Charles Broderick, an alumnus of MIT and Harvard University, donated $9 million toward cannabis research this past year. This is the single biggest grant to ever be given toward the study of cannabis products to date. Broderick announced that the money would be split evenly between MIT and Harvard University and will be used by scientists to study the “effects on the human brain, its use in treating medical and psychiatric conditions, and how it might be regulated”.
Staci Gruber, PhD, is the director of the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) program at McLean Hospital, which is an affiliate hospital of Harvard University. She is one of four recipients of Harvard’s portion of the grant and plans to use the money to “help identify differences between a whole-plant, full-spectrum cannabis product and a product made from a single extracted compound”. Full Spectrum cannabis includes all the cannabinoids, such as cannabidiol (CBD) and delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), as well as other compounds found within the plant. On the opposing side of Gruber’s research are single extract cannabinoids that don’t encompass other compounds.
You can already find many different products on the market that fall within either the full-spectrum or the single isolate typology, but very little research has been done in regard to the differences between these two types of products in terms of efficacy and safety.
“Everybody who is interested in using any cannabis-based product wants to understand potential differences between single extracted compounds and whole-plant, full-spectrum compounds,” Gruber said. “The grant money will help allow us to identify differences in these two different approaches, which are very common across the nation.”
As we all know, the laws in our nation around Marijuana and Marijuana products are constantly changing. Marijuana, the species of the cannabis plant that has psychoactive THC, is legalized in fifteen states, and within those states, CBD products can have as much THC as desired. In all fifty states, hemp and CBD are legal so long as they only carry up to 0.3% of THC. Some CBD products carry zero percent, but because of the full-spectrum process, much CBD does include trace amounts of THC.
For all of these reasons and more, Gruber believes that the data she is able to collect from her research will be able to provide crucial information for consumers, clinicians, policymakers and regulators.