Nanaimo medical marijuana producer Tilray says it is working with Health Canada to get advertising in line with standards of accuracy for the sale of a prescription drug.

The national agency sent memos out to 13 commercial cannabis producers across Canada on June 30, calling for the immediate removal of inappropriate claims in advertising for medical marijuana.

The federal government was "concerned about advertisements that are false, misleading or deceptive and those that advertise marijuana and remind them that their obligations, specifically that the advertising (of) marijuana is prohibited," the agency told the Ottawa Citizen the in July.

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Illicit substances, including tobacco and alcohol, are easily available to children and adolescents.

As a parent, you have a huge impact on your child's decision not to use drugs.

In most cases, children in elementary school have not begun to use alcohol, tobacco, or any other kind of drug. That is why elementary school is a good time to start talking about the dangers of drug use.

This is the best time to start to introduce difficult topics and set clear expectations. It is crucial to prepare your child for a time when drugs will be offered.

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Local crime numbers from October show a decline in calls for service, bringing a more manageable workload for the Port Alberni RCMP.

Reports to the local detachment normally peak in the summer months, as traffic through Port Alberni increases. After calls for service reached 934 in August, the autumn has brought a decline with 859 incidents in September and 845 last month.

"Our calls for service came down to more normalized numbers, which really has eased some of the pressures on the detachment," said Insp. Mac Richards of the Port Alberni RCMP.

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Long-Lost Promoter Of Vancouver's First Hippie Club Returns With Stories, And Some Amazing Posters

The saying goes that if you can remember the '60s, you weren't really there.

Jerry Kruz knows this all too well. At 66, his memory of the parties, concerts and happenings he took part in during the hippie era are a bit hazy.

But a marvellous thing happens when he looks back at his collection of old psychedelic concert posters. The memories of the shows come floating back, like a contact high.

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FOR THE PAST three years, a program called Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) has emerged as a preferred support service for an especially marginalized group of people who struggle with severe addiction and/or mental illness.

In May 2014, B.C. Health Minister Terry Lake described ACT as a "success story" and announced the province was working with Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) to expand the program, which has a mandate to provide care in the community.

There is a need. According to a September 2014 report received by Vancouver city council, there are an estimated 2,000 "severely ill" hotel tenants (mostly living in the Downtown Eastside) who are not receiving the treatment they require for mental-health and addiction challenges.

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Doctor blames increasingly easy access to alcohol, which accounts for 10 times more medical costs than all other drugs combined

Hospital visits attributed to alcohol and drug abuse increased by 63 per cent in the Greater Vancouver area over just four years ending in 2013, and visits to St. Paul's Hospital in downtown Vancouver for substance abuse increased by a whopping 89 per cent over the same period, according to emergency room data.

And despite dire headlines about opioid addiction and IV drug use, alcohol is driving most of the increase.

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Fraser Health: Training film seeks to treat addiction like any other illness

"Just sit there and wait. Don't you know there are real sick people here?"

In my years of severe alcoholism, I lost track of the number of times an ER nurse or doctor said something like that to me. In a column a few weeks ago I tallied up how the lack of care and compassion I experienced in my 31 drunken ER visits actually cost the taxpayer a lot more money and made my condition much worse.

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STARTING THE WEEK of November 23, doctors will administer prescription heroin to a select group of patients in Vancouver.

It will be the first time that heroin, or diacetylmorphine, is given to patients anywhere in North America outside of an academic study.

"For this group, the addiction is so severe that no other treatment has been effective," said David Byres, vice president of acute clinical programs at Providence Health Care. "The goal is stabilization."

The harm-reduction program will be run out of Providence Crosstown Clinic in the Downtown Eastside. In a telephone interview, Byres emphasized that heroin-assisted treatment is only recommended as an appropriate intervention for individuals who have repeatedly failed with traditional therapies such as methadone.

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I've come up with a solution to the current oil/gas pipeline controversy. This plan will have the full support of B.C. residents:

* Legalize marijuana.

* Make B.C. bud a recognized agricultural crop.

* Form a Crown corporation to market and price B.C. bud. Including the creation of processing plants and warehouses.

* Establish a pipeline system which will deliver B.C. bud to every customer in the province and to export terminals on the coast.

* The B.C. bud can be made to flow through pipelines by liquefying the product or by drying and aerating the product.

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Early last month, veteran RCMP officer Ron Francis committed suicide. Francis claimed smoking marijuana helped him cope with post-traumatic stress disorder. The RCMP ordered him to turn in his uniform, and put him on sick leave.

Obviously, marijuana wasn't enough to save him.

"The treatment he should have received just wasn't there for him at the end," said Francis's friend and lawyer T.J. Burke.

It wasn't there for 16 other RCMP officers who committed suicide over the past nine years, along with 15 retired members. Or for 160 Armed Forces personnel, also suffering from PTSD.

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Collection moving to Detroit, while organizer plans 'world-class dispensary' for Vancouver

For the last decade, $2.50 would get you a 30-minute tour through the ins and outs of herbal medicine - from the story behind Absinthe to a brief history of magic mushrooms in Canada to ancient cannabis use.

But after 10 years in Vancouver, the Herb Museum - billed as a global one-of-a-kind site for scope and accessibility - is closing its doors to make way for a seed sanctuary in the BC Marijuana Party Building.

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'Looking for Answers'. Producer Hopes to Begin Next Spring

British Columbia researchers and a medical marijuana producer have joined forces to conduct Canada's first-ever clinical trial to back up anecdotal evidence in using cannabis to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with hard facts.

Pending regulatory approval, the University of British Columbia Okanagan and Tilray, a Health Canada licensed producer under the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations, hope to begin the world's first large-scale clinical trial examining cannabis for a mental health disorder as early as spring 2015.

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North American first comes after more than a year of battles between doctors and federal Health Minister

In a North American first, heroin addicts in Vancouver will soon receive prescription heroin outside of a clinical trial.

Doctors at the Providence Crosstown Clinic received shipment of the drug this week for 26 former trial participants and will begin administering the drugs next week. In all, 120 severely addicted people have received authorization from Health Canada to receive the drugs; the rest are expected to get them soon.

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Aside from being a common recreational drug, marijuana may be able to help with the side affects of anxiety and fear that are common with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Zach Walsh, who is an associate professor of psychology at UBC Okanagan, studies the roles of substance use and the impact of drugs on behavior. Walsh started researching the impact of cannabis six years ago, as he was interested in finding out more about the world's most widely-used illegal substance.

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Just before 9 p.m. on November 15, Nelsonites received the news that Deb Kozak would serve for the next four years as the community's first female mayor. Having served on council since 2005, Kozak defeated both incumbent John Dooley and challenger Pat Severyn with a final tally of 1,756 votes.

The Star sat down with Kozak on Tuesday afternoon to debrief on her historic achievement, and to hear about her plans for the next four years.

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Stunning. Impressive. Historic. Those are just a few adjectives to describe Deb Kozak's upset win Saturday in knocking off three-time incumbent Nelson mayor John Dooley. I was among those guessing Dooley would be unstoppable, given a lack of polarizing issues in the campaign.

The mayoral race was instead about "leadership style." While some on council were clearly dissatisfied with Dooley at the helm, I never got the same sense from the community at large.

Early on, I speculated Pat Severyn's candidacy would benefit Kozak by drawing away votes that would otherwise go to Dooley, but as the campaign progressed I began to think the opposite would be true, as Severyn and Kozak seemed to be singing from the same song sheet.

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Marijuana producer and UBC are pitching a clinical trial on the impact of the drug on people with post-traumatic stress disorder

After developing post-traumatic stress disorder during his second deployment in Afghanistan in 2007, Canadian army veteran Fabian Henry tried numerous anti-depressants to quell his suicidal thoughts and violent rages. For three years, he was on as many as nine pills a day. But only one drug worked for him: marijuana.

"It literally gave me relief and changed my life," says Henry, who now vaporizes 10 grams of medical marijuana a day. "I went from suicidal and homicidal ideation, to DUIs, to threatening to kill people, to beating people up, to doing yoga seven days a week, using cannabis and spending more time in nature with my kids."

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The number of clean needles handed out to drug users by Alouette Addictions has more than doubled this year, from 18,000 to 50,000.

That doesn't mean, though, that the number of drug users has jumped by that amount.

"What we're seeing is that people are becoming more aware of the service. People are becoming more aware of their health," and are exchanging the needles to keep themselves and the streets cleaner, said Annika Polegato, executive-director of Alouette Addictions Services.

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Medical pot: Dispensaries increase legalization momentum, despite Ottawa's eff orts

Sitting in the back of the Weeds Glass & Gifts outlet on Burrard, pounds of pot at his feet, Don Briere beamed about the bright, bright future.

Forget the pipeline protesters - the most successful civil disobedience movement in Vancouver is the burgeoning number of illegal medical marijuana dispensaries.

And the irrepressible Briere had been at the vanguard of the many entrepreneurs who have opened more than 40 shops across the city and elsewhere.

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Fewer teens South of the Fraser are drinking or taking drugs than five years ago, according to a comprehensive new study that paints a generally improved portrait of adolescent health in B.C.

The McCreary Centre Society surveyed 30,000 B.C. students in grades 7 to 12 in 2013 and released itsdetailed report Tuesday on the Fraser South region, which includes Delta, Surrey and Langley school districts.

On substance use, the survey found fewer youth in Fraser South had ever tried alcohol (37 per cent), marijuana (21 per cent) or tobacco (16 per cent) compared to 2008, when those rates were 48 per cent, 26 per cent and 23 per cent, respectively.

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