Medical Cannabis Bike Tour: April 2020

Paradise Seeds joins the Medical Cannabis Bike Tour in April 2020. Discover more about the world’s biggest cannabis sporting event. 

Medical Cannabis Bike Tour: April 2020

Team Paradise is in training this month for a special sporting occasion! The Medical Cannabis Bike Tour is returning next month (April 21,22,23), after two years break, and it will be taking its message on a 420km journey through France and Belgium.

Starting in Brussels, seat of the European parliament, the tour hopes to highlight the issue of people’s right to medical cannabis. From here riders will be heading for Paris and, after a 3 day cycle, will reach Paris with a symbolic arrival at the Champs-Élysées.

Sign Up!
There are still a few spaces left on the tour so if you are a fan of cycling, head over the Medical Cannabis Bike Tour website and join Team paradise and riders from around the world on what is always a great adventure!

This will be the seventh time the Paradise crew have joined the bike tour and it is also proud to be one of the major tour sponsors. The MCBT is very close to our hearts because our company founder, Luc Krol, also co-founded the bike tour back in 2013.

Medical Cannabis Bike Tour Cancer Research

On the first bike tour, 50,000€ was raised through the generosity of sponsors. It was at this time that the bike tour first formed a partnership with the science team from the Madrid Complutense University which is a world leader in the study of cannabis and its action on cancer cells.

Over the last editions of the bike tour, another 350,000€ has been raised towards the costs of staging independent clinical trials which will use cannabis as a potential treatment for gioblastoma (brain cancer). These trials will be run by Dr Guillermo Velasco from the university and GEINO (Spanish Group of Neuro-oncological Investigation).

It has been a long process (almost five years) to set up these trials, due to the necessity of following the correct protocols in order to get the approval of health authorities. The process gives a real insight into the chasm between anecdotal and scientific evidence. It’s very easy to make a claim about something, but science demands clinical processes and hard data.

France, Cannabis and Cycling

The Medical Cannabis Bike Tour has visited many places in Europe since it began – Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic – but this French edition really catches the imagination.

France is the spiritual home of cycling. The Germans may have invented the mode of transport, but it was the French who made cycling popular from the 1860s and gave this new machine a name – ‘the bicycle’. The Tour de France, which began in 1903, is the most famous cycling sporting occasion in the world (until the arrival of the biggest cannabis cycling event in the world perhaps?!…).

Also exciting is the fact that the Medical Cannabis Bike Tour seems to be arriving in France at just the right moment. France has a reputation for having one of the most draconian legal positions regarding cannabis in Europe, but in the past year there has been a big shift, particularly in regard to medical cannabis. In 2019, the French government voted to endorse a two year medical cannabis trial (also approved by ANSM (Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament et des Produits de Santé), the medical safety agency.

Cannabis users in France report a real sense of optimism that change could be in the air in reference to medical cannabis. For this reason, the Medical Cannabis Bike Tour Foundation hopes to become a rallying focus towards normalizing medical cannabis, by bringing its stereotype busting tour to Paris to challenge ‘stoner’ associated preconceptions.

One thing is for sure, the world of medical cannabis looks very different in 2020 to how it did back in 2013. Back then it was a category that was just starting to emerge as an element of the wider cannabis business. To illustrate how different things were, CBD was still quite a novelty. Paradise Seeds, one of the first companies to produce CBD rich strains, only introduced Durga Mata ll CBD and Nebula ll CBD in 2014.

The big wheel of history keeps turning and in Paris next month many bicycle wheels will be turning in support of the medical cannabis cause once again!