What turned Shiksha Gallow into a campaigner for cannabis to be used in formal medical treatments?
“I was once an insider,” she says.
At the start of her 24-year career in medical research, she worked for a decade on vaccine clinical trials for a large pharmaceutical company.
She signed a non-disclosure legal form and must choose her words carefully.
“I was looking at how we can actually save people instead of them just being stuck on these medicines and stuff that doesn't work?
“I saw big pharma. All I can say is, I don't do that any more. I only do holistic and plant medicine.”
She worries about a system designed to create dependency.
“I want to help people. I don't want to make you sick.
"I'm not against pharmaceutical medicine. It has its place.
"My plant medicine is not going to help you if you have an accident and need to go and have emergency surgery.”
Her other big concern is specialisation, with medical experts living within their own silos and not aligning their treatments.
“We are working with blinkers on.”
But what does she see for medical cannabis in the treatment of cancer in the next 10 or 20 years?
She wants oncologists and urologists and all specialists to lay out options — there's chemotherapy, there is medical cannabis, which has been through all the stages of clinical trials.
Patients will be given the options for registered cannabis products.
She feels offended by medical practitioners who tell patients to “eat whatever, eat sugar. We need to start changing the way we practice medicine".
Turning to the issue of a vegan diet, she says medical schools offer only a few hours of nutritional education in a six-year degree.
“But your food is your medicine.”
She says pure plant-based cannabis will not kill someone who takes too much, and does not affect the respiratory centre of the brain stem.
“It is safe. It's as addictive as coffee.”
Daily Dispatch