A double-blind placebo-controlled study with 24 patients suffering from Tourette syndrome was conducted at the Medical School of Hannover, Germany. The 6-week trial confirmed results of two earlier short-term studies by Dr. Kirsten Mueller-Vahl and colleagues that THC is effective in the reduction of tics.
The Tourette syndrome is a complex neurological-psychiatric disorder characterized by motor tics (sudden spasms especially in the face, the neck and the shoulders) and one or more vocal tics. In many cases, it is associated with behavioural problems or psychopathologies (autoaggression, disturbed attention, etc.). Presently, neuroleptics are the most effective drugs. However, neuroleptics are not effective in all patients and in many cases, are not well tolerated.
Patients were treated over a period of 6 weeks. The dosage was titrated to the target dosage of 10 mg THC. Starting at 2.5 mg/day, the dose was increased by increments of 2.5 mg/day every 4 days. Tic severity was rated using several established scales.
Seven patients dropped out of the study or had to be excluded, but only one due to side effects. Application of THC resulted in a significant improvement of tic severity. No serious adverse effects occurred. Authors concluded that the “results provide more evidence that THC is effective and safe in the treatment of tics.”
HM. Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is effective in the treatment of tics in Tourette syndrome: a 6-week randomized trial. J Clin Psychiatry 2003;64(4):459-465)
Originally published May 2003 at: http://www.cannabis-med.org/english/bulletin/ww_en_db_cannabis_artikel.php?id=146&fbclid=IwAR1uE-15QDzTcbn_QKrkTlSOv_SfsN3VJ5Tf_9Sjqr8r2TMWdDl0kbH24U0#1
Analysis from New Frontier Data, a firm that focuses on the marijuana industry, also found that the federal government would create at least $131.8 billion in federal tax revenue over the next eight years if cannabis were legalized in all 50 states.
With federal legalization, there would be 782,000 jobs created immediately, and the firm forecasts that the number would increase to 1.1 million by 2025, including growers and retailers.
In 2015, a year after Colorado legalized recreational cannabis sales, the legal marijuana industry created 18,000 full-time jobs and $2.4 billion in economic growth in the state, according to the Marijuana Policy Group. New Frontier suggested this trend could be sustainable on a national level.
“If cannabis businesses were legalized tomorrow and taxed as normal businesses with a standard 35 percent tax rate, cannabis businesses would infuse the U.S. economy with an additional $12.6 billion this year,” New Frontier CEO Giadha Aguirre De Carcer told the Washington Post.
The economic growth would be pushed by increased demand on various industries, according to the Marijuana Policy Group. Farmers need warehouse space, and they purchase specialized equipment like lighting and irrigation for marijuana growth. Retailers rely on contractors and book-keeping services to run businesses. In states like Washington and Colorado, legal recreational marijuana has also led to a boost in some tourism sectors.
California became the eighth state to sell legal recreational marijuana on January 1, and 29 states now allow medical marijuana. Federal legalization, while popular across nearly every demographic group in the U.S., is facing renewed challenges from U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose strong opposition to statewide marijuana laws has slowed the bipartisan push. Sessions last week rescinded an Obama-era rule that told federal prosecutors to leave marijuana alone in states that legalized it, leaving open questions about the future of the burgeoning industry.
Originally published by: SUMMER MEZA ON 1/11/18 AT 6:29 PM
Western medicine has some good points, and is great in an emergency, but it’s high time people realized that today’s mainstream medicine (western medicine or allopathy), with its focus on drugs, drugs, radiation, drugs, surgery, drugs and more drugs, is at its foundation a money spinning Rockefeller creation.
People these days look at you like a weirdo if you talk about the healing properties of plants or any other holistic practices. Much like anything else, politics and money have been used to warp people’s minds and encourage them to embrace what is bad for them.
It all began with John D. Rockefeller (1839 – 1937) who was an oil magnate, a robber baron, America’s first billionaire, and a natural-born monopolist.
By the turn on the 20th century, he controlled 90% of all oil refineries in the U.S. through his oil company, Standard Oil, which was later on broken up to become Chevron, Exxon, Mobil etc.
World Affairs reports: At the same time, around 1900, scientists discovered “petrochemicals” and the ability to create all kinds of chemicals from oil. For example, the first plastic — called Bakelite — was made from oil in 1907. Scientists were discovering various vitamins and guessed that many pharmaceutical drugs could be made from oil.
This was a wonderful opportunity for Rockefeller who saw the ability to monopolize the oil, chemical and the medical industries at the same time!
The best thing about petrochemicals was that everything could be patented and sold for high profits.
But there was one problem with Rockefeller’s plan for the medical industry: natural/herbal medicines were very popular in America at that time. Almost half the doctors and medical colleges in the U.S. were practicing holistic medicine, using knowledge from Europe and Native Americans.
Rockefeller, the monopolist, had to figure out a way to get rid of his biggest competition. So he used the classic strategy of “problem-reaction-solution.” That is, create a problem and scare people, and then offer a (pre-planned) solution. (Similar to terrorism scare, followed by the “Patriot Act”).
He went to his buddy Andrew Carnegie – another plutocrat who made his money from monopolizing the steel industry – who devised a scheme. From the prestigious Carnegie Foundation, they sent a man named Abraham Flexner to travel around the country and report on the status of medical colleges and hospitals around the country.
This led to the Flexner Report, which gave birth to the modern medicine as we know it.
Needless to say, the report talked about the need for revamping and centralizing our medical institutions. Based on this report, more than half of all medical colleges were soon closed.
Homeopathy and natural medicines were mocked and demonized; and doctors were even jailed.
To help with the transition and change the minds of other doctors and scientists, Rockefeller gave more than $100 million to colleges, hospitals and founded a philanthropic front group called “General Education Board” (GEB). This is the classic carrot and stick approach.
In a very short time, medical colleges were all streamlined and homogenized. All the students were learning the same thing, and medicine was all about using patented drugs.
Scientists received huge grants to study how plants cured diseases, but their goal was to first identify which chemicals in the plant were effective, and then recreate a similar chemical – but not identical – in the lab that could be patented.
A pill for an ill became the mantra for modern medicine.
And you thought Koch brothers were evil?
So, now we are, 100 years later, churning out doctors who know nothing about the benefits of nutrition or herbs or any holistic practices. We have an entire society that is enslaved to corporations for its well-being.
America spends 15% of its GDP on healthcare, which should be really called “sick care.” It is focused not on cure, but only on symptoms, thus creating repeat customers. There is no cure for cancer, diabetes, autism, asthma, or even flu.
Why would there be real cures? This is a system founded by oligarchs and plutocrats, not by doctors.
As for cancer, oh yeah, the American Cancer Society was founded by none other than Rockefeller in 1913.
Originally published at: http://ehealthmagz.com/2018/08/17/how-rockefeller-founded-big-pharma-and-waged-war-on-natural-cures/
The contemporary version of argument can be traced to a 2012 Duke University study, which found that persistent, heavy marijuana use through adolescence and young adulthood was associated with declines in IQ.
Other researchers have since criticized that study’s methods. A follow-up study in the same journal found that the original research failed to account for a number of confounding factors that could also affect cognitive development, such as cigarette and alcohol use, mental illness and socioeconomic status.
Two new reports this month tackle the relationship between marijuana use and intelligence from two very different angles: One examines the life trajectories of 2,235 British teenagers between ages 8 and 16, and the other looks at the differences between American identicaltwin pairs in which one twin uses marijuana and the other does not.
Despite vastly different methods, the studies reach the same conclusion: They found no evidence that adolescent marijuana use leads to a decline in intelligence.
I wrote about the study of British teenagers before, when it was still a working paper. It has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, and its findings still stand: After adjusting for a range of confounding factors, such as maternal health, mental health and other substance use, the researchers found that “cannabis use by the age of 15 did not predict either lower teenage IQ scores or poorer educational performance. These findings therefore suggest that cannabis use at the modest levels used by this sample of teenagers is not by itself causally related to cognitive impairment.”
They did find, though, a distinct relationship between cigaretteuse and poor educational performance, which is in line with what other research has found. The researchers did not find a robust link between cigarette use and IQ.
The authors of this study stress that their results don’t necessarily invalidate the findings of the 2012 Duke University paper. That paper focused on persistent heavy use over a long period of time, while this study looked only at low to moderate levels of adolescent use. “While persistent cannabis dependence may be linked to declining IQ across a person’s lifetime,” the authors write, “teenage cannabis use alone does not appear to predict worse IQ outcomes in adolescents.”
But the researchers in the study of American twins tackle the Duke University findings head-on. Examining the life trajectories of twin pairs in which one uses marijuana while the other doesn’t, they found that those who used marijuana didn’t experience consistently greater cognitive deficits than the others.
Identicaltwin comparisons are a powerful tool for this kind of analysis, because their genetic makeup is nearly identical and their early home environment is consistent. This automatically controls for a lot of the confounding factors that can make sussing out causality difficult.
The twin data “fails to support the implication by Meier et. al. [the authors of the Duke study] that marijuana exposure in adolescence causes neurocognitive decline,” the study concludes. The numbers suggest, on the contrary, that “children who are predisposed to intellectual stagnation in middle school are on a trajectory for future marijuana use.” In other words, rather than marijuana making kids less intelligent, it may be that kids who are not as smart or who perform poorly in school are more inclined to try marijuana at some point in their lives.
Also, if marijuana use were responsible for cognitive decline, you might expect to find that the more marijuana a person smokes, the less intelligent they become. But this paper found that heavier marijuana use was not associated with greater decreases in IQ.
Originally published by: Christopher Ingraham on January 18, 2016 at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/18/scientists-have-found-that-smoking-weed-does-not-make-you-stupid-after-all/
Good news for people who’ve worried that smoking too much marijuana (cannabis) — especially as a teenager — might lead to some dramatic problems in the future, even schizophrenia.
New research from Harvard Medical School, in a comparison between families with a history of schizophrenia and those without, finds little support for marijuana use as a cause of schizophrenia.
“The results of the current study suggest that having an increased familial morbid risk for schizophrenia may be the underlying basis for schizophrenia in cannabis users and not cannabis use by itself,” note the researchers.
The new study is the first family study that, according to the researchers, “examines both non-psychotic cannabis users and non-cannabis user controls as two additional independent samples, enabling the examination of whether the risk for schizophrenia is increased in family members of cannabis users who develop schizophrenia compared with cannabis users who do not and also whether that morbid risk is similar or different from that in family members of schizophrenia patients who never used cannabis.”
Marijuana use is becoming increasingly commonplace as two U.S. states have already legalized its use next to alcohol for adults. Some previous studies have suggested that there may be a correlational link between teenage marijuana use and the increased likelihood of being diagnosed with schizophrenia in the future.
So researchers from Harvard Medical School and the VA Boston Healthcare system got together to determine whether family risk for schizophrenia is a crucial factor underlying the association between the development of schizophrenia in teens who smoke marijuana.
The researchers recruited 282 subjects from the New York and Boston metropolitan areas who were divided into four groups: controls with no lifetime history of psychotic illness, cannabis, or any other drug use; controls with no lifetime history of psychotic illness, and a history of heavy cannabis use during adolescence, but no other drug use; patients with no lifetime history of cannabis use or any other drug and less than 10 years of being ill; patients with a history of heavy cannabis use and no other drug use during adolescence and prior to the onset of psychosis.
Information about all first-, second-, and third-degree relatives was obtained, as well as information about any other relative who had a known psychiatric illness. This resulted in information on 1,168 first-degree relatives and a total of 4,291 relatives. The study gathered together information regarding cannabis use, and family history regarding schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and drug abuse.
The researchers concluded that the results of the current study, “both when analyzed using morbid risk and family frequency calculations, suggest that having an increased familial risk for schizophrenia is the underlying basis for schizophrenia in these samples — not the cannabis use.
“While cannabis may have an effect on the age of onset of schizophrenia it is unlikely to be the cause of illness,” said the researchers, who were led by Ashley C. Proal from Harvard Medical School.
“In general, we found a tendency for depression and bipolar disorder to be increased in the relatives of cannabis users in both the patient and control samples. This might suggest that cannabis users are more prone to affective disorders than their non-using samples or vice versa.” Future research is needed to understand this relationship.
Drug abuse also appears to have an important genetic component.
“Drug abuse is present more frequently in family members of all 3 samples compared to those of non-cannabis abusing controls. This is in line with past research confirming a genetic predisposition for drug use.”
The research was published earlier this month in Schizophrenia Research.
Source: Schizophrenia Research
Originally Published by: John M. Grohol, Psy.D. in August 2018 at https://psychcentral.com/news/2013/12/10/harvard-marijuana-doesnt-cause-schizophrenia/63148.html?fbclid=IwAR38zTvmfLeXKZ8fS_Zt3e0pTZKzLzV6rYPHiTjSmXsu7-uqFwOWErWtyX4
An amazing study authored by professors D. Mark Anderson (University of Montana) and Daniel Rees (University of Colorado) shows that traffic deaths have been reduced in states where medical marijuana is legalized.
The study notes that this is equal to the effect raising the drinking age to 21 had on reducing traffic fatalities.
One key factor is the reduction in alcohol consumption. The study finds that there is a direct correlation between the use of marijuana and a reduction in beer sales, especially in the younger folks aged 20-29.
A drop in beer sales supports the theory that marijuana can act as a substitute for liquor.
The study also finds that marijuana has the inverse effect that alcohol does on drivers. Drivers under the influence of alcohol tend to make rash decisions and risky moves, whereas those under the influence of marijuana tend to slow down, make safer choices, and increase following distances.
Originally Published By: Travis Okulski on Dec. 19, 2011, 10:55 AM at https://www.businessinsider.com/it-turns-out-that-smoking-marijuana-may-actually-make-you-a-better-driver-2011-12?international=true&r=US&IR=T&fbclid=IwAR214UmrezPQFFh1cfbq0Xbhp4n9LLQewu2w-SrYTDse5o85EgAvt3R5sII
My name is Mike Wise, and I want to share my story of how I cured Crohn’s disease using cannabis oil produced via the Rick Simpson protocol.
Before I get into the details, I would like to share my symptoms with you because throughout my life I have had many friends with similar symptoms. Yours may not be as bad as mine was, but if left untreated it will get progressively worse.
I have always been on the go, an “A-Type” personality as they say. It’s hard for me to sit still or remain idle, so my days are never-ending and I am always moving. My entire life has been on the road, traveling constantly; first as a professional skateboarder in my pre-college years then working as a broadcast television camera operator and filmmaker after graduating from The University of Texas. I never really developed good eating habits so eating fast food from drive through restaurants, drinking sodas daily, and taking acetaminophen (over-the-counter pain/headache medicine) were commonplace activities during my life on the road.
It all started around 2001, as an occasional bloating type feeling and general discomfort after meals. At first, a few belches would relieve the discomfort. Then over the years, a few belches after each meal then became dozens of belches during, and after meals, and all throughout the day. The general discomfort turned into sharp chest pains, so sharp that it would cause vomiting. Eventually it got so bad that it would affect my sleep and it became impossible to get more than 4 hours of sleep each night. I would have to eat a snack every 2 to 4 hours or I would become extremely nauseous. My symptoms now affected me during every hour of my life.
I would be nauseous all day, and no longer had an appetite; ever. I had to eat something or the excruciating chest pains would return. Then the vomiting. Every 2 to 4 hours, extremely sharp pains and vomiting… but I could not eat every 2 to 4 hours at night. This is the time which most people sleep. How could I eat if I was asleep? So every night, I would sleep for as long as I could; which was never longer than 2-4 hours. I would wake up, run to the toilet, and vomit. Every morning. This was how I started my day. Every day. I began to live in the bath room. The vomiting became more and more frequent. From once a day, to dozens of times per day. Then came the blood…
Every time I would vomit there would be blood in it. It alarmed me at first, but began to happen so frequently it became normal. Then the diarrhea started. Then that got worse. The diarrhea then began to have blood in it. Occasionally at first, but then the blood became more and more frequent. Every trip away from my home was meticulously planned to keep me within easy access to a toilet every 30 minutes. My life became a series of destinations to different toilets. Everything else was secondary to the disease. It controlled my life… Until I found about about Rick Simpson Oil.
Rick Simpson Oil, RSO, High THC Cannabis Oil, FECO (Fully Extracted Cannabis Oil), Golden Oil, Hemp Oil, Honey Oil, Amber Oil… New names seem to come out every day, but they are all referring to the same thing. An extract produced by washing the resins off the cannabis plant with a solvent, then boiling that solvent off. These are the essential extracts from the cannabis plant. The real medicine. When done correctly, this process will leave you with a pure, clean oil.
No coconut oil, mct oil, grapeseed oil, etc. are added when making this oil. These type of oils are known as “carrier oils” and will help to get the cannabinoids into your blood stream more efficiently through “bio-availability”. For this reason, I add a small amount of coconut oil into my suppositories (complete process is outlined in my free video, link provided below). I do not dilute my dose with it, but instead add some into my suppository along with my full dose. This is completely different from products sold by most within the “cannabis industry” that I will refer to as a tincture, which are primarily composed out of these carrier oils with very little cannabinoids contained inside.
Please understand that these ingredients are traditionally added to dilute the oil into a nicely packaged “product” developed to be sold to you; not to cure you. During the peak of this protocol you should be ingesting 1000mg of cannabinoids daily, primarily THC. Do not believe the “golden oil” hype: Tinctures which are touted as being better because of their golden oil color which are made completely out of carrier oils and typically contain around 150mg of cannabinoids. You would have to be consuming just under 7 bottles of these tinctures a day to be consuming the necessary amount of cannabinoids needed for this protocol!!
This simple process can be done at home using basic kitchen appliances, and producing the oil yourself is the only way to ensure that you are getting the real thing. I have made a video that is available to watch for free at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKT9tRcA-RU which completely describes the entire process along with everything you need to know about dosing, and various methods of ingesting the medicine.
Around September 2016, I produced my first batch of oil at home using 1 ounce of indica buds and began to ingest the oil. Immediately, I noticed a relief of my symptoms. In an instant, I had regained my appetite and slept a full 8 hours the first night I took the oil. For the first two months, I was so happy with the results I was witnessing that I did not follow Rick’s protocol on dosing. Since I was feeling so good mentally and physically, and all my symptoms had subsided; I decided to embark on a cross-country tour with former NFL athlete Boo Williams to promote cannabis through his BooBeary Kares brand.
Everything was going great! We had traveled to about 13 states at this point and were educating people all across the US to the medical benefits of the plant all along the way. Then we got to Canada…
After a series of unfortunate events, I ended up detained in a Canadian jail cell at the border. They eventually let me go and allowed us to continue on our journey after paying a hefty fine, and confiscating my oil. The next week was absolute hell! The combination of not having the oil along with the stress of the incident caused my symptoms to immediately return. Once I got home, I made another batch but still didn’t follow Rick’s advice for dosing.
Then at the end of November, I flew out to Croatia to film with Rick for a new documentary I am producing. When I was out there, Rick saw the condition I was in (I was still vomiting if I didn’t eat every 6 to 8 hours or so at the time) and scolded me accordingly. “For god sake’s Mike, take the oil” he would tell me. “It would really benefit you.” So after I got back home to Colorado, I made some more oil and began to strictly follow the protocol for the first time. I bring this story up as a reminder to not get complacent as soon as your symptoms subside. It is EXTREMELY important to ingest at least 60 grams of the extracts in 90 days and to then continue a maintenance dose of at least 1 gram per month.
The dosing protocol goes like this: ingesting a rice grain size amount three times a day, then doubling that dose on the fourth day. Every four days until you are taking a gram total per day. Along with following this protocol, I believe that is also very important to switch your diet to one that is referred to as a “high alkaline” diet (google it for more info). Taking out all refined sugars and carbohydrates, and to reduce your stress levels. Removing all sources of stress from your life is also a good idea. I did this for 120 days total, ingesting 90 grams over that time.
Halfway through my regimen, I discovered the importance of ingesting the medicine via suppository. This is the most effective and medically beneficial method of ingesting the medicine. To make the suppositories, I simply go down to the nearest health food store and purchase some empty gelatin or vegetable capsules along with some organic coconut oil. I take them home, open them up, and add a small amount of the coconut oil into the capsule. I then add my dose and use the coconut oil as a lubricant. Simple and clean.
When it was all said and done, I took the first 45 grams orally; then the second 45 grams via suppository in a total of 120 days. My oil was made with 5-6 indica strains mixed together, is full spectrum, and extremely high in THC (50%-95%) and only about 1% CBD. Since March of this year, I stopped taking the oil daily and have been ingesting 1 gram per month as a maintenance dose via suppository. My symptoms have completely subsided since beginning this protocol, and have not returned.
Since I began to make the oil for myself, I have also made it for over 1000 patients around the world. As well as educating hundreds of thousands on how to make it themselves. Every single person has reported positive results for whatever condition they were treating. Everyone who strictly followed the regimen has cured or controlled their disease, just like I have. From brain tumors and cancers (unless undergoing chemotherapy or radiation, patients who have taken those pharmaceutical poisons will most likely need to consume a gram a day, for the rest of their life), to Alzheimer’s, COPD, Lyme, chronic pain, various skin conditions, addiction issues, etc., etc., etc. The list goes on and on. Cannabis Saves Lives. Prohibition needs to end. Now!!
As more states legalize cannabis consumption, many more people will likely use medical marijuana as a supplement to or substitution for prescription drugs, says a University of Michigan researcher.
A new study by Daniel Kruger of the U-M Institute for Social Research found that 44 percent of medical cannabis users stopped taking a pharmaceutical drug, or used less of one, or both, in favor of cannabis.
Kruger and co-author Jessica Kruger, a clinical assistant professor at the University of Buffalo, conducted the study to assess attitudes and use of medical cannabis and the mainstream health care system—described as either a doctor or hospital—among marijuana users.
In general, people use medical cannabis to treat pain, back problems, depression and headaches. Nearly a third of the study’s participants (30 percent) said their mainstream health care provider did not know that they used medical cannabis, indicating gaps between the two treatment systems.
The researchers administered surveys to 450 adults who identified as current cannabis users at an annual public event advocating for marijuana law reform. The event occurred at U-M, in a state where medical cannabis use became legal in 2008.
———————————————————————————————–
Use of Medical Cannabis
in the mainstream health care system:
78%reported using cannabis to help treat a medical or health condition
Due to the medical use of cannabis,42%stopped taking a pharmaceutical drug
However, 30%said that their mainstream health care provider did not know that they used medical cannabis
Most people use cannabis to treat ailments such as pain, back problems, depression and headaches.
Also 38% used less of a pharmaceutical drug after using medical cannabis.
This has indicated gaps between the two treatment systems.
———————————————————————————————–
From the 392 usable responses, the majority (78 percent) reported using marijuana to help treat a medical or health condition. Users also had more trust in medical cannabis compared to mainstream health care, in part, because they rated marijuana better than pharmaceutical drugs on effectiveness, side effects, availability and cost.
“This study advances knowledge in the evidence-based approach to harm reduction and benefit promotion regarding medical cannabis,” said Daniel Kruger, a member of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. “Given the growing use of cannabis for medical purposes and the widespread use for recreation purposes despite criminalization, the current public health framework focusing primarily on cannabis abstinence appears obsolete.”
The findings appear in the current issue of Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.
Standard cancer treatment must be adapted to the type and location of tumor, whereas cannabis is an equal opportunity killer. Cannabis kills all types of cancer cells.
Curing cancer is the holy grail of medical research and it’s the most-coveted breakthrough of our time. If we could discover a way to prevent malignant cells from overrunning the human body, not only would we save millions of lives, we would end years of suffering. And, we could finally feel superior to sharks which are rumored to be cancer free (It turns out, they actually can be afflicted). Is cannabis the way? Studies, so far, show that cannabis kills all types of cancer cells.
One Treatment Doesn’t Fit All
While chemotherapy and radiation have certainly helped humanity’s battle against cancer, research into the recently discovered (1990s) endocannabinoid system keeps providing new information about how tumors form, spread and turn deadly.
But cancer isn’t just one thing. It’s an umbrella term for a collection of related illnesses. What unites these is the method of mayhem: cancer divides and spreads like ants at a picnic. And because it’s not just one kind of ant, we’ve developed slightly different ways to deal with each species.
Partially, that’s because when cancer infects the brain, we can’t necessarily handle it the way we would handle cancer in the foot. Even if the same treatments would effective at stopping the cancer, the collateral damage to brain cells is just too risky.
But when cannabis treats cancer, it does not cause the kind of harmful negative side effects that chemotherapy does.
