Law & Politics

Wealthy Family Donates Over $30 Million to Cannabis Research, Source: http://www.dearjohn.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/University-of-Sydney.jpgA very wealthy family from Australia donated a cool 33.7 million dollars to the University of Sydney. This money, dubbed the Lambert Initiative, is to be expressly used for cannabis research.

Barry and Joy Lambert, the philanthropists responsible for the Lambert Initiative, made their fortune in financial management. Their granddaughter, Katelyn, once suffered from intense epileptic seizures. Like many who exhausted all traditional medical approaches to treatment, Katelyn’s parents sought out cannabis-based applications after hearing of the success stories of other children.

Joy said of Katelyn’s use of cannabis-treatment, “When you get to the end of the road you try desperate measures. I never imagined she would be able to go to preschool.”

These are people with unlimited resources, presumably with access to the top medical minds and technologies and even they resorted to the black market to get what they needed for Katelyn. How many loving parents have to risk criminal records to get medicine for their children before world leaders say enough is enough?

Desperate parents are becoming the new poster-children for the war on cannabis. It makes me think of some post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie where people are at war over the few precious stores of potable water. Would a parent stealing a bottle of water to keep their child alive land them in a prison cell or worse?

Wealthy Family Donates Over $30 Million to Cannabis Research, Source: https://s3.amazonaws.com/cdn.inside.com/slide/557b473369702d668dd80700/medium/medium_image-557b473369702d668dd80700-coalesced

Barry & Joy Lambert

The idea behind the donation is to bring some unity to the university’s cannabis research. It aims to bring the three top researchers (who believe that cannabis holds the potential to be medicine’s next great discovery) together under one grant.

Premier Mike Baird said of cannabis research, “This is something that is going to reverberate around the world. We are now leading this country and, in many respects, the world.”

They are certainly ahead of the game in comparison to the United States. Perhaps a bruised national ego will be the catalyst that brings the United States up to par with Israel and, now, Australia, in government sanctioned cannabis exploration. Will the competitive American spirit and the drive to be the best finally be the last silver coin needed to shift the scale and reschedule cannabis? It certainly can’t hurt the chances.

We need this revolution so that we can stop considering cannabis-therapy a “desperate measure.” The term “desperate measure” implies that the risk is worth the reward. The only risk I can imagine in giving epileptic children non-psychoactive CBD drops is that it might not work. There aren’t likely going to be side effects nor are you endangering your child with the application (CBD oil can be harmlessly mixed with applesauce, juice, bananas, etc. and safely administered to the child).

What makes cannabis-therapy a “desperate measure” is the legally illicit status it holds. As is common with cannabis, there are exceptionally few problems to health or safety from the substance itself, but the laws that govern it can be highly detrimental to your life.