DO YOU REALLY WANT PURE CANNABIS MEDICINE?

I believe in general, when we use the term “pure”, it refers to a lack of contaminants. Often when plants are turned into pharmaceutical medicine, the final medicine is a “pure” single molecule. In theory, the reproducibility is the advantage as well as being patentable.

I do not think that evolution expected humans would be purifying plants into single molecule medicine. Certainly there are situations where creating a single molecule medicine from plants makes sense, but with cannabis, that is not the case.

We are seeing pharmaceutical companies taking whole plant CBD and stripping out every molecule other than CBD as a look into the future of pharmaceutical cannabis. So, they are creating essentially “pure CBD” from a whole plant. Is the medicine effective – yes it is. However, dosing of these medicines requires much higher doses than whole plant CBD. On average, our experience with over 100 children suffering from seizures is that our average dose is 60 mg of whole plant CBD. The pharmaceutical Epidiolex (which is a purified CBD) often requires doses of over 200 mg daily. The dose for whole plant medicine for pain, anxiety, seizures, etc is much lower than the pharmaceutical purified medicines or for that matter any hemp based CBD product as they are missing most of the molecules of the plant.

So, yes, I am assuming that the molecules nature has created to work with CBD are not there by accident. Cannabis like all green plants grown from the ground represents a source of healthy nutrition for humans and many other species.

The dumbest plant is smarter than the smartest doctor. Let’s listen to the plant and try use ALL of it’s wonderful entourage of molecules.

Author

Allan Frankel, MD