The Emperor Wears No Clothes

by Jack Herer

Putting the Fox into the Health Care Chicken Coop

The drug companies took over all research and financing into analogs of synthetic THC, CBD, CBN, etc., promising “no high” before allowing the products on the market. Eli Lilly came out with Nabilone and later Marinol, synthetic second cousins of THC Delta-9, and promised the government great results.

Omni Magazine, in 1982, stated that after nine years, Nabilone was still considered virtually useless when compared with real, home-grown THC-rich cannabis buds; and Marinol works as well as marijuana in only 13% of patients.

Marijuana users mostly agree, they do not like the effects of Lilly’s Nabilone or Marinol. Why? You have to get three or four times as high on Marinol to sometimes get the same benefits as smoking good cannabis bud.

Omni also stated in 1982 (and it’s still true in 1999), that after tens of millions of dollars and nine years of research on medical marijuana synthetics, “these drug companies are totally successful,” even though raw, organic cannabis is a “superior medicine” which works so well naturally, on so many different illnesses.

Omni also suggested the drug companies petition the government to allow “crude drug extracts” on the market in the real interest of public health. The government and the drug companies, to date, have not responded. Or rather, they have responded by ignoring it.

However, the Reagan/Bush/Clinton administrations absolutely refused to allow resumption of real (university) cannabis research, except under synthetic pharmaceutical studies.

Omni suggests, and NORML and High Times concur, the reason the drug companies and Reagan/Bush/Clinton wanted only synthetic THC legal is that simple extractions of the hundreds of ingredients from the cannabis crude drug would be enjoyed without pharmaceutical company patents which generate windfall monopolized profits.