11/08/08
Dr. Courtney speaks on the CANNABIS ISSUES PANEL of experts and authors at the 18th ANNUAL SOUTHERN HUMBOLDT HEMP FEST

Emcee: Jimmy Durchslag:

Next we have William Courtney, DR. BILL COURTNEY, Cannabis Medical Consultant. Many of you… I know he’s based in Mendocino, has an office in Willits, but he’s also here in our area, regularly. He’s my medical consultant. And I know if you’ve e’er seen him, you get a lot of information about cannabis–it’s health effects. So he’s going to talk to us about that. Dr. Bill. Welcome. (applause)

Dr. Bill:

Thank you. I just noticed today that this is the 18th Annual Hemp Fest. Interestingly, the International Cannabinoid Research Society has also had it’s 18th Annual.

And this is the manual that came out of the 18th Annual research [He shows the bound sheaf of papers.] And it’s free online. If you go to [sounds like “Icarus”] ICRS, and go to the symposium page, like you were going to sign up for the symposium, this is a PDF.

And for those who are not able to go online, there are a stack of cd’s over there. You can take this to Staples and for $20 print your own copy.

“Icarus” [ICRS], this year, was phenomenal! It was only overshadowed by my discovery of the United States Patent on CBD and cannabinoids.

But, since there is so much to talk about, I want to focus a little bit on Icarus, first, and then we’ll get into the U. S. Patent.

The thing that came out of this years’ ICRS that was quite amazing is there’s a whole series of acid molecules in the raw plant – the 21 carbon molecules. Those break down with the slightest amount of heat or aging. THC-A, which previously was thought of as a storage molecule, is in fact and active molecule, and when you heat it, you break that carboxy group off to create THC, which is psychoactive. So a lot of our activities over the last 40 years have been aimed at how to improve the thc potency, because we had assumed that the psychoactivity was tantamount to the medicinal aspects.

But as we look at it closer it turns out that there’s an awful lot about the green plant, before it’s been treated culturally, with heat, that has a lot of benefit. And this years’ Icarus introduced a lot of these: cannabidiol acid, cannabichromic acid, cannabigerol acid: all of those 21 carbon molecules have unique medical properties. In particular, CBD-A, or cannabidiol acid, is an antibiotic. As soon as you put it into a tea, you simmer it, you saute it, you bake it, you smoke it, you lose that antibiotic function, and it converts it into CBD; with additional heat it converts into thc; and so with prolonged heating you increase the amount of THC (but our plant currently has a lot of THC, so that really isn’t essential.

My current position, for those of you who I’ve met with clinically, I’m recommending that the greens be part of your diet.

If you look at the world around us you see that the deer eat it; they don’t really eat a lot, but they kind of munch at it. Iguanas eat it. Birds eat it. Rats. Dogs. Cats. Animals understand that.

A few of the leaves allows you access to, not only THC, but the THC-A, these other cannabinoids, all of which are fat molecules, that move into the adipose tissue of your body. And if you eat it regularly for two months, you eventually will become saturated, which is a desirable state in which these various chemicals can be found, and are plentiful, in the fat tissue of the body.

The benefit of them being fat molecules that store in the fat is that it acts like a depo, in the sense that if your body needs a particular supplement, it can draw down from the fat tissue that particular cannabinoid. And these cannabinoids, we now know, provide anti-epileptic, they provide antibiotic, antiviral, antifungal, anti-anxiolitic, anti-psychotic, a tremendous range of medicinal activities.

And there was an article out of last years’ Icarus that talked about the unique ability of body to draw down the specific cannabinoid as it’s needed. So, ideally, if it’s a part of your diet, the way that it is with the rest of the animals who are not enculturated, if you have a minor fungal infection, you’ll pull down an antifungal before it becomes clinical, and you’ll prevent the problem from becoming even noticeable. The same with an anti-psychotic, the same with an anti-anxiolitic (anti-anxiolitic is something that reduces anxiety, cuts anxiety. So, it’s such a wide range of conditions that this plant is capable of contributing to our body’s ability to modulate.

And I think that’s one of the take-home messages of this last Icarus, is that all this plant does is facilitate the body’s ability to take care of itself.

If each person here would take ten hours and review the immune system on the web, go to Wikepedia, look up all the links, learn about the immune system, how anti-inflammatory, auto-immune, how it detects self, not-self, precancerous changes. I mean, the immune system is absolutely amazing. And what cannabis does is facilitate the regulation of the immune system.

The body produces endogenous cannabinoids. You may have heard of endorphins: that’s endogenous morphine. Well, in a similar fashion, the body produces endogenous cannabinoid.

I’m currently submitting an article for publication which would contract that to “encannans”, and the reason that I selected that word is because it removes part of this tone of cannabis, which causes such panic in so many people, and, in order to reach out across the aisle to the Republicans. . . You know you want to not insult them too strongly from the get-go, that first impression is hard to redo. . .

But also part of that article is the history of these molecules. Lipins are the little fat messenger molecules. Those are found in archeia, which is a primitive single-celled organism that was in existence four billion years ago. These little fat molecules would attach to a protein receptor, which we now call a cannabinoid receptor, and the structure of those (they go back and forth through the membrane seven times) that specific structure is still found in the proteins in the membrane of your T cells and D cells (white blood systems in your immune system found in your lymph nodes, spleen, thiamus).

So the entire immunologic system in the human being communicates through the CB2 receptor, which is similar to the same receptor that was first evolved (if evolution is a part of your world view) billions and billions of years ago. So we had this incredibly conserved system (and conservation is when a design is so effective that it doesn’t change over time). Most biological designs evolve over maybe a couple million years, and they turn over and evolve, but this was so effective and so incredible that it has. . . 4 billion years later you can find it in the cells that are involved in fighting cancer, and that are fighting infection.

I may be getting a little bit detailed here, but all to say, if you want to look at this Icarus, and I highly, highly recommend that you do this, send me an email, and I can send you this as a pdf file that you can just look at electronically, or you can take it to Staples, print it out, and for those of us who like to look at a physical copy, you can make notes and go back and forth.

We’re hoping to bring the Second International CB2 Conference to Mendocino. I attended the First International, which was in Banff in May of ’06, and Ive been speaking with Keith Sharkey, who coordinated that. Researchers from all over the world, from Israel, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, all convened for three days and we did nothing but exchange information about this 2nd cannabinoid binding receptorthat CB2 receptor we were just talking about–thats in the immune system.

Because medicine is nothing but about enhancing immunology, and immunology is nothing but about detecting self/non-self, thats foreign bodies, protection from cancers, and trying to make a peace in the world where your own cells can decide to defy.

A million times a day, cells begin to divide that shouldn’t be dividing and the immune system has to say, “Hey, you know, the shrubs are getting a little hairy there; we’ve got to trim them down. We’ve got enough renal cells or kidney cells. We’ve got enough bone cells, muscle cells.” So the immune system’s highly competent at dealing with that, but it can become more competent. And that is exactly what cannabinoids do, whether you’re talking about the body’s endogenous cannabinoids, or the plant, which can be phytocannabinoids (which just means cannabinoids from plants) or exogenous cannabinoids. Both of those terms refer to those 20 carbon molecules that are produced outside of the body, but bind to the protein receptors on the cells in our body and therefore help regulate it. So whether we’re talking about the body’s chemistry, or the plant chemistry, their role is to modulate the function of the immune system. And a modulator is a chemical substance that can either increase the activity of the immune system, or decrease it.

And it’s like, medicine always bothered me when I would study traditional pharmaceuticals, and they’d say, “Well, they can give diarrhea or constipation.” Well, that’s great, you know, huh!? Can you choose, or do you just kind of get stuck with what you get stuck with? Well, the same with. . . A modulator is a substance which provides feedback. Every cell in the body has a function: brain cells, nerve cells, blood cells, bone cells, muscle cells. There’s something that they’re supposed to be doing. And it could be overactive. And, if it’s overacting, the body would like to tone it down, slow it down. And the feedback it gets from the cannabinoids say, “Wow, this is too much, we need to slow it down, dial it in.” If the system is insufficiently active, then it wants to speed it up to normal.

So a cannabinoid is a modulator that restores optimal function. That’s what the body’s system is doing. That’s what the plant does. The plant facilitates the rapid restoration of the normal function.

And I focus a lot on the immune system because that’s so central to disease and illness, but it modulates the endocrine system. It modulates the neuromuscular system. It modulates bone remodeling – osteoporosis and osteomalacia. Those are conditions in which there are two cells, one of which burrows through the bone and chews up the old bone, then a new one, the osteoblast comes and lays down new bone, and so the bone is completely rebuilt every seven years. That’s the bone life-cycle, the longest in the body. And these two cells are involved in that constant remodeling. Well, they communicate by cannabinoids. It’s become the “duh!” [laughs] of modern physiology.

Everything uses these very simple fat molecules to provide feedback, and as we age with the loss of some of the female hormones, in particular, that communication falters, and the osteoclasts (that cell that burrows and dissolves the bone) just keeps tunneling away, and the osteoblast just kind of kicks back and gets out of sync and doesn’t lay down new bone, and we perforate, making the bone porous. And so the cannabinoids facilitate that one-to-one communication, restore, (Restore may be a leap. Lots of times I get overzealous in my hopes.) at least will facilitate the communication which will prevent further porosity changes. It will stop the condition from progressing and, if the design is consistent, I actually believe it will increase the density and restore normal density with that communication. Because, if you’re burrowing, and you cross a tunnel, you don’t have to burrow through that tunnel because it’s missing, but the new one will come through and lay down new bone.

So, I’m going to stick with my thing. I think it will actually improve the condition. So, bone-remodeling, cancers, inflammatory conditions, prostate cancer, growth regulation, metastasis, all that, can be found in this free book on the web. Consider this the most gracious gift of the web to people who have an interest in health. And, like I said, just send me your email, I’ll send you an electronic copy that you can peruse.

And, we hopefully will review this before the 2nd Cannabinoid Conference. I’ll try to do a one to two or three day review of the language, and we’ll go from the terms, the definitions; we’ll look at a little bit of chemistry, then we’ll look at a little bit of microbiology (which is a big love of mine) and how biochemistry is involved in the functions of the cell: all that to kind of prepare us for this group of visiting dignitaries which, you know, will tell us where the dream is today.

Something that is incredibly overwhelming is the discovery of Patent 6,630,507B1. The United States of America has been assigned the patent rights to cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants.

Over on the table there is a face sheet, these are free hand-outs. You go home. You type in USPTO (which is US Patent and Trademark Office) and google, it will take you to their site. Search by patent number. Just type that patent number in. It’ll bring you up the electronic copy of this patent (for those of you can do that), for those who can’t, there are hard copies over there and if you want to make a donation for print and paper you can. But these are primarily for people who don’t have access to the web, and are not into electronic copies. This should be read probably a minimum of ten times, and then committed to memory. It really is absolutely phenomenal. It reminded me of more organic chemistry than I ever knew. Whenever you write a patent, you hire a very expensive attorney, who really is an English literature graduate doctoral person, and there are some patent attorneys who aren’t like that, but in general their skill is in being very articulate.

And this talks about the chemistry of, particularly, cannabidiol. On two separate occasions the government lists cannabidiol on separate line item claims. It spells out the conditions for which cbd is uniquely beneficial – the oxidated stress diseases–and that includes everything from diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, the neo-plasias, coronary vascular disease.

In particular they isolate the neuro conditions.

CBD can cross the blood-brain barrier. So, it’s a fat molecule that can get into the brain, which is very hard to do, because the brain is very protective, but because this has 34 million years of research on its side it knows how to walk between the lines and the body has allowed it access to the brain. So, for Parkinsons, for Alzheimers, for strokes whether embowelic, hemmorhagic, or traumatic, or surgical, these are all conditions where CBD is uniquely beneficial.

For the first time ever in three years of looking, this has human dosage schedules. This is of phenomenal importance to you legally. It tells out what you are entitled to do, and then you just look at the plant, and the plant tells you how much plant material you need to generate that.

Speeding quickly forward through many other things, part of what I talk to all my patients about is the ability to fractionate for cbd, which means. . . There’s a piece of paper over there which tells you the technique. That’s another thing to read and memorize, because it’s the single most important thing for your health, and for your legal safety.

You take fine grind cannabis.

At my office there’s this $400 thermometer, which is supposed to be very accurate. You get a variable temperature heat gun, which allows you to provide a constant single temperature for hours at a time, so that it’s better than any of the vaporizers, because it’s very, very, very steady. So you come in here. You turn the heat on until it goes to 166 degrees Centigrade. Take the file; mark that place on your heat gun, so you can get back to that.

Take your cannabis. You grind the cannabis to a fine degree which increases the surface area so that you can get to the cannabinoids in the plant material.

Put the heat to it. The longer you heat it the more THC is boiled.

We’ve now gotten down to the physics of the cannabinoids. The vaporization temperature is a temperature at which a liquid goes through a phase change to a gas. Like with water, at a 100 degrees Centigrade water begins to boil. You’ll never get water at 101 degrees because it turns into a vapor before it can get that hot.

THC boils at 157 degrees, that’s Delta 9. Delta 8 boils at a 175. Cannabidiol at 188. So if you have a very specific temperature, you can heat the cannabis and vaporize the THC. If you want THC, you go ahead and use that, or do whatever you can do with that, but there’s so much of it there that for most people, we need to lower the THC content so you can get to the CBD.

So once you’ve heated it you’ve stripped the THC out of it. You now have cannabidiol plant material. That CBD plant material is nonpsychoactive, and it’ll allow you to begin to get to the dosage schedule that this patent recommends.

For the last year I’ve been recommending 5 milligrams per kilogram body weight. That is an amount of cannabidiol that it takes for this particular mouse strain to block the development of diabetes.

Now, I’ve been hanging my hat on that for a year, but I now have 5,000 pegs to hang my hat on, thanks to the United States government patent. Because. . . They talk about higher doses. They talk about 10 milligrams per kilogram body weight. They talk about 20 and 40. Huge. Hugely important!

But if you just stick with the 5 mg/kg, that still requires you to process a lot of plant material, because the amount of cbd is so low. There is a strain called “White Russian”, which is 100% more CBD, and there’s some new strains coming out of Mendocino which could have up to 700% more CBD. These strains will make it a lot easier to get access to the 500 mg a day, which is the schedule that I’ve been recommending to my patients.

That’s the same amount that you would use of vitamin C, and at that level, in this particular mouse strain, you block the development of diabetes 60% of the time. There’s a particular mouse strain that 86% of these mice develop diabetes. The pharmaceutical industry tests all oral and injectable medications on this mouse strain because it’s such a reliable model for diabetes, so, you know, does glucophage inhibit diabetes? Does insulin/hemulin? It’s an amazing animal model for diabetes.

If you give that animal model which 86% of the time will develop diabetes, if you give them 5 mg/kg body weight, 60% of them do not go on to develop diabetes. It completely blocks the. . .[audience applause]

Yeah, 14 million Americans go blind with diabetes a year! Kidney renal failure. I’ve got patients I see in their homes who are on dialysis, people who’s knees have been cut off, people who’s vision fails because of diabetic retinopathy.

And, we could prevent that with something that’s non psychoactive, and that’s just an amazing molecule, as is thoroughly detailed in this patent. Which is why every person here needs to just know this thing inside and out. And it will take you a while. I mean, I’m still studying it and every time I read it there’s more stuff there. It really is phenomenal.

I have a room upstairs at 4:20, and any specific questions on either fractionating for cannabinoids (and pick up that sheet and study that–key to your legal and central to your physical health). . . There’s one over there on green leaf.

Did we talk about green leaf yet?

So if you talk about those molecules that are present in the fresh green leaf, I try to use 8 leaves a day. I juice it with carrots. I started out with carrots – I do four in the morning, four in the afternoon, but after eating carrot juice for five or six months you begin to turn orange a little bit (I knew someone in college who actually did), and so I now put in beets and broccoli (just because Bush doesn’t like it, it figures it’s got to be good for you), anything laying around – kales. It makes a drink.

And it’s phenomenal because you get these cannabinoids in, they’re non-psychoactive, they saturate the body and they facilitate the body’s regulation. And so, I tell each of my patients: the single most important thing you put in your mouth after water, on a daily basis, is, approximately, eight green leaves a day.

That number is unknown, but I’ve had 90 year old people who have gotten out of their wheelchairs who’ve had arthritis that was so inflammatory and painful. . . By down-regulating the inflammatory system you decrease the swelling and inflammation, you increase mobility and articulate function. Its prevention of alzheimers, of coronary vascular disease. Prophylactic uses.

Prophylactic uses are the most pivotal in this document. I don’t know how they’ll stand up in court but I plan on using them very soon, like November 6th Im going to be in court presenting this information on this prophylactic use. That’s until they take my license away. But then I’ll keep doing it, so…

If you have any questions, talk to me later upstairs, and I’ll answer them if I’m able. [audience applause]

emcee Jimmy:

Dr. Courtney! Thank you, Bill. Obviously a wealth of information there. He has his very attractive banner up here. Is that drcourtney@mcn.org? yes, if you want a copy of the Icarus document which he has offered on line. His card is there. There’re a couple books here that he’s involved with, and he’ll be upstairs after this panel to answer questions and give more information.

The workshop room is up in that corner. 4:20, he said. I don’t know how that time got chosen, probably just randomly. So, thank you for that.