//http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/11/Respectable_Reefer.html
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Respectable Reefer
By Gary Greenberg
November/December 2005 Issue
IF IT WEREN'T FOR the little photo gallery on the wall, the office where Dr. William Notcutt’s research assistants keep track of their patients would be just like any other cubicle at the James Paget Medical Center in England. As phones ring and stretchers wheel by and these three women go about their business, the snapshotsâ€"Cheryl Phillips, one of Notcutt’s staffers, gently holding an emerald green bud of marijuana; a group of people in lab coats smiling for the camera, sinsemilla towering over their heads; a hangar-sized greenhouse stuffed to the gills with lush pot plantsâ€"are about the only evidence that this hospital in East Anglia is at the epicenter of one of the most extensive medical marijuana research projects in the world. In part, that’s because there’s no actual pot here; by the time it gets to Paget, GW Pharmaceuticals, the British startup that owns the greenhouses, has turned the plants into Sativex, a pure extract of pot that comes in a pharmacy-friendly bottle and is designed to be sprayed into the mouth. And in part it’s because the frivolity is carefully confined to the photos, taken against company policy during a field trip to the secure, undisclosed location where GW grows its weed. After five years, Phillips and her colleagues have grown used to having cannabisâ€"as the British call marijuanaâ€"in their workaday lives. Not only that, but their boss has been on a bit of a campaign to keep things sober. “To get to the perception that this is a medicine,†Notcutt says, “we’ve had to move away from the funnies that relate to the pot world. So no pot jokes.â€
Over a beer at the end of his day, this rumpled, 59-year-old anesthesiologist and contract researcher for GW is positively ebullient about the news that just today the Canadian government approved Sativex, a success he thinks is likely to be repeated soon in England and eventually in the United States. He’ll gladly tell you how important earnestness has been in getting GW to this point, how Sativex owes its success not only to the rigorous science of its successful clinical trials but also to painstaking attention to matters of perception. ..."
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read the rest by clicking on the link. Interesting to catch the shift of attitude as one moves around the planet.
judih
:D -- Great link sis.. Loved that comment "Marihuaniphobia is much greater on your side of the pond"... :P :P ---------- sal
yeah,sal, that's the word that left me no choice - i had to post the link here! and s/he who listens to the word, spreads the word.
j