In the early 1960s, a young postdoctoral student came across something that puzzled him.
After reading information about cannabis, he was surprised to see that while the active component in morphine had been extracted from opium plants 100 years ago and cocaine was extracted from coca leaves at about the same time, the active component of marijuana was still unknown.
This simple observation launched his life’s work.
The young Israeli researcher, Raphael Mechoulam, is now a scientist who has received many awards and was recently nominated for the prestigious Rothschild Award. However, more than 50 years ago, he had some problems early in his scientific career.
First of all, he needed cannabis to study it and didn’t know how to get it. Eventually, he got what he needed for the investigation from his friends in the police department. The young scientist was in a hurry and had no time to deal with all the bureaucracy required by Israel’s health ministry.
“Yes, I broke the law,” he said when I met him in Tel Aviv last year, “but I apologized and explained what I was trying to do.”
It is good that the Israeli government did not want to stop its advance, because Mechoulam was advancing at breakneck speed.
By 1963, he determined the structure of cannabidiol (CBD), an important component of marijuana. A year later, he became the first person to extract delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Over the course of the following decades, Mechoulam and his team continued to extract numerous components from the cannabis plant.
His work also progressed in such a way that it clarified the way the drug works in the brain. When Mechoulam’s team identified the first known endogenous cannabinoid, a chemical actually made by the brain itself, they named it “anandamide.” In Sanskrit, ananda means “supreme happiness,” which gives us some insight into what Mechoulam thinks of cannabis in general.
It was in the middle of our long discussion in the afternoon that Mechoulam, who is now 83 years old, pulled out a paper he had written in 1999, describing something known as “the cumulative effect.”
Think of it this way: There are over 480 natural components in the cannabis plant, of which 66 have been classified as “cannabinoids”. These are unique plant chemicals, including delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol. However, there are many more, including:
- cannabigerol (CBG)
canabichromene (CBC)
other types of cannabidiol (CBD)
other types of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)
cannabinol (CBN) and cannabinodiol (CBDL)
other cannabinoids [such as cannabicyclol (CBL), cannabielsoin (CBE), cannabitriol (CBT) and other various types].
Other components of the cannabis plant are: nitrogenous compounds (27 are known), amino acids (18), proteins (3), glycoproteins (6), enzymes (2), sugars and related components (34), hydrocarbons (50), simple alcohols (7), aldehydes (13), ketones (13), simple acids (21), fatty acids (22), simple esters (12), lactones (1), steroids (11), terpenes (120), phenols non-cannabinoids (25), flavonoids (21), vitamins (1), pigments (2) and other elements (9).
This is an important point. Mechhoulam, along with many others, said he believes that all of these components of the cannabis plant probably exert some therapeutic effect, more than any individual component.
While science has not yet revealed the exact role or mechanism for all of these various components, there is more evidence that these components work better together than in isolation: that is the “cumulative effect.”
Take the example of Marinol, which is pure, synthetic THC. When the drug went on sale in the mid-1980s, scientists thought it would have the same effect as the cannabis plant. But it soon became clear that most patients preferred to smoke marijuana instead of taking Marinol.
The researchers began to understand that other components, such as CBD, could play a bigger role than they had previously believed.
To better understand the concept of the cumulative effect, I traveled to the secret laboratories of GW Pharmaceuticals, outside London. In developing Sativex, a cannabis-based medication to treat multiple sclerosis, the company’s president, Dr. Geoffrey Guy, told me that the company had encountered some of the same obstacles that Marinol faced.
More than a decade of experiments revealed that the extract of an entire plant, which contained roughly the same amounts of THC and CBD in addition to the other components in the plant, was more effective in reducing the pain and spasms of multiple sclerosis, than a medicine made from a single component.
It could be that multiple individual components play a role, or it could be due to their interaction in the body; It could also be a combination of both, Guy said.
Now maybe all this sounds obvious. After all, eating real fruits, vegetables, and other plants gives us better nutrition than just taking vitamin pills with a nutrient or mineral contained in each one. Science shows us that we can probably say the same about cannabis.
As we move forward in creating medicines, such as Charlotte’s web, for patients who can benefit from cannabis, this is an important point to keep in mind.
Unlike other drugs that can work as a single compound, synthesized in a laboratory, cannabis can offer the most complete benefits as a whole plant, if we let the cumulative effect flourish, as Mechoulam suggested over a decade ago.