Cannabis — Diamond Medicine Technologies

The plant that started it all

Jimmy began working with cannabis to ease his sister Jenny’s suffering. That personal search became a lifelong study of the plant — how it works, how to make it better, and how to bring it to people who are hurting.

Ride with Larry

Larry Smith, a former police captain who lived with Parkinson’s for two decades, became the subject of the 2013 documentary Ride with Larry. In one now-famous scene, Larry takes a single drop of cannabis oil under his tongue — and within minutes his tremors soften and his voice returns. The footage has been seen around the world. Larry passed in 2020; his courage continues to open minds about what this plant can do.

The work lives on through Jenny’s Rose — named for Jennifer Rose Castillo — bringing patented, science-backed cannabis formulations to the people who need them.

A plant older than history

Cannabis is one of the oldest plants humanity has ever cultivated. Long before it was a controversy, it was medicine, fiber, and sacrament. A Chinese pharmacopeia attributed to the emperor Shen Nung described its healing uses nearly five thousand years ago. In India it was woven into spiritual practice as one of the sacred plants. The Greek historian Herodotus described Scythian tribes breathing its smoke. Across the ancient world — from China to the Middle East — people turned to this single plant for the body and the spirit alike.

Cannabis in the ancient temple — and the Bible

In 2020, archaeologists confirmed something remarkable: residue of burned cannabis, rich in THC, on an altar at the Judahite shrine of Tel Arad, dating to roughly 760–715 BCE. It is the first hard evidence that cannabis was burned in worship in the ancient kingdom of Judah — in the very era of the Hebrew prophets.

That discovery gives new weight to an argument scholars have made for decades. The holy anointing oil described in Exodus lists an ingredient called kaneh-bosm. In 1936 the etymologist Sula Benet argued that kaneh-bosm was cannabis, mistranslated as “calamus” or “sweet cane” when the Hebrew scriptures were first rendered into Greek. The root kan means reed or hemp; bosm means aromatic. By this reading, the sacred oil used to anoint Israel’s priests and kings, and to consecrate its holiest objects, contained cannabis.

The implications reach into the Gospels themselves. The word Christ means “the anointed one.” Researchers such as Chris Bennett have argued that the healing-by-anointing practiced by Jesus and his followers used an oil built on that same recipe — and that the relief people felt may have owed something to the plant within it. Mainstream scholarship still favors “cane,” and the question may never be fully settled. But the linguistics are real, the case is serious, and the altar at Tel Arad proves that cannabis truly did burn in the worship of ancient Israel.

How a sacred plant became “public enemy”

For most of recorded history cannabis was legal, common, and valued. That changed in the United States in the early twentieth century — and the reasons had little to do with public health.

In 1937 the Marihuana Tax Act effectively outlawed the plant. It rode in on a wave of sensational “reefer madness” newspaper stories, many carried by the Hearst press, and was driven by Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, whose public case leaned openly on racial fear rather than science. The American Medical Association objected that the law would cut physicians off from a useful medicine. It passed anyway.

In 1970 the Controlled Substances Act placed cannabis in Schedule I — the most restrictive category, defined as having “no accepted medical use” and a high potential for abuse, in the same tier as heroin. In 1971 President Nixon declared a “war on drugs.”

Then came an inconvenient truth. Nixon’s own commission — the Shafer Commission, made up of his appointees — studied the question and reported in 1972 that “neither the marihuana user nor the drug itself can be said to constitute a danger to public safety,” and recommended that personal possession be decriminalized. Nixon buried the report.

Decades later, one of his closest aides put the strategy plainly. In an interview surfaced by Harper’s Magazine, Nixon’s domestic-policy chief John Ehrlichman recalled that the administration’s real targets were “the antiwar left and black people,” and that by associating those communities with drugs and “criminalizing both heavily,” the government “could disrupt those communities.” By that account, the war on drugs was never really about the drug.

The plant that disrupted industries

There is another thread to the story — money. Hemp, cannabis’s industrial cousin, is one of the most useful plants on earth: paper, rope, textiles, fuel, building material, even early plastics. As cheaper machinery made hemp easier to process in the 1930s, a 1938 Popular Mechanics article famously hailed it as the “new billion-dollar crop.”

It never got the chance. Advocates and historians have long noted that the men positioned to lose from a hemp boom were among the most powerful in America: timber and newspaper interests tied to William Randolph Hearst; the DuPont chemical empire, which had just patented nylon and new wood-pulp processes that hemp threatened; and the banker Andrew Mellon, DuPont’s financier and the man whose Treasury Department housed Anslinger. How coordinated it all was is still debated. But the timing is hard to ignore: a plant that could have competed with paper, plastic, and synthetic fiber was branded a menace and pulled from the market just as it was about to take off.

Why cannabis threatens the pharmaceutical model

To understand why a healing plant was treated as a public enemy, you have to understand how the modern drug industry makes its money. The business model rests on one thing: exclusivity. A company spends years isolating or inventing a single molecule, patents it, and for the life of that patent becomes the only party allowed to sell it. High prices, protected markets, and recurring revenue all flow from that one point of control. Anything that breaks the exclusivity breaks the model — and cannabis breaks it from several directions at once.

First, the plant itself cannot be owned. Cannabis is not an invention; it is a living thing that has grown on this earth for thousands of years, and a plant as nature made it cannot be locked behind a patent. Anyone with soil and sunlight can grow it. For an industry built on being the sole supplier, a medicine a person can raise in their own backyard is a structural threat — relief that depends on no pharmacy, no refill, and no price tag.

Second, one plant competes with many drugs at once. Most pharmaceuticals are designed to do a single job. Cannabis speaks to an entire regulating system in the body, and people have found relief across an enormous range — pain, sleep, nausea, seizures, anxiety, inflammation, appetite. A single, accessible plant that can ease conditions normally divided among a dozen separate and highly profitable drug categories — including opioids — is not one competitor. It is many.

Third, it is often gentler than what it would replace. A large part of the pharmaceutical model depends on dependence — on medicines people must keep buying, some carrying real risk of harm or addiction. Cannabis has a remarkably forgiving safety profile by comparison, and for many people it lowers the need for harsher drugs rather than adding to them. A medicine that helps patients need fewer medicines is, for that industry, a problem rather than a product.

This is exactly why prohibition was so convenient for the incumbents. For fifty years, Schedule I did more than keep cannabis off the shelf — it kept it out of the legitimate, research-backed, investable pipeline, while patented synthetics quietly filled the space it would have occupied.

And here is the part that turns the whole story on its head. The plant cannot be owned — but the science around it can. The specific formulations, the precise ratios of compounds, the extraction and stabilization methods, the delivery systems, the standardized preparations that turn a variable plant into consistent, dependable medicine — those are genuine inventions, and they can be protected. That is the work Diamond Medicine Technologies was built to do, and it is why this company holds patents in cannabis. We have not fenced the plant off from the people; the plant belongs to everyone. We have done the harder thing — taking what the earth provides and the body already recognizes, and making it consistent, safe, and precise enough to stand beside anything in modern medicine.

The proof is hiding in plain sight — and the government left it there. United States Patent 6,630,507, “Cannabinoids as Antioxidants and Neuroprotectants,” was granted in 2003 to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In its own words it describes cannabinoids as useful in protecting the brain and limiting damage from stroke and trauma, and in treating neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In other words, the same federal government that classifies cannabis as a Schedule I drug with “no accepted medical use” quietly holds a patent on its medical use. That single contradiction tells you almost everything: the “no medical value” label was never really about the science.

That is the real disruption. Not that cannabis cannot be owned, but that it can be both free and refined — grown by anyone who needs it, and elevated by those willing to do the science into medicine that meets the patented blockbusters head-on. Honored at the source, proven in the lab, and finally allowed to compete on a level field. For an industry that depends on a captive market, nothing is more threatening than that.

The science catches up — the endocannabinoid system

Here the story turns from history to biology, and the facts are no longer in dispute. In 1964 the Israeli chemist Raphael Mechoulam first isolated THC, the plant’s best-known active compound. The deeper discovery came later. Through the 1980s and 1990s, researchers found that the human body is built with a system designed to respond to these compounds — the endocannabinoid system.

It works through receptors, named CB1 (concentrated in the brain and nervous system) and CB2 (found largely in the immune system and throughout the body). And the body makes its own molecules to fit them: in 1992 Mechoulam’s lab identified the first and named it anandamide, after the Sanskrit word for bliss. A second, called 2-AG, followed in 1995.

This system turns out to be one of the body’s master regulators, helping to keep mood, pain, sleep, appetite, memory, and immune response in balance. We did not evolve receptors for a plant. We evolved a system the plant happens to speak to. Cannabis works in human beings because, in a real sense, the body was already listening.

The cannabinoids your own body makes

Here is the part most people never hear: you are producing cannabinoids right now. Your body builds its own endocannabinoids — anandamide and 2-AG — on demand, from fats in your diet. Their raw materials are omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids, and the balance between those fats helps set what scientists call your endocannabinoid tone: how well this regulating system runs.

This is why nutrition reaches a system most people have never heard of. A diet badly skewed toward processed omega-6 oils and starved of omega-3 can throw off the very system that keeps the body in balance. A cleaner daily balance of omega-3 and omega-6 gives the body the building blocks to make and use its own cannabinoids properly. Long before any plant is involved, the foundation of this medicine is a body whose own endocannabinoid system is well-fed and working.

What we know — and why we don’t know more

Today there is a large and growing body of evidence — in the laboratory, in animal studies, in clinical trials, and in the lived experience of countless patients — that cannabinoids can ease pain, calm tremors, quiet seizures, lift nausea, and bring rest and relief where little else has helped. The U.S. National Library of Medicine’s own PubMed database now catalogs thousands of peer-reviewed studies on cannabis and cannabinoids, spanning chronic and neuropathic pain, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, the nausea and wasting of cancer treatment, anxiety, inflammation, and far more. The science is not missing. Whole-plant cannabis is not a cure, and anyone making medical decisions should make them with a clinician.

But there is a reason so much of this knowledge is still labeled “preliminary” or “anecdotal.” For more than fifty years cannabis sat in Schedule I — the legal category reserved for drugs with “no accepted medical use.” That one classification made rigorous human research extraordinarily difficult: scientists needed sign-off from multiple federal agencies, and for decades could legally study only cannabis grown at a single government facility. Prohibition did not just punish people; it strangled the science. The thinness of the evidence was, to a real degree, manufactured.

That is finally beginning to change as cannabis is rescheduled and the barriers to research come down. The plant our ancestors trusted for thousands of years is, at last, being allowed back into the laboratory — and what we keep confirming is much of what they seemed to know all along.