RESPECTABLE REEFER

How a Pulverized, Liquefied, and Doctor-Prescribed Form of Marijuana
Could Transform the Drug-War Landscape

IF IT WEREN'T FOR the little photo gallery on the wall, the office
where Dr. William Notcutt's research assistants keep track of their
patients would be just like any other cubicle at the James Paget
Medical Center in England. As phones ring and stretchers wheel by and
these three women go about their business, the snapshots--Cheryl
Phillips, one of Notcutt's staffers, gently holding an emerald green
bud of marijuana; a group of people in lab coats smiling for the
camera, sinsemilla towering over their heads; a hangar-sized
greenhouse stuffed to the gills with lush pot plants--are about the
only evidence that this hospital in East Anglia is at the epicenter
of one of the most extensive medical marijuana research projects in the world.

In part, that's because there's no actual pot here; by the time it
gets to Paget, GW Pharmaceuticals, the British startup that owns the
greenhouses, has turned the plants into Sativex, a pure extract of
pot that comes in a pharmacy-friendly bottle and is designed to be
sprayed into the mouth.

And in part it's because the frivolity is carefully confined to the
photos, taken against company policy during a field trip to the
secure, undisclosed location where GW grows its weed. After five
years, Phillips and her colleagues have grown used to having
cannabis--as the British call marijuana--in their workaday lives.

Not only that, but their boss has been on a bit of a campaign to keep
things sober. "To get to the perception that this is a medicine,"
Notcutt says, "we've had to move away from the funnies that relate to
the pot world. So no pot jokes."

Over a beer at the end of his day, this rumpled, 59-year-old
anesthesiologist and contract researcher for GW is positively
ebullient about the news that just today the Canadian government
approved Sativex, a success he thinks is likely to be repeated soon
in England and eventually in the United States. He'll gladly tell you
how important earnestness has been in getting GW to this point, how
Sativex owes its success not only to the rigorous science of its
successful clinical trials but also to painstaking attention to
matters of perception.

Take the spray concept.

There are sound medical reasons for spraying cannabis under the
tongue rather than smoking or eating it. The mucosa of the mouth will
absorb the drug faster than the digestive system, indeed almost as
fast as the lungs, but without irritating the respiratory system.

And Sativex can be precisely metered--a single one-tenth milliliter
spray contains 2.7 milligrams of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), pot's
main psychoactive chemical; 2.5 milligrams of cannabidiol, which
doctors think reduces anxiety and muscle tension; and all of pot's
active ingredients known as cannabinoids--so that it can be accurately studied.

But it also has "the advantage of looking like a medicine to the
outside world," Notcutt says. "It has been served up like a medicine,
prepared like a medicine, researched like a medicine. It looks like a
medicine, and it's prescribed like a medicine." Taking pot out of
joints scored on the street and putting it into bottles found on
pharmacy shelves shows that "we're not just being silly about the
herb, even though in the end that's exactly what it is. It's as if
you just squeezed the plant," he says, wringing an imaginary stalk in
his hands.

Notcutt began trying to medicalize cannabis more than a decade ago,
and has been working with GW and its founder and executive chairman,
Geoffrey Guy, since the company's inception in 1998. He credits Guy
(who wouldn't be interviewed for this article) with hitting upon the
spray, just one of the measures he's taken to distance Sativex from
its unsavory origins.

Guy has styled GW, which he started solely to develop cannabis
medicines, as just another drug company seeking to develop just
another drug. He raised money in the usual ways--first from private
investors, then with a 2001 stock offering that garnered $48 million,
and finally, in 2003, with an estimated $65 million licensing deal
with German pharmaceutical giant Bayer--and used it to purchase the
rights to pot varieties that a Dutch company had spent millions of
dollars and more than a decade developing for their medicinal
properties. Guy presents himself as neutral in the drug wars and
gained the support of the British government by offering to institute
extraordinary security measures at his grow facility to prevent
"diversion." The British government, in turn, gave him permission to
grow his pot and test it on human subjects and so exempted GW from an
international treaty forbidding private production of outlawed drugs.

Guy developed a way to blend the plants (a process he has likened to
making blended burgundies) into precise mixtures whose chemical
profiles can be standardized (which regulators like), patented (which
investors like; cannabis itself can't be patented), and then
described in company press releases as "a novel prescription
pharmaceutical product derived from components of the cannabis plant."

Having successfully distilled pot's reputation as a medicine from its
reputation as a way to get high, Notcutt says, "the powers that be at
GW worked hard to maintain this myth. We start in that comfort area,
we don't talk about anything outside this comfort area." This hard
work has no doubt paid off in Canada and England, reassuring
regulators that, as Notcutt put it, "we're talking about a serious
medical subject here." The real audience for all this mythmaking,
however, isn't Britain or Canada, which will ultimately account for
only a small percentage of the cannabinoid drug market, estimated to
be almost $1 billion a year. It's the United States, where, Notcutt
says, things are different. "Marijuanaphobia is much greater on your
side of the pond," he told me. "We've never had the reefer madness."

SINCE POT was prohibited in 1937, there's been a virtual epidemic of
this malady in the U.S., and GW's posturing seems designed to exploit
its latest manifestation: the strange politics of the pitched battle
over medical marijuana.

The federal government lists cannabis in all its forms on Schedule I
of the Controlled Substances Act, a designation reserved for drugs
that it says are unsafe and have no known medical use. But medical
marijuana activists, drawing on a growing body of evidence indicating
that cannabis is a safe and effective medicine, especially for nausea
and spasmodic pain, have clamored for its legalization for medical purposes.

And they've gained support among the general public.

Eleven states have passed medical marijuana laws; no state ballot
initiative put before voters has ever failed to pass.

Some of the resulting controversy breaks down along predictable
lines--chronically ill people accusing the government of withholding
treatment while the government denounces medical marijuana as a
"cruel hoax"; legalization advocates hoping to use medical marijuana
as a wedge issue while drug warriors warn that it's a Trojan horse.
But recently new political fissures have opened up. In Gonzales v.
Raich, a case brought to the Supreme Court after the feds busted a
medical marijuana patient over the objections of California sheriffs,
the Court recently determined that this was "a valid exercise of
federal power," but Justice John Paul Stevens' majority opinion was
rife with regret about "the troubling facts of the case." Alabama,
Louisiana, and Mississippi, three states not exactly known for their
liberal traditions, filed briefs in support of the patients, urging
the justices to allow states to exercise their function as
"laboratories for experimentation." And three justices--including
Clarence Thomas and William Rehnquist--dissented on the grounds that
medical marijuana should be an issue for individual states to decide,
thus placing two of America's most prominent conservatives on the
same side of the issue as George Soros and Barney Frank, another
ideological divide gone up in smoke.

The significance of the medical marijuana skirmish goes well beyond
its fractured politics or its implications for federalism. Even as
the government ratchets up prohibition--it currently spends $4
billion a year just arresting and prosecuting people for
marijuana-related crimes--evidence of cannabis' safety and efficacy
accumulates and the cornerstone of marijuana prohibition weakens.
With stakes this high, it's no wonder that judges and politicians,
and maybe the rest of us, are dazed and confused about medical
marijuana. And it's also no wonder that GW is already garnering
notice in the U.S. or that it has managed to attract prominent drug
warriors, including the government's leading anti-medical-marijuana
spokeswoman, to its cause.

Sativex, the pot that dares not speak its name, may be exactly what
the doctor ordered: a way for drug warriors to squeeze between the
rock of prohibition and the hard place of patients clamoring for medicine.

With a prescription version of cannabis available in pharmacies, the
feds could regain their moral authority to raid your backyard garden,
disrupt the delicate alliances the medical marijuana movement has
spawned, and deprive legalizers of what may be their most powerful wedge issue.

GW may end up, that is, with a shareholder's dream: a monopoly
welcomed by policymakers and enforced by the police, leaving medical
marijuana activists to wish they'd been more careful about what
they'd asked for.

ENGLAND ISN'T the only place where clinical trials of cannabis are
being conducted.

In fact, on ward 5-B of San Francisco General Hospital--once the site
of the world's first dedicated AIDS unit--there are two rooms with
oversize exhaust fans where patients can smoke marijuana in the name
of science.

Sometimes the staff has to put towels under the doors to prevent the
smoke and smell from permeating the hallway, but not today.

Emily, the healthy volunteer sitting in a half-lotus on a bed in room
29, is only going to smoke half of a joint, while David, the
AIDS-related-pain patient reading his Bible in the room next door,
won't smoke until tomorrow.

Emily, 26, is outfitted for her six-day stay at the research
center--during which she will take pot each day at precisely 10 a.m.,
alternating between smoking and taking it through a high-tech
vaporizer device called a Volcano--with a stack of books and videos,
a suitcase filled with comfortable clothes, a boom box, and a cell phone.

She's been relaxed and chatty and looking forward to the study--"a
lounging, couch potato-y thing to do," she says--but that was before
nurses Lorna Aquino and Hector Vizoso took her through the final
preparations. Aquino has just finished listing the various exams--the
blood draws, the breath test for carbon monoxide levels, the survey
of her levels of intoxication, the computerized pattern-recognition
test--that she will be taking each day, once before she gets high and
five times after.

Now Vizoso hands her the "Instructions to Smoke Marijuana"--a
laminated card detailing the Fulton Puff Procedure. He goes over the
method--5 seconds on the draw, hold it for 10, exhale, and wait for
45--and explains that Aquino will watch her from a window in the
hallway to make sure she gets the timing right.

Now Emily seems self-conscious and flustered. "You're really going to
watch while I do this?" she asks.

It's a perfect moment for Dr. Donald Abrams to come in. Although he's
wearing a crisp pin-striped shirt and shiny shoes instead of a
cardigan and sneakers, he looks like Mister Rogers, and he introduces
himself in a neighborly way that immediately puts Emily at ease. "I
need to do a little exam here," he says apologetically, fixing his
stethoscope to his ears. "It's just that when you're stoned you don't
want someone coming at you like this." His exam is brief.

On the table in front of Emily, Aquino has arranged a blue plastic
ashtray, a Bic lighter, and a shiny hemostat--for a roach clip. In
the ashtray is precisely half of a marijuana cigarette, as everyone
around here calls the government-issued, machine-rolled joint, which
is bright white and perfectly round.

Emily lights it up and draws deeply while Abrams coaches her through
the Fulton procedure.

She starts to hack, and he assures her in his doctorly tones: "If you
don't cough, you don't get off." Abrams, a professor of medicine at
the University of California-San Francisco who was one of the first
people to suggest that a virus causes AIDS, knows all about working
with stoned people.

He's one of the few American scientists allowed to study pot in human subjects.

Since 1992, he's been trying to bring some scientific law and order
to the medical marijuana frontier, where patients take pot for
complaints ranging from chemotherapy-related nausea to menstrual
cramps and where, in California anyway, dispensaries function without
much regulation. But progress has been slow, in part because it has
been difficult to fill his studies: He recently had to close down a
cancer pain trial for lack of subjects, and patients don't always
complete the studies. Half the subjects in the neuropathy study get
pot that has been denuded of THC. "Nobody gets fooled for long," says
Abrams, and he worries that David may go the way of a recent subject
who said, "I don't want to be here for a week smoking a placebo when
I can get real pot out on the street," and bailed.

But at least he's fretting about recruiting and retaining patients
rather than whether he's going to be allowed to do the research in
the first place.

It took five years to get his first trial--initially a study to
determine whether marijuana would help people with AIDS-wasting
syndrome--under way. He had his FDA approval within a year, but
acquiring the pot to actually run the study proved nearly impossible.
He couldn't just buy it on the street or grow it in his back yard
like everyone else. He needed a drug that the FDA would accept as
pure and that was legally obtained.

So he applied for a license from the Drug Enforcement Agency to
import research-grade weed (from the same Dutch company that supplies
GW). The DEA stone-walled him, as did the National Institutes on Drug
Abuse, the nation's only legal supplier, when he asked for some of
the pot grown for NIDA at the University of Mississippi. NIDA
eventually denied his request, on the grounds that the FDA-approved
study was not "scientific" enough.

Abrams persisted, however, and NIDA finally relented in 1997, after
Abrams overhauled his study so as to investigate marijuana's
potential harms to people taking protease inhibitors--a strategy he
says he adopted after Alan Leshner, then NIDA's director, reminded
him that "we're the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, not the
National Institutes for Drug Abuse." (Leshner declined to comment.)

Abrams says he can now get NIDA pot when he needs it. But the six
studies he has run have enrolled only 161 people and are still in the
preliminary stages of proving pot's efficacy and safety.

Meanwhile, GW has tested Sativex on more than 1,000 subjects, and is
well into the late stages of the kind of clinical testing required by
the FDA. Abrams won't comment directly on Sativex. ("I'm just not a
political person," he says repeatedly.) Nor will he speculate about
the commercial implications of his research, about how, or even
whether, pot ought to be brought to market (or back to market; Abrams
points out that cannabis was used medically for thousands of years
prior to its prohibition), or about GW's lead in the race to restore
cannabis to legitimacy.

Rick Doblin, on the other hand, will. Doblin heads the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit
organization that first applied to develop marijuana as a treatment
for AIDS wasting (Abrams' first study was originally intended for
MAPS), and he has been trying unsuccessfully to launch medical
marijuana research for nearly 15 years.

MAPS, like GW, wants to develop cannabis as a pharmaceutical drug,
but, as Doblin puts it, "in the least refined, least expensive way
possible--as plant material that people can get in pharmacies or as
plants or seeds that they can grow and process themselves." Doblin
envisions patients choosing among a number of methods of taking the
drug, but he's especially keen on vaporizing, which he thinks may
answer concerns about smoking.

But he hasn't been able to investigate this hunch. "We can get the
FDA to work with us, but we can't get pot from NIDA," says Doblin.
"We've been waiting for two years just for a decision on whether
they'll sell us 10 grams for our vaporizer study." Doblin thinks that
NIDA is "scared of the research. If we prove that it's not true that
pot pushes people into schizophrenia or causes lung cancer, if it's
not doing the things the government says are the reasons it's bad,
then we undercut their credibility."

But even if NIDA were a reliable supplier, Doblin says, "we don't
want their weed." NIDA's brown, stems-and-seeds-laden, low-potency
pot--what's known on the streets as "schwag"--cannot stack up against
the dense green, aromatic, and powerful sinsemilla favored by most
medical marijuana patients (and grown by GW). Doblin asked the
University of Mississippi to grow the good stuff for him, but they
refused, so he approached a botanist at the University of
Massachusetts, who applied to the DEA to grow research-grade pot in a
200-square-foot room in the basement of a building in Amherst. This
started a whole new kind of collegiate rivalry, the Rebels squaring
off against the Minutemen over the quality of their pot. In a letter
to the DEA, Mississippi's botanist--after pointing out that no one
had ever officially complained about the "adequacy" of their
product--trumpeted recently acquired "custom-manufactured deseeding
equipment" and a new stock of seeds that had allowed Ole Miss to
amass more than 50,000 joints' worth of a "special batch" of
high-potency, smooth-smoking weed. Three and a half years after UMass
kicked off the battle--and only after a judge ordered the feds to
make their decision--the Rebels prevailed, its monopoly preserved
when the DEA denied UMass the license necessary to grow pot legally.

MAPS is appealing the decision through the DEA's administrative law
court. But while the bureaucratic process crawls along, the
organization's attempt to bring pharmaceutical-grade, inexpensive pot
to patients is at a standstill. "We can way outcompete GW in a legal
market," Doblin says. (In Canada, a month's supply of Sativex will
cost patients using nine sprays a day about $500, comparable to other
multiple sclerosis drugs and about the same as a month's supply of
pot bought at California medical marijuana clubs.) "But if you're
going to invest millions of dollars in drug development," he
continues, "you have to have an uninterrupted supply. We don't even
have a pilot study. We're nowhere." As a result, GW, with its
government-sanctioned greenhouses yielding 60 tons of high-quality
pot every year, is lightyears ahead of its nearest American
competitor and, according to Doblin, it has drug warriors to thank
for its lead. "They're going to let this whole market go to the Brits."

WILLY NOTCUTT thinks that one of Geoffrey Guy's shrewdest moves was
his choice of multiple sclerosis patients as the first population on
which to test Sativex. With its myriad symptoms and variable
progression, Notcutt says, MS is a very difficult disease to study.
"So why use it? Nothing to do with logic. It has everything to do
with politics." MS patients were already "screaming and shouting and
writing about it," Notcutt told me. Using them "was opportunistic. It
could have been the hemophiliacs with pain from AIDS. It could have
been the gay AIDS lobby. But the perception of the young mother
struck down by MS was powerful. There was no taint of any
recreational use nor any prejudice over sexuality."

Whatever the spin, John Ross is glad to have his Sativex. A
66-year-old former truck driver, Ross has had multiple sclerosis for
25 years, and he lost his driver's license to it 15 years ago. Since
then, it's gotten bad enough to put him in a wheelchair some of the
time (including this morning), racked with pain that he likens to
being plugged into a wall socket and muscle spasticity that makes it
hard for him to keep his balance.

But he's chipper and ramrod straight in the chair and there's a glint
in his blue eyes when he tells me that since he's been on
Sativex--which he, like all Notcutt's cannabis patients, calls "The
Spray"--he's even gotten back onto the golf course.

Ross' story is much like the accounts of the other MS patients I
encountered at Paget: a nightmare descent, as the sheaths around
their nerves unraveled, into a world of pain and debilitation,
frustrating attempts to find relief through various drug cocktails,
and finally the suggestion, made by a doctor in Ross' case, to "get
your hands on cannabis." Ross was surprised, but he dutifully rounded
up some pot, rolled it with tobacco into a cigarette (the usual
method of recreational users in England), and got nearly instant
relief. He avoided the black market by growing his own in the little
greenhouse attached to his home, but the fear of being busted was
never far away. (Nor was mishap, like the time he dried his plants in
the oven and his wife came home to a house full of smoke and a too
happy husband.) So when his doctor referred him to Notcutt's trials,
Ross was pleased to discover that the spray was not only legal and
cleaner than smoking, but also just as effective as his homegrown. "I
was brilliant," he says, "on 28 sprays a day." (Notcutt estimates
that five or six shots of Sativex is "very roughly speaking" the
equivalent of one joint.) Now he generally takes six sprays before
bed, usually drinking it mixed into milk because, he says, the spray
gave him mouth ulcers and it "tastes vile."

Ross says that Sativex doesn't get him high, a claim repeated by most
patients I spoke to at Paget--and by medical marijuana users
generally. This isn't as far-fetched as it sounds, says GW spokesman
Mark Rogerson, echoing the long-accepted principle that a drug's
effects depend on the mindset and environment of the user as much as
on chemistry. "In general the aim of the recreational user is to
achieve intoxication, while the aim of the medicinal user is to avoid
it--because they want to go on with their lives." The company uses
this claim to further distinguish its product from pot--GW calls
intoxication a "side effect"--but in fact it is nearly impossible to
disentangle cannabis' medicinal effects from its side effects.

According to Notcutt, Sativex users do not avoid euphoria so much as
they become experts in finding the "borderland" between disabling
pain and disabling intoxication, to learn how to "go up to the point
where that was enough, thank you very much. If I go much further, I
start to feel kind of funny and I don't want to be there." Notcutt
thinks that Sativex patients can safely find their own dose, and
points out that no one has ever died from an overdose of cannabis in
any form. And he's sure this method will work, in part because it's
been working for years: "A group of people [can be] passing a joint
around, and one will take a puff and get a bit too high and the next
time pass on it. Smoking a joint in a group is a patient-controlled
analgesia device."

John Ross has found that borderland, and he is pleased to be allowed
to be there. (His reward for participating in clinical trials is a
free supply of Sativex by prescription.) "Yesterday, I fell in my
garden," he told me. "I came straight indoors and took four sprays,
and I knew it would keep me calm and in control, and out of pain. And
even if I did have the pain, it's easier to contend with." Ross is a
satisfied customer, and he wants me to spread the word. "Anyone in
the States got the MS," he says as he wheels himself out of Notcutt's
office, "you tell them to get on The Spray."

AT LEAST ONE PERSON in the States would like to do exactly that.
Julie Falco, a Chicagoan who has had MS for half of her 40 years,
bakes an ounce of pot into a pan of brownies ("I like a little
chocolate with my cannabis," she says) every 10 days or so and eats a
small square every morning for pain and spasticity. She sees Sativex
as "another option in the arsenal," one that can provide quicker
relief than eating pot and can be used in public.

But getting Sativex from Canada is not as easy as hopping on a bus
and buying Prilosec. Even if she could get a prescription, U.S.
Customs and Border Protection would, according to a spokesman, seize
and destroy Sativex on the grounds that cannabis is illegal in this country.

So Falco has applied to the FDA for permission to obtain Sativex
under the Compassionate Use program, which allows patients for whom
there is no other treatment to obtain drugs still considered
experimental by the U.S. government. (More than 40 medical marijuana
patients once got pot directly from the government under this
program, but in 1992 the FDA stopped considering Compassionate Use
applications for the plant.)

Even if Falco is successful, most patients will have to wait for
Sativex to run the FDA's gauntlet--notoriously difficult and
unpredictable even for drugs without political baggage.

But there is precedent for FDA approval of cannabinoids. In 1985, the
agency approved Marinol, a synthetic form of THC, as a treatment for
AIDS-related wasting and chemotherapy-induced nausea, but it has
proved unpopular with patients, who complain that the drug takes too
long to work, which makes the dosage hard to adjust, and that it is
ineffective. (Some scientists believe that pot's medicinal effects
depend on the interaction among all its chemicals, not just on THC.)

Drug policymakers had hoped Marinol would be "a godsend," according
to Mark Kleiman, director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at
UCLA's School of Public Affairs. "It wasn't any fun and made the user
feel bad," Kleiman says, "so it could be approved without any fear
that it would penetrate the recreational market, and then used as a
club with which to beat back the advocates of whole cannabis as a
medicine." Kleiman thinks that Sativex might succeed where Marinol
failed, not only because evidence from GW's clinical trials might
convince regulators that it works, but also because GW is poised to
"persuade the drug warriors that getting Sativex approved fast is the
best way to block the medical marijuana movement."

But this kind of maneuvering could have unintended consequences. "The
approval of Sativex will show that the drug warriors have been lying
all along about medical marijuana," says Rob Kampia, head of the
Marijuana Policy Project, an organization that has spearheaded
several state ballot initiatives. It will also, Kampia thinks, vastly
complicate law enforcement efforts. "If Sativex is approved in the
U.S., and a patient is arrested for whole marijuana and they go to
court, they're now going to be able to say, 'Hey, we know that liquid
marijuana has medical value as declared by the FDA, therefore I
shouldn't go to prison for having nonliquid marijuana.'"

UCLA's Kleiman points out other complications for drug warriors: "If
the word gets out that in fact it can be used to get high, then there
might be a substantial demand for it among those who want to get
stoned while remaining within the law, especially since it could be
prescribed for relatively nonspecific indications such as pain and
anxiety. And the one thing this is going to do for sure," he adds,
"is wreck the drug-testing industry."

GW refuses to comment on these possibilities, calling drug policy "a
matter for lawyers and governments." But drug-war politics matter to
the company, if for no other reason than that prohibition would make
Sativex the only legal cannabis in the marketplace. ("I wouldn't want
to comment on that particular statement," says Rogerson.) Indeed
without prohibition, GW might not have a market, which may be why, in
addition to its larger population, the United States holds more
appeal to the company than Canada and Europe, with their relatively lax laws.

A couple of GW hires indicate that the company is not nearly so
apolitical as it claims: John Pastuovic, a campaign spokesman for
George W. Bush in 2000 who was part of an effort to derail medical
marijuana legislation in Illinois earlier this year, and Andrea
Barthwell, who, as a deputy drug czar from 2002 to 2004, led the
campaign to brand medical marijuana as a hoax. Both can be expected
to enforce message discipline. As soon as I told him I was writing
about medical marijuana, Pastuovic interrupted. "Sativex is not
medical marijuana," he said. "What you have out [in California],
that's medical marijuana. Sativex is medicine." For her part,
Barthwell has refused to publicly comment about her turnaround,
except to say to the Los Angeles Times that "comparing crude
marijuana to Sativex is like comparing a raging forest fire to the
fire in your home's furnace. While both provide heat, one is out of control."

GW even offers a high-tech way to control the fire that is bound to
appeal to drug warriors: the Advanced Dispensing System, a
thumbprint-activated, computerized dispenser that limits the dosage
to what a doctor (through a cell-phone link) authorizes, preventing
Sativex from being overused for its "side effects." Rogerson says
that GW can certainly make the device--originally designed for
methadone users--available to the U.S. government. "We can say, 'Here
is your motorcar, sir. Would you like the standard version or the
armor-plated version?'" Either way, Kampia says, "Sativex fits the
niche that the drug warriors have created." And they seem to agree.
"It is entirely possible that there are elements of the cannabis
plant that have medicinal value," says Tom Riley, spokesman for the
drug czar's office, echoing an Institute of Medicine report that his
office commissioned in 1999. "If such elements were developed into
safe, effective medicines, they could theoretically be prescribed and
distributed like all the other drugs that have dependency-producing
side effects."

Sativex also fits a niche that Kampia's movement has created, if
inadvertently, by seeking to legitimize pot as a medicine even as it
remains otherwise illegal.

In a society that relies on a profit-driven, science-based industry
to supply drugs and on government regulators to approve them, a raw
herb that grows like a weed and has been vilified for nearly 70 years
is a tough sell as a medicine. A patented liquid that you can pick up
at Walgreens along with your Prozac, on the other hand, may be
precisely the formula for bringing cannabis in out of the cold,
especially if it has a carefully crafted reputation as something
other than pot.

It is, of course, way too early to tell, but within two days of the
Canadian approval, U.S. newspapers were already reporting that
Sativex consisted of a "type of cannabinoids that have been isolated
and purified [to] work specifically at the targeted pain receptors,"
and that the drug "does not intoxicate users." That, according to
Willy Notcutt, "is a load of bollocks. But why," he asked me,
"correct such misapprehensions at the current time?"