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The Wolves of Wall Street may have paved their way to success and ultimately, a federal penitentiary by snorting copious amounts of cocaine and gang banging high-end prostitutes while running penny stock scams on blue-collar America, but these cash carnivores are preparing to sink their teeth into a new kind of green these days – legal marijuana.
Dean Petkanas, who over twenty years ago was the chief financial officers for Stratton Oakmont, the stock-slinging organization led by Jordon Belfort that gained mainstream notoriety with Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of the book “The Wolf of Wall Street,” was recently awarded an exclusive patent by the United States government to put cannabis-based medication into the mainstream.
KannaLife Sciences, Inc., which was founded by Petkanas, signed a contract with the National Institutes of Health in early August that will allow the company to manufacture marijuana-related products under U.S. Patent 6,630,507, “Cannabinoids as Antioxidants and Neuroprotectants,” also known as the “‘507 Patent.” Interestingly, this license deal will allow KannaLife to develop cannabis-based drugs to be approved by the FDA and marketed as a treatment for brain injuries.
“We have committed ourselves towards researching and developing cannabinoid based therapeutics that can provide for preventative, curative and quality of life improvement for patients suffering with rare forms of encephalopathy. We can now focus our efforts on CTE alongside Hepatic Encephalopathy (HE) as our early pre-clinical work on HE is pointing towards advanced neuroprotection. We hope our early efforts on CTE will meet the same level of success as our on-going research and development regarding HE,” according to a company press release.
However, while statewide legislation for medicinal cannabis often allows patients to smoke marijuana, KannaLife will only create edibles and candies because apparently Uncle Sam is not interested in issuing patents to companies that want to sell smokeable marijuana. In some states, like New York and Minnesota, the medical marijuana laws strictly prohibit patients from smoking their medicine, which some pot proponents believe is how the government will eventually decide to legalize medicinal cannabis nationwide.
Since 2003, the National Institute of Health has held the patent on cannabinoids, which is somewhat confusing considering the feds still consider marijuana a Schedule I dangerous substance with no medicinal value. Yet, while the government agency has bogarted the patent for over the past decade, they finally decided to put it to use by granting exclusive rights to KannaLife – the soon to be Big Pharma of marijuana.
Of course, while some marijuana advocates will praise this illusion of progress, many others remain concerned that these types of dealings will lead to no good. “We find it hypocritical and incredible that on the one hand, the U.S. Department of Justice is persecuting medical cannabis patient associations, asserting that the federal government regards marijuana as having absolutely no medical value, despite overwhelming clinical evidence,” James Shaw, with The Union of Medical Marijuana Patients, said in a 2011 statement. “On the other hand, the Department of Health and Human Services is planning to grant patent rights with possible worldwide application to develop medicines based on cannabis.”
Ultimately, this could be how Uncle Sam intends to legalize medical marijuana on a federal level, which could eliminate the dispensary as we know it and put medicinal cannabis solely in the hands of the pharmacies.
Mike Adams writes for stoners and smut enthusiasts in High Times, Playboy’s The Smoking Jacket and Hustler Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @adamssoup and on Facebook/mikeadams73.
