Medicine
Cannabis has been known as a medicine for at least 7,500 years.
Due to the unfortunate demonization of hemp in general, cannabis as a medicine has fallen into disrepute quite unjustly.
Various industries had and still have a vested interest in hemp being subject to a ban.
This is particularly evident in medicine and is directly perceptible to all of us.
We should know that all medicine originally emerged from naturopathy, i.e. it is mainly based on the knowledge of the effectiveness of plants and substances from nature.
When the production of medicines shifted from the small rooms and laboratories of healers, doctors and pharmacists into the hands of companies that can make profits from the production of medicines on a large scale, a sinister dynamic began.
Companies began to register trademark rights to medicines. Particularly profitable are pills and solutions that can be chemically produced and patented cheaply and, above all, are not found in nature ready for use, so that they have to be bought at high prices in pharmacies.
One example of this is the well-known and effective cancer drug Taxol. Originally found in nature as an extract from the bark of the yew tree, Taxol is now produced chemically at a cost of less than €1 per dose. A dose of Taxol is now sold for almost €700. These almost fantastic profit margins for the drugs produced in this way ensure that the pharmaceutical manufacturers have bulging coffers, with the help of which they have been able over many decades to evade all state and other regulatory bodies such as the WHO, the European Commission, the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, the medical associations and even the German Pharmaceutical Industry Association,
medical associations and even pharmacy journals.
Doctors are invited to lavish "seminars" in luxury hotels, often with partners; the approval of generic drugs (drugs that have the same effect but are cheaper) is delayed; governments stockpile hundreds of millions in vaccines for epidemics that have not occurred.
The years 2005 ("bird flu") and 2009 ("swine flu") deserve special mention here - both alleged pandemics that did not take place at the time.
It is therefore not in the interests of pharmaceutical manufacturers for people to continue to self-medicate or to start using easily accessible substances from the hemp plant.
This is the reason for the fierce opposition to the legalization of cannabis.
In this context, it is worth remembering that to date there has not been a single death caused by cannabis!
However, it is estimated that in Germany alone, around 60,000 people die every year from the fatal side effects of drugs. In comparison, the approximately 2,500 traffic fatalities in Germany in 2022 seem almost negligible. Even employees of the pharmaceutical industry admit: "We have to assume that 25,000 patients die every year in Germany from adverse drug reactions and that there are 500,000 serious adverse drug reactions.
The remarkable thing is that half of these side effects are preventable." However, the German Medical Association admits "only" 8,000 cases. Why only? The answer to this is almost self-explanatory when you realize how much these alleged control bodies are already forced and dependent on the pharmaceutical manufacturers.
It is not much different in the USA. There have been and still are no deaths due to cannabis use.
The US has a very different problem: according to the CDC, almost 841,000 people died from drug overdoses between 1999 and March 2021. Between July 2021 and June 2022, more than 107,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States. Most of them were addicted to painkillers that had previously been prescribed to them.
More recently, synthetic fentanyl, which is cheap to produce and highly effective, has played a central role in the crisis, displacing other more expensive and harder-to-obtain substances such as heroin, which is about 50 times weaker. During the opioid epidemic, fentanyl intoxication became the leading cause of death among Americans between the ages of 18 and 45.
The death toll from this epidemic far surpassed that of the crack cocaine epidemic in the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s. So we see that the pharmaceutical industry has its priorities wrong.
Instead of conducting research (also and especially in the area of cannabis use) to help people effectively and with few side effects, it is still primarily concerned with maximizing profits at the expense of patients' health. This may be an inherent problem of capitalism, but it should be curbed by supervisory and regulatory authorities. However, this is currently failing due to their dependence on and infiltration by the pharmaceutical industry.
Growing your own cannabis can make you independent of pharmaceutical companies to a certain extent!