Today we are discussing medical cannabis and I'm so excited to get into the nitty gritty.
In the past there has been quite a lot of negative press about cannabis but it can be
so beneficial.
My guest today is Dr Brian Walker who specialises in medical cannabis and thyroid and has practiced
medicine for many years.
He is an advocate for truth, freedom and growth and is currently a member for parliament.
He believes some of our laws are unfit for purpose and is a champion for change.
Welcome Dr Walker, thank you so much for joining me.
Hello.
Really eager to jump straight into it as there is a lot to unpack.
Perhaps I know there was a, this morning I heard some news that perhaps I can play you
from channel 7 and it's a plan to legalise cannabis use in WA.
So perhaps I can start by playing the interview and get your thoughts on it.
Sure.
A controversial new plan to give WA the most relaxed marijuana rules in the country has
been revealed this morning.
The West Australian reports West Aussies would be allowed to legally possess 50 grams of
cannabis and households would be allowed to grow four plants.
The two MPs from the legalised cannabis WA party hope the bill will be introduced into
parliament next year and spark a public debate.
So what are your thoughts or do you have any insider knowledge?
Oh yes I do.
I'm actually fascinated.
You see, listening to that there's such a lot of misconceptions.
Look, first of all they're using the term marijuana.
That's actually a pejorative term.
It was created to make cannabis sound foreign and that was the start of the FBI approach
to persecuting blacks and Hispanics in the southern states of America.
If you look at the original banning of cannabis it was purely because they wanted to have
control of cotton, of oil and also of the minorities in the southern states.
A very xenophobic racist rant by the FBI assistant director started all of this.
They asked actually 28 doctors is cannabis bad for you and they all said no.
The 29th said oh yes it's dangerous.
Now they've got medical grounds for banning it.
So the whole banning is actually based on falsehoods.
Everything since then has been created, this propaganda has been created to describe cannabis
as something bad.
I used to believe this because I was trained this.
As a medical student and as a doctor practising cannabis was always, it gave me into harder
drugs, always dangerous and always caused a risk for psychosis, that kind of thing.
So imagine my surprise when I do my research and find actually that's all wrong.
That was shocking.
Oh how interesting.
And you raise some really important points I think in that there is so much propaganda
it's good to really delve into the truth and find out what is going on.
So now you said you've done a lot of research so perhaps you can tell us about what the
active compounds are and how cannabis affects neurotransmitter release in the brain.
Sure.
Well first of all we have to get used to the idea that cannabis is a dangerous drug, it's
a narcotic.
It is not.
In international law cannabis is described as a narcotic and therefore is banned as being
dangerous to health.
That is a complete lie.
From the pharmacological point of view there's no way that cannabis is a narcotic.
But the international legal description is of a narcotic.
And that has to be, the problem with that is a narcotic will slow your respiratory response
and can kill people by stopping their breathing.
That cannabis absolutely cannot do that because the receptors are not being addressed with
cannabis.
So that's the first thing to say.
Secondly, my team has scraped about 4,000 annual reports of reputable sources as to
the research into cannabis.
Now some of it is going to be negative because look there are, if you use cannabis wrongly
there can be negative consequences but most of them are actually proving that the previous
prejudices are actually completely false.
And that needs to be put into the public domain.
We don't need to be frightened of cannabis, we just need to use it properly.
Now then you look at what's actually in the cannabis.
Well there's a friend of mine, a very knowledgeable person who has described his experience by
saying that the more I learn about cannabis the more I realize we don't do anything about
it.
It's such a lot to learn.
Oh it really is.
Well the 80 to 100 different cannabinoids we've got there and also the terpenes, those
oil constituents which give their taste, they all have medicinal properties and the question
is how much do they have of properties.
There is really, they're doing fantastic research, they're identifying the individual cannabinoids,
the individual terpenes and they're testing them against individual patients and individual
diseases to see what actually works.
This is science, this is research getting the facts of the matter and that's beautiful
to see because this will transform.
For example, just last week we had this, we know that cannabis has an anti-cancer effect.
One of the properties of one part of cannabis is it kills melanoma cells.
Now 80% of our skin cancer deaths are due to melanoma.
And if they're destroyed by a constituent of cannabis, why are we depriving our citizens
of the right to have protection from melanoma?
I agree, yes.
That's wonderful and there's so many other uses for it as well.
Now individually, but most people know nothing about cannabis or if they know anything at
all, they say our THC is bad for your brain.
Nonsense.
I'm using THC in small doses for treating ADHD and autism with good effects.
Can CBD on its own and pre-pubertal people with ADHD, wonderful effect on autism and
ADHD but not for everyone.
It's not a universal panacea.
To us, the cutting edge and it needs to find its resonance in the public.
There's a good medicine here with a very low side effect profile which can be of great
importance in helping to manage wellness.
You mentioned a few different things in there.
So it sounds like different strains and different forms affect the brain differently.
Yes.
And I guess how does it affect the brain differently and sort of does it, not only the different
strains but does it affect us, well I assume it does, affect us differently depending on
whether it's edibles or it's smoked or whether we drink it as a juice, have it oil.
Huge variation.
On the one hand, we've got to recognize that there are a lot of constituents and there's
two basic properties of cannabis.
One is it can elevate or it can sedate.
It can elevate your brain or sedate it or it can elevate your body by sedating.
So therefore, if you've got four areas of potential effect, elevating, sedating or a
combination of that.
And so certain strains of cannabis are useful for helping you during the day and others
are helpful for the night.
The second thing, pharmacologically, there's three ways of using cannabis.
So you can apply it to the skin as a cream or a lotion.
You can ingest it or you can inhale it.
I have to say that the worst way of taking cannabis is smoking it.
I absolutely do not recommend that you smoke cannabis.
I'm a rabid anti-smoker, passionate anti-smoker.
There are other ways of inhaling cannabis.
For example, they can get an asthma-like spray or they can vape it.
People now say, oh, vaping is bad for you.
And I'm telling you nonsense.
What the government is putting out about vaping is completely scientifically incorrect.
But that's another topic altogether.
When you put your herbs into the pan to heat up to make a curry, when you get that aroma
coming off, you're now actually vaping your herbs.
That's what you're doing.
You're heating it.
You're not combusting it.
And so all you're doing is you're taking the essential oils or the chemicals at different
temperatures and you're inhaling them.
Now, it can be innocent to the chest, absolutely, but it's absolutely not the same as smoking.
And I would want to emphasize that.
The difference is if you look at just ingesting or inhaling, when you ingest it, it can take
between 20 minutes and two hours to absorb.
And then when it's in your system, it works for six or eight hours.
If you inhale it, it'll be there within a minute, I think, but lasts for about an hour,
maybe two if you're lucky.
So you'd want to use these two different approaches for different needs.
For example, if you have an acute panic attack, taking an oil will do nothing for you.
So you need to actually inhale that product right now.
And that gives an almost immediate effect.
On the other hand, if you've got chronic pain or something similar, which is on a daily
or nightly basis, taking an ingested form, an edible, would give you six or eight hours
of relief.
And you can top up with inhaled if you need for exacerbations.
So what you need is someone who's prescribing this, who knows how to use a very sensible,
healthy healing herb.
And I think that's so important to let people know.
I feel like there's just not enough media about this.
So hopefully, you know, if they are relaxing the laws, then perhaps we will get some more
information coming through as well.
Well, first of all, they're not going to relax the laws.
The government is dead against this, although it's in their policy manual from the law and
state party.
But they're all frightened that if they seem to be soft on drugs, they're going to lose
votes.
That's really it.
They don't really care about the truth of the matter.
This really is...
Oh, sorry.
Go on.
It's sad, isn't it, really?
We need truth, not perception of truth.
We need actual truth.
And you know, from the media point of view, there's been a blanket ban on listening to
what I have to say because always these are smoker of cannabis.
Nonsense.
If you listen to what's actually being said, you'll realize that we're actually looking
for fundamental change, not just in cannabis, but in society.
Let's look at things the way they really are, not the way we think they are.
For example, how do you manage mental health?
Oh, yes, that's a big one.
What really gets me going about this is I see the impacts of Amsterdam and how they
treat cannabis and their laws are relaxed.
Now I see the social benefits where then you've got younger people who it's not a thrill anymore
because it's not illegal.
So they're not doing anything wrong.
They might try it and like, oh, yeah, that's, you know, that's okay.
But there's also a financial and economic impact because you've got the government
tax it.
So you're getting, you know, funds that then can be re-dispersed through health or other
means.
So I feel like there's some really positive things going on there that I don't feel is
being perhaps heard in Australia.
Oh, it's being hidden entirely.
Look, as a doctor in parliament, I have got, I talk about wellness.
Now wellness is physical, mental, social and financial wellness.
And that covers all areas of society, does it not?
When it comes to cannabis, the question is, you know, what are we actually missing out
on financially?
I mean, we put out an economic paper which shows over the four year forward estimates,
if you legalize recreational cannabis alone, $1.25 billion to the government.
Now that's not a small change.
If we then focused on the whole cannabis plant, including industrial hemp, then you'd actually,
did you know, for example, a farmer with a hectare of wheat would earn about $700, $800
per hectare.
If you then planted cannabis or hemp and were able to use the whole plant, if regulations
were changed so the whole plant could be used, can you guess what that hectare would be worth?
Have a guess.
I'll tell you, $23 million per hectare.
Wow.
It's not only the financial impact, you've also got the environmental impact because
it absorbs carbon dioxide.
Well, apart from that, it's the carbon capture, but it also is a phyto remedial.
You can plant it in polluted ground and it'll take up the pollutants and you can extract
them.
So a mine site which needs to be redeveloped, you can plant hemp and you can take out the
contaminants.
You can take out the chemicals from, say, the hydrocarbon industry.
You can remove those very efficiently if you know this.
But more importantly, you can actually turn the topsoil from a few centimeters into one
and a half meters and the microbiome, the bacteriology of the soil is transformed.
You can use that soil now for a multitude of things.
So if you plant hemp in a rotation crop, you can now get better yields on your lupins,
on your wheat, anything you want to plant.
Then you've got the water connection.
You can actually save the water.
For example, planting hemp in the Kimberley area to help reduce the impact of floods.
And then in our area here, if you plant that, you've now got microclimate change because
you're getting ground cover.
You're getting here the absorption of carbon dioxide.
They're putting back into the atmosphere of water vapor.
We're now getting here the chance to actually improve our climate in small areas.
If you plant in large amounts, huge amounts.
And also, you look at things like managing the forests here, cutting down old trees.
Don't do that.
Plant hemp.
You can make from that wonderful industrial woods, which will last for 30, for 90 years,
still capturing carbon, and are wonderful woods, very solid, very strong, very lasting.
And this can be used in building, in flooring, in so many applications, furniture, and it's
wonderful stuff.
And you've got two or three crops a year and you're getting the carbon credits.
So, generally, the possibilities are immense.
And socially, for giving people jobs in the area who are now without a job because of
their sawmills being shut down, will have a future.
And look beyond that, the innovative approaches to using hemp as a material.
You can use that.
There's someone I know making bullet and bomb proof protection using hemp with Kevlar and
carbon fiber.
Isn't that something wonderful?
We could stand this in this space.
That is incredible.
That is so incredible.
We could even make it into a battery.
We can turn hemp into batteries and we can even create from sunlight using a hemp wall
into electricity for the house.
And when you build a house using hemp, you don't need to heat the home or cool the home
in winter or summer because it's actually temperature controlling.
It's wonderful stuff.
So the people who have trouble with their budgets, as most of us do, you don't have
to pay for your air conditioning.
You don't have to pay for your heating because it's taken care of with the building material
and it insulates against sound as well.
Fantastic material.
It is.
That is just absolutely amazing.
And I believe it can be used to make clothing as well.
So it's so multifaceted.
For centuries, thousands of years.
Yeah.
Yes, thousands of years.
And it's comfortable, nice clothing as well.
You should try it.
There's a place in Margaret River, the Margaret River Hemp Company, which can control the
clothing.
Wonderful stuff.
That's really well worth investing in by hemp.
So I feel like I'm getting a little bit off track here as incredibly valuable as this
information is.
So jumping back to the brain, are there sort of short term and long term effects on brain
function and behaviour?
Yes.
We actually have an endocannabinoid system.
That's discovered in 1996 and it's still not taught in medical schools.
The function of that system is to actually balance the body, homeostasis.
In fact, we make our own endocannabinoids and andamide is one of them.
And you could even postulate we've got an endocannabinoid deficiency syndrome, but we
need more cannabis to actually balance the body.
Now at a brain level, we're looking here at the transfer of neurotransmitters from one
cell to the other.
And if you look at the biochemistry, it's fascinating biochemistry, is how this balances
out the neurotransmitters.
For example, with anxiety, wonderful use of using cannabinoids, we've got CB1 and CB2
receptors all over the body, but very particularly in the brain, which then has a wonderful effect
at managing, well, as I said, anxiety and sleep.
What happens with the sleep is you get actually normal REM sleep patterns.
You wake up refreshed rather than drugged as you do with the sleeping tablets.
With anxiety, we can actually get a very wonderful resolution of anxiety simply by use cannabis
as needed, either as a regular oil or as the occasional inflammation.
I've got a friend of mine, there's a PhD in this, who can show you the biochemistry.
It's absolutely mind blowing, the structure of how our body is made and how by depriving
ourselves of cannabis, we're actually asking for sickness to develop.
So we really need to put this out here.
Cannabis is a healthy healing herb, not a danger.
Yes, you can overuse it.
You can do bad things with it, but you've got to work at it as a healing plant is very,
very useful.
That just blows my mind.
We've spoken about some of the different uses for it and some of the other benefits include
what we talked about, pain relief, neuroprotection, anti-inflammatory effects.
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing this correctly.
Anxiolytic effect.
Anxiolytics, yes.
Yes.
Treating anxiety, yes.
Antidepressant and epilepsy management.
So how does it protect the brain from cell damage and neurodegeneration?
Well, it's very interesting.
When I was a medical student, I learned in neurology that once a brain cell is gone,
it's gone forever.
That's not true.
Cannabis actually is able to help regenerate brain cells.
So you get more brain cells.
And the second, and even more interesting, is that the connections between the brain
cells can be increased.
So you get more brain cells which have more connection and therefore you could actually
help to protect the brain against, for example, concussive damage on the footy oval or indeed
injuries.
Indeed, we can possibly use it post stroke to help with the recovery from that.
Neuroprotective is actually an anti-inflammatory effect and cannabis has a number of anti-inflammatory
properties.
Nice and gentle and they don't cause any adverse effects.
But it's very useful in helping the brain not to get over-inflamed and therefore suffer
damage.
There's many mechanisms you could look at but in essence, broad-brush strokes, that's
what we're dealing with.
Kind of going off a little bit of a tangent here.
So with what you said about cell regeneration, that sounds like, and I don't know a whole
lot about this, but peripheral neuropathy, that sounds like something that could assist
with that, that would help with cell regeneration.
Well, no, that's possibly true but peripheral neuropathy is very nasty and difficult to
treat and the medication is actually quite nasty with side effects.
However, cannabis and especially using the THC components is very useful at reducing
the pain of a peripheral neuropathy and it's certainly something I would recommend as a
first-line treatment.
Very much safer than the current medications like the gabapentin and similar products.
Gosh, that's so interesting.
And I read a little bit about can help reduce the likelihood of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Can you talk me through that a little bit?
Well, actually, yes, cannabis is very useful.
It doesn't stop the generation of Alzheimer's.
It slows progression and that's very nice.
So you can actually get reduced rate of worsening of dementia.
So at an early stage, you can maybe hold it off indefinitely.
We don't know, it hasn't been properly studied but the assumption is there and that needs
to be tested.
And the patients I've used it on, the partners have said that they've actually improved,
that the progression hasn't been as fast as they would have expected.
But also you can treat the symptoms quite nicely, this wandering, this confusion or
state.
You can actually get the behavioral change which is very, very pleasant.
I'm just so gobsmacked, I think is the word, as to why we're having so much resistance
to changing these laws so that we can help people and that people don't have to live
in pain or don't have to put up with some of these symptoms.
I'll tell you why.
It's because first of all, we've had 90 years of propaganda saying that it's supporting
a racist xenophobic rant for political purposes in the USA and funded by lies.
I think the science behind that has shown that everything we believe so far has been
a lie.
But what we have now is a very justifiable concern, could THC cause damage?
For example, could it cause psychosis?
And therefore if we allow that to happen, then we have a problem.
So we shouldn't allow that.
Now this fear of THC is holding everything back.
For example, if I want to give industrial hemp to cows to eat, it's oh, but I get THC
in the meat and it'll cause people to have a high.
Well, a question I asked in parliament is, well, okay, assuming that is true, how many
whole cows do I have to eat to get one particular high?
Three cows I have to eat and one goat to get one high.
Guys, get your act together.
And because we're frightened of THC, there's regulations in place written by people who
are basically status quo thinkers thinking in the past based on propaganda and lies.
And so because of that, the whole hemp industry has been shut down.
Well, a charitable view might be that the government needs to protect the people from
things it doesn't know it needs to be protected from.
And they're saying that THC could possibly be dangerous.
It causes psychosis, they think.
It can affect the brain.
It can make children go crazy.
And so very properly, they want to say, well, we're not sure if it's safe or not.
So what they're not realizing is that they're following fear of THC, which has been proven
to be wrong.
In the last year, we had about 6,000 deaths due to alcohol, zero deaths due to THC.
In fact, the last 20 years, no deaths due to THC.
It can be misused in the high doses.
It's not a good thing.
But having fear of THC and therefore you build regulations which prevent the whole hemp industry,
we're now actually saying goodbye to about $20 billion worth of trade, which could well
offset things like our iron ore exports.
And so we're actually digging a hole for ourselves economically because we're frightened of
something about which we have no need to fear.
And because of this, the whole cannabis and the whole hemp industry is being blocked.
I can see why, but they're completely wrong.
And I really don't understand this when it's been shown to be quite financial benefit in
other countries.
I mean, they have it in America.
They have it in Amsterdam.
Well, if you look at what the AMA, the Australian Medical Association, is saying, I think the
week before, an article that came out about our bill we're putting in, and they were
saying, oh, it's associated with schizophrenia.
We shouldn't allow this.
It's bad.
And what they were doing was they were quoting false information that we know that cannabis
does not cause schizophrenia.
It might be associated with psychosis, but what they're not recognizing is that a bigger
association with psychosis is with tobacco.
It causes more of a problem than cannabis.
And even worse for psychosis is alcohol.
And they're okay with alcohol and tobacco being sold, but they're not okay with cannabis.
This whole thing is just based on false information or prejudice and not really being aware of
the science.
So what's then the difference between THC and CBD?
And does it depend on what your diagnosis is as to which one is more suited to you?
That's a really good question.
Well, first of all, THC and CBD are two of the 80 or more cannabinoids.
There's plenty more to talk about, but they're not that commonly present.
They're in much smaller quantities.
For example, CBG is a very useful cannabinoid, which can be transformed into other cannabinoids.
And that's the one which we give to refractory epilepsy children.
It's very, very useful in managing that.
So THC, there's Delta-8 and Delta-9, there's variations of that.
There's the acid form of that, which these are different effects.
In fact, that lab test you've got in the urine for saying, oh, you've got THC in your system,
is testing a metabolite of THC, which isn't actually active.
And so we're looking here at the chemistry of a very complex plant.
And we've really got to get to grips with the understanding that only certain parts
of the plant in certain volumes could pose a problem.
The rest is absolutely fine.
It's just understanding how to use what's called a healthy healing herb, how to use
it properly.
And because science has banned its use, because it's been forbidden from consideration at
most levels of medical care until the 1960s when it began to become investigated in Israel,
we haven't had the chance to examine it properly.
And so the medical knowledge is way behind where we should be.
So you can understand why people are reluctant, because it's ignorance and unwillingness
to go into a new area, because, well, our parents didn't do this, our grandparents
didn't do this, therefore we're not going to do it.
It's blind, it's not clever.
But that's what we are having to deal with.
And that, really, is where I as a politician need to be active, because part of my job
is to educate the people, the politicians, and of course my colleagues, the doctors.
So your passion on this subject really shines through.
Is there anything as a nation that we can do to help these changes come about?
I think the first thing we need to do is recognise as a people that our politicians are way behind.
They're in a system which is not serving the people.
People have little respect for politicians, and rightly so too, because we're keeping
people stuck in the back, and we've got no real progress.
Both parties are the same, both sides are the same.
We need new thinking.
But the new thinking is stopped by the civil servants, the highly paid civil servants,
behind them, whose only function is to keep things the way they were.
So we've got a system there which is not serving the people.
Now, I think, as one of the people, I would want to get up on my hind legs and say, this
is not good enough.
We need a new way forward.
And for that, we need a people which is passionate and educated and willing to stand up and make
their voices heard.
And so, yes, I would encourage the people to find out about this, make up their own
minds and then decide, I am going to take part in doing something that will change,
shift the equation, like they did for voluntary sister dying, like they did for gay marriage,
like in fact they did for homosexual laws.
Because it wasn't so long ago, but 40 years back, the punishment for being gay was about
21 years in prison.
We've moved way beyond that, let's do the same for cannabis, shall we?
And while we're about it, what about other things which need to be addressed?
How about, for example, should we treat people who have committed a crime as people to be
punished and given a hard time?
Or do we want to go the Scandinavian model and help to rehabilitate, properly rehabilitate?
Do we want to continue using prison as a de facto place for harboring people with mental
health issues and leave them untreated to discharge them to make the same mistakes again?
Or do we want to actually physically change what we do because it's better for the people,
it saves us money, it saves us the police, it saves us the court time.
Let's have a new way of thinking.
A lot of things have to be thought new.
And if we're stuck in the old ways, we're not going to get any systemic change and we
need systemic change.
And that really is what I'm about.
It's not just about cannabis, I'm wanting to change the system.
I love talking to you, you're so progressive and it's really enlightening, it really is.
We are running sort of towards the end of time, but, and I've kind of done this a little
bit back to front today, but how did you get into this to start with?
So what led you to sort of investigate medical cannabis?
The first thing that happened was I found that there was more to cannabis than I had
been led to believe.
I first of all thought that was just for drug seekers.
No, I was wrong.
My first contact was actually with a man who wanted to kill himself, a lovely man who used
to break horses for a living until they broke him.
He was living in a doner and he wanted to kill himself.
So we happened to have some available cannabis because it's in the country and so he used
that and he came in about two days later with a smile across his face.
He says, Dr. Lee says, I can live again.
And life was saved.
And the next thing I discovered when I began to prescribe with great difficulty the first
initial cannabis products, the oils, and what I discovered to my amazement is that people's
thinking became clearer.
They weren't becoming confused or greened out.
They were actually able to think better.
And so that made me realize that all I'd learned about cannabis in the past was wrong.
I got angry.
I had been lied to my whole clinical career by people who thought they were doing the
right thing.
They were lying to me.
So I began this process of discovering for myself.
That's how I got into it.
Thank you so much for sharing.
It's been such a pleasure to have you on and have a chat.
And I would love to maybe talk to you again about mental health and some of the other
different topics that we could look into.
Let's begin to shift the dial, shall we?
Yes.
There's so much we need to do.
Let's shift that dial.
Amazing.
Thank you.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you.