Transcript
Cultural Baggage / May 22, 2011

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Broadcasting on the Drug Truth Network, this is Cultural Baggage.

“It’s not only inhumane, it is really fundamentally Un-American.”

“No more! Drug War!” “No more! Drug War!”
“No more! Drug War!” “No more! Drug War!”

DEAN BECKER: My Name is Dean Becker. I don’t condone or encourage the use of any drugs, legal or illegal. I report the unvarnished truth about the pharmaceutical, banking, prison and judicial nightmare that feeds on Eternal Drug War.

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DEAN BECKER: Hello my friends. Welcome to this edition of Cultural Baggage. Here in just a couple a moments we’re going to be joined by our good friend Dr. Robert Melamede, the professor out there in Colorado. He’s now president of Cannabis Science, Inc. We’re going to be talking about what is marijuana, what is it comprised of, what does it do, how does it interact with the human body.

But first I want to share with you a more local story out of Texas, one that’s all too common, all too ugly. Please listen up. The following comes to us courtesy of Fox News, Houston.

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FOX NEWS ANNOUNCER1: Tonight a couple’s recreational drug is the reason Child Protective Services want to terminate those parental rights.

FOX NEWS ANNOUNCER2: But wait until you see what happens to their 4-year-old daughter while in CPS’s care. Here’s Randy Wallace with a “Only On Fox Investigation.”

RANDY WALLACE: For now, 4-year-old Rachel Harrison is back with her parents

DAVID HARRISON: She belongs with her mother and her father.

RANDY WALLACE: But if Child Protective Services has its way, Rachel’s 28-year-old father, David, and her 24-year-old mother, Kristina, will not be her legal guardians. CPS wants her to be adopted by non-relatives.

DAVID HARRISON: If it was up to them, absolutely, they’d take her away in a heartbeat.

RANDY WALLACE: You’re probably thinking David and Kristina must have done something really awful to their little girl for CPS to spend almost a year trying to terminate their parental rights.

KRISTINA HARRISON: They actually testified in the first hearing that Rachel was never neglected, never abused and she was a happy, healthy child.

RANDY WALLACE: Neither parent has been convicted of a felony so, then, why is the state agency so “hell bent” on stripping this couple of their parental rights?!

KRISTINA HARRISON: I went to the hospital to get my appendix out and tested positive for cocaine.

RANDY WALLACE: Did you test positive too, David?

DAVID HARRISON: Yes.

RANDY WALLACE: Even though CPS has offered no evidence in court that Rachel was ever harmed by her parents’ prior drug use, just the fact that they’ve done drugs is enough for CPS to say they should not be parents.

RANDY WALLACE: Why were ya’ll doing drugs?

DAVID HARRISON: Just recreational use. Out with friends, you know, holidays and occasional. Never did it with Rachel around.

RANDY WALLACE: Last July CPS took custody of Rachel.

KRISTINA HARRISON: Well, at first, we didn’t see her for three or four months. They refused visitations.

RANDY WALLACE: When they finally got supervised visits with Rachel, family members say they couldn’t believe their eyes. You might either. Check this out.

Here’s a picture of Rachel that was taken one week before CPS took custody of her. Here she is in January after 6 months in CPS’s care.

KRISTINA HARRISON: When I seen her in foster care, it was killing me.

DAVID HARRISON: Every time we’d go to see her for visitation, she…

KRISTINA HARRISON: She would be skinnier…

DAVID HARRISON: …she was skinny and she’d be just, you know, lethargic and not wanting to move, not wanting to say “Hi” and just sort of sit in the corner and just keep to herself.

KRISTINA HARRISON: …not even play…

DAVID HARRISON: And that’s not her.

KRISTINA HARRISON: At times she’d be drooling at the mouth, her tongue would be hanging out, she couldn’t focus. It was terrible and I asked them, “Is she on drugs?”

They said No.

RANDY WALLACE: But in a January court hearing CPS admitted that the then 3-year-old was put on a number of psychotropic drugs including Risperidone, a drug commonly used to treat Schizophrenia.

RANDY WALLACE: They take her away from you because they say ya’ll were doing drugs then they take a 3-year-old and they put her on drugs.

KRISTINA HARRISON: Yes.

RANDY WALLACE: What do you think about that?

KRISTINA HARRISON: I think no 3-year-old needs to be put on psychotropic drugs. None of them are psychotic.

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DEAN BECKER: Alright. Putting 3-year-olds on psychotropic drugs probably because she wouldn’t mind. Probably missed her mother and dad, wouldn’t you think?! But we hear…actually there’s almost 2 million such stories every year of abuse by authority. For going after people for what they put into their own bodies and that harm no one else.

Alright, let’s bring in our guest, Dr. Robert Melamede. How are you, sir?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: I’m good.

DEAN BECKER: Now, Robert, we’ve talked many times in the past, but, for those who may not have been listening through all those previous conversations, I want you to take us back to what you’ve discovered about the cannabis plant. What does it do to human beings?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: What I’ve done is assembled a holistic interpretation of how cannabinoids made from the plant or the ones that we make ourselves, endocannabinoids, how they fit into the basic biology and physics of life. They’re very unique because we have an endocannabinoid system, meaning that we make marijuana-like compounds, and those compounds literally regulate all of our body systems; our immune system, our digestive system, cardiovascular system, nervous system, endocrine system. All of our body’s organization is homeostatically maintained, meaning kept in balance by the endocannabinoids.

And, it turns out that because of how our environment has changed in terms of public health and sanitation and medicine and nutrition, we now need to be less inflammatory then we needed to be in the past when we lived with more filth. And the way our body turns down inflammation is with the endocannabinoid system.

So basically what I’m saying is that our inflammatory thermostat is set too high and our endocannabinoid thermostat, our anti-inflammatory thermostat, is set too low. So we’ve got to increase that in order to inhibit the age-related illnesses that come from the inflammatory reactions and the free radicals that they produce which basically underlie the aging process and all age-related illnesses.

So what I’m basically saying is cannabis inhibits cancer, it inhibits auto-immune diseases like arthritis, Crohn’s Disease, etc., it inhibits neurological deterioation like Alzheimer’s Disease and it inhibits cardiovascular diseases like clogging of your arteries which all those illnesses have this pro-inflammatory component to them that, in general, cannabis seems to be, on the whole, inhibiting the negative consequences of those through the way the cannabinoid system modulates the flow of biochemistry through us.

DEAN BECKER: I often remember the description you gave once that it’s like a thermostat. That if it gets too high, well, it turns on the A/C a bit and if it gets too cold it kicks up the furnace just a bit. It keeps us in balance, right?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: That’s exactly the case. And, if you think about that analogy…think about when you have a fever, for example, you’re getting hotter. We get hotter because that helps us kill some of the bugs but it’s also detrimental to us, especially if it goes too high and you start to kill your brain, for example.

So everything’s got to be kept in balance and the way our bodies control our body temperature, in terms of keeping it from getting too hot, is through how the endocannabinod system basically cools us off. It’s all part of this same picture of whether our inflammatory system thermostat is set too high…we got to turn that down and cool ourselves off a little.

And there could be negative consequences to that in terms of certain infections, but, in general, we’re not infected. We’re infected less than we used to be and we’re living longer so we’re suffering the consequences of the accumulation of the biochemical damages inflicted by the free radicals and the thermostat being set too high for inflammation.

DEAN BECKER: Well, then the analogy about the thermostat and the reality are both true.

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Absolutely true. You gotta remember, all vertebrates have cannabinoid receptors and as you go up the evolutionary tree we reach the point where we have warm-blooded organisms that maintain our body temperature. Well, in order to maintain body-temperature you gotta, on one hand be able to make it hot and on the other hand be able to make it cool so that you stay within the appropriate range.

So, it looks to me like our endocannabinoid system has been very much fundamentally involved in driving the evolution of mankind on many different levels. Temperature being a very important one because that’s part of what sets off…, you know, warm-blooded animals.

But, we can go further and look in the case of mammals where we even have endocannainoids in mother’s milk. Which, of course, brings up the interesting absurdity that nursing mothers are giving their newborn infants psychoactive compounds so should we be out there, based on the retarded prohibition mentality, should we be out there arresting nursing mothers calming their kids after the trauma of child birth, stimulating their appetite, protecting their brains from the increased levels of oxygen that they’re now being subject to.

Should we go out there and arrest mothers for nursing their kids?! Or maybe we should just arrest all women for walking around with paraphernalia.

DEAN BECKER: (laughing) Alright friends, we’re speaking with Dr. Robert Melamede. Professor, where are you based, sir?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: I’m a professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, UCCS.

DEAN BECKER: Over the years, I guess decade that I’ve known about you or talked with you, this has been a focus of your because … well, there were some preliminary implications…Let’s see if I can get this right. In 1968 Dr. Mechoulam out of Israel discovered the cannabinoid system, is that right?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: No, close, but no. Mechoulam, in 1964, identified THC, the molecular structure and also a method of synthesizing it. But it was later on in 1992, I think it was, that he discovered anandamide which is one of the endocannabinoids. It was in 1988 that the receptors were first identified. And, of course, the question then was, “Are these receptors there simply so we can use the plant?”

Not likely, more likely that we’re making something that responds and interacts with those receptors. So the receptors were discovered by one group and then a couple years later Rafie Mechoulam, in Jerusalum, discovered anandamide which is one of the main neurotransmitters that we all produce in abundance. Not only neurologically but immunologically and, as I said, to control everything in our body we produce that and a number of other endocannabinoid compounds that contribute in a very complex fashion to us being able to maintain homeostasis, biochemical balance on multiple levels throughout the organization that characterizes life as being highly organized and flowing.

DEAN BECKER: Dr. Melamede, I want to talk about those years around 1988, if I heard right, when they discovered the process, if you will, the use of the cannabinoid system. It’s been 23 years, it seems like we could have made a lot more progress towards those solutions you were talking about for MS and other diseases if we had wanted to.

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Well, we’ve made tremendous progress, Dean, you know why? Because we have wanted to. You know who has wanted to? The people have wanted to.

For the most part our legislators are brain-dead. They’re cannabinoid-deficient, un-high people. I call them BLiPs, backward-looking people. But it’s the people who have demanded and created the change that first saw in California and the progression of that medical marijuana movement.

I just saw today that we’ve got the 16th state onboard and some of those, the weaker ones, have come through legislation. So there are, at least, some open-minded, forward-looking people (the FLiPs) in legislatures in some states. But it’s really been catalyzed by the people and what I’m very confident is going to happen is that more and more people, as they understand the health benefits of cannabis, of using cannabis for our lives but, in particular, what we are now seeing that people are getting cured by using high dose cannabis therapy along the lines of what they can see on YouTube from Rick Simpson.

You can go to the Phoenix Tears Foundation or to Rick Simpson’s YouTubes and see people who are claiming their cancer cures and we are now accumulating, because of the people with the ability within the states to treat themselves, we’re getting more and more medical documentation where cannabis has helped people basically cure themselves of their cancers.

Some of these people are now successful for years in having remained in remission so they use the term “cure.” And as more and more people find out the value of this drug, of this plant, really, in holistically restoring health rather than trying to kill the cancer as it kills you and hoping it kills the cancer first, which is the conventional approach of the pharmaceuticals. Here we have a plant that makes you healthier and healthier while it kills the cancer cells so the synergy there is exactly what the people seem to need.

And we’re seeing people truly benefit with glioma, with breast cancer, with prostate cancer, with colorectal cancers, skin cancer, numbers of cancers. And I have 730 articles on my computer showing that cannabis kills cancer cells in tissue culture and in animal studies.

So rather than tormenting through the federal system, people are able to experiment on their own, on themselves in the states that have legitimized by following some of the protocols that are out there. And we’re hoping that in the fairly near future that Cannabis Science in Colorado will be providing a standardized extract of the quality that we’ve experienced people using on themselves and, you know, that people are treating themselves because they have the right to do that in these medical cannabis states.

DEAN BECKER: And, for the most part, with some very positive results, right?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Yes, we’ve seen a glioma shrink 90%, we’ve seen astrocytoma tumor disappearing, we’re seeing prostate cancer disappearing – we have the medical documentation. We’ve seen a person with lung cancer who couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs, lung cancer and COPD, and after a month and a half was able to run up those stairs so the nurse said, “You don’t need me anymore.”

DEAN BECKER: You know it’s becoming…If it weren’t so horrible…if it weren’t so tragic, it would be funny that many of these officials cling to these fables of yore. They refuse to let go no matter the science that’s presented to them. Your response, please.

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Well , half of them have such rigid religious beliefs that science is not part of their lives. And that’s certainly part of the fundamental problem. But, you know, more and more people are learning about the endocannabinoid system and its benefits, more and more people are actually experiencing it. And we’re in the process of actually establishing a system that will allow the reporting and accumulation of that data along with the kind of medical records that we need so that, “Hey, look, if the Arabs can have a Arab spring, we can have sick people and cancer patients in America demanding the right to use a plant that we know if non-toxic, has been deemed by a federal judge to be one of the safest substances known to mankind with pharmaceutical activity, has a therapeutical index with something like 40,000-to-1 compared to aspirin which is 30-to-1 or 15-to-1 actually.”

So, you’re looking at something that’s impossible to kill yourselves. You may not like getting too high, most people don’t. So, if you make a mistake and get too high, you learn next time…your body helps compensate. These cancer patients that are treating themselves, they use really, really high doses of cannabis, much more than most people would want to use but their body compensates by turning down the receptors in the brain, by creating metabolites that inhibit that cycle activity as well and it allows them to take these high doses and have dramatic improvements in their health.

We’ve seen a person with ovarian cancer that spread to the liver and was told, you know, “Go home and die.” It’s now a year later and she’s healthy and vital and working 12 hours a day. So we’re seeing more and more of this. It’s not to say that it’s going to work on everyone but we certainly have seen a number of people for whom it worked.

One of the things that Cannabis Science is involved in now, we’re involved with a group of wonderful people including the government of Thailand, and we’re going to be setting up cannabis-based health clinics for health tourism in Thailand for people to go and get what they need in a responsible fashion with appropriate quality control, pharmaceutical grade cannabis. And come away from a cannabis vacation healthier and less expensive than if they were treated with the pharmaceutical drugs that are out there right now.

DEAN BECKER: I’m not asking for a political synopsis opinion here, but, just your observation. These pharmaceutical houses are very threatened by the potential uses of cannabis, aren’t they?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: I don’t know because I’m not an insider. You say threatened from the point of view that cannabis medicines will cost them billions and billions of dollars, yes, I 100% agree. Whether you’re saying they internally feel threatened, I don’t know if they understand enough yet about what’s really going on and how cannabis plugs into the fundamental nature of life.

Now their models of treating are very linear. Let’s find a chemical that controls a particular, individual pathway. Well, cannabis controls all of our pathways and that’s why it changes the whole gestalt of an individual. It’s a holistic approach as opposed to a linear approach where we know the body is much easier to overcome the privations that are generated by that simplistic-minded attitude. So I think that power to the people is the answer here and that everybody out there should be supporting your radio station and similar efforts by people be it NORML or MAPS or MPP or Drug Policy Foundation, all of these activists groups have things to offer people depending on their particular needs and intents.

People should be supporting Cannabis Science by buying our stocks because we are going to force our way through by conforming to the regulations and making things happen.

DEAN BECKER: Alright, and I am all for that. Now, Robert, if you will hang with me for just a minute I’m going to take another little break.

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(Game show music)

DEAN BECKER: It’s time to play: Name That Drug by Its Side Effects.

Nausea, vomiting, dizziness, urges to gamble or increased sexual urges and behaviors, hallucinations, unreal sounds or visions or sensations, overwhelming sleepiness while driving a car…

(gong)

Time’s up!

The answer: to be used for RLS, restless leg syndrome, for patent extension reasons and Parkinson’s Disease…Requip from GlaxoSmith laboratories. Meantime, nearly half of Parkinson’s Disease patients who have tried marijuana have experienced therapeutic relief from it according to a survey presented at the Movement Disorder Society’s 7th International Congress of Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders in Prague, Czechoslovakia.

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DEAN BECKER: Drug…Truth…Network…Teaching the choir to sing … so low.

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DEAN BECKER: Alright, you are listening to Cultural Baggage on the DrugTruth Network. I’m Dean Becker and I’m here with Dr. Robert Melamede of Cannabis Science. Robert, for Restless Leg you’re liable to kill yourself otherwise and it just seems like there’s all these horrible consequences with most of these pharmaceutical drugs.

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Well, and it’s true and most people wind up…and this is one of the beauties of cannabis. Most people who are using conventional pharmaceuticals wind up taking multiple drugs because you take the first drug and then you get the side effects. And then you take the second drug for the side effects and then that drug gives you side effects.

I had a guy call me the other day, he wants to move his mother from where she is in Tennessee to Colorado so she can treat her Rhematoid Arthritis. Because right now she’s on 25 pills with breakfast, lunch another 25 and dinner another 25 and she’s miserable and they’re not working.

So you wind up taking all these multiple drugs to counteract side effects, people become zombies, the pharmaceutical companies love it because they’re making all the money. So, in the case of conventional pharmaceuticals, it’s many drugs for each illness. Cannabis, in contrast, is one drug for many illnesses. It’s a whole different paradigm because one is holistic and the other is not.

DEAN BECKER: OK, we’re speaking with Dr. Robert Melamede, President of Cannabis Science. Robert, I wanted to ask you…

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Can I just make a quick mention of the children?

DEAN BECKER: Please.

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Cannabis Science and myself are also involved with the Unconventional Foundation for Autism from Mieko Hester-Perez who saved her son’s life by getting him on cannabis. He was severely autistic, uncontrollable and at 10-years-old he was down to 45 pounds and dying. And she wanted to get cannabis into him just to stimulate his appetite and found that it totally changed his behavior. And it’s become quite profound so that’s something that people need to understand that many types of illnesses of all sorts that people benefit from using cannabis. All age groups as well. In general, cannabis is better the older you get. In most cases, recreational cannabis should be avoided by children. But even children…why would you want to give a kid with cancer chemotherapy if you had an alternative of basically putting the kid to sleep for a couple of weeks with some cannabis and really curing them?

DEAN BECKER: You know, Robert, I hear stories every once in a while about somebody’s kid got a hold of some marijuana. You know, somebody’s kid ate a cookie that they shouldn’t have. You know, that kind of thing and everybody freaks out and they send him in an ambulance to the hospital. And the truth of it is it doesn’t matter, I mean it’s wrong for kids to get their hands on it but the threat or the danger is often not what it’s purported to be, right?

ROBERT MELAMEDE: Well, there is essentially no danger. There’s a chance…if anybody eats way too much and they start to hallucinate…some people enjoy it, some people don’t. But, in general, that’ll keep you away from ever taking too much again. It’s not going to hurt you.

And there’s this whole issue with psychosis but that’s a very complicated picture. There’s about 1% of the people in the country that are psychotic, Schizophrenic and they guesstimate that some subset of that could be enhanced or brought on prematurely by cannabis consumption. Well, you know, it’s a complicated picture but some of the latest studies show that cannabis use actually results in more successful treatments when they’re taking their conventional, antipsychotic meds as well. And, it may very well be that a lot of these kids that are predisposed may actually be more likely to experiment and also to find that it’s relieving their problem in terms of how they feel. If they’re feeling better and less stressed….all I’m saying is it’s a very complicated picture.

But there’s pros and cons to this. And there are certainly a number of circumstances where a child could benefit by using cannabis medicines. There’s a very interesting book out there called, “Jeffrey’s Story” about a kid who was very hyperactive and Attention Deficit and totally nonfunctional and cannabis basically turned him around as well. So, we’re seeing more and more of this and, again, appropriate use as a medicine for children is appropriate.

Why would somebody assume that it’s better to give a kid with HDD, why give them speed?! That would be OK? That’s Ritalin…that’s what they’re doing. Why is that OK but a natural medicine, a plant that’s been used for thousands of years, that’s not OK?! Something that’s in mother’s milk is not OK?! But Ritalin is?!

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DEAN BECKER: OK, I’ve got to interrupt here. I’ve got to admit that this was a pledge drive show. My discussion with Dr. Robert Melamede ran long and we’ll be including the end of this discussion on this week’s Century of Lies program.

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(lighter flick….followed by water pipe bubbling)

Voice: ….kindly classify what I’ve just smoked is marijuana and it’s a hybrid, chronic, supernova afghany kush…coded brown betty

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DEAN BECKER: Ah yes, Fringe, my favorite program. I want to thank Dr. Robert Melamede for being with us on Cultural Baggage and Century of Lies. I want to thank you for being with us. Here’s hoping we can get our “group think” together and do something about ending this madness of drug war. As always, I remind you that because of prohibition you don’t know what’s in that bag. Please be careful.

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DEAN BECKER: To the Drug Truth listeners around the world, this is Dean Becker for Cultural Baggage and the Unvarnished Truth.

This show produced at the Pacifica studios of KPFT, Houston.
Transcript provided by: Jo-D Harrison of www.DrugSense.org

Tap dancing… on the edge… of an abyss.