OK, so somewhat tangential to the original post but... GW Pharmaceuticals has some interesting ties to the UK government. Firstly there's Paul Kenward whose wife is the UK Drugs Minister. The same...
OK, so somewhat tangential to the original post but... GW Pharmaceuticals has some interesting ties to the UK government. Firstly there's Paul Kenward whose wife is the UK Drugs Minister. The same minister who insists there is no medical value to cannabis, yet licensed her husband to grow 45 tonnes of it a year, making the UK the world's largest grower of commercial cannabis. On top of that, Theresa May's husband Philip owns a nice hefty chunk of GW Pharma. Although May's husband has his fingers in a LOT of pies and it's hard to know the degree to which he's actually involved in anything. It genuinely could just be coincidence. But there are quite a few coincidences surrounding investments made by Philip May and decisions made by his wife's administration. It would be quite the coincidence if all of them were coincidences.
It's intensely annoying that our government in the UK refuse to adopt an evidence-based approach to drug policy but it's the liberal dusting of hypocrisy on top that really gets my goat.
A new drug derived from marijuana just became the first of its kind to get the green light from the US government.
British-based GW Pharmaceuticals makes the drug. It does not contain THC, the well-known psychoactive component of marijuana responsible for the drug's characteristic high.
It's evidently CBD-based
"This approval serves as a reminder," Scott Gottlieb, the FDA commissioner, said in a statement on Monday, "that advancing sound development programs that properly evaluate active ingredients contained in marijuana can lead to important medical therapies."
A month after the Neurology meeting, Devinksy and his colleagues published a positive study of the drug in children with Dravet syndrome in the New England Journal of Medicine. Roughly 43% of the children in that study who got the drug saw their number of seizures cut in half, and 5% stopped having seizures entirely. In comparison, children who got a placebo had barely any noticeable change in their symptoms.
For a 2017 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers tested 84 products purchased from 31 different online CBD sellers. Roughly seven out of 10 items had different levels of CBD than what was written on the label. Of all of the items they tested, roughly half of the items had more CBD than was indicated; a quarter had less. And 18 of the samples tested positive for THC, despite it not being listed on the label.
The drug's green light also means that the Drug Enforcement Agency now has 90 days to reschedule CBD, which it listed in January of last year as a "marihuana extract" separate from "marihuana" or THC.
"We don't have a choice on that," DEA public affairs officer Barbara Carreno told Business Insider. "It absolutely has to become Schedule 2 or 3."
OK, so somewhat tangential to the original post but... GW Pharmaceuticals has some interesting ties to the UK government. Firstly there's Paul Kenward whose wife is the UK Drugs Minister. The same minister who insists there is no medical value to cannabis, yet licensed her husband to grow 45 tonnes of it a year, making the UK the world's largest grower of commercial cannabis. On top of that, Theresa May's husband Philip owns a nice hefty chunk of GW Pharma. Although May's husband has his fingers in a LOT of pies and it's hard to know the degree to which he's actually involved in anything. It genuinely could just be coincidence. But there are quite a few coincidences surrounding investments made by Philip May and decisions made by his wife's administration. It would be quite the coincidence if all of them were coincidences.
It's intensely annoying that our government in the UK refuse to adopt an evidence-based approach to drug policy but it's the liberal dusting of hypocrisy on top that really gets my goat.
Wow that's a really interesting (and infuriating) perspective, I'll have to read further into all this
It's evidently CBD-based