Medical Cannabis Blog

Suppose you woke up one morning, and when you opened your eyes, this is what you saw:

Suppose you then went to, say, CVS, pulled a pair of glasses off the rack, put them on, and this is what you saw:

The glasses obviously help a bit, but not a lot. How much would you be willing to pay for these glasses for the improvement they bring? Probably not much. For the sake of argument, let’s put a value of $5 on your willingness to pay for the improvement these glasses would give you. 

Contents:

• What Are Psychedelic Substances?
• What Effects Do Psychedelic Substances Generate?
• What's Presonsible for the Therapeutic Benefits of Psychedelic Substances?
• References 

Download this article: Fisher_Overview_of_Psychedelics.pdf (797kb)

What Are Psychedelic Substances?

Definition and Nomenclature

The term psychedelic was originally coined by Humphry Osmond, a psychiatrist who pioneered research in psychedelics in the 1950s, 1960s and beyond. In a correspondence with the noted author and philosopher Aldous Huxley, Osmond crafted the term psychedelic as a combination of the Greek words psyche (for mind or soul) and deluon (meaning to make visible, or reveal).[1] As for a formal definition of psychedelic substances, none is commonly agreed upon. Longtime psychoactive drug pioneer, David Nichols defines the substances as follows:[2]

Psychedelics (serotonergic hallucinogens) are powerful psychoactive substances that alter perception and mood and affect numerous cognitive processes. 

The cannabis world is all a buzz about cannabis honey. The talk is not about taking honey and infusing it with cannabis, but rather feeding cannabis to bees and having the bees incorporate cannabis into the honey they make. It’s bee-made cannabis honey, not man-made.

The reason for the buzz is that bee-made cannabis honey has a much faster onset – “five to ten minutes compared with thirty to ninety” – together with “100 times the efficacy of cannabis-infused [i.e., man-made] honey.”[1] So it’s not the honey that’s making the cannabis more bioavailable; it’s something else.

What, exactly, are bees doing to the cannabis to make it so much more accommodating for medical cannabis use?!

This analysis seeks to answer two questions:

1. How do bees process cannabis?
2. How is bee-processed cannabis incorporated into honey?

States that have legalized the sale and use of cannabis have generally exhibited similar patterns in cannabis sales over time. States start by legalizing medical cannabis. As medical cannabis programs are rolled out, numbers of cannabis patients and sales of medical cannabis products increase over time. After medical cannabis has been legalized for some years, many states eventually also legalize cannabis for recreational (adult use) purposes. If and when a state legalizes recreational cannabis, total cannabis sales continue to rise, where sales for recreational uses increase, but sales for medical uses decrease (see Figure 1).

There are three different forms of medical cannabis currently available in select regions:

• Pharmaceutical cannabis products: Plant-derived or synthetic isolates that have passed through clinical trials and received FDA-approval.

• Cannabis isolates: Cannabis-derived isolates that have not been FDA-approved.

• Whole plant cannabis extracts: Cannabis-derived extracts that contain a variety of compounds from the plant.

Throughout history, bacterial infections have been the scourge of human beings. Up until the early 1900s, the top 10 leading causes of death globally were all bacterial infections, most of them infectious diseases. Between the late 1800s and early 1900s, however, the introduction of public sanitation measures, together with the advent of vaccines, significantly curtailed death from bacterial infections, particularly in more developed nations. Nonetheless, while sanitation and vaccinations prevent much bacterial infection from occurring, they certainly do not eliminate all infections, nor do they treat the infections that do occur.

Benefits of Whole Plant Medicine

The cannabis industry is new, but quickly evolving. The rapid pace of change is aggravated by the complexity of the plant itself, the complexity of its supply chain, the complexity of products offered, the complexity of rules and regulations for legal cannabis, and the complexity of legal market suppliers having to compete with a thriving black market.