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About Cannabinologist

This is the website of Sunil Kumar Aggarwal PhD, MD, Physician-Scientist and Medical Geographer. 

Here is my Curriculum Vita.

I use this site to further cannabinology of all kinds, including integrative medical cananbinology, using my own work to anchor.

The Cannabis Hemp Plant was revered by many ancient civilizations, as far back as the 10th century (BCE), for its unique properties.

The global war on drugs has maligned and demonized the Cannabis and it has inhibited human, social, and medico-scientific development.

In the United States, it was the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that enacted the first state-wide prohibition law in 1911 that criminalized non-medical use of cannabis.

At the federal level, the first near-prohibition was instituted in 1937 through a demonstratably racist 'junk science' campaign.

please take time to explore this website...

The deep historical factual information and broad-based examination will hopefully enrich  and inspire.

Thank you!

Dr. Sunil Aggarwal's History (excerpted from piece by c.a. riley)

Dr Aggarwal is one of the most effective medical cannabis proponents few people outside the Seattle area have ever heard of.

It has been easy to find documentation of his myriad achievements in education, research, medicine, medical cannabis advocacy and more, but it has been nearly impossible to ferret out any personal information on Dr Aggarwal.

As a University of Washington medical student, Aggarwal told the crowd at the 2008 Seattle Hempfest, “We have to change the way people think about people and cannabis. This is a staple of the earth and a basic medicine for a lot of people.”

Long before his time at the University of Washington, in the early 1990s Sunil Aggarwal attended high school in Muskogee, Oklahoma until his Junior year when he went on to the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics in Oklahoma City.

After finishing high school, Aggarwal left the Midwest in 1997 and traveled to the west coast, where he resumed his education at UC Berkeley–which included a semester of study abroad in Edinburgh. After 4.5 years at Berkeley, Sunil moved to Seattle and continued his studies at the University of Washington in the Geography Department.

There, he completed his first two years of med school, completed his doctorate in geography, writing his dissertation on the “medical geography of cannabinoid botanicals in Washington State.” Two more years of med school followed, in which Aggarwal focused on the Medical Scientist Training Program and the Global Health Pathway, graduating in June, 2010, some two years after his Hempfest proclamation. Dr Aggarwal also holds degrees in chemistry, philosophy and religious studies.

In conjunction with his dissertation, Dr Aggarwal conducted research with 176 chronically and critically ill patients in two groups, one from a rural pain clinic and the other from an urban cannabinoid botanical delivery clinic. At this writing, two peer-reviewed published articles have come from this work. [SKA: now 6]

So, what led Dr Aggarwal to the medical cannabis movement?

It began while he was an undergraduate.

He says that when he discovered “marijuana wasn’t a horribly dangerous thing” he wanted to study it thoroughly and he has done so for at least the past decade.

When medical student Sunil K. Aggarwal convinced the UW chapter of the medical student group of the AMA to support a resolution he had written in support of rescheduling cannabis, he presented the idea and his research to the American Medical Association (AMA) at its annual meeting in 2008. The organization agreed to study the issue for a year.

At its 2009 meeting, the country’s largest physicians’ organization formally adopted a policy urging the federal government to reclassify, or “reschedule,” cannabis.

It was Aggarwal’s research, dissertation, and the two articles derived from it and published in the Journal of Opioid Management that helped convince the American Medical Association (AMA) of the potential for medical uses of cannabis and led the organization to reverse previous policy and call for the rescheduling of cannabis so that more research could be conducted upon it.

So far, the government has not changed its policy and, incredibly, has stepped up efforts to quash medical cannabis production in the states that have legalized it for medical use.

Dr Aggarwal also holds degrees in chemistry, philosophy and religious studies and is a much-sought-after speaker at medical, drug policy reform and other conferences and conventions.

--snip--

The Phenomenon of Hempen Cannabinergy

‘Hempen‘ is the adjectival form of ‘Hemp‘, the oldest English word for Cannabis plants.
Cannabis plants are the only known botanicals to robustly produce secondary metabolites known as cannabinoids in their essential oils.

Cannabinoids, classically 21-carbon terpenophenolics, have medically important receptor-based pharmacological activities in humans chiefly mediated by the molecular signaling network known as the endogenous cannabinoid system, which is found ubiquitously throughout the body.

...Excerpt "Doctoral Dissertation" by Sunil Kumar Aggarwal