Marta Veenhof’s Reviews > Super-Charged: How Outlaws, Hippies, and Scientists Reinvented Marijuana > Status Update

The San Francisco Medical Cannabis Cup, is a celebration of all things cannabis. This event competes with Hempcon, the Kush Expo, the Colorado Cannabis Convention, THC Expose, and the International Cannabis and Hemp Expo, to name a few. Like many of these events, the San Francisco Medical Cannabis Cup is part trade show, part conference, and part pot smoker's paradise.

Some have told me that GW is the Monsanto of cannabis. They fear that it will monopolize the plant, tie up strains with legal barriers, making it illegal for others to grow their high-THC and high-CBD strains. They worry that the company plans to take medical marijuana away from the decentralized network of underground growers and breeders and place it firmly in the hands of a publicly traded pharmaceutical company.

Activists have used studies by GW to bolster their own claims for marijuana's effectiveness. And GW is not pleased. The company has asked organizations to stop quoting its studies. There is no relationship between a joint and Sativex. "I can see why there are connections but there is a very different process we go through. The whole point of modern medicine has been to try to safeguard patients."

Those cannabinoids are then extracted under high pressure using liquid carbon dioxide. GW actually uses a machine that once made extracts from hops - the cannabis plant's nearest relative. What results is a dark viscous liquid of very concentrated THC or CBD - about 70% pure. That liquid is then refined. At the end the extracts are combined with ethanol, propylene glycol, & peppermint oil to help mask the bitterness.

Once the cannabis is dried and the stems are removed, the leaves and buds are packed up into boxes and moved across the parking lot to another single-story brick building where it is processed into Sativex. THC and CND strains are kept separate until the very end of the process. The marijuana is minced into a fine powder and then heated to activate the cannabinoids.

GW grows its marijuana in a large, high-ceiling greenhouse. (...) The plants here are grown in soil and GW does not use pesticides. Instead it uses eight types of insects that are benign to the cannabis plants to control the population of pests that infest and feed on cannabis, an approach called integrated pest management.

However, the company (GW Pharmaceuticals) was never able to breed a plant with equally high levels of both compounds. SO Sativex is made from extracts from two different strains, one high in THC and one high in CBD.

... where it turns dried cannabis into its siblingual spray, Sativex. As of the end of 2011 the drug was approved to treate muscle spasms associated with MS in Canada, the UK, Spain, Denmark, Germany, and New Zealand, and cancer pain in Canada. Sativex's main active ingredients are THC and CBD - about a one-to-one mix of the two cannabinoids.

In 2002, Ringo began trying to breed a strain of marijuana that would help him with his chronic back pain. He began with a Sour Diesel (...) crossed with Ferrari (...) then crossed that plant with his Sour Diesel pollen. "It turned into something else completely. You smoke it and you can never get high on this shit, but you feel great, really centered." It did wonders for his back.