As legal weed looms, barriers to research still standing
published on April 9, 2017 by Kate Allen in thestar.com
After punching a string of numbers into a bolted-down, fireproof, alarm-protected safe — the location of which can’t be divulged for security reasons — Steven Laviolette pulls out a tiny vial. Inside that vial is an even tinier dab of dark tar. The tar is purified THC, the mind-altering compound in marijuana.
The street price for a gram of weed is about $10. A gram of this stuff costs about $2,000, not counting the cost of the researcher’s time acquiring it. Laviolette, a professor in the department of Anatomy and Cell Biology and Psychiatry at Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, studies the effects of marijuana on the brain. His lab is investigating both some of the troubling brain changes associated with THC, and also — a rapidly growing avenue of research — the very different and perhaps protective brain changes associated with cannabidiol, or CBD, another compound found in the plant.
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“Really, science has been stuck for past 80 or 90 years or so, unable to do many of these tests,” says M-J Milloy, a professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia and a research scientist at the B.C. Centre on Substance Use, who studies the effects of cannabis use among people living with HIV/AIDS.
“Hopefully when it is legalized many of those barriers will fall away.”