For quite some time now, Lisa Tollner, co-founder of the California cannabis edibles business Sensi Products, states that she has been receiving numerous reports from her customers saying that the edibles she had sold them helped with pain, insomnia, nausea, and other debilitating conditions. However, Tollnet wanted to hear more.
“These people are telling me their stories, but with no real consistency,” Tollner, who was interested in the data on her products, said. “I need ways to prove our products’ efficacy.”
Fifty percent of the United States, including Washington D.C., have legalized medical cannabis, driving an exploding new industry that nearly made nearly $1 billion in sales during 2015. However, the science behind the cannabis products has not been well understood up to now.
For that reason, Tollner decided to participate in the scientific research of the Institute For Research On Cannabinoids (IROC), the first nonprofit scientific organization of its kind in the United States. IROC Executive Director Marcel Bonn-Miller, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, reported to International Business Times that IROC is going to put together a team of the best cannabis scientists in the country to finally derive results.
Not only did the founder of the institute want to learn more about cannabis and its benefits, but he also wanted to find new ways to get funding for marijuana, which is desperately needed when it comes to research.
“With any other drug, the research comes before it reaches a patient,” said Bonn-Miller. “With cannabis, it’s completely the opposite. It’s in the hands of everybody, but nobody knows about dosing, nobody knows the best methods of delivery, nobody knows what strains are best for different uses. The cart is so far before the horse in terms of the gap between research and policy.”
