Cannabis: The Super Antibiotic Of The Future….
“Without urgent, coordinated action, the
world is headed for a post-antibiotic era,”
Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the Assistant Director
General for the World Health Organization’s
Health Security department, said last year
after the WHO released its first ever global
report on antibiotic resistance. “Common
infections and minor injuries, which have
been treatable for decades, can once again
kill,” he continued, explaining how
antibiotic resistant bacteria are now one of
the top health concerns of the world.
The horrible irony is that the evolution of
bacteria into “superbugs” is driven in large
part by the antibiotics that were designed to
treat them in the first place. Methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)
for example, which causes over 10,000
deaths each year, is a direct by-product of
over-using antibiotics, which bred a stronger
and more dangerous version of the
common Staph aureus bacteria.
MRSA, which infects open wounds and
increases the chance of death in patients by
over 60 percent according to the CDC, is
now wreaking havoc in hospitals and other
facilities where it can spread easily between
people in close contact.
A Game Changing Study
In 2008, however, a first of its
kind study conducted by a team of British
and Italian researchers had already found
that one of the world’s most commonly
cultivated plants could stop M RSA in its
tracks: CANNABIS
Specifically, the team tested five of
cannabis’s most common cannabinoids
against six different MRSA strains of
“clinical relevance”, including epidemic
EMRSA strains, which are the ones
responsible for hospital outbreaks.
They found that every single one of the
cannabinoids tested showed “potent
activity” against a wide variety of the
bacteria.
Cannabinoids are substances unique to the
cannabis plant that have wide-ranging
medicinal properties: they fight cancer,
reverse inflammation and act as powerful
antioxidants. Now we know that they are
also some of the most powerful antibiotics
on earth.
“Everything
points
towards
these
compounds having been evolved by the
plants as antimicrobial defences that
specifically target bacterial cells,” said
Simon Gibbons, one of the authors of the
study and head of the Department of
Pharmaceutical and Biological Chemistry at
the University College London School of
Pharmacy, in a follow up interview in
the MIT Technological Review. Amazingly,
the cannabinoids even showed “exceptional
activity” against a strain of the MRSA that
had developed extra proteins for increased
resistance to antibiotics, showing that
cannabis remained effective despite the
bacteria’s adaptations
“The actual mechanism by which they kill
the bugs is still a mystery…” said Gibbons.
“I really cannot hazard a guess how they do
it, but their high potency as antibiotics
suggests there must be a very specific
mechanism. "The researchers recommend
cannabis as the source of new and effective
antibiotic products that can be used in
institutional settings right now. “The most
practical application of cannabinoids would
be as topical agents to treat ulcers and
wounds in a hospital environment,
decreasing the burden of antibiotics,” said
Giovanni Appendino, a professor at Italy’s
Piemonte Orientale University and coauthor of the study. Since two of the most
potently antibacterial cannabinoids were not
psychoactive at all and appear in abundance
in the common and fast-growing hemp
plant, producing the antibiotics of the future
could be quick and simple. “What this
means is, we could use fibre hemp plants
that have no use as recreational drugs to