Patent Absurdity

Originally published in the September 2013 issue The Hemp Connoisseur magazine

Uncle Sam can’t seem to get his story straight. Chalk it up to old age. Alzheimer’s maybe. 

October 7 marks the 10-year birthday of the most duplicitousdocument in the sordid history of American intellectual property law. US Patent Number 6630507 is almost too bizarre to be believed, considering its recipient.

Sometime in the late 1990’s the United States Federal Government—which defined cannabis then as having “no currently accepted medical use in treatment” just as it does nowdecided to take out a patent on medical marijuana. By 2003 it was officially on the books. For those keeping score, there have been over 900 dispensary raids and 8 million cannabis arrests since then.

The US government effectively granted this patent to itself. (The assignee is named as “The United States of America as Represented by the Department of Health and Human Services.”) Titled “Cannabinoids as Antioxidants and Neuroprotectants,” the grant is as explicit as it is comprehensive. Cannabinoids—the organic compounds within the cannabis plant—can be used to treat brain damage resulting from stroke, concussion, Alzheimer's disease, HIV dementia, even Parkinson’s disease.

“It is an object of this invention to provide a new class of antioxidant drugs that have particular application as neuroprotectants, although they are generally useful in the treatment of many oxidation associated diseases,” they write.

The patent names three “inventors”, all under the employ the National Institute of Health. Dr. Maurizio Grimaldi, who was director of the Neuropharmacology Laboratory at Southern Research when research began in 1999, was one of them. Fourteen years later, he still counts the project as among his most important and memorable.

“It was a big deal, yes,” he says over the phone. “It’s difficult to pinpoint a single mechanism by which cannabinoids act on the human body. But we discovered cannabinoids are particularly effective in halting brain damage, especially Alzheimer’s.”

I had to make sure I heard him right. ‘Halt?’ As in dead-in-its-tracks?

“When applied early and effectively, yes,” he replied. He went on to emphasize that cannabinoids are helpless to dramatically reverse the effects brain damage, only stop the progression. Even so, the implications are paradigm-shifting. How can he reconcile his findings with the federal government’s insistence that marijuana possesses zero medicinal value? 

I ask Dr. Grimaldi. He seems evasive. A details-oriented, hard-science guy, he’d rather expound on the different classes of cell membrane receptors than dwell on the political/legal ramifications of whatever molecule he’s researched. For example, he claims to be oblivious to how the federal government goes about scheduling its drugs. When I tell him that cannabis is classified as Schedule 1—meaning “no medicinal value”—he seems surprised.

“I don’t think that’s true,” he says. “Clearly it has medicinal value.”

But not according to the federal government, the patent’s very owner. Why though? What possible motivation could the federal government have in owning a patent on a “drug” it claims to want eradicated?

Dr. Grimaldi offers no speculation. But taking everything into account, there’s a couple possibilities worth consideration.

On one level, it appears to be a corporatist gambit in which big business colludes with big government to get a leg up on the competition. Specifically: in 2011—another record-setting year in terms of dispensary raids btw—the NIH-Office of Technology Transfer granted the Exclusive License for the commercialization of patent 6630507 to a New York-based pharmaceutical company called KannaLife Sciences, Inc.. 

Per its licensing agreement with the federal government, KannaLife can only utilize the patent grant in the treatment of Hepatic Encephalopathy (a neurological disease often brought about by alcohol-induced liver failure). But a precedent with a predictable path has been set. The fact that the scope of the agreement is so narrowly tailored seems to suggest that the patent owners intend to maximize its value by divvying out agreements to multiple deep-pocketed drug companies.

Or it just might represent something more sinister. From a business/revenue standpoint, patent 6630507 represents an insurance policy—an escape clause—for the medical-industrial complex should patients start opting out of expensive conventional therapy en masse. If legalization were to hit critical mass and patients began flocking to “greener” pastures, cannabis producers and consumers could still be punished—not for possessing an illegal plant, but for violating patent law. Maybe the Federal Government really is suppressing a cure for brain damage for the express purpose of monopolizing the inevitable breakthroughs for profit.

Maybe.

Or maybe that’s just the neuroprotectants talking.

Originally published in the September 2013 issue The Hemp Connoisseur magazine

MP Snyders