POTSHOT #19: Chapter 48: Farben Has Their Eye On Legal Pot Too

The first Farben-linked company to study cannabis was Hoffmann-LaRoche - back in 1913 (321)

In 1943, Dr. H. E. Warmke began research to create "Drugless hemp." He worked at Rockefeller's Cold Spring Harbor laboratory. (322)

The August-September 1946 edition of "Ciba Symposia" - the trade magazine of Ciba pharmaceuticals - was entirely devoted to hashish. (323)

The cover for this magazine is found at the start of this show:
http://www.pot-tv.net/archive/shows/pottvshowse-1994.html

This must have been printed immediately after the end of WW2. Why 1946? Was it a good deed to make-up for all the years of death and destruction?

For whatever reason it was printed, the cover of the magazine is quite positive, suggesting some of cannabis's pleasurable and inspirational effects. Depicted is a plant and a hookah, and from the smoke of the hookah comes music, peacock feathers, naked dancing women, the sea, the mountains and the cosmos.

Naked ... dancing ... women. See? They know exactly what cannabis is all about - fun, joy, appreciation, sensuality, social activity and inspiration.

Big chemical has known cannabis to be effective for a variety of illnesses for a very long time. They are also aware of cannabis's safety. The following quote is from the 1987 edition of the Merck Manual;

"Marijuana used in the USA has a higher THC content than in the past. Many critics have incorporated this fact into warnings, but the chief opposition to the drug rests on a moral and political, and not a toxicological, foundation." (324)

Compare that statement with the recent one (325) from the White House;

"The Bush administration now claims that marijuana poses a greater risk to health than any other drug."

President George W. Bush smells fresh skunk with Ralph Waycott, volunteer coordinator of the Rancho Sierra Vista Nursery, during a tour of the Santa Monica Mountains National Marijuana Fields in Thousand Oaks, Calif., August 15, 2003.

Of course, he must be talking about the health of the Big Chem monopolies, otherwise that statement makes no sense at all.

After harvesting several tonnes of genetically engineered Novartis maize with the full support of French farmers, Greenpeace returned the sample to Novartis headquarters in Switzerland.
Novartis, the Swiss side of I.G. Farben, (326) has a website with "health information," some of it mentioning the various clinical trials being done with dronabonal (synthetic cannabis-like medicine) at the Mayo Clinic (327), the University of Arizona (328), and in the UK (329) The problem with judging the whole plant medicine by observing the effects of isolated synthetic cannabinoids are many. The whole plant provides "complementary cannabinoids" that balance each other out - that just doesn't exist in the synthetics. (330)