Cbd May Protect Against Alcohol’S Side Effects
Because so many people already use cannabis and think it helps, patients might be, in effect, pioneering new uses through self-experimentation. Now she studies how CBD could help opioid addicts kick the habit.
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After he returned to the United States, it was six months before Sam could take Guy’s extract again. It helped, Jacobson thought, particularly with the most severe fits, which caused him to lose consciousness. Across the Atlantic, Geoffrey Guy, the founder of a company called GW Pharmaceuticals, had successfully brought one cannabis-derived medicine, called Sativex, to market in Britain and other European countries. The first such medication permitted by a government, it was approved to treat the symptoms of spasticity caused by multiple sclerosis, a progressive autoimmune disease of the central nervous system. Guy was intrigued when, through a mutual acquaintance, a California family seeking CBD to treat epilepsy reached out to him — Evelyn Nussenbaum and her son Sam.
Cannabis should not only take its place as an F.D.A.-approved drug, they contend. Drugs are typically developed in the lab and go through trials before reaching patients. But in the case of Epidiolex, two mothers of epileptic children experimented on their own sons and then helped push a version of what they discovered into the F.D.A. pipeline. “In the modern era, it’s certainly the most striking example of a drug that has gone from patient use to drug development,” Ken Mackie, a neuroscientist at Indiana University, told me.
Some of these drugs might cause severe side effects, including fits of rage or sedation so extreme that, as one mother described it to me, “the light goes out” in a child’s eyes. Last year, California legalized recreational marijuana and phased in a series of stringent quality controls, including tests for various microbes, pesticides and heavy metals. Customers who buy cannabis from licensed California dispensaries can now be reasonably confident that they’re getting what they think they’re buying and that it’s safe to consume. Elizabeth Thiele, the epileptologist at Harvard, says that some children, for reasons that aren’t clear, undergo mood changes on some nonprescription CBD oils.
Only under the tutelage of two University of California, Davis, scientists did she make progress. The technique she developed required heating cannabis plants in ethanol to extract the cannabinoids. Next, a machine that created a vacuum sucked the green-tinted liquid through a tube filled with carbon powder.
The molecules in the extract moved through the powder at different speeds, depending on their weight and other characteristics, yielding different “fractions” that she could test for CBD and THC content. Then she heated the resulting green solution until the alcohol evaporated, leaving a green paste. Finally, nearly a year after starting, she had a cannabis extract that was high in CBD and lacked measurable THC. Modern scholars argue that his demonizing cannabis both justified his position and provided a way for him to gain legal leverage over peoples he despised. The high cost paid by people of color, once he had begun what we now call “the war on drugs,” may not have been an incidental byproduct of his efforts but an unstated goal from the start.
(These issues might be caused by different cannabinoids or terpenes, another type of biologically active molecule produced by plants.) CBD can also interfere with how quickly the body breaks down other medications. Around the same time, Figi, Stanley and Heather Jackson, another mother whose epileptic son had benefited from CBD, founded a nonprofit called Realm of Caring. It helped families relocate to Colorado and offered them advice on how to negotiate the state’s medical- cannabis environment. Still, many who have direct experience with CBD, including a few scientists, do not think it should be available only by prescription. They point out that long before the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which made marijuana illegal, people used the plant medicinally.
Jacobson’s dealer in Oakland seemed to be selling harder stuff as well, which made her very nervous. But her impression was that he was having a difficult time selling this particular product — kilos of California-grown cannabis — precisely because it wouldn’t get anyone very high. With her black-market stash in hand, Jacobson entered what she calls her R.& D. As suspected, the cannabis she had acquired illegally in Oakland was high in CBD and low in THC. She set up a lab in her garage — and then proceeded to fail miserably, for months, to extract anything of much use.
