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??

Marijuana           0

One of the most challenging issues facing cannabis research is where to begin to understand how or even which chemicals in cannabis cause an effect on symptoms. Unfortunately, at least at this point in time, medical cannabis for clinical trials is just not available. I can only hope this will change, but in the meantime, I believe we can get started with an intermediate survey type study – Open Source Cannabis.

The idea is to create a database of information that crosses patient testimonials on how strains treat their symptoms with the chemical breakdown of that strain from a Gas Chromatography machine.  Regrettably, it takes weeks to get the results from a Gas Chromatography machine.  During this time, the strain usually is distributed from the dispensary resulting in patients being unable to use the GC analysis information. Perhaps in the future, the market will require all growers to perform their own analysis on their strains or send them in for analysis, but as with research into this subject, that will not soon happen.

So, as to a solution for the time delay, what if when any strain is delivered to the dispensary, it is assigned a random ID by a database program. With this database, the dispensaries can logon to the system and get the ID for the strain and send it off for GC analysis.

When patients find a particular strain that really works very well for them, they logon to the database and enter basic symptom questions as well as the strain ID that would be stamped on the label.

Over time, as the GC results come back, they are tied back to the strain IDs.

This will enable two things:

1.As individuals have entered data on strains that work very well for them, they can see what combination of Cannabinoids and Terpenoids work best for them. Over time, they would select their medications based upon this information and not just a name such as “bubble gum kush” – which can mean anything.
2.The patient community data should yield interesting results as well. As patients give feedback on strains analyzed by a GC, I suspect we will begin to see some trends of cannabinoid and terpenoid benefits that we cannot even currently imagine.

I would really appreciate feedback on this one.

I am very hopeful.

http://www.greenbridgemed.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/Conyers_DEA_Letter-1.pdf

After reading the results, researchers learned that extracting a single active ingredient from cannabis does not produce the ends desired. This is one more well designed, although “rat-based”, study encouraging us to realize that including all genetic variations of the whole plant in medications will probably produce better and safer drugs than extracting one cannabinoid at a time.

Researchers might not be achieving the effects they desire, but this might be the result of ignorance in the knowledge of manipulating cannabinoids, or it might be that the whole plant is in fact “the medicine”.  Certainly the ratio of the various cannabinoids in different strains will greatly vary, but at the very least we can say that overall, cannabis is an extremely safe medication.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18618522