Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN has recently blown the doors wide open on medical marijuana and the people in America are acting fast. Even while cannabis remains a Schedule I substance under federal law, politicians are quickly changing state laws to allow people to use the plant.

So who is it that should get credit for the medical marijuana momentum that we are experiencing right now? Dr. Sanjay Gupta definitely deserves credit but who inspired him to take a deeper look at benefits of medical marijuana?

We may never know exactly who or what inspired Dr. Sanjay Gupta to report many of the fascinating facts about medical marijuana but the discovery of the Charlotte’s Web oil can be linked to two people that have never had the spotlight in the mainstream media.

One of those people is Rick Simpson, the first person to show others how to make cannabis oil on the internet. His documentary Run From The Cure was launched on the internet in 2008 and suddenly there was a tidal wave of people creating a substance that Rick Simpson called Phoenix Tears.  At the time, the tidal wave was not visible to most people in America but there were plenty of people secretly creating and sharing Phoenix Tears in the same fashion that the bootleggers created and shared alcohol during the time of prohibition.

Although there were people having success with making oil in the same way that Rick Simpson taught, the process was impractical for people with limited amounts of marijuana. Luckily for all of us, there was a lady in Kansas named Shona Banda that was so desperate to make Phoenix Tears to save her life from Crohn’s disease that she found a way to make the oil by using a vaporizer that cost less than $50. Not long after using the oil, she was back to good health and decided to tell the world about her invention and her experiences before and after the oil.

Last Friday marked 5 years of what Shona calls her “Canna-Birthday”. On her Canna-Birthday she posted the following Facebook post with the video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM5xzL2Ta90

Americans have now recognized that the secrets about the benefits of marijuana were held long enough by people in the federal government. Due to Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s latest marijuana reports Americans are now well aware that in 2003 the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services patented the oil in Patent No. 6630507 in what some would call a heavy-handed measure to halt the use of the oil.

As Dr. Sanjay Gupta wrote, “It is about emerging science that not only shows and proves what marijuana can do for the body but provides better insights into the mechanisms of marijuana in the brain, helping us better understand a plant whose benefits have been documented for thousands of years. This journey is also about a Draconian system where politics override science and patients are caught in the middle.”

It goes without saying that countless lives would have been saved in America and around the world had marijuana never been made illegal by the U.S. federal government.  Thankfully, Shona Banda has courageously helped to boost the understanding of Phoenix Tears and at the same time has helped people understand (even many politicians) that humanity is greater than politics.