INTERNATIONAL CANNABINOID RESEARCH CONFERENCE

Brain Power, Cutting-Edge Science And Political Conflict At The 10th Annual
Cannabinoid Research Convention.

I walked into a cavernous meeting room at a hotel in Baltimore and
encountered the biggest collection of brainy brain researchers that I had
ever witnessed. Cerebral cortexes were literally throbbing with talk of
endocannabinoid systems, custom-built experimental mice, receptor
sequestration, hippocampuses, amygdalas, and whether there would be enough
potent coffee to keep everybody awake during three days of formal and
informal presentations, symposiums and panel discussions.

Underneath the technowords and chemistry equations, the ICRS conference was
basically about marijuana - what can be derived from it, how those
derivatives (called cannabinoids) affect the body at a cellular and
systemic level, how the body's reaction to cannabinoids can be used to
decode its reaction to disease and other drugs, how cannabinoids can be
manipulated and reconfigured to achieve medical and research goals.

The tenth annual ICRS meeting cast of characters included legendary
cannabinoid researchers such as Dr Raphael Mechoulam, the US government's
marijuana farm boss Dr Mahmoud ElSohly, and maverick physician-businessmen
like GW Pharmaceuticals' Dr Geoffrey Guy.

The scene was surreal, politically charged, and slightly intimidating. Most
American cannabinoid researchers are funded by the National Institute of
Health, the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), other government
agencies, and pharmaceutical companies. Few of these funding sources are
friendly to smoked marijuana or the marijuana legalization movement, and as
I was to find out later, some officials representing NIDA are openly
hostile to whole marijuana and those who believe that individual citizens
should be able to do high level cannabinoid research in the privacy of
their own brains.

Still, Dr Mechoulam listened patiently with apparent interest as grow guru
Ed Rosenthal talked about marijuana varieties and offered him a copy of The
New Prescription, Marijuana as Medicine, a new book published by
Rosenthal's Quick Trading publishing company.

Dr Guy, a treating physician, pharmaceutical products developer, and
British pot greenhouse sponsor, found himself discussing rat brain slices
and marijuana cultivation techniques with doctoral candidates.

Some NIDA representatives, who rudely refused to let me interview them or
write down their names (they claimed their handlers in Washington DC
prohibited them from speaking to journalists), found themselves confronted
by Jeff Jones, the boy wonder head of the Oakland Cannabis Buyers
Cooperative (OCBC), who told them that their "abuse" paradigm was
unscientific and harmful, especially to patients that Jones' OCBC tries so
hard to assist by providing high quality medical grade whole marijuana,
derivative products, and harm reduction devices.

ICRS treasurer Dr Richard Musty stood with Scottish researcher Dr Roger
Pertwee and ICRS Administrative Director Diane Mahadeen, talking about
neurotransmitters, absent colleagues, and whether the host hotel would be
able to handle the conference's seating and feeding requirements.

A bevy of international researcher-babes, consisting of beautiful, bright,
young female cannabinoid researchers, provided grace notes to the
gathering, which otherwise would have been dominated by receding hairlines
and graying hair of the senior geniuses who have been researching
cannabinoids since the 1960's.

Image and Reality

The ICRS is an eclectic organization. Its scientists and researchers are
extremely well qualified academically and professionally, but instead of
doing mainstream pharmaceutical, behavioral or physiological research, they
study cannabinoids. This means they fight an image problem because
cannabinoids come from marijuana.

Publicly, they present themselves as straights, no different from other
scientists. They're offended when peers, corporations, media or government
agencies view their specialization as "Cheech and Chong" research. Musty
recalled occasions when ICRS had trouble booking potential conference
sites, for example, because hotel reps didn't want a "cannabis conference"
at their facility.

Behind the straight arrow facade, however, I found many ICRS members are
closet radicals, iconoclasts, pioneers. Some of them even smoke marijuana!
They are a small cabal, interested in constituents of a plant that has been
slandered and persecuted for 70 years. They have heard drug czars and other
prohibitionists describe cannabis as an evil weed with no medical efficacy.
They have seen pharmaceutical companies and doctors, who had cannabis
extracts in their pharmacopoeia as recently as the 1970's, gradually move
away from cannabinoids in favor of totally artificial drugs.

Now, ICRS members are feeling vindicated, as more and more scientists and
capitalists are acknowledging that cannabinoids, even derived from raw
plant materials, are a fascinating, useful and potentially profitable
source of substances with an almost infinite variety of medical and
research applications.

It's been a long road. Cannabinoid research began in the 1940's, when an
American isolated CBD, CBN and THC from plant materials. The next big
breakthrough was courtesy of Dr Mechoulam's lab in Israel in 1964, where
Mechoulam first detailed the exact chemical structure of THC.

In the 1970's and 80's, pharmaceutical companies and researchers
concentrated on creating synthetic substances that mimicked cannabinoids,
but the most important discovery came in 1988 when Allyn Howlett and Bill
Devane discovered the existence of cannabinoid receptors in the brain. In
1992, Devane was again instrumental in another big breakthrough: he and
Mechoulam discovered that the body manufactures its own endogenous
cannabinoid, arachidonylehtnaolamide, which they dubbed anandamide, from
the Sanskrit word for bliss.

By the mid-90's, researchers had cloned cannabinoid receptors, designed
substances that prevent cannabinoids from acting on receptors, and
established that cannabinoids and the cannabinoid systems influence
virtually every major neurotransmitter function in the body. From mood to
muscle tone, from anxiety to appetite, cannabinoid systems are integral to
an organism's core functions.

According to Dr Richard Musty, cannabinoid scientists began networking in
the 1970's. In the mid-80's, Musty got together with two other
cannabinoidists to plan a formal conference in Melbourne, Australia which
took place in 1987. Later, the widely respected Virginia-based scientist,
Dr Billy Martin, formed the International Cannabinoid Study Group, which
met in Virginia and more exotic locales, like Crete.

In 1991, Martin, Musty and a few other dedicated networkers chartered the
ICRS; by 1992, the organization was growing in stature. It has increased
its membership every year since 1991, and has had yearly conferences in
Cape Cod, Acapulco, France, Montreal, and other beautiful locations.

The Politics of Science

Much of this year's ICRS conference consisted of oral presentations in a
large darkened meeting room. Every afternoon, however, researchers
conducted "poster sessions" during which posters were pinned on mobile
walls in the hallways, with research authors explaining or arguing about
what they had studied.

About 60% of what I heard at these sessions was too technical for me. My
lack of comprehension was compounded by the fact that whenever I joined an
audience containing NIDA reps at a poster session, the NIDAites would
quickly move away. I wondered if I had bad breath. When I confided my fears
to a senior scientist, he said, "Have you noticed that you are the only
journalist here? This group isn't very eager for publicity."

Some researchers were kind enough to tell me what they were talking about.
Emmanuel Onaivi, a Vanderbilt University researcher and African national
who is also affiliated with NIDA, said his research indicates that genetic
differences based on ethnicity might create different types of CB1 receptors.

"The expression of the receptors, which is gene-modulated, has mutated
among different groups," he said. "There may be differences in how one
group's receptors react to cannabinoids. These differences might explain
why some people are more prone to abuse than others, or why different
people experience cannabinoids in idiosyncratic ways."

A few posters away, a handsome 27-year-old doctoral candidate named Jason
Schechter told a group of people what he does to rats.

"We inject substances into rats that create two acute pain states," he
explained. "One state makes normally painful stimuli even more painful.
Another state, called allodynia, makes skin so sensitive that in humans
people cannot even wear clothing. I administered HU210, a cannabinoid
agonist that is 500 times more potent than THC. It completely got rid of
both these conditions. Dr Gabriel Nahas [the infamous anti-marijuana
scientist] says cannabinoids have no pain-relieving effects. But I had a
discourse with him about this, and he had little to challenge me with."

Publicity Shy

Many people looked forward to the Friday lunch session because NIDA head
Alan Leshner was scheduled to speak.

Leshner and NIDA are controversial. Cannabinoid researchers take NIDA's
money, but many wish they didn't have to. Privately, some admitted that
NIDA money automatically skews research proposals and outcomes. Dr Donald
Abrams, a San Francisco AIDS researcher who recently completed a clinical
trial involving cannabis, makes no attempt to hide his opinion that NIDA
interferes with expedient approval and facilitation of marijuana research.

When Leshner strolled into the hallway toward the main conference room, he
was surrounded by well-wishers, but was also met by Dr Tod Mikuriya, the
courageous California pot doctor who has been recommending marijuana to
patients for 20 years. Mikuriya tried to engage Leshner in a dialogue about
compassion, science and law enforcement. Leshner stood mutely with a smile
frozen on his face.

During Leshner's 40-minute speech, it became apparent why he'd shut
Mikuriya down. The NIDA head, a former acting director of the National
Institute of Mental Health who has studied the biological basis for human
behavior, stunned us by reciting reefer madness propaganda.

In regards to medical marijuana, he intoned that NIDA was going to "replace
anecdote with science." He also claimed marijuana was addictive, and then
moved on to what really seemed to excite him: NIDA's new public school
propaganda package, in which children are lied to about marijuana under the
guise of a program designed to encourage them to enjoy science!

When I tried to take a picture of Leshner, he barked at me to stop.

As he made his way out of the building after his speech, I asked him to
explain his comments about marijuana.

"You really believe marijuana is addictive?" I asked.

"Of course it is, no doubt about it, absolutely," he responded, trying to
move past me.

"What evidence do you have to support that?"

"Look," he said, side-stepping so he could get out the door, "I've had to
answer these questions 20,000 times. I don't need to answer you. I'm tired
of these questions. Look at our website. Goodbye."

A Jones for Real Bud

As the conference drew to a close, OCBC's Jeff Jones pulled off a major coup.

To my knowledge, all the other presenters had been scientists or doctoral
candidates. Somehow, Jones, who has no advanced degree or science
background, got permission to give one of the last presentations of the
conference.

He was dressed in a suit as he strode to the front of the packed meeting
room. Only one other researcher, from Holland, ironically, was on deck, and
then it was on to the closing banquet.

Jones carried a small wooden case with him. He opened it and produced an
odd contraption: a high-tech vaporizer, powered by a heat gun. Jones had
demonstrated it in Rosenthal's room. It was definitely a harm reduction
device that eliminated particulates and tars the government seems so
worried about, while allowing a healthy cannabinoid profile to shine through.

Announcing himself as the director of a medical marijuana club, Jones
demonstrated the device the best he could, although the bowl was empty.

Midway through his presentation, several female NIDA bureaucrats got up
loudly from their chairs near the front of the room, gathered their
belongings, and stormed out.

Dr Mikuriya, who earlier that afternoon made his own presentation, during
which he shocked the audience by saying marijuana's status should be reset
to the way it was before 1937, urged me to ask the women what they objected to.

The trio were talking in hushed, disparaging tones when I approached them.
When they saw me coming, they covered their nametags and said they didn't
want to talk to me.

"Did you have some objection to Mr Jones's device?" I asked.

"We don't have to talk to you," a portly woman said. "We're government
employees. Get away."

Reflecting on the incident later, Jones pretty much summed up how I felt
about the entire conference.

"There are obviously a lot of talented, dedicated and sharp people here,"
he said. "Almost all of them were cool, open-minded and professional. I was
impressed by how much they know and how creative they are in their
research. But there's a disconnect between what they know and what I know.
NIDA is hung up on the abuse angle. They don't realize or care that people
all over the world enjoy the plant and use it to make them feel better. My
clients don't need somebody to tell them which receptor site mediates that
feeling. I think ICRS should put the cannabis back into cannabinoids."