What’s the deal with the US Cannabis Patent 6630507?

Rob Sanchez

Way back when in 2009, I wrote a paper in Psycho-Biology at Kansas State University about the effects of cannabinoids on the neurodegenerative disease Alzheimer’s. My paper was returned with a note at the top that cannabis wasn’t federally legal. Imagine my surprise to find that the US government had held a patent for cannabinoids to treat neurodegenerative disease? I didn’t know it at the time. After K-State, I moved to Denver to cultivate cannabis and make concentrates in the medical industry and didn’t consider federal legal option much, since then I have made a point to live in legal states, but the greater federal issue has definitely impacted me and many others. Leaving home to pursue cannabis interests safely. But how did things get that way? On an upcoming episode of the podcast with Frank Falvo he mentions US Cannabis Patent 6630507. I couldn’t resist digging in to find out more.

Before we get to the patent, let’s look at the schedule 1 status. Scientists and medical professionals have been ignored as cannabis has sat in a schedule 1 designation in the US. Law Enforcement instead has the final say, but why? Well, like many things, it all starts with Nixon. The dude ordered the Schafer commission as a national commission on “Marihuana” and drug abuse. The Schafer commission came back to Nixon suggesting in their results that cannabis should be decriminalized and adult cultivation and consumption should be allowed. Ol’ Nixon ignored the findings of this report as they were not the “truth” he wanted. Instead, he insisted that cannabis remain schedule 1. See, Nixon had a problem; he would be up for re-election for his second term soon, and there were swathes of anti-war leftists, African Americans and Mexican Americans that would most likely not vote for him. Scheduling cannabis at 1 was a great way to sic law enforcement on cannabis users and communities known for cannabis use. Now, they could round up anti-war folks and imprison them on a “legitimate” legal basis. We know how this story ends, Nixon gets wrapped up in Watergate on the heels of this cannabis decision and resigns before he could be impeached. Then, as the cherry on top Gerald Ford pardoned him right after.

In the US, Schedule 1 is reserved for substances that have a high potential for abuse, with no accepted medical use and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision. Things like heroin, LSD, ecstasy and peyote are set as schedule 1, along with cannabis. While the dangers of these substances are known and something to be considered, we’re still learning that many have therapeutic effects for consumers. To make matters worse, in international drug treaties, the US set out obligations to “never schedule cannabis below a schedule 2 status” (1961). To set the comparison, all the opioids that are leading to insane addictions and deaths across the US are set to schedule 2. They are by this scheduling, less of a potential for abuse than cannabis, which is ridiculous. People have been trying to change this since it was set in stone.

For over 40 years, cannabis has been in this schedule 1 designation. Many opponents to cannabis would say that there’s no research to prove therapeutic uses. But the fact that the substance is schedule 1 means it’s very difficult to get approval to study it. Throughout the decades the National Institute of Health is known to only approve those studies that were looking to prove that cannabis was bad, not investigate its potential for good. This creates a chicken or egg kind of issue where cannabis can’t be rescheduled because there is not enough research but research is blocked to the aforementioned schedule. Mind boggling isn’t it? 

Now to the crux of this conversation: US patent number 6630507, “Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants” filed in April of 1998 and approved in 2003. This patent is precisely what my college paper, albeit amateur, was trying to prove. Aiden J. Hampson, Julius Axelrod and Maurizio Grimaldi were awarded this patent through the NIH, National Institutes of Health. The NIH has over 6 thousand scientists working away to research different topics. Anytime a breakthrough is found, NIH considers filing a patent. What makes this interesting and as clear as mud is that the NIH doesn’t have to or regularly disclose the payments or financial details around their involvement with private parties whom they contract to use said patents. Some of this is or was slowly revealed thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. There are cannabis pharmaceutical companies that started to make derivatives of the cannabinoids found to be helpful to make them medically available. The patent only covers non-psychoactive cannabinoids, so the goal is to extract or replicate those to leave the rest of the cannabis experience (entourage effect) behind. This leads to multi-million dollar pharmacy companies making big profits and continuing to run the show. 

The patent states, “Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism. This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The cannabinoids are found to have particular application as neuroprotectants, for example in limiting neurological damage following ischemic insults, such as stroke and trauma, or in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, HIV and dementia.” Now, my intrepid reader, how on earth could a federal patent state that a schedule 1 substance has medical value? Wouldn’t that be grounds for a rescheduling conversation almost immediately? Not in US politics… In fact, this incensed the cannabis community and its advocates but didn’t do much more except make a few pharmaceutical companies and the government a big chunk of change.

The DEA is slow, to say the least, when it comes to hearing petitions to the scheduling of cannabis and many other things. Petitioners had to wait for decades and in some cases court intervention was required to get DEA responses to previous petitions. All of which are systematically denied by the DEA. But they aren’t exactly the biggest bully on the block preventing cannabis from being de-scheduled though; it goes deeper than that. They are unfortunately tied to the findings of the Department of Health and the Food and Drug Administration which again have a history of biased research funding and much more. The federal government has essentially governed itself into a corner where they can’t act on modern science and popular knowledge to address substances being used by the population. A pretty good reason to be thankful for the state governments and freedom there to follow and litigate based on science and popular opinion. 

Patent #6630507 expired in 2019 and was not renewed, but the effects and lost time are impactful on the landscape of pharmaceutical cannabinoids and schedule status. Other companies are now legally able to use the patented cannabinoids but their products still need to be approved by the FDA who in restricting new products allows the NIH to continue to profit off early private deals. This is clearly a multifaceted issue that can’t be properly addressed in a single chapter of a cannabis book. It’s also an example of government control and the stigma around cannabis use and consumption throughout history. Things are always changing though, in fact the federal government has been issuing more studies (40% more researchers) and asked for more cannabis flower in 2021 than it had in previous years from government sanctioned cultivators. In 2022 Biden approved a measure to green light even more medicinal cannabis research. In the meantime, embrace your state politics in the US and let’s all keep our fingers crossed for that mythical Schedule 2 status that would allow more therapeutic research, cross state transactions, better banking options and so much more.