No sooner had Charles Clarke, the home secretary, stressed the dangers of cannabis (though he has no plans to reclassify it so that possession would attract stronger penalties) than, across town, a company legally growing the stuff told investors that business was booming. GW Pharmaceuticals probably enjoyed the irony.

Official hostility to smoking dope is good for business if you're the world's only producer of pharmaceutical-grade cannabis extracts.

GW was licensed in Britain in 1998 partly because of official antipathy to people smoking cannabis for relief from the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, AIDS and cancer. “The nightmare of the time was wheelchair-bound multiple sclerosis patients being wheeled down Whitehall in protest,” says Geoffrey Guy, GW's founder. When even the ancients in the House of Lords suggested that doctors ought to be able to prescribe cannabis, a compromise was inevitable.

Sativex, an under-the-tongue spray developed by GW, promised to help both patients and politicians. A regulated, prescription-only product that couldn't possibly be confused with recreational marijuana would allow the government to placate patients without legalising general consumption. Clinical trials started in 1999 and are continuing. Meanwhile GW is attracting interest abroad. It sold C$1.1m (£500,000) of the drug in Canada last year. And the Spanish government has contracted GW to supply Sativex to 600 patients.

The best prospects lie in America, where this month the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave its blessing to clinical trials of GW's cannabis-based pain-killer on patients with advanced cancer. Twelve states let people use medical marijuana, and as many as 115,000 people may have been prescribed it. But federal officials have threatened to arrest even those users licensed by their states.

Sativex, which comes closer to an extract of the whole weed than currently approved drugs, might be expected to please everyone. But proponents of medical marijuana are ambivalent. Some argue that Sativex is pricier and less effective than an ordinary joint.

“Sativex's saleability depends on people and governments believing marijuana is very dangerous, and only they can eliminate the dangers,” says Lester Grinspoon, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

“The bottom line is that that Sativex isn't as good as whole smoked or vaporised herbal marijuana, which is remarkably non-toxic for something so useful as a medicine.”

Note: Cannabis moves from the streets to the medicine cabinet.

Source: Economist, The (UK)
Published: January 26, 2006
Copyright: 2006 The Economist Newspaper Limited
Contact: letters@economist.com
Website: http://www.economist.com/

Related Articles & Web Sites:

GW Pharmaceuticals
http://www.gwpharm.com/

MMJ: The Forbidden Medicine
http://www.rxmarihuana.com/

GW Wins U.S. Okay for Pivotal Cannabis Study
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread21437.shtml

An Interview With Lester Grinspoon, M.D.
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread21197.shtml

The Lesson of Sativex
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread20542.shtml

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Cha-Ching!

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Funny, I seem to recall more than just threats? This sentence makes them sound like they are all bark and no bite to medical users, which is quite far from reality.

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"Pharmaceutical Marijuana (Sativex) is Second Best".

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This quote should be worked into every article where Sativex is mentioned.

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