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ARTICLE
HEMP
There is no such thing as CBD-only cannabis
By Jeremy Daw
A chemist and a neuroscientist walk into a grow
room.
No, this is not a joke. To Dr. Jahan Marcu, Senior Science Advisor at Americans for Safe Access (ASA), this is very serious stuff, because in
this case the two scientists in question happen
to be Dr. Geoffrey Guy, Chairman of GW Pharmaceuticals in England, and Dr. Sanjay Gupta,
who needs no introduction. Half an hour into
Gupta’s medical marijuana documentary sequel
for CNN, “Weed 2,” Dr. Guy opens a greenhouse
door with a flourish to reveal the company’s
football-field long cannabis cultivation space.
Gupta, immediately noticing the pungent smell
of flowering cannabis, asks Guy how he feels
about the odor.
“I’m not particularly partial to the smell,” Guy replied.
For Dr. Marcu, hearing such an answer was bizarre. “GW knows how important the terpenes
are,” said Marcu, referring to the class of organic compounds which gives cannabis its famous
smell. “GW standardizes their processes to guarantee terpene consistency.”
The reason, according to Marcu and the other
experts who joined ASA for an internet videochat discussing their reactions to Gupta’s documentary, is the so-called “entourage effect” referenced by Gupta’s documentary. Dr. Raphael
Mechoulam, the grandfather of cannabinoid
research, is quoted as saying that THC usually
doesn’t provide the same medical benefit by itself as when in the presence of its lesser-known
cousin, CBD. But to Marcu, the entourage effect
goes much, much further than that – and he’s
got the research to prove it.
As Ethan Russo - a senior medical adviser at
GW - discovered in 2011, the terpenes present
in cannabis flowers don’t just provide scent and
flavor to cannabis flower but also contribute to
the entourage effect in their own way, which
means that the fragrant organic molecules provide therapeutic benefits heretofore barely understood.
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