Respectable Reefer

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http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/27996/

 

 

 

Respectable Reefer

 

By Gary Greenberg, MotherJones.com. Posted November 14, 2005.

 

 

 

Sativex, a pulverized, liquefied, and doctor-prescribed form of

marijuana, has the potential to 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. "

 

Gary Greenberg is a contributing writer for Mother Jones. His writing

on science and public policy has also appeared in The New Yorker,

Rolling Stone and Harper's Magazine. For information on reprinting

this article, contact featurewell.