Thanks RedBeard - you classy.glassy dude!
38•TreatingYourself• Issue 37, 2012
Dear Treating Yourself:
I am writing to you for two very good reasons, the first being a gigantic thank you for the best magazine out there for all level headed cannabis lovers. The second rea-son is in response to an article you published in issue 35-2012, Opium Made Easy By Dr.Z. We were very happy to see some positive light being shed on another won-derful medicine plant for our use. Just as the wonwon-derful cannabis plant. I've loved, admired, grown and used them both since the mid 70's and will continue to do so until I die. I must admit that in the beginning it was a defiance and antiestablish-ment thing but for the past couple of decades it's been all about the medicine.
My wife and I are both physically disabled. I have COPD and a very painful case of arthritis in my back. My wife suffers from a severe case of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a rare genetic disorder that causes all of her connective tissues to be defective causing severe pain in her entire body and frequent joint dislocations daily. We both take a long list of medications for some relief but we both believe that the cannabis and the poppy plant provide much better pain relief with zero negative side affects. And for this reason I would like to elaborate just a bit on Dr.Z's article and provide your readers with a very nice and easy way to use the wonderful poppy.
Opium is described as: The latex that is gathered from the scarred poppy seed pod. Which, by the way, is the least productive method as well as being the most legally dangerous, especially for the small home gardener. We find the most productive and safest way to get your O is to go a step beyond the tea
as described by Dr.Z and end up with what's known as poppy extract.
For those of you who aren't in a position to grow your own or are just afraid of your poppies being noticed by a nosey neighborhood snitch, don't despair. You can easily find poppy pods on the Internet.
I would also like to suggest to any of your interested readers what I consider to be the best book ever written on the subject. Opium For The Masses/Harvesting Nature's Best Pain Medication By Jim Hogshire. A must have for all home growing and medical users of nature's best.
I thank you very much for your time and I can only hope you'll allow me to share this wonderful information with your readers.
Thank You, The Mad Scientist
RECIPE
Harvest your poppies when ripe, and leave a few of your best plants for next years seed. Harvest your plants, stems, leaves and pods, and chop them up like a fine salad. Put this salad in a blender, 2 or 3 cups at a time. Chop this as fine as you can in the blender. Bring about three cups of water with a quater teaspoon of lemon juice or apple cider vinegar to a hard boil. Remove from the heat and pour in your blended product and let steep for about 20 minutes, stirring often. Strain this tea through a T-shirt like cotton cloth and a screen strainer into a 9 x 13 glass bak-ing dish. Set this liquid in front of a lite fan, check and scrape the sides from time to time keepbak-ing the distillate togeth-er. Conditions dependent, in about a day or so you should end up with several grams of a thick, black, gooey, tar-like substance, poppy extract.
An excellent home made pain medicine and it also is very good for a restful night's sleep. You'll have to find your own dose, but a 1/4'' to a 5/16'' ball of your hardened extract should do the trick. You can also get a second and third run (just use half the amount of water with the leftover poppy grounds), a little less product from these runs, but the product is just as good as the first.
40•TreatingYourself• Issue 37, 2012
September 14, 2012 |
Imagine there existed a natural, non-toxic substance that halted diabetes, fought cancer, and reduced psychotic tendencies in patients with schizophrenia and other psy-chiatric disorders. You don’t have to imagine; such a sub-stance is already here. It’s called cannabidiol (CBD). The only problem with it is that it’s illegal.
Cannabidiol is one of dozens of unique, organic com-pounds in the cannabis plant known as cannabinoids, many of which possess documented, and in some cases, prolific therapeutic properties. Other cannabinoids include cannabinol (CBN), cannabichromene (CBC), cannabigerol (CBG), and tetrahydrocannabivarin (THCV). Unlike delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive cannabinoid in marijuana, con-suming these plant compounds will not get you high.
Nonetheless, under federal law, each and every one of these cannabinoids is defined as schedule I illicit sub-stances because they naturally occur in the marijuana plant.
That’s right. In the eyes of the US government, these non-psychotropic cannabinoids are as dangerous to consume as heroin and they possess absolutely no therapeutic util-ity. In the eyes of many scientists, however, these cannabi-noids may offer a safe and effective way to combat some of the world’s most severe and hard-to-treat medical con-ditions. Here’s a closer look at some of these promising, yet illegal, plant compounds.
Cannabidiol
After THC, CBD is by far the most studied plant cannabinoid. First identi-fied in 1940 (though its specific chemical structure was not identified until 1963), many researchers now describe CBD as quite possibly the most single important cannabinoid in the marijuana plant. That is because CBD is the cannabinoid that arguably possesses the greatest therapeutic potential.
A key word search on the search engine PubMed Central, the U.S. government repository for peer-reviewed scientif-ic research, reveals over 1,000 papers pertaining to CBD – with scientists’ interest in the plant compound increasing exponentially in recent years. It’s easy to understand why.
A cursory review of the literature indicates that CBD holds the potential to treat dozens of serious and life-threatening conditions.
“Studies have suggested a wide range of possible thera-peutic effects of cannabidiol on several conditions, includ-ing Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral ischemia, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, other inflamma-tory diseases, nausea and cancer.” That was the conclu-sion [3] of researcher Antonio Zuardi, writing about CBD in the Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry in 2008. A 2009 lit-erature review [4] published by a team of Italian and