The cannabinoid which most interests pot connoisseurs, after THC, is cannabidiol or CBD. It isn't formally classed as psychoactive but it alters the action of THc. In Hashish! Rob Clarke suggests that cannabis that's heavy in CBD takes longer to have an effect, and that the high is less euphoric and lasts longer, and that there is less tendency to sleepiness. The simplest way of classifying pot, after generally 'weak' or 'strong', is by the ratio of THC and CBD.
While recreational users are interested in the different highs created by different cannabinoid profiles, Geoffrey Guy wants to discover exactly what impact they have on the body. He has formidable resources in this quest, which he described over the phone, as he didn't think it would be within the spirit of his Home Office licence to let me see them in person.
'The glasshouse was used in a pesticide and fungicide testing programme and it's designed to grow plants in absolutely standard conditions. Therefore we control all aspects: light, daylight length, light intensity, heat, humidity, carbon dioxide ... my botanists say they've been very pleased; we've had a very high yield rate on our cloning. Something near 100 per cent took root. We planted the seeds from Holland in August and we've taken hundreds of clones from those original plants. We're now about to do the analysis on the clones, which are now ten weeks old, so that by the time they get to maturity we'll have a full analytical and chemical breakdown. We've done thousands of analyses.'
A set of photos followed the next day from Geoffrey's PR agency. There was a forest of indoor-grown cannabis, tied to bamboo stakes in big plastic pots in a mixture of soil-free compost and white grains of Perlite. The first-generation plants towered in the background. These looked all wrong as plants intended to produce weed; a visitor to Exodus saw the pictures in a newspaper and said, 'This geezer doesn't know what he's doing.' Seed-grown plants waste time and energy on growing bushy; the modern approach, as advocated by Rob Clarke, is to make cuttings which will turn into compact, high-yielding plants. And in fact in other pictures there were recognizable clones - only a foot high, but with the developed growth habit of mature plants.
It might have been a routine assignment for a High Times photographer, but actually it all looked different. Geoffrey was emphasizing his respectability with a white coat and an expression of intense, almost pained seriousness. And the photos had apparently been taken neither by nor for a cannabis connoisseur. Amsterdam's seed companies go in for shots of engorged fruiting buds of an almost pornographic voluptuousness. But here all the attention was on the plants' familiar multi-fingered leaves which are barely worth smoking. The seeds came from HortaPharm, the Dutch company which, unlike Maripharm, did hold a licence to develop medical strains for a period, before the Dutch Government pulled the plug on this kind of activity, at least for the time being. HortaPharm's Dutch and expatriate American researchers had been after very high levels of THC, but, said Geoffrey Guy, 'Because they had a love and a passion for the botany and the agronomy they equally included all different varieties of cannabis - hundreds or thousands of samples.'
Not everyone is convinced that this kind of effort is worthwhile. One sceptic is Scott Imler of the Los Angeles Cannabis Research Center who simply concentrates on giving patients high-THC marijuana, and who takes a jaded view of the value of cannabis breeding: 'There are a lot of pot growers in California, and I'm sure in Amsterdam, who don't think medical marijuana can exist without them. They're trying to spin marijuana connoisseurship into this notion that different strains produce different therapeutic functions. There's some truth to this theory, but the reason it's being promulgated is to provide work for the breeders rather than to provide relief to patients.'
But Geoffrey Guy believes there is still much to be learned about the Cinderella cannabinoids: the obscure ones which are not psychoactive in themselves but have some other as yet undefined action, or which modify THC in some partly understood way. He argues that there's no point in reinventing THC, since synthesized THC is already a medicine, licensed for AIDS and cancer patients in the United States where it is marketed in gelatine capsules under the trade name Marinol. So an early task was to sift through the thousands of seedlings to find clones naturally high in a single cannabinoid. 'Our programme is to have clone lines whose cannabinoid production will be either exclusively THC or exclusively CBD. Then we've got others which have no THC but which produce high concentrations of CBC, CBG or THCV: those are the other cannabinoids of interest. We'll establish in the clinical trials which are most beneficial for different conditions. We can then go back to our clone library to breed plants which will specifically produce these ratios and use those clones for the mother plant of that line of production. That will also give us very secure plant registration rights.' There are already reasons to be interested in the other cannabinoids. Both THC and CBD look as if they can prevent brain damage after strokes, according to research carried out by the British-born neuropharmacologist Aidan Hampson at the US National Institute of Mental Health lab in Bethesda, Maryland. ') Aidan Hampson explained to me how the brain is harmed in a stroke - which is not, as I'd imagined, mostly through bursting blood vessels doing physical damage. Instead, there is a kind of chain reaction in which dying brain cells, deprived of blood and hence starved of oxygen, spew out their full load of neurotransmitters, including the highly excitatory substance glutinate. 'It's just saying to the neighbouring cells "Fire! fire! fire!",' he explained. The stimulation inflicted on these neighbouring cells far exceeds their fuel supply, and they collapse and die, and in turn release their full complement of glutinate. (The process onlv stops when cells have access to an alternative blood vessel to the one originally damaged.) But the havoc wreaked by a stroke is not caused by the glutinate on its own. Cells which are unexpectedly fired up by this substance need oxygen, which with sugar forms the body's essential fuel. But one effect of trying to find oxygen in a low oxygen environment is to create the highly destructive oxygen based compounds called 'free radicals'. Aidan Hampson likens these to firebrands, or fireships, which destroy all they touch. The urgent need is for anti-oxidants which bind to the free radicals and put them out, to continue the analogy. Vitamins C and E are powerful anti-oxidants, but are of no use in a stroke as they don't cross the blood-brain barrier. But the cannabinoids achieve this with ease, as any pot smoker can testify.
Aidan Hampson's team was only just moving from work using rats' brain cells to seeing whether cannabinoids help live rats recover from simulated strokes. He was some way from publishing this second programme in a scientific journal, but was optimistic that an anti-stroke medicine could be developed which, unlike the main drug in use at present, would offer no risk to a recovering patient.
When Geoffrey Guy put together his written submission to the House of Lords committee in 1998 he listed other properties of the more obscure cannabinoids. He suggested that CBD in isolation might be a sedative and in high doses might also be antiepileptic and anti-psychotic, that CBD, CBG, CBC, CBNA and CBG had pain-relieving properties and that the first four were also anti-bacterial and anti-fungal agents.
To evaluate these properties Geoffrey Guy has created an Aladdin's cave for HortaPharm's botanists, who had been left facing an uncertain future. 'Our success has been very much down to the help from HortaPharm,' he acknowledges. 'If they hadn't existed I'd have had to deal with non-legal entities. As it iS, the plants are grown from stock as part of a research programme by the only people in the world licensed at that time. For them it's the fruition of many years' work.'
The pay-off should come in a variety of ways. GW Pharmaceuticals will have plant breeders' rights in certain strains of proven medical desirability. Even when these strains are highTHC ones they may be more attractive to offer patients than synthetic THC on its own. There is more to cannabis than cannabinoids: one American researcher reports that the plants' essential oils have sedative and painkilling properties and that one in particular called 1.8-cineole enhances the flow of blood through the brain and stimulates brain activity. 6
Part of the problem with Marinol, the synthetic THC, may be that it has to be swallowed. When smoked, cannabinoids go straight into the bloodstream, but when they're eaten they go to the liver, where most of THC gets converted into another substance, 11-hydrm .. Y'- THC, which produces a high that is slower to arrive, but more intense, much longer-lasting and less predictable.I Geoffrey Guy's preferred method is a hand-held inhaler-style propellant which is sprayed under the tongue, which he's convinced should be filled with extracts from real cannabis plants rather than with synthesized single cannabinoids.
This is his real passion. Whole-plant medicines are not the easiest cause to take up in an industry in which licenses are granted on the criteria of consistency, safety and efficacy in that order of priorities. In choosing cannabis, though, he has picked his ground carefully. A synergy has been demonstrated between different cannabinoids. Researchers in the early 1980s administered THc to subjects, made them anxious by getting them to speak in public, then used CBD to calm their nerves.f The CBD worked, not by blocking the effect of the THC, but by a helpful 'antagonism of effects between the two cannabinoids'. Dr Guy sums up his ambition: 'I hone what we will show is cannabis as a template or as an example of the whole-plant approach: that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.'
Geoffrey Guy has created an extraordinary business. If he doesn't lose his shirt he will be in a position to relieve the sick, vindicate his theory about whole-plant medicines and even make a second fortune. The Dutch cannabis seed industry has come to inhabit a more familiar commercial world, though one in which, because of its grey legal status, everyday standards of consumer protection don't necessarily apply.