glasshouse.

Scientists here are testing different strains, processing raw plant matter, and converting

it into potent medicinal extracts.

But this isn't your typical grow house, it's a pharmaceutical research operation

in the U.K. — which as it turns out, is the world's largest supplier of medical

grade cannabis Here, they've developed Epidiolex, a new

medicine containing cannabidiol, a compound derived from cannabis, that's shown potential

to treat severe forms of epilepsy.

It's the first of its kind to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, and

is available to patients in the United States at special pharmacies.

But, cannabis is still a Schedule I drug in the US, meaning it has no medicinal value.

If doctors here want to study it further, they have to walk through a complicated patchwork

of regulations.

And if they make it through the hurdles, once the medicine arrives, it has to be stored

in a roughly 750lb vault that's bolted to the floor and secured with a lock.

But outside a doctor's office, weed seems more accessible than ever.

As it's gotten easier for the average person to go buy cannabis at a dispensary, it's gotten

even harder for scientists to be able to study it.

Cannabis is a controversial and complex plant, with over 100 unique chemicals called cannabinoids.

There's very little that we really understand about a lot of these chemicals.

We understand the effects of two of them, somewhat.

Delta 9 THC which is the chemical that produces the classic cannabis intoxication.

THC in relatively high doses can cause euphoria, hunger, anti nausea properties, anti-pain

properties.

Cannabidiol is very different.

It doesn't produce any intoxication whatsoever yet it has anti inflammatory effects.

It is scientifically interesting because there is a receptor in the brain called the cannabinoid

receptor that binds to these chemicals and produces a whole range of effects.

And this network of receptors are found throughout the brain and body.

So it's really a new frontier in many ways to understand its role in brain development

and regulating mood and food intake and cognition.

It's a complicated plant and just labeling it a medicine as is isn't sufficient.

Society has jumped ahead and is just moving on treating it like it's a medicine in lieu

of this data.

Everybody's taking CBD and ointments and massages and oils and added to their coffee.

We don't know anything about if it's absorbed by these routes of administration.

I have no idea if it actually gets into your bloodstream at any level that would be meaningful.

So it's critically important that we were able to conduct these studies so we can say

what it works for at what concentration, which cannabinoids, and what it doesn't work for.

And right now we're severely hampered in our ability to conduct these studies.

And that goes back to weed's status as a Schedule I drug, a classification that puts

it in the same line as heroin, with no recognized medicinal value in the eyes of the U.S. federal

government.

Meanwhile, states have moved forward to legalize cannabis and patients with severe diseases

are turning to their doctors for answers.

I get patients coming into my clinic asking me all the time, "What do you think of this?"

and "My friend tried it for this and it worked, and my other friend tried it for that," and

it seems to have these magical properties where it seems to work for almost everything.

And physicians and researchers are stuck.

On the one side, we don't have adequate studies that establish the safety and efficacy of

these drugs, but we don't have studies that negate it, either.

The National Academy of Science released a major report that found conclusive evidence that cannabis

can treat chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, and improve nausea symptoms during chemotherapy.

There's moderate and limited evidence for other diseases in the 10,000 abstracts they considered.

Still there's a lot scientists don't know about weed.

But that's not stopping patients from taking matters into their own hands.

Patients really didn't need our permission or our approval to go after these therapies.

And given the desperation that parents face when they have a child with infantile spasms

or other similar disorders, it's understandable that they would be looking outside the box.

There were a few patients who responded to cannabidiol extracts and we didn't have a

better explanation for why and that's what really got us curious.

Self-medicating with cannabis may be able to solve some medical issues, but unknowingly

they could be causing others.

So doctors responded to their patients by launching their own investigations.

The first step that we started upon was to systematically survey parents and we asked

people to bravely describe what they were doing even though it was illegal.

And that's pretty low quality research when you ask clinical scientists out there.

We wanted to go after formal clinical trials, but that's where it got tricky.

All three experts we spoke to are at different stages of their trials, but the hoops they

have to jump through are mostly the same.

The first step is to go to the FDA.

Describe your study.

Explain all the risks and benefits.

It's quite a process.

There really wasn't a lot of literature.

At the end of the day, we did have to make some reasonable guesses to design the study.

And once you get approval from the FDA.

The next step is going to the DEA.

So there is a federal DEA and then each state has its own narcotics control regulatory agency.

In order to be granted a Schedule 1 license, the DEA wants to make sure that you are taking appropriate

precautions to protect and safeguard drugs.

And it seems strange that we need to lock it in a vault, while the same patients that we are

trying to recruit into our studies have the opportunity to get a nearly identical

product in a dispensary one mile from our hospital.

And this entire process could take years.

And I'll be frank, I'm not sure if my funding is going to last before all these regulatory

agencies approve the study so it's enormously frustrating.

We tried to work our way through the red tape and pretty much gave up.

It wasn't until there was a little bit more pharmaceutical development, and that folks

with deeper pockets and more resources were willing to partner with me to run clinical trials.

That seems to be the trend here.

Because the red tape is so thick, pharmaceutical companies can jump in to partner with doctors

on cannabis clinical trials.

They know how to work the system and have the resources to develop cannabis therapies

in the UK and Canada.

It gets more complicated for the public when “some” pharmaceutical companies fight weed

legalization, and then receive approval to

develop synthetic cannabis.

Because another hurdle, can be the weed itself.

With the current DEA regulations, the only way federal researchers can study cannabis

is to study it from one source and that's a farm in Mississippi that the National Institute

of Drug Abuse regulates.

The problem is that there's a huge variety of products that are available online, in

dispensaries, which have had favorable responses associated with them.

There are not reports of kids responding beautifully to NIDA farm products.

If you compare the potency between what doctors receive from NIDA versus what a recreational

user can get at a dispensary, the difference is pretty striking.

And this constant approach where we ignore the specific product which has been associated

with plausible response, and we substitute it either with a pure pharmaceutical product,

or a NIDA farm product doesn't make sense.

We should really study what seems to be working.

But I also understand the other side of this argument, that we want to use the best standardized products.

And when you depend on those products which are available in dispensaries they are

known and notorious for not being adequately consistent.

For any kind of clinical trial, doctors need to control the variables.

It's not to say that what may be purchased through a dispensary is necessarily less pure.

We don't know if it has the exact percentages that are listed on the label or what the purity

is and whether it's been run through screenings for pesticides or things like heavy metals.

The farm can't keep up with all the federal researchers so if

the DEA allowed other sources of cannabis that are well vetted.

That's an important next step.

Recently hemp was made legal and that is very exciting for us because hemp could be a source

for cannabidiol because right now as researchers we don't have a good source.

There's a huge interest in the medical field to better understand efficacies, side effects,

tolerability, what sort of best ways to deliver it.

The chief mission at this point is to have rational, scientifically-based, medically-based

regulation of research.

And that really requires action from Congress.

Epidiolex, is now Schedule 5, meaning the DEA says that it has accepted medical use

and limited abuse potential.

So it's hard for me to understand how the DEA can say that one product is Schedule 1,

and one product is Schedule 5.

And that is the chief quandary, I think.

I don't know how we can reconcile that without simply changing the designation of all marijuana products.

We have to recognize that marijuana in general does have therapeutic potential, and that

at the very least it should be scheduled as a Schedule 2 drug, meaning it's a drug that

has some acceptable use but still has potential for abuse.

That would be scientifically rational.

We have a tough challenge before us.

We need to balance our desire to do things that are most scientifically rigorous with

the need to make real forward progress with these diseases that are so severe and for

which the need for new therapies is so desperate.