Mary Jane Stawell - Marijuana Recipes and Remedies for Healthy Living

Note to Reader:

Information in this book is made available for informational purposes only under the authority of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The information presented is not meant to prescribe or to provide any medical advice. Readers should always consult with their personal physician before using marijuana as food or a remedy. Marijuana may be illegal in certain areas. The author and the publisher advocate no illegal activity of any kind, and make no implied or expressed warranties with respect to the information in this book. For legal advice, Readers should consult a licensed attorney.

Marijuana

Recipes & Remedies

for Healthy Living

by Mary Jane Stawell

Marijuana Recipes & Remedies for Healthy Living

Copyright 2011: Beverly A. Potter

ISBN: 978-1-57951-150-0

Published by

Ronin Publishing, Inc.

PO Box 22900

Oakland, CA 94609

www.roninpub.com

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or translating into another language, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the author or the publisher, except for inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Library of Congress Card Number: 2011933025

Distributed to the book trade by PGW/Persesus

Mary Jane Stawell is a pseudonym.

Table of Contents

F OLKS MAY GIGGLE when you speak about marijuana as food and a medical remedy since we tend to associate the weed with recreational uses rather than nutrition or medicine.

When eaten marijuana yields a different high that some describe as deeper or as having more of a body sensation. If your throat is feeling a little scratchy or a bit raw, you may not feel like smoking. Eating pot offers a valuable alternative when you are afraid that someone will smell it on your breath and clothes. Some people dont enjoy the taste of weed when smoked. If you are one of these people, you can see how eating it in a sweet food masks the taste but still gets you high.

But marijuana is more than a turn-on weed. It is a herb with nutritional and medicinal value. Marijuana Recipes and Remedies offers easy, delicious, nutritious recipes, including desserts of all kinds, breads, main courses, and elixirs. It teaches basic alchemical principlessuch as how to use butter to extract herbal essenceso that you can experiment with your own creations. What fun!

Most cookbooks tell you how to cook from scratch, which is great if youre a cook and you have enough time. But many us arent cooksyet we would like to incorporate marijuana herbals in our menu. Marijuana Recipes and Remedies is unique in that it includes how to use inexpensive, off-the-shelf, ready-made mixes you can find at the corner store to make some fabulous marijuana cuisine and how to make tinctures, poultices, and healing oils.

T HE EUPHORIC EFFECTS OF MARIJUANA ORIGINATE from tetrahydrocannabinolTHC, the main active ingredient. THC is most concentrated in the marijuana flowers, often called buds. Medicinal benefits include sedative, pain-soothing, and anti-inflammatory action, all of which stem from marijuanas palliative qualities. Palliative care is any form of medical treatment that concentrates on reducing the severity of symptoms, rather than curing the disease progression. Marijuana has strong palliative properties and can be used to prevent and relieve suffering and to improve the quality of life for people with serious, complex illness, such as cancer and Alzheimers. Marijuana also has strong analgesic or pain-killing qualities stemming from its anti-inflammatory actions. An added benefit is that marijuana is not addictive as are stronger analgesics, like opioids.

Receptors

Marijuana, or cannabis as it is also called, contains over 60 oxygen-containing aromatic hydrocarbon compounds known as cannabinoids. Modern research into the therapeutic effects of the cannabinoids began in the 1960s with the identification of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabindiol (CBD) as the major psychoactive and non-psychoactive cannabinoids, respectively.

Some of THCs effects are useful in the world of medicinelike preventing nausea and blocking pain. Researchers have shown that the brain makes a chemicalanandamidethat attaches to the same nerve receptors as THC. When someone uses marijuana, these chemicals travel through the bloodstream and quickly attach to special places on the brains nerve cells. These places are called receptors, because they receive information from other nerve cells and from chemicals. When a receptor receives information, it causes changes in the nerve cell. The chemical in marijuana that has a big impact on the brain is THC. Scientists recently discovered that some areas in the brain have a lot of THC receptors, while others have very few or none. These clues are helping researchers figure out exactly how THC works in the brain.

Anandamide

Marijuana research gained legitimacy with the discovery of these cannabinoid receptors in the 1990s. The cannabinoid receptor CB1 is widely expressed throughout the CNS, and seems to modulate psychoactive effects, motor control, memory processing, and pain. The endocannabinoids that are the natural ligands for the CB1 receptor are part of an endogenous physiologic system for regulating synaptic neurotransmission, analogous to that of opioids.

The distribution pattern of the CB1 receptors suggests that the typical effects of cannabinoids on cognition, memory, and motor performance could be mediated by their effects on cortical, hippocampal, basal ganglia, and cerebellar sites. These receptors are densely concentrated on output neurons in the outflow relay stations of the basal ganglia (substantial nigra and globus pallidus), where they are well-placed to affect movement control; receptors are sparser in most parts of the brain stem and spinal cord. Their presence in the nociceptive pathways of the brainstem and spinal cord suggests that they participate in a natural analgesic system.