In early April of 2011, two drug manufacturing giants, G.W. Pharmaceuticals and Novartis, announced they had formed an alliance to license and market GW’s Sativex, a liquid cannabis drug. The drug is already available in Great Britain, as well as Canada and Spain. The licensing agreement with Novartis will enable sales to expand into markets in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. FDA Phase III trials are still being organized for Otsuka, GW’s partner for licensing Sativex for the US market.

Unlike other cannaboids produced for recreational or medicinal use, Sativex is not a synthetic but an actual extract of the cannabis plant. It therefore lacks the side-effects of the synthetic drugs which merely attempt to replicate cannabis. Patients, primarily people diagnosed with MS or cancer, spray Sativex beneath their tongues.

GW claims that Sativex is formulated to provide the same health benefits that medical marijuana offers but without that drug’s high. GW says that Sativex balances the psychoactive agent THC with cannabidiol (CBD), the chemical believed to be the source of medical marijuana’s anti-nausea and cancer-cell-killing effects, in such a way as to eliminate any of the sensations associated with recreational marijuana. However, cannabis expert Dr. Lester Grinspoon, professor emeritus of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, points out that the issue of whether Sativex produces marijuana high depends on the size of the dosage.

One of GW’s allies in its attempt to replace state-legalized whole-plant medical marijuana with its own chemical extract is Dr. Andrea Barthwell whose career includes consulting for GW, as well as stints as deputy drug czar under President George W. Bush and as president of the American Society for Addiction Medicine. Barthwell frames Big Pharma cannabis as best way to bring marijuana into medical usage: “The safety and advisability of any prescriptive medicine should depend on years of careful scientific scrutiny, not whims at the ballot box by individuals who lack the qualifications to make such decisions. Allowing cannabis to circumvent FDA approval sets a dangerous precedent and puts us on a slippery slope.”

Big Pharma’s big contributions to many legislators means they have many elected officials willing to see things the drug companies’ way on this, as on many other issues. Even legislators known to take a strong states’ right stance on other issues, such as offshore drilling, somehow find themselves standing up for federal oversight on this topic. For example, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who holds the dubious distinction of the being the member of Congress who has accepted the largest amount from pharmaceutical firms, has taken a stance against state legalization of marijuana.

If you have a politician in your state who speaks out against medical marijuana, you may want to look into his/her ties to Big Pharma. As the American Independent observes, the pharmaceutical giants’ strategy as regards marijuana seems to be “demonize it, prosecute it, shut it down, then grab the market.” Let your friends and family know that many of those who fight against medical marijuana are not, as they may prefer to present themselves, taking a pro-family stance against drug addiction, but shills for multinational drug corporations who want to keep all drug profits in their coffers.

The idea that a drug can be denounced as evil in one context but hailed as a medical miracle if sold within the pharmaceutical system is nothing new. Big Pharma’s magic cure pills for ADHD bear a suspicious chemical resemblance to speed.

As consumer health advocate and critic of federal drug policy Mike Adams has pointed out elsewhere in NaturalNews (http://www.naturalnews.com/021501_m…), this double standard, with multinational corporations valued above the health of private citizens, has a pernicious effect on our culture “While dangerous prescription drugs are killing a hundred thousand Americans each year, the DEA does nothing. But when herb smokers light up in private, they are branded criminals and subject to a form of tyranny and oppression that should never be tolerated in a free society.”

At issue is a petition filed Oct. 9, 2002, by the Coalition for Rescheduling Cannabis, a group of medical-marijuana patients and attorneys, which asked the Drug Enforcement Administration to drop marijuana from Schedule I, its list of most dangerous illegal drugs. This classification means a drug has zero medical value and a high potential for abuse.

Since the petition was filed, the DEA has taken no action and provided no response to the claimants, who had filed a federal Freedom of Information Act request to get a 2006 memo from the Department of Health and Human Services. That memo was written in response to a DEA inquiry asking if a rescheduling was appropriate That, in turn, led to today’s filing in a District of Columbia federal Court of Appeals.

“The federal government’s strategy has been delay, delay, delay,” said attorney Joe Elford, chief counsel for Americans for Safe Access and the lead lawyer on the writ filed Monday.

In the writ, which accuses the federal government of “unreasonable delay,” in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, the claimants argue that cannabis is not a dangerous drug because evidence of its use as medicine is legion around the world. It also claims that “despite numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies that marijuana is effective,” the government “continues to deprive seriously ill persons of this needed and often life-saving therapy by maintaining marijuana as a Schedule I substance.”

If the feds were trying to hide the fact that medical cannabis patients were asking for their medicine to be declared safe, they’re doing a good job: When Angel Raich took her case to use medical marijuana legally to the Supreme Court in 2005, Justice Stephen Breyer told her she or someone else should have asked the government to take marijuana off Schedule I. In other words, the Supreme Court had no idea such a petition had already been filed.

Both the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians have called on the feds to review marijuana’s classification. And who can forget the National Cancer Institute’s inclusion of cannabis as an accepted “Complementary Alternative Medicine”? That says that “cannabis has been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years prior to its current status as an illegal substance.”

Readers might wonder why a pot group would demand that the federal government give them an answer which will undoubtedly say, “No, now fuck off.” Well, here’s why: No answer would allow the claimants to challenge, in court, the government’s assertion that marijuana has no medical value, and to force a judge to sound off.

“We don’t know what’s gone on inside the DEA toward resolving this issue,” says Kris Hermes, a spokesman for ASA. “They’ve clearly taken some effort to think about this issue, but have not responded to the petition.”

An answer could come within a matter of “weeks or months,” Hermes says. After that, it’s more court time — but at least there will be less waiting. Or so patients hope.

The day that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act was signed, March 23, 2010, was also the day that the first challenges to the law were filed in federal court. Back then, the notion that health care reform could be overturned seemed remote. For one thing, it would require the Supreme Court to abandon decades of precedent. But nearly as big an obstacle, it seemed, was that the filer of the first suit to move forward was Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, the attorney general of Virginia, a politician whose seven-year stint in the state legislature had earned him the nicknames “Crazy Cuccinelli” and “Kook-inelli.”

After becoming Virginia’s top lawyer in 2010, Cuccinelli altered the state seal to cover the exposed breast of the Roman goddess Virtus. He has also questioned whether Obama was born in the United States and suggested he might not register the youngest of his seven children for a Social Security number. (“A lot of people are considering that now, because it is being used to track you,” he told a supporter.) The Washington Post‘s editorial board has twice used the word “embarrass” to describe his effect on the commonwealth.

At the outset, Cuccinelli’s health care lawsuit seemed like exactly the sort of intemperate move one would expect from an upstart Tea Party politician who is more concerned with public displays of disaffection than results. And health care reform was far from Cuccinelli’s only gripe. He has also sued the Environmental Protection Agency over its power to regulate greenhouse gases and investigated a former climate-change researcher at the University of Virginia (UVA) for fraud. Last March, he notified state-run universities that their non-discrimination policies could not extend to gay students.

One year on, however, Cuccinelli’s health care challenge no longer seems so far-fetched. Last December, Judge Henry Hudson of Virginia’s Eastern District Court sided with Cuccinelli and ruled that the individual mandate was unconstitutional. Seven weeks later, in Florida, a similar lawsuit filed by more than two dozen attorneys general and governors also successfully challenged the law. Now, even the most determined naysayers have been forced to acknowledge the case’s viability. And Ken Cuccinelli, once easily derided as a mere troublemaker, has become something of a hero to conservative opponents of health care reform.

Long before Cuccinelli became a politician, it was clear that he was drawn to procedure and order, to clear delineations of right and wrong. He served on his college’s judiciary committee, and, at George Mason School of Law in Arlington, he ran for honor board chairman on a platform of firm retribution for violators. Fellow board members recall that he took his duties seriously and didn’t hesitate to schedule board meetings on weekends. In 1994, Cuccinelli oversaw the investigation of a student accused of interfering with the publication of a law journal. The inquiry dragged on for months; eventually the student refused to attend his own hearings and was expelled. While several colleagues on the board describe his management of the matter as fair, years later, something about the investigation troubles them. Maybe, they say, had another personality type been in charge, the case could have been resolved without ending the student’s law career. “It was all pretty black and white to [Cuccinelli],” one board member told me. “He was uncomfortable in the gray.” (Cuccinelli disputes this characterization. “I bent over so far backwards to accommodate him,” he says of the student.)

During the 1990s, Cuccinelli was a familiar sight on Northern Virginia’s GOP scene. But, when he first ran for the state Senate in 2002, his candidacy seemed so unlikely that a number of Democrats voted for him (Virginia has open primaries), thinking he’d be easy to defeat. When Cuccinelli went on to win the primary, the Republican vacating the seat, Warren Barry, backed his opponent. “I don’t want to make a habit of endorsing Democrats,” Barry said at the time, “but, in this case, the GOP picked someone whose thinking is so ancient, he would be an embarrassment to Northern Virginia.” Cuccinelli won by about 2,000 votes. It wouldn’t be the first time his detractors had underestimated him.

Here’s some of the information we do know from the only book in the world on the topic. Keep this information in the back of your mind as it may one day help save you or someone you know.

Most people are aware taking potassium iodide (KI) or potassium iodate (KIO3) tablets will help block your thyroid gland from absorbing radioactive iodine should there ever be a dirty bomb explosion or nuclear power plant mishap such as the Three Mile Island incident. In 1999, another such accident happened in Tokaimura, Japan where several individuals died from radiation exposure in a fuel processing facility.

What people don’t recognize is that potassium iodide or iodate tablets only protect the thyroid gland and do not provide protection from any other radiation exposure, so taking them should not give you a false sense of security. It’s important to detox your body after radioactive exposure!

One question is, what do you do if KI or KIO3 tablets aren’t available during an emergency? Interestingly enough, according to research by Ken Miller, health physicist at the Hershey Medical Center, he found that an adult could get a blocking dose of stable iodine by painting 8 ml of a 2 percent tincture of Iodine on the abdomen or forearm approximately 2 hours prior to I-131 contamination. Potassium iodine tablets are best, but if they’re not available this is the next best thing.

An entirely different problem arises after you’ve been exposed to radioactive contamination because now you have to get rid of any radioactive particles you may have ingested through the air you breathed, water you drank, or food you ate. Some people suggest Epson salt, Clorox or clay baths to remove any residues on your skin and to leach out any heavy metals you may have absorbed, but the big worry is internal contamination. To gain some insights into what to do, we have to turn to the story of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

At the time of the atomic bombing, Tatsuichiro Akizuki, M.D. was Director of the Department of Internal Medicine at St. Francis’s Hospital in Nagasaki and he fed his staff and patients a strict diet of brown rice, miso and tamari soy soup, wakame, kombu and other seaweed, Hokkaido pumpkin, and sea salt. He also prohibited the consumption of sugar and sweets since they suppress the immune system.

By imposing this diet on his staff and patients, no one succumbed to radiation poisoning whereas the occupants of hospitals located much further away from the blast incident suffered severe radiation fatalities. Much of this positive result has to do with the fact that the This is why seaweed sales usually skyrocket after radiation disasters, and why various seaweeds and algae are typically used to treat radiation victims. sea vegetables contain substances that bind radioactive particles and escort them out of the body.

In Chernobyl, for instance, spirulina was used to help save many children from radiation poisoning. By taking 5 grams of spirulina a day for 45 days, the Institute of Radiation Medicine in Minsk even proved that children on this protocol experienced enhanced immune systems, T-cell counts and reduced radioactivity. Israeli scientists have since treated Chernobyl children with doses of natural beta carotene from Dunaliella algae and proved that it helped normalize their blood chemistry. Chlorella algae, a known immune system builder and heavy metal detoxifier, has also shown radioprotective effects. Because they bind heavy metals, algae should therefore be consumed after exposure to any type of radioactive contamination.

In 1968 a group of Canadian researchers at McGill University of Montreal, headed by Dr. Stanley Skoryna, actually set out to devise a method to counteract the effects of nuclear fallout. The key finding from their studies was that sea vegetables contained a polysaccharide substance, called sodium alginate, which selectively bound radioactive strontium and eliminated it from the body.

Sodium alginate is found in many seaweeds, especially kelp, and since that time the Russians have been seriously researching the use of their own kelps from Vladivlostok, from which they have isolated the polysaccharide U-Fucoidan, which is another radioactive detoxifier.

Miso soup was so effective in helping prevent radiation sickness, the Japanese have also done research identifying the presence of an active ingredient called zybicolin, discovered in 1972, which acts as a binding agent to also detoxify and eliminate radioactive elements (such as strontium) and other pollutants from the body.

The kelps and algaes aren’t the only natural foods with radio-detoxifying effects. In terms of fluids to drink, BLACK AND GREEN TEA have shown “radioprotective effects” whether consumed either before or after exposure to radiation. This anti-radiation effect was observed in several Japanese studies, and studies from China also suggest that the ingredients in tea are radioactive antagonists.

In short, after any sort of radioactive exposure you want to be eating seaweeds and algaes along with almost any type of commercial heavy metal chelating formula to bind radioactive particles and help escort them out of the body. Whether you’re worried about depleted uranium, plutonium or other isotopes, this is the wise thing to do which can possibly help, and certainly won’t hurt. Many nutritional supplements have been developed for the purpose of detoxifying heavy metals, most of which contain the algaes and plant fibers and other binding substances.

Yet another benefit of the sea vegetables rarely discussed is their high mineral content, which is a bonus in the case of radioactive exposure. Consuming natural iodine, such as in the seaweeds, helps prevent the uptake of iodine-131 while iron inhibits the absorption of plutonium-238 and plutonium-239. Vitamin B-12 inhibits cobalt-60 uptake (used in nuclear medicine), zinc inhibits zinc-65 uptake and sulfur is preventative for sulfur-35 (a product of nuclear reactors) incorporation by the body.

Since nuclear workers are potentially exposed to radioactive sulfur, this means that workers in the atomic power industry need a higher content of sulfur in their diet. MSM supplements provide a source of dietary sulfur, but thiol supplements such as cysteine, lipoic acid and glutathione serve double-duty in this area because they help detoxify the body and attack all sorts of other health problems as well.

The immune system is usually hit hard after radiation exposure, and a number of steps can be taken to help prevent opportunistic infections after a radioactive incident. Though the full dimensions of the protective mechanism is still unknown, Siberian ginseng is one form of ginseng that exerts a definite radioprotective effect and has been demonstrated to lessen the side effects of radiation. It was widely distributed by the Soviet Union to those exposed Chernobyl radiation and is commonly used to help cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy.

Consuming Reishi mushrooms is another proven way to bolster your immune system after radiation exposure and helps reduce the damage from radiation. It’s been used to decrease radiation sickness in animals and help them recover faster after potentially deadly exposure.

Panax ginseng has prevented hemorrhaging after radiation exposure, prevents bone marrow death and stimulates blood cell formation, so it’s another supplement to add to one’s protocol. In short, yeasts, beta glucans, bee pollen and various forms of ginseng have all been shown to bolster the immune system after radiation incidents. In terms of radiation burns, aloe vera has a proven ability to treat serious radiation burns and offers other radioprotective effects, and can easily be grown in your house.

The amino acid L-Glutamine can be used to help repair the intestine in case of the gastrointestinal syndrome usually suffered due to radiation exposure, and a variety of substances can help rebuild blood cells to prevent hematopoietic syndrome. Those particular foods include beet juice, liver extract, spleen extract, and shark alkyglycerols. Most oncologists don’t know that shark liver oil, with alkyglycerols, can help platelet counts rebound in days.

Depleted uranium is currently in the journalistic spotlight because US weapons are made from this material, and after being fired leave a legacy of depleted uranium dust in the environment, which anyone can absorb.

Because the kidneys are usually the first organs to show chemical damage upon uranium exposure, military manuals suggest doses or infusions of sodium bicarbonate to help alkalinize the urine if this happens. This makes the uranyl ion less kidney-toxic and promotes excretion of the nontoxic uranium carbonate complex.

In areas contaminated by depleted uranium dusts, it therefore makes sense to switch to drinking slightly alkaline water and to favor a non-acidic diet to assist in this detoxification. Any of the heavy metal detoxifiers, such as miso soup, chlorella, spirulina and seaweeds, are also commonsense warranted.

Another thing you can do is use homeopathics for radiation exposure. People commonly argue over whether homeopathics work or not, but if you assume the position that they produce no results whatsoever then you must also assume that they certainly won’t hurt you, which means the only loss from using them is a few dollars.

Frankly, there are countless cases and double-blind studies where homeopathic tinctures do provoke physical healing effects in the body. Therefore they are a viable adjunct treatment option. One homeopathic, in particular, is URANIUM NITRICUM (nitrate of uranium) which homeopaths suggest should be used in cases of depleted uranium exposure or uranium poisoning. Not just soldiers or civilians exposed to battlefield dusts, but uranium miners and radiation workers may find it quite useful.

While we’ve discussed just a few of the many supplements and protocols you can use to help detox the body of the lingering results of radioactive contamination, including the residues of depleted uranium, the last thing that might be of interest is that there is a plant that is a natural geiger counter. The spiderwort plant is so sensitive to changes in radiation levels (its petals change color upon exposure) that it’s often used as a natural radiation detector (dosimeter), just as they use canaries in mines as detectors of poisonous gas. Some people like knowing that they have an ongoing monitoring system for radiation in the environment, and this is just another tip available in “How to Neutralize the Harmful Effects of Radiation or Radioactive Exposure.”

Source:  San Francisco Medical Research Foundation

Resources:

• Detoxified Iodine