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Pot and poppies, basically lettuce to professor Facchini
By Hempology | November 6, 2007
Calgary Herald, AB
5 Nov 2007
Sean Myers
PROFESSOR’S GRANT GOES TO ‘POT’
A city poppy expert is teaming up with a medicinal marijuana producer in Saskatchewan to develop new health applications for the notorious plants.
University of Calgary biology professor Peter Facchini has received a three-year, $650,000 federal grant to work with plants best known for their illicit derivatives such as heroin.
“As plants, opium poppies and cannabis evoke a lot of emotions,” said Facchini. “To me, they’re basically lettuce.
“These plants in themselves aren’t bad plants. It’s a question of understanding the basics of how they produce medicinal products like morphine and codeine.”
Facchini holds the Canada research chair in plant metabolic processes biotechnology.
He has a licence to grow 100 opium poppy plants in his lab at the U of C, and he has been working with the plant for about 15 years.
Saskatoon-based biotech company Prairie Plant Systems has a contract with Health Canada to grow medicinal marijuana and is also growing a vaccine antibody against hepatitis C within plants for the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization.
The biotech company cultivates its marijuana supply at a high security underground growth chamber in a former copper and zinc mine in Flin Flon, Man.
The goal of the cannabis research is to find a way to block the production of psychoactive cannabinoids that produce the mind-altering effects in users so cannabis can become a useful crop for oil, fibre and even food, said Facchini.
The Calgary professor, however, is best known for his work with poppies.
In July, when city police raided a northeast home and discovered 1,500 poppy plants capable of producing heroin, they called Facchini to advise them on what they’d found.
It was believed to be the city’s first poppy bust, worth an estimated $45,000 — far less valuable than the equivalent number of marijuana plants.
“The public is very poorly informed about poppies,” said Facchini.
“A few thousand plants is not going to produce very much morphine. In Afghanistan, they cultivate hundreds of thousands of hectares of poppies. And it’s a very labour-intensive activity to extract morphine.”
Heroin is a derivative of morphine.
Facchini said he hopes to find medicinal properties in the opium poppy that don’t require the extraction of morphine and won’t be useful in heroin production.
“We’ve used this plant for 7,000 to 8,000 years, but it’s only in the last 15 years that we’ve started to understand the nature of this plant at a very basic level,” said Facchini.
“We’ve only identified maybe 14 or 15 genes in poppy plants so far,” he said. “That’s barely scratching the surface, there’s many more that need to be identified. And then we can look at how these genes are controlled, how they are regulated.
“We don’t know how the plant puts all these things together.”
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