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PHILANTHROPY FUNDS CANNABIS ALZHEIMER’S STUDY
Funding research in spite of the government.
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A voluntary society works without the violence of the state. This is beautiful. That $2 gummy would be about $0.02 in a voluntary market. – VP
Greg Spier doesn’t remember his father ever talking about his experiences during the Holocaust. But after developing Alzheimer’s disease, the suppressed trauma from the concentration camps resurfaced to torment him. And the son could only stand by, helplessly, watching his father wracked by anxiety and sleeplessness that no medication his doctors came up with could relieve.
After all else failed, a cannabis gummy, smuggled in by a family member, finally gave the elder Spier a reprieve from his suffering. The effects were immediate and notable. As Spier recalls, his father became calm, slept well and the next day was more relaxed and lucid than he had been for months.
It is difficult not to be moved when you witness someone close to you benefits so profoundly from cannabis medicine. And such stories abound, filling the statistically useless pool of anecdotal evidence. But some individuals are able to leverage their positive cannabis encounter in a meaningful way. And Greg Spier is one of them.
Motivated by the experience of the family patriarch, the Spier Family Foundation recently decided to fund a study on cannabis as a treatment for Alzheimers disease.
“Comparing the special cocktail of drugs they came up with for my father – that actually made things worse – to a $2 cannabis gummy bear, it’s kind of a no-brainer”
The federal government’s draconian restrictions on cannabis research have limited evidence-based findings to a trickle. But pressure is mounting for this to change. In a recent op-ed piece, Reps. Earl L. Carter (R-FL) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) take the government to task for obstructing that research. “In 2019, we believe there should be more medical options available outside of traditional therapies, and it’s troubling that the federal government is standing in the way of research to clearly determine the health benefits of cannabis. Cannabis could be a life-changing miracle for some patients, and we need the research to prove so, or to let patients know that they need to pursue a different treatment.”
In the meantime, charitable giving, like the recent, major gift by cannabis investor Bob Broderick, is stepping in to fill the gap.
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