Berkeley Bio-Organic Research Laboratories

Hi Louis,

Thanks for the question.

I haven’t had a lot to do with the edibles for a couple of years. I have been putting all my energy into our work at Berkeley Bio, but I can tell you a bit about things.

There are a number of dispensaries in Southern California who work with the hospice program and have the YAK whole plant capsules, but I can’t direct you to any specific ones here. There are a number of online sites that direct patients to specific dispensaries.

In 2008, Dharma Patients Cooperative, Inc. was founded as a California corporation organized not for profit, and has been operated as such since its inception. The Dharma Care and Hospice Program has helped thousands of patients with its two main services. Dharma supplies YAK whole plant cannabis capsules to patients, at approximately their cost to manufacture, through a statewide network of about 200 or so participating collectives and dispensaries. Additionally, the program supplies free cannabis medicine to any Californian who is in hospice, or is hospitalized for a terminal illness, and cannot afford the cannabis medicine recommended by the doctor.

As I said, I haven’t had much to do with the edibles lately, but I’ll use this opportunity to explain a bit about how Berkeley Bio came into existence. About three years ago, a distant relative of mine, a young man in his mid-twenties who had been battling non-Hodgkins leukemia for years, showed up at our home. He had been through chemo twice, bone marrow transplants, the whole works. He was told that he needed another round of chemo or he would die. His reactions to the last two rounds were so bad that he opted for death over another round of traditional chemo.

When he showed up he looked like a walking cadaver. His eyes and cheeks were deeply sunken, and his skin was yellow. He began self-medicating with the standard gram per day regimen of whole plant cannabis oil. In two weeks he looked like a different person. Five weeks after starting the treatment he went to the hospital for a minor injury. He told them he had cancer and they ran extensive tests. Alta Bates Hospital could find no traces of cancer in his body.

I had previously taken Rick Simpson’s claims with the proverbial grain of salt. I often felt that he was exaggerating the efficacy of cannabis against cancer and that overblown claims could hurt the overall movement to legitimatize this medicine, which has been proven to be so efficacious in many other areas. When I witnessed its immediate results first-hand in as dramatic a fashion as they were presented to me, it changed my life, and I started to write the book Cannabis Chemotherapy … which we will have up on a free link soon.

It became very important to me to see if we could medicinalize the kind herb in such a manner that the pharmaceutical and/or neutraceutical industry would accept its benefits and usage, and its cancer-fighting properties would become available to all. So the next step I took could be viewed by those who know me as pretty darn ironic; I decided that the way to go was to explore every method possible to remove the “high” from the herb.

We know that the non-psychoactive cannabinoids seem to have the same medicinal efficacy as THC, and the key to medicinalizing the massive doses of cannabinoids necessary to fight cancer palatable lies in the removal of the psychoactivity. Thus the birth of Berkeley Bio.

Hope this was helpful.

Dave