The 1960s was a big decade for cannabis. The imagery of Flower Power, Summer of Love, and Woodstock wouldn’t be complete without hanging out of someone’s mouth. But in the early 1960s, scientists knew surprisingly little about this plant. When Raphael Mechoulam, then a young chemist in his thirties at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, set out to investigate in search of interesting natural products, the hippie found a fascinating gap in his knowledge of weeds. rice field. It went well.
Mechoulam has started work.
The first hurdle was getting cannabis, given that it is illegal. “I was lucky. Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology“My institute’s administrative director knew the police…I just went to police headquarters and had coffee with the officer in charge of the storage of illegal drugs and found 5 suspected to have been smuggled from Lebanon.” I confiscated kilos of hashish.”
By 1964, Mechoulam and his colleagues had developed a complete formula for both delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol, or CBD, better known to the world as THC (causing marijuana’s psychoactive “high”). The structure was determined for the first time.
That chemical coup opened the door to cannabis research. Over the decades that followed, researchers including Mechoulam identified more than 140 active compounds called cannabinoids in the cannabis plant and learned how to make many of them in the lab. Mechoulam helped scientists understand that the human body produces its own natural versions of similar chemicals called endocannabinoids that shape our moods and personalities. is now creating hundreds of new synthetic cannabinoids, some more potent than those found in nature.
Today, researchers are mining a vast array of known cannabinoids, both old and new, both natural and synthetic, found in plants and humans for potential medicinal uses. It has become a hot trend in drugs and can have devastating effects.
For most of the synthetic cannabinoids produced so far, the adverse effects generally outweigh their medical uses, says João Pedro Silva, a biologist at the University of Porto in Portugal.these drugs Annual Review of Pharmacology and ToxicologyBut that doesn’t mean there aren’t better things to come, he adds.
a long history of cannabis
For centuries, cannabis has been used for everything from calming anxiety and pain to stimulating appetite and relieving seizures. In 2018, Epidiolex, which consists of purified CBD, a drug derived from cannabis, was approved to help control seizures in some patients. Some people with serious conditions such as schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and cancer self-medicate in the belief that cannabis will help them, and Mechoulam sees promise. “There are many documents [these] Diseases and the effects of cannabis (or individual cannabinoids) on them. Mostly positive,” he says. well-known magazine.
I’m not saying that there are zero risks in using cannabis. Silva points to research that suggests that daily cannabis users have a higher risk of developing psychotic disorders, depending on the potency of the cannabis. One paper showed a 3.2- to 5-fold higher risk. Long-term chronic users may develop cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, which is characterized by frequent vomiting.Some public health experts worry about driving impairment, and some recreational cannabis contains contaminants such as heavy metals that have harmful effects. .
Finding medical uses for cannabinoids means understanding their pharmacology and balancing the pros and cons.
Mechoulam played a role in the early stages of research into the potential clinical use of cannabis. Based on an anecdotal report of cannabis that helps with seizures that dates back to antiquity, he and his colleagues examined the effects of THC and CBD on epilepsy. In 1980, at what was then the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mechoulam co-published the results of a small 4.5-month trial in epileptic patients who had not responded to current medications. The results looked promising: of the eight people taking CBD, four had few seizures throughout the study and three had partial improvement. was the only one.
“We assumed that these results would be magnified by pharmaceutical companies, but for over 30 years nothing has happened,” Mechoulam wrote in his autobiography. It wasn’t until 2018 that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Epidiolex to treat epileptic seizures in people with certain rare and severe medical conditions. Thousands of patients could have been saved, ”he wrote Mechoulam.
