Green Bridge Medical Center, Inc as a 501C3 dedicated to providing guidance and education to physicians, patients, collectives as well as consultation in the political arena.

We are working with Health Care Facilities, growers and genetic specialists while doing other consultative work regarding true Whole Plant AND Dosable cannabis medications. We often suggest CBD rich strains and help make the genetics available to growers generally at no charge.

As the collectives grow their own CBD Rich healing plants, the plants are monitored and tested at several times during their flowering cycle. So, there is a closed loop between the “owner” of the plant, the collective, and the final certified cannabis medicine, fully Sherman Act Compliant labelled, etc available for that collective’s patients.

This is working fine, but I see a much bigger picture. I have a very difficult time supporting most of the stores and I know I will take flack for saying this, but I personally wouldn’t miss most of them.

Think of the morning after pill, as Plan B. Well, here is Plan B. This is starting right now and can operate alongside the entire storefront model. It is nothing new. It is very old.

We, Green Bridge Medical Center, GBMC, are consulting with a Delivery/Grow Collective in Los Angeles. We have been working with them for many months and have chosen for them and secured: statewidecollective.org. The Site will be up soon.

The “motto” for SWC is “Tested and Dosable Medications”. In the beginning, this will be restricted to dosable medications. i.e. tinctures, capsules and CBD based topicals for local pain.

SWC will soon be delivering to it’s members, a 3 foot by 3 foot very elegant grow box. Made for the living room. Clones, ready to flower are delivered, six at a time and then inspected both online as well as weekly by the “pool guy”. The patient in return receives Certified Medicines for no charge. Each of these small, but very respectable small patient “grows”, will produce 100′s of bottles of tincture each year. Enough for it to be both very inexpensive to it’s members and very possible to have excess to share.

The same technology is applied to larger grows, but always with modest numbers of plants. There would be single genetic strains being grown at each “Certified Phyto Laboratory”. Then as SWC grows in size, it MAY begin providing reasonably priced “flowers” for it’s members, in addition to dosed medications. After all, social cannabis is something I love very much. For example, it is quite possible that while operating as a TRUE collective; great indoor flowers on a cost plus basis cost around $1000/pound, including full time employee. Even with some extra fees, we are talking about $100 ounces; or medication priced where it should be priced.

As SWC grows, and we suggest all collectives suggest joining SWC. as there is no harm in joining a second collective or even third collective. I am not certain about 50 collectives, but I leave that up to the 18 y/o kids. Anyway, SWC should become huge; it should morph into a true co-op, 1960′s style, with membership and membership benefits; perhaps token monthly fees that go to credit medication purchases.

There are approximately 1.2 million patients in the sate. It is not impossible to have 100,000 patients in this collective. By then charging $5/patient, a war chest is developed AND MONITORED VERY CLOSELY, I PROMISE, to fight every case needing to be fought.

It is not too much of a leap to take this co-op and obtain health insurance. I have met with three actuaries. Even at 100 patients, a group such as this could have great coverage. With 10,000 or more, we would have first dollar coverage. In fact, two insurance companies had already looked at the Cannabis patient group; we are very, very low risk as we are often/mostly medicine adverse. Great to insure.

Then comes the politics. We now have a super pak and I believe we would soon add more and more members both state wide as well as nationally, but this would be a “chapter”;not a collective, as that would obviously be illegal – at least for now. :)

This can be done. It is my dream. It is a way to build a patient and plant wall around us. The money would go towards keeping our medicine inexpensive and available. This size organization can defend itself from any local, state or federal attack better than legislation. If nothing else, we have sort of walled ourselves in and this MIGHT allow the feds to ignore a totally legally running non-profit, that is non-profit and dosed medication based. This might be a tough fight for them and we should easily have the resources to prevail. Can you imagine ANY jury ruling against this? No, of course not. You can’t find a jury without a few cannabis patients on it. There is no jury with no cannabis users – anywhere – I mean anywhere.

In addition, this fight would, by nature, be between a huge “legal” co-sop using mostly dosed medications, against the pharmaceutical industry. What jury would convict SWC, IF it is truly state wide.??

Back to reality, as this dream unfolds, patients would of course obtain most of their medication from their current places. Again, it can start with a modest number of patients, a large number of members and the ability to grow very quickly if the need arises.

So, I say “Let’s be prepared”. If our initial set of rules somehow fails us, let be ready the next morning, with “Plan B”; perhaps not the ideal solution, but it works. :)

Well, that is the first time I have put all this down in one place.

What do folks out there think??

1. The cannabis plants used in the making of the tincture are organic

2. The entire plant is used in the making of the tincture other than fan/water leaves

3. The cannabis plant as well as the tincture is chemically tested for cannabinoids and 35 Terpenes

4. Carbon Dioxide in liquid form is pressurized to separate the plant material from the lipid soluble medicating molecules

5. No alcohol is used

6. The labels will be Sherman Act compliant and state cannabinoid/terpene content in mg/cc

7. Each tincture is clinically evaluated for its degree of psychoactivity – altered thinking/mind altering

HOW TO SELECT THE RIGHT TINCTURE FOR YOU?

Strain type is not the best predictor of which tinctures may work the best for you. Strain type as well, does not predict efficacy. So, a psychoactive clinical scale is used, as below, to help the patient select a tincture that is likely to be best for them without causing excessive psycho activity, or how mind altering the tincture may be for you.

The scale goes from 0 to 10, with 0 being no psycho activity and 10 being extremely psychoactive.

Not Psychoactive<–0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10 –>Very Psychoactive

In general, the greater the ratio of CBD(cannabidiol / THC the less psychoactive a tincture will tend to be. However, for many patients even with a relatively high level of  THC, even a small amount of CBD can virtually eliminate the psychoactivity. Also, as with everything in medicine, patients and conditions vary. We will be asking your help in determining what works best for various conditions in different groups of patients.

If you are using a tincture with CBD, please take the Project CBD survey. It is one of the main pages of this site.

]]> http://www.greenbridgemed.com/certified-cannabis-tinctures-3/feed/ 4 http://www.greenbridgemed.com/health-issues-and-gay-marriage/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=health-issues-and-gay-marriage http://www.greenbridgemed.com/health-issues-and-gay-marriage/#comments Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:58:37 +0000 Allan I Frankel, MD http://greenbridgemed.com http://www.greenbridgemed.com/?p=338 As a physician, my only “agenda” must be my patients health and comfort. This involves preventive issues as well as “disease” issues. None of us would minimize preventive health care.

I do not know how much gay marriage restricts extra-marital affairs, but it does a reasonable job among heterosexuals. I would imagine, that gay marriage must decrease multiple partner exposure therefore leading to decreased exposure to HIV.

How many lives might be saved? How much money would be saved? I don’t know. At this point in time we can’t lose lives and money to politics.

Does anyone know about studies regarding this issue? Perhaps this is another way to help pursuade powers that be?

1. The city of LA is broke

2. The city of LA is not always on the best terms with the Medical Cannabis Community regarding “standards”

So, how about if we setup a committee to consider the following:

Standards for the dispensing of Medical Cannabis are jointly (pun intended) determined in a non “partisan” manner. To help ensure this, a city cannabis tax might be introduced within the dispensary system. A portion of this money would be to create standards which might become national standards. The balance and the lion’s share would go directly to the city of LA.

Thoughts?

Marijuana           0