Small Town Will Share in Pot Company's Profits At least two Maryland state universities are jumping at the chance to work with marijuana growers to research the medicinal application and cultivation of cannabis. A tiny Western Maryland town says it would happily accept a 5 percent share of profits from a company that hopes to operate there. As competition to join Maryland's burgeoning medical marijuana industry intensifies, some out-of-state entrepreneurs are forging partnerships with local institutions even before securing a license to operate. [continues 876 words]
The classic 1936 anti-marijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness revolved around very melodramatic events where high school students, lured by pushers to try marijuana, descended into a sensational multitude of drug-induced depravities. In decades hence, this cautionary tale of a drug menace gone mad has been rightfully seen as an extremely exaggerated take on the use of marijuana. Today the pendulum has swung to quite another extreme. Recently a Gas & Grass (combination gas station and marijuana dispensary) has opened in Colorado Springs so customers can get a variety of errands done in the same place for their unprecedented convenience - including the purchase of lottery tickets, beverages and cigarettes. The March 2014 issue of Psychology Today published an article titled, "It's Time to Address the Marijuana Issue: To put it simply, What are we thinking?" In it, the author, Dr. Robert Berezin, writes that "the substance abuse epidemic is so incredibly destructive to the well-being of our society ... it's problematic enough to deal with the hard drugs and prescription pharmaceuticals." He furthers that marijuana is a psychoactive drug, and while not physically addictive, it is powerfully habituating. Dr. Berezin says that he has treated all the addictions and that marijuana usage has gotten a "pass" - a substance whose habitual use negatively affects the brain and can be distorting and destructive to the personality and optimum functioning in life. [continues 429 words]
Experts Want More Data on Effects of Medical Marijuana Even though Maryland is following the lead of 23 other states in setting up a medical marijuana industry, the collective experience of those states has translated to relatively little understanding of how the dozens of active substances within the plant affect health. As a result, Maryland will launch what likely will become a multimillion-dollar industry to make a psychoactive drug more available statewide without the benefit of proven information about the health implications. [continues 1288 words]
A Nonprofit Group Has Ranked Hawaii No. 6 for the State's Rate of Fatal Substance Use We don't have nearly the extreme kind of heroin epidemic that you see on the mainland. ... What we most commonly see kids overdose with in Hawaii is still alcohol poisoning." Colleen Fox Director of adolescent programs, Hina Mauka Hawaii has the sixth-lowest rate among the states of youth dying from drug overdoses, but the figure is trending upward across the country, according to a new report from the Trust for America's Health. [continues 722 words]
President Barack Obama's National Drug Control Strategy in 2010 first proclaimed the major policy goals of the administration's approach to the drug problem and the goals were to be met by 2015. Not only have they not been met, in critical instances, the policies have been going in the wrong direction, rapidly. We learned last week that, in the midst of the opiate overdose crisis, heroin overdose deaths rose an additional 28 percent between 2013 and 2014. That's on top of the 340 percent rise in heroin deaths since 2007, such that beyond the 8,217 deaths of 2013, we now have another 10,574. That is, we now see a 440 percent increase from the Bush years. [continues 948 words]
Third Time This Year Obama Has Commuted Terms Under Initiative President Obama commuted the sentences of 95 drug offenders Friday, more than double the number he granted this summer, in an effort to give relief to drug offenders who were harshly sentenced in the nation's war on drugs. It is the third time this year that Obama has used his unique clemency power to release federal drug offenders, whose harsh sentences have contributed to the phenomenon of mass incarceration. The commutations are a centerpiece of the president's effort to make the most significant changes in the nation's criminal justice system in decades. He and former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. have spoken passionately about the need to fix what they say is a broken system - one they argue has subjected too many nonviolent inmates to decades behind bars, disproportionately hurting minority communities. [continues 1185 words]
BURLINGTON (AP) - As more states allow for the use of medical marijuana, the University of Vermont is offering a course in the science of the drug - and the professors say they are challenged by a lack of research on what has long been a taboo topic. Other institutions have offered classes in marijuana law and policy, but the university's medical school is likely the country's first to offer a full course on medical cannabis, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Other medical schools have touched on the topic. [continues 519 words]
An Arizona State University student is asking an appeals court to overturn the law that makes it illegal for him to have physician-recommended medical marijuana in his dorm room. Andre Maestas, 20, an ASU junior and medical-marijuana cardholder, was arrested in 2014 and charged with a felony for having 0.6 grams of weed in his room on campus, roughly the equivalent of one joint. He is the first to challenge a 2012 statute banning medical marijuana on state university campuses, which the Legislature passed two years after Arizona voters approved a ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana. [continues 1363 words]
The "Just Say No" campaign kept me off drugs. NOT! Still, I appreciate Nancy Reagan for using ignorant scare tactics to at least try to keep kids like me away from the Devil's Lettuce. Drugs are for adults, and having a dialogue about that notion is important. The conversation does not, however, require a sizzling egg to represent your brain on drugs. Drug Abuse Resistance Education campaigns, aka DARE, were all the rage in the 1980s and '90s, sucking up hundreds of millions of tax dollars on TV spots, branded backpacks, stickers, and even cartoons featuring Daren the Lion. At its peak, the program was deployed in 75 percent of American schools, with police officers leading classroom discussions and assemblies that students absolutely loved-not because of the content, but because it got us out of math class. [continues 751 words]
Governor Baker's plan to increase opioid education, which he announced on Nov. 9 with the deans of the state's four medical schools, gets it only half right. It's wonderful to teach future doctors how to prescribe opioids safely to reduce abuse and addiction. But the United States is actually caught in the middle of two colliding epidemics, not just one: the well-publicized problem of opioid abuse, and the under-publicized epidemic of chronic pain, which affects 100 million American adults, according to the Institute of Medicine. [continues 531 words]
Florida State University defensive back Greg Reid was supposed to be a first-round NFL draft pick. University of Florida defensive back J.C. Jackson was supposed to be an elite playmaker in the Southeastern Conference. University of Central Florida running back Will Stanback was supposed to help carry the Knights' offense during what has turned out to be a dismal season. Instead, their links to marijuana altered the trajectory of their promising careers. At least 12 UF players have been linked to marijuana use by law enforcement since the start of former coach Will Muschamp's tenure in 2011, and the number is not considered exceptionally high for major college-football programs. Arrest figures were much higher during former Gators coach Urban Meyer's tenure. When schools announce that football players have been suspended for undisclosed rule violations, many immediately suspect marijuana was involved. [continues 2402 words]
We can't solve a problem without knowing its origin. To solve America's drug problem, we have to know the history of the drug war. The drug war did not start with Richard Nixon. It wasn't a Republican idea, or a traditional idea. The drug war was launched before the First World War by utopian Progressive Democrats. Woodrow Wilson signed the first federal drug law in 1914, the Harrison Act. It was intended as a weapon against opiate-using "Orientals." Some doctors supported it because it granted them a prescription monopoly. At first, the Harrison Act only increased the cost of opiates to users. But soon the doctors fell victim as well, as the Harrison Act was used to imprison pain doctors and even those who ran opiate-addiction treatment clinics. [continues 616 words]
Stricter guidelines for prescribing and dispensing powerful pain medications are needed to curb the nation's deadly opioid epidemic, according to a report released last week from public-health leaders at Johns Hopkins University. The analysis offers broad recommendations for addressing opioid abuse but focuses on the supply chain, including physicians and pharmacists. The report calls for greater monitoring, training and rule-making to prevent misuse of opioids, addiction and overdoses, and said doctors often prescribe pain medications "in quantities and for conditions that are excessive, and in many cases, beyond the evidence base." [continues 349 words]
PALMER -- Despite what one Alaska state trooper described as "a huge rise in heroin" in recent years, Alaska's fastest-growing region has no place where addicts can undergo detox when they make the hard choice to get clean. That's according to panelists at a substance abuse forum hosted by the Mat-Su Health Foundation and attended by about 130 people at Mat-Su College's Glenn Massay Theater Monday night. Detox is the process of clearing the chemical dependence on drugs or alcohol from an addict's system. Most experts advise doing it under medical supervision. Symptoms of heroin withdrawal can include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea or seizures -- none generally considered life-threatening in the way alcohol detox can be. Many addicts end up detoxing in jail after getting arrested on drug-or alcohol-related crimes. [continues 870 words]
Jean Kennedy has a BS in biology and a master's in special education. Now, she's trying to decide what to do with her third degree: a certificate of achievement from Oaksterdam University, the Harvard Business School of marijuana. "I'm Italian," said Kennedy, 56, a retired high school biology teacher with graying hair and a heavy New York accent. "You know Italians, we grow tomatoes. Maybe I'll grow some plants." Horticulture 102 is one of the many subjects Kennedy studies at Oaksterdam, whose storefront campus is set amid the hip cafes, restaurants and cannabis dispensaries of downtown Oakland. Founded in 2007, the school sees itself as a training ground for citizen advocates in the fight to legalize marijuana. [continues 1416 words]
This week, just some cold, hard stats. Clearly I am in support of the legalization of marijuana. And I'm passionate about the subject not only because I enjoy smoking weed, but I'd also prefer not to be arrested for buying it. Regardless, I try to be objective on the matter, understanding that not everyone likes to get high (on cannabis, anyway), and that countering decades of Reefer Madness may take time. So in an effort to be more neutral and journalistic, I'd like to let the plethora of statistics I've gathered speak for itself. Although numbers, of course, cannot speak. [continues 742 words]
Baltimore Moves to Eradicate Synthetic Drugs in the City As Emergency Room Visits Rise When you think about drugs that ultimately lead people to the E.R., the first things that come to mind might be heroin, cocaine or prescription drugs. However, there is another dangerous set of substances that are sending thousands to hospitals across the country: synthetic drugs. As an emergency physician, I have treated high school students who came in unresponsive and needed breathing tubes to stay alive. I have seen teens hallucinating and suffering seizures. I have attended to adults who sustained long-term brain, heart and kidney damage because of these harmful drugs. [continues 593 words]
Yes on Issue 1 We strongly support Issue 1 on the Ohio ballot this Tuesday. It sets up a much fairer process for drawing district lines for Ohio House of Representative and Senate seats. Under the current corrupt system, maps for state legislative and congressional districts are redrawn every 10 years, after updated Census numbers are released. A five-member state Apportionment Board, whose members include the governor, secretary of state, state auditor and a legislator from each major party, draws the legislative districts. A simple majority wins any vote on the board, so the party that controls the board (Republican in recent years) has absolute control over how the legislative lines are drawn. [continues 1267 words]
Parents, if you haven't already done so, be sure to cull through the kids' Halloween bounty to check that all goodies are safe to eat. That should be a routine every year - but this September, there have been reports here of high school students being sickened by candy containing THC, the active ingredient and toxicant in marijuana. The packaging was innocent-looking enough, with one "100% vegan and organic" fruit roll-up product bearing the label Shaka Organics Hawaii. Be warned that cannabis candies are being sold in the several states that have legalized recreational pot, and, of course, all over the Internet. [end]
COLUMBUS, Ohio - As a member of the International Cannabinoid Research Society, a collector of antique marijuana apothecary jars, the founder of an industrial hemp business and "a pot smoker consistently for 47 years," Don Wirtshafter, an Ohio lawyer, has fought for decades to make marijuana legal, calling it "my life's work." But when Ohio voters go to the polls Tuesday to consider a constitutional amendment to allow marijuana for both medical and personal use, Mr. Wirtshafter will vote against it. [continues 1193 words]
