Stewart For Stewart, the medical marijuana industry seems like a natural extension of his experience in the science of pain management and 33 year career with Purdue Pharma, best known as the maker of OxyContin. For him, it’s all about getting more science behind the industry. The course is being set, as is evidenced by of a 2015 Journal of American Medical Association study that looked at the conditions for which medical marijuana has substantial or good evidence including pain, neuropathic pain, symptom management for patients with MS, sleep disorders, some forms of anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder.
“I believe in cannabinoids as valuable therapeutic agents, however to get good therapeutic value out of them we have got to move away from these things being taken as “bud” and rolled into a joint or put into a vaporizer for inhaling,” says Stewart. “There is no dosage control, and having to inhale or smoke four to six times a day is unacceptable when it’s come to round the clock treatment of something like pain.”
Stewart says cannabis needs to move out of the back room and into the examination room.
“If it’s a socially unacceptable way of taking medication and people themselves don’t want to do it, any treatment regime becomes virtually impossible,” he says. “We need to move into advanced pharmaceutical like formulations and dosage forms.”
Stewart is heading the Emblem team’s process to identify the right cannabinoid strains for the right treatments. For medical marijuana to become a meaningful contributor in the global healthcare industry, Stewart offers, it needs to “grow the strains consistently, extract them consistently, and then take the extract to be put into tablets, transdermal formulations, or sublingual rapid melt formulations for instance because delivery needs to improve; combined with have high quality, and dose to dose consistency.”