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Scientists found a cannabis compound that relieves pain without the high
(www.sciencedaily.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm going to run with a little cynicism.
I live somewhere where cannabis is not legal. There's pressure, sure, but there's resistance too.
One of the factors that helped it legalized in western countries like Canada and the US is the notion of health. Pain relief. Treatment for some chronic illnesses.
That's cool. But imagine a pharmaceutical company isolates those health things.
No need to legalized cannabis anymore.
This stuff supports the anti-lefalisation movement by taking the benefits from it.
Damned if we want to use if recreationally.
What do you think happened to cocaine and heroine? Hell, alcohol some places.
What happened to them? I really don't know the history behind these hard drugs.
They started as medicines and were concentrated, distilled, and extracted to the point where the medicine it became was deadlier than the cure it provided.
Coca leaves are still consumed medicinally/recreationally in some parts of south america.
Poppy seeds have a whole history of being abused and weaponized through the silk road.
Marijuana has faced a similar story, though without the deaths. This hasn't stopped governments around the world from conflating the deaths caused by other things with the use of medicines that in no way cause death.
I have to point out that in medicine we use the derivatives from cocaine, novacaine, lidocaine, benzocaine etc as potent short/medium term anaesthetics. Drugs like these make dental extractions for example relatively painless today. Pure cocaine was used previously but was far more toxic to the liver and had a much higher incidence of allergic reaction than its modern derivatives.