revive the experiments, and restart the modern scientific research, and, shortly thereafter, their efforts were joined by many other researchers around the world and the first experiments showing the efficacy of cannabinoid medicine were confirmed again and again. Recently, Harvard validated the tumor-fighting properties of cannabis medicine.
All of the politics have forced many researchers to focus on the non-psychoactives, that is why we have so much research on CBD. Also, medical research traditionally utilizes isolated and purified single-molecule medicines for study, as opposed to a blend of similar compounds such as the entire array of cannabinoids and related compounds found in marijuana and hemp.
Because of these two factors, many people attribute specific actions of cannabinoid medicine to specific molecules. THC does that, CBD does this, CBN does something altogether different, etc. While there is certainly a lot of truth in the specific actions of the different cannabinoids against various medical conditions, the ultimate benefit in treating the great majority of conditions that cannabis works well against comes from what we refer to as “whole-plant” medicine.
There are a number of different figures quoted for the number of chemical compounds that may have medicinal benefit in the cannabis plant. I like the number 421. I figure they counted one of them twice. All the anecdotal evidence, as well as some of the scientific research, shows that cannabis medicine works better as a whole-plant preparation, providing the widest array of cannabinoids, terpenes, etc. that the plant has to offer in the medicine.
The exception to this is when psychoactive THC causes unwanted side effects that limit the amount of medicine that a patient can consume. In this case, it is helpful to eliminate the THC, as is the case with medicines focused on the delivery of pure CBD, or consume the THC in it’s carboxylate (non-psychoactive) form, as happens when one juices fresh cannabis plants, or uses Dharmanol™.
Berkeley Bio did not pioneer the use of the carboxylates in cannabis medicine. That honor belongs to Dr. William Courtney of Willits, CA. Another true hero of the movement, Dr. Courtney has been treating patients with fresh cannabis juice for years, and his wonderful results can be seen on a number of videos on YouTube.
The biggest drawback to Dr. Courtney’s work is that a patient must maintain forty to eighty living cannabis plants to get enough juice for the daily treatment. That isn’t that hard to do in Willits, California – the heart of the Emerald Triangle – but it can be impossible for someone who is not deeply immersed in the culture, or lives in another part of the country.
Dr. Apel’s new technology has allowed us to medicinalize the carboxylates, so they can be taken in tablet form, far more convenient than maintaining forty to eighty live cannabis plants. We have been able to extract and stabilize certain components of hemp/cannabis yielding an oil with about 60% mixed cannabinoids and less than 0.2% (point 2 percent) THC. When this concentrate is tableted with 5 mg. of mixed cannabinoids, the amount of THC will be well below that in many of the health food products found on US shelves today.
Along with the 5 mg. of mixed cannabinoid carboxylates, each Dharmanol™ tablet also contains 5 mg. CBD, for a total of 10 mg. of mixed phyto-cannabinoids. Also included is a steam-extracted mixture of a wide array of terpenes and terpenoids, taken from a number of different strains of cannabis.
The medicinal activity of the cannabinoids is enhanced by the naturally-occuring terpenes and terpenoids in the plant. These are the molecules that are responsible for the taste and smell, and they vary greatly from plant to plant. There is the wonderful sweet smell of the strains called “pineapple”, the aroma of blueberry cannabis can be indistinguishable from that of the actual berry, and at the whole opposite end of the spectrum is the aptly named “Skunk #1”, winner of the very first High Times Cannabis Cup, and the marijuana which, in my opinion, provides the happiest high of all.
Certain terpenes and terpenoids found in the cannabis plant, as well as many other plants, have been tested for their medicinal efficacy. And, guess what? The medicinal efficacy of the ones found in cannabis is very, very promising. (Pardon my personal opinion here and let me again note that I will never claim cure until we have double-blind placebo-controlled proof, but I gotta ask myself: “Is there ANY part of this plant that doesn’t fight disease in every possible way it can?” I can’t find one.)
The overall purpose of the Dharmanol™ technology, and the low-dose tablets in particular, is to combine many of the healing factors of the kind herb together into one medicine – a medicine which allows the patient to benefit from phyto-cannabinoid therapy stimulation of the internal cannabinoid receptors on a regular basis, with no THC psychoactivity.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is high dose cannabis therapy with Dharmanol™. The removal of the psychoactivity from larger doses allows consumption of doses far in excess of those recommended by Mr. Simpson. We have been working on appropriate delivery systems for whole-plant extracts and today announced Mary Ann’s Canna-Loz™ product, which makes the recommended gram each day regimen far more palatable. Shortly the Canna-Loz™ will be available in most of the dispensaries that carry YAK edibles, and the lozenges will supplement the Organakoil that the Care and Hospice Program has been supplying to patients in need for several years.
Mary Ann has always been the heart of the Care and Hospice Program, (even back when it was Dharma Patient’s Cooperative, Inc.) making sure that new patients were able to legally begin treatment as soon as they applied for help. She was also responsible for the interface between the patients, their caregivers, the doctors, etc. She has taken it as her personal mission to see that all the patients in the program are taken care of in the best possible manner, as soon as possible.
The absolute yuckiness (excuse the medical term and no puns, please) of taking cannabis rubbed on the gums is overwhelming, especially to a patient who is frail and has trouble keeping down food and fighting nausea. The relief of being able to slowly let a lozenge dissolve in the mouth is a great improvement.
And while Mary Ann had been working on this for a few months, it was recent events that caused us to bring it out now. Recently a friend of Liani’s had her 22 month-old son diagnosed with a brain tumor. There were numerous MRI’s, numerous doctors were consulted, and chemo was insisted upon by all, even though the doctors said the treatment would ruin the child’s quality of life, and would probably make little difference in treating the cancer.
Mom refused, went and got her own caregiver card, found the right private doctor to OK things, and started treating the child with Organakoil, and other cannabis products. The child responded well, but hated the oil. Mary Ann made a special batch of lozenges and the child was able to chew on a thin slice, which he liked. I will try to get Mary Ann and Liani to write a bit on this; it is a fascinating story. But suffice it to say here that, the cancer is gone, and the kid is doing great.
GoldNApel 10-17-2013
Q. Does Dharmanol contain THC?
To answer your question, Dharmanol does contain some active THC. It also contains a full spectrum of all the other cannabinoids contained in the source material. The big difference here is that the great bulk of the THC has been preserved (extracted and stabilized) in its non-psychoactive form as THCA. It will not get one "high".
While the total cannabinoids in each tablet is 10 mg., the amount of psychoactive THC in Dharmanol is less than that found in many hemp products that can be purchased at the health food or nutrition store.
The laws and regulations on THC in hemp-based health products are as convoluted as other parts of cannabis law. Right after the turn of the century, the DEA made a high-handed proclamation that no hemp products could exist in the US if they had any amounts of THC.
Thankfully, they were sued by a hemp advocacy group, led by David Bronner, son of Dr. Bronner of soap and health food fame, and the hemp forces won in around 2006. The court basically told the DEA to keep their hands off hemp-based products that were not meant to get someone high. And this is the situation we work under today, and why we have hemp-based beer, salad dressing made from hemp oil, and a myriad of similar products.
GoldNApel 10-12-2013
Q. Why not wait until there are clinical trials?
I think there is an obvious two-fold answer: People are dying and a huge body of research shows that concentrated cannabis medicine may save their lives.
Clinical trials are an important part of medicine. Almost all pharmaceutical medicines have very close ratios between the effective dose and the LD-50 (lethal dose). Pharmaceuticals are, in a word, dangerous. Also pharmaceutical drugs can have bad effects that show up years later, or even in the next generation or in an unborn child. Vast amounts of testing are needed before a new pharmaceutical can and should be brought to market; in many cases I am for far more stringent testing than what we have now.
That's not to say that all herbal or natural drugs are safe. But, when judged by the best yardstick for safety that I can imagine - the ratio between effective dose and lethal dose - cannabis is the safest and most tested medicine on the face of the earth.
It has been used for thousands of years and never killed a single person. The most powerful governments have been trying to prove its dangers for fifty years, spent fortunes trying to do so, and have found no negative effects on the body.
So while I am a huge believer in the value of clinical testing to determine the safety of new pharmaceuticals, I am hesitant to withhold our new medicine from those who need it just to repeat safety testing on the safest and most-tested herbal medicine on the face of the earth. But, rest assured, clinical trials will be initiated in a timely manner on all of the Dharmanol products.
