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A Simple Question To The Medical Establishment: Does Cannabis Cure Cancer?

A filmmaker’s journey to find some answers

Recently The 420 Times sat down with writer and film maker Len Richmond (Agony, Everything Bad is Good) to discuss the motivation behind the movie What if Cannabis Cured Cancer?

420: Okay, so let’s talk about your movie. So what made you do this film? I mean you came from TV and you have a lot of writing credits and you started directing stuff. What turned you on to medicine and cannabis?

Len: My mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and we have a family history of cancer – my aunts, my grandmother and my stepfather and everybody. They all went for conventional therapy of chemotherapy and radiation and they all died.

The cancer industry is an absolute scandal. They are hurting more people than they’re helping. Even the treatments that appear to work, the people frequently come down with cancer five years later even when they’re supposedly cured. It’s a real scandal. It’s not working, the doctors won’t admit it and my mother was very aware of this.

She said, “You know, the doctors are not going to touch me. I’m going to find a way to heal myself with nature.” And we were kind of into health foods. So she went on the internet and started researching. Now there was nothing about cannabis, you know. Nobody knew that you could use cannabis to treat cancer but there were a hell of a lot of other herbs including mistletoe and Asian mushrooms. There are a lot of anti-cancer elements out there in nature. So she started doing them all and going on a raw food diet and she stopped the tumor from growing for four years and after four years it began to shrink.

Now mind you, during this whole time, my brothers and sisters and I are going, “Oh my, Mom, you’re going to kill yourself. You have to go for radiation and therapy. Doctors, oh we have to trust the doctors, they’re there to heal you.” And she’s just a stubborn lady and she said, “No, the doctors are stupid.” That was her favorite phrase, “Doctors are stupid. They don’t know what they’re doing. Nature is there to heal us and I’m going to find a way.”

And she did. She shrunk her tumor and I was really impressed by that. It kind of proved to me that yeah, there is something about herbs and diet that really is more powerful than all the radiation and chemotherapy in the world. And I made a film about it called Everything Bad Is Good, where I interviewed a whole group of people who had all cured themselves of cancer with natural therapies.

420: So from there, what?

Len: I started reading here and there about cannabis and to tell you the truth I was totally skeptical. I just thought, “This is too good to be true; this is a stoner’s dream,” you know. Not only were you wrong about what we’re doing all these years but, hey folks, that cancer that your wife has, your grandma has, your granddad has, if they had been smoking cannabis, first of all they might not have got it. And secondly, in highly concentrated forms, we’re talking about oil here like Rick Simpson’s oil; it’s been shown to have curative effects.

Now I’m not going to say it absolutely cures cancer in all cases but there are certainly other people out there who have had their cancer cured who will say that. And there are a lot of researchers and doctors who are really coming to believe that we have something really unique in this earth beyond any other cancer-killing herb and there are a lot of cancer killing herbs out there.

420: Okay, so how did you finance the film?

Len: I didn’t even try to get financing because, you know, from what I know about this field, they do not trash doctors and my film was all about trashing doctors. It basically said doctors are killing people, and that’s a very radical point of view. PBS is not ready for that or at least I certainly didn’t think they were ready for that.

So I proceeded cautiously and I found some doctors who had been quoted in some of these articles and I tried to interview them and they said absolutely not, you know, “I have a career, I’m not sticking my neck out by coming on a film and saying that cannabis cures cancer. No way.”

I mean one of them worked at Cedar-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. I was all set up to do an interview with him because he had been quoted in an L.A.Times article and at the last minute the Cedar-Sinai press people said absolutely no way can you interview him, we will not allow it. We’re not having our institution associated with this cringeyness, you know.

420: Got it.

Len: So this is totally unacceptable in the medical field, particularly to the people who treat cancer. They don’t want to know, they don’t want to know that what they’re doing is hurting people and that maybe they’ve been ignoring a cure that’s been out there for thousands of years.

So, anyhow, I found one brave doctor, Jeffrey Hergenrather who lives in Sebastopol who, again, had been quoted as treating cancer patients and having success with cannabis. And, again, I have to emphasize it’s not just smoking a joint. Because everybody says, “Well what about all the people who smoke for chemotherapy and they still die of cancer?”

420: What did Taskin’s study show?

Len: Smoking may help prevent cancer, that’s what Taskin’s study has shown; that people who smoke marijuana have less cancer than people who smoke nothing at all.

But once you get cancer, I mean we’re talking about your body being under a lot of stress and just smoking a joint is not going to do the trick. You have to bombard it with the cannabinoid chemical in marijuana, all of them because they all have slightly different actions, in an oil, in something that’s way concentrated. And you have to do it frequently.

I mean Jeffrey was saying that one patient he had that had been diagnosed with a brain tumor that should have killed him within a year, that’s with radiation and chemotherapy.

Had he done that, he would have been dead within a year probably, but he’s been alive for seven years. He does cannabis multiple times a day. He bombards his system with the chemicals.

420: What else did Dr. Hergenrather teach you?

Len: He said, “Well you know you have marijuana in your body right now Len, whether you’ve ever smoked it or not.” That was like totally news to me. He said, “Yeah, we’re born with the endo-cannabinoid system. It’s a mirror image of what happens when you smoke cannabis. It’s virtually the same chemical in slightly different forms.”

It’s like a key fitting into a lock in the body and the lock is the endo-cannabinoid system you’re born with and the key is cannabis and it feeds it, it makes it more powerful.

420: What is the endo-cannabinoid system?

Len: It’s there to keep us healthy. It’s a tumor regulator, it regulates inflammation, it’s antibacterial, it’s anti-spasmodic – I mean the list goes on. It’s the system in our body; it’s a chemical reaction with the neurotransmitters that is there to try to keep us healthy. And every cat and dog, every elephant, every fish has it. And it developed thousands of years ago as a way to survive. However, in modern times, our endo-cannabinoid system is just stressed beyond belief because of all the toxins coming in our bodies because of the food we eat and the pollution and you know.

420: And you don’t believe prescription medication can help?

Len: Pharmaceutical drugs are extremely toxic to our system. And so it can’t always be a tumor regulator and stop the tumors from growing when we’re bombarding ourselves with cancer causing toxins in our food and pharmaceutical drugs and the air we breathe. But when you smoke cannabis, it gives it more power. It’s basically like a little booster shot saying, “Here, you need some help? Smoke this cannabis and your endo-cannabinoids are going to be woken up a little bit and recharged.” Well, that’s revolutionary; I mean that’s beyond any other herb on this planet.

So Jeffrey was talking about this and I just went, “Oh my God, there is a film here.” This is beyond anything I realized. We’re talking about the whole science of medicine and this would be a revolution.