wider reforms, watched as suppliers diverted their medical product in bulk to the new recreational market rather than in hundreds of smaller deals to medical patients. This combined with a confusing, bottlenecked distribution and retail system has meant that many medical patients have moved back to the black mar-ket to find product that meets their needs. The endocannabinoid system hoped to corner the Canadian market by throwing millions of dollars of shareholders’ money into massive grow sites. Now, as companies struggle to reach profitability, product development has devolved to one simple factor – how to get people higher, faster. Having worked in the industry since 2014, I spent years trying to set up product innovation strategies that emulated the evolution of herbal medicine manufacturing. It’s not complicated… it required looking beyond THC content and, in-stead, investigating the many medicinal compounds that the cannabis plant makes that are not intoxi-cating. However, this required time and dollars and, as financial pressures began to build and stock markets began to turn negative on the industry, companies shifted focus to the most readily avail-able market – the recreational consumer. One of the main goals of the legislation was to force black market producers out of business by supplying a regulated supply of cannabis. Now, in 2022, the black market is still vibrant while canna-bis stocks have crashed, medical patients say they can’t get hold of essential medicines, and thousands of jobs have been lost. In a stinging irony, medical patients – the very people whose decades of activism had driven the www.Cndoctor.ca The body has multiple systems that help regulate and maintain normal housekeeping – nervous, cir-culatory, immune, endocrine, and gastrointestinal systems, to name a few. These systems not only modulate different tissues and organs to function properly, but also facilitate communications both within the system and with other systems. As recent as the 1990s, another system was iden-tified and termed the Endocannabinoid System. It also helps with communication, and it prepares the body against attack by a variety of harmful insults: stress, carcinogens, pain, inflammation, infections, UV damage, etc. Initially the definition was confined to what was referred to as the endocannabinoids (ECs), that being two molecules – arachidonoyleth-anolamide or anandamide (AEA) and 2-arachi-donoylgycerol (2-AG) – produced by the body which acts on the two cannabinoid receptors (CB1 and CB2) located throughout the body (mainly the central nervous system and immune system, respec-tively). The enzymes that help in the synthesis and breakdown of ECs, FAAH and MAGL, were in-cluded as part of the system. In comparison to classical neurotransmitter sys-tems, the EC system possesses several unusual properties from which its key role in the control of nociception is derived. Perhaps the most important of these features is the positioning of the EC signal-ling machinery at neuronal synapses in pain process-ing pathways. ECs are predominantly retrograde neurotransmit-ters, synthesized in the postsynaptic cell and released into the synapse to travel across and interact with receptors on the presynaptic cell resulting in an in-hibition of neurotransmitter release. Since ECs are not stored in vesicles prior to release, but instead are produced through activity-driven “on demand” synthesis following strong neuronal activation and/ or activation of receptors, their signalling is uniquely positioned to act as a brake on neuronal signalling in response to high activity. In pain pathways, this manifests as antinociception or analgesia. Additionally, in contrast to the single ligand mul-tiple receptor paradigm present in most classical neurotransmitter systems e.g. glutamate, GABA, 5-HT, etc. the EC system possesses multiple ligands acting at just two major receptors, although the metabolites of these ECs seem to target multiple receptors. May/June 2022 Chiropractic and Naturopathic Doctor 19
Chiropractic + Naturopathic Doctor June 2022: Page 19
