Cannabis Vernacular Spells Confusion
<Note: I’m suffering from severe brain fudge today, so please bear with me.>
After studying medical cannabis and related industries for over a decade, I’ve come to the conclusion that the lack of common vernacular in discussing medical cannabis is an enormous barrier to universal understanding and acceptance, especially in the medical community. This became particularly evident when I attended a high-level, 2-day research summit on the neuroscience of cannabinoids, hosted by the US government’s top medical agency, the National Institute of Health (NIH) in 2016.
I had a chance conversation with a researcher over a box lunch on the first day that resulted in me giving two days of impromptu classes on medical cannabis-related jargon to dozens of research scientists, PhD students, medical doctors, and other interested parties. During the first morning’s presentations, I noticed that several presenters had used some very basic cannabis-related terms incorrectly, particularly when it came to discussing cannabis-based preparations. Later I was sitting at a large table eating lunch in a cavernous atrium at the NIH facility and two people got into a heated discussion about “cannabis oil” with one of them exclaiming over and over again, “You just don’t understand!” The truth was, neither of them understood. They were both wrong.
So, I asked the 10 people at the table for their definitions of “cannabis oil” and I got 10 different answers, ranging from raw cannabis resin to tinctures. Some thought “cannabis oil” only referred to CBD-based medicines while others insisted it meant THC-based medicines. One scientist thought it meant the synthetic THC, Marinol (dronabinol). When I asked the same group what “marijuana” was, some said it was a plant, some said it was a drug, and many didn’t seem to know that both THC and CBD exist in every cannabis plant.
The word “hemp” presented another stumbling block because some nationalities use it to mean the non-psychotropic varieties (yes, plural) of cannabis while others understand it to refer to recreational cannabis. Most disturbing to me was the discovery that many of these people had never been allowed to use actual cannabis in their experiments; they were limited to using synthetic THCs (yes, plural), but they hadn’t heard of synthetic THCs on the street, like Spice and K2. It occurred to me then: If the research scientists don’t understand all this, how can we expect GPs to suddenly jump up and shout “Count me in!”?
What is holding us back is the fact that much of the vernacular we use to talk about medical cannabis is slang from the street and the Stoner Culture. Scientific settings and medical practice require accuracy and precision, but doctors and scientists are learning about medical cannabis from patients and the general public who don’t have the vocabulary to be able to translate the lingo for them. On top of that, slang does not lend itself to definitions set in stone.
It’s time for a change. I propose to change the way we talk about cannabis by using more appropriate words, borrowing from other industries and processes, and by creating concrete definitions. We can use existing terminology commonly understood by both the medical profession and the general public. This will result in a two-fold benefit — deeper understanding and removal of stigma. I’ll give you some examples.
Marijuana
Stop using the word “marijuana”. Period. Just stop. It’s “cannabis”. Just cannabis. There are many thousands of varieties of cannabis all around the world and there is no plant in biology called marijuana. Unfortunately, the US government made it a legal term by including racially-tinged slang in federal legislation. It was wrong to do that and 80+ years later, no one is still able to make sense of the definition.
Stoned, High
We should be using more appropriate terms to describe an altered mental state other than “stoned” or “high”. It’s much better to refer to patients as “intoxicated” or “inebriated”. This removes the stigma of street use.
Cannabis Oil
This one drives me crazy. The first time I spoke to a cannabis doctor in the UK, he said he was going to prescribe “cannabis oil”. He was absolutely flummoxed when I asked him “what kind” of cannabis oil. I asked if it was concentrated extract of cannabis resin in a syringe or processed cannabis resin dissolved in a carrier oil. He didn’t know. He didn’t know there are dozens of medical cannabis treatments that can be loosely referred to as “cannabis oil”, but they have different methods of preparation and administration.
Although the UK medical cannabis industry is mainly offering “cannabis oil” and “flower”, doctors should at least know the different formulations in production around the world. As the UK market matures, patients will want more choice and specific formulations. We can borrow terms from the food manufacturing industry, dietary supplement industries, and the perfume and essential oil companies to describe and define cannabis-based products.
<I have much more to say about this, but need to take a break to see if I can get rid of some of the brain fudge that’s afflicting me today. My UK cannabis pharmacy screwed up my prescription for the 4th month in a row and I’ve run out. At times like this my thinking can get very muddy and I can’t find the correct words. Kinda funny when the subject of this post is about using the correct words.>
