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Hearing Set on Columbia County Cannabis Moratorium

A public hearing will be held next month to take comments on a moratorium halting new cannabis operations in Columbia County.

Commissioners last month enacted the moratorium on applications for production, processing or retail operations. The moratorium did not affect the one retail cannabis store in the county or an indoor grow operation approved by the county hearing examiner before the moratorium was enacted.

The resolution for the moratorium stated the current county code governing recreational and medical cannabis operations “allows for too much public safety issues and concerns, disallows for appropriate moderation and is in need of complete revision to ensure only suitable development occurs.”

Union-Bulletin

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Lawmakers In U.S. Territory Vote To Legalize Marijuana

By a margin of 18 – 1, with one abstention, the CNMI House of Representatives passed the legislation, which would end cannabis prohibition for adults over 21 and create a system of taxed and regulated sales. It would also allow medical marijuana and industrial hemp.

“The lawmakers and people of CNMI are on track to make history, and more U.S. policymakers would be wise to take notice before the upcoming midterm elections,” Justin Strekal, political director for NORML, said in an interview, referring to marijuana reform’s growing popularity with voters.

Therefore, the Legislature finds that it is in our best interest to move marijuana into a regulated and controlled market for responsible adult personal use, allowing for the creation of jobs and the capturing of a new revenue stream that can be used to fund public safety programs, public school infrastructure and programs, supporting the retirement fund, and other government and social programs, such as drug abuse treatment; furthermore, providing an effective alternative medicine for those suffering from medical conditions; and allowing for the development of an industrial hemp industry here in the CNMI.”

The CNMI Senate is now expected to take up the House-passed legalization bill.

Read the full article at Forbes

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Is CBD Okay For Dogs?

If your pup has long suffered from anxiety, you’ve probably tried every treatment option in the book — which might have left you wondering as an alternative, “Is CBD OK for dogs?” There’s evidence that cannabinoid oil, which is derived from the cannabis plant but has no THC in it, can help humans with everything from anxiety to pain management — so why not dogs?

According to PetMD, cannabis oil can treat a wide range of health conditions in dogs, including not just anxiety and stress, but also seizures, nausea, arthritis, back pain, and gastrointestinal issues. (Indeed, the FDA recently approved a CBD-based medication for the treatment of epilepsy in humans, so it’s not too far of a stretch to examine CBD oil as a treatment for seizures in dogs, too.) And yes, it’s safe for your pup; in fact, it even has a leg up on some traditional pet medications in that, when properly dosed, it doesn’t have any life-threatening side effects.

According to Mashable, BarkShop began offering health and wellness supplements for dogs in 2017 and started work developing dog-specific CBD supplements in January of 2018. They’re available in both treat form and straight extract; the treats can obviously be eaten as is (think of them as CBD gummies for pets), while the extracts can be mixed with food.

Research tested and sourced from “family farms in Colorado,” the supplements claim to be useful for everything from anxiety brought on by thunderstorms or car rides to relieving nausea and treating seizures.

Read more at Bustle

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Why Talk of Removing Federal Ban on Marijuana is Getting Louder

In a move that will affect thousands of defendants and millions of residents, New Jersey’s attorney general has announced an immediate adjournment of all marijuana cases in municipal courts statewide until at least September.

In a letter to prosecutors obtained exclusively by NJ Advance Media, New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal wrote that he was asking “that all municipal prosecutors in New Jersey seek an adjournment until September 4, 2018, or later, of any matter involving a marijuana-related offense pending in municipal court” so that his office could develop “appropriate guidance” for prosecutors.

Meanwhile, a source in the state Senate also told NJ Advance Media on Monday that a bill legalizing adult-use marijuana sponsored by state Sen. Nick Scutari, D-Union — himself a municipal prosecutor in the city of Linden — was expected to reach the Senate for consideration by September as well.

Last week, Jersey City’s newly installed prosecutor, Hudnut, announced his office would seek to downgrade some marijuana charges to non-criminal offenses, seek the outright dismissal of low-level marijuana charges and divert those defendants with prior drug arrests and signs of addiction to the city’s community court.

Read more at NJ.com

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Does Legal Marijuana Make Police More Effective?

Marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington state has “produced some demonstrable and persistent benefit” to police departments’ ability to solve other types of crime, according to researchers at Washington State University.

To isolate the effects of legalization, the researchers looked at how the trends in clearance changed after the implementation of marijuana legalization in November 2012 in Colorado and December 2012 for Washington. While recreational markets in these states didn’t open until 2014, provisions allowing for personal possession and use took effect shortly after the votes were certified.

The researchers stress, however, that the data can’t prove conclusively that legalization directly caused the changes in clearance rates. There could have been other changes to policing in those states during that time period, such as increased use of overtime hours, the implementation of new policing strategies or a more aggressive focus on certain types of crime.

Advocates for legalization have frequently argued that freeing police from the burden of low-level marijuana enforcement would allow them to devote resources to more serious crimes. The Washington State researchers say their findings support this idea: “Our results suggest that, just as marijuana legalization proponents argued, the legalization of marijuana influenced police outcomes, which in the context of this article is modeled as improvements in clearance rates.”

The Cannifornian

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Is Indiana On The Verge Of Legalizing Medical Marijuana?

In the fall of 2015, the Indiana Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources committee gathered at the Statehouse for yet another study on the potential legalization of cannabidiol oil, or CBD oil, for children with intractable epilepsy. In the back of the room, waiting to testify in support, were the head of the Epilepsy Foundation of Indiana, multiple doctors, and the parents of kids who had found relief from seizures by illegally using CBD oil, an extract derived from the cannabis plant that has no psychoactive properties—it doesn’t get users high.

It proved to be a winning argument—when Republican Senator Jim Tomes introduced a bill to legalize the substance for epileptic patients the following legislative session, it died a quick death in an unfavorable committee. CBD oil supporters were devastated, but they learned from the experience. In subsequent years, armed with new studies showing other health benefits of the oil and emboldened by rising public support, they refined their approach and focused on educating lawmakers. It finally worked. This past March, the legislature passed SB52, legalizing CBD oil for all Hoosiers, a bill that Governor Eric Holcomb signed into law.

The Indianapolis Star and other outlets covered the entire saga, but a piece of related legislation passed with far less media attention. In some ways, it’s a direct result of the efforts on the CBD oil front. Without a single dissenting vote, the House also approved HR-2, calling for a study committee to look into something that would have seemed inconceivable a few years ago: legalizing medical marijuana.

The resulting public outcry caused Governor Holcomb to issue a moratorium and demand that the legislature find a solution during the ensuing session, which they did, overwhelmingly. Of the 144 members of the General Assembly who voted on SB52, only 11 remained, as one lawmaker put it, “sympathetic to the prosecutor’s case.” But as IPAC attorney Negangard feared, it didn’t stop there. With an increasing number of Hoosiers in favor of dismantling more marijuana laws and a study of the curative properties of cannabis underway this summer, CBD oil may be just the beginning.

Read more at Indianapolis

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This Cannabis Company Is Going Public With CBD Oil

Another cannabis stock is gearing up to trade publicly on the Canadian Stock Exchange (CSE). Tree of Knowledge Inc. (TOK) is the latest company to apply for a listing application on the market, following a growing list that includes headline-making companies such as MedMen (CNSX:MMEN) and The Green Organic Dutchman (TSX:TGOD.

A group of business and medical professionals founded TOK in 2015 with the goal of building a trusted CBD product line. The company also has an advisory board with leaders from diverse sectors from medicine to professional sports. Since then, the company has expanded to three continents and has grown its brand of CBD products called EVRCBD—oils, capsules, tinctures and vape pens.

Courtland Capital and TOK announced their merger agreement in April. Courtland is in the process of forming a Nevada subsidiary company to merge with TOK, whereby TOK shareholders will receive Courtland common shares, owning approximately 88 percent of the outstanding undiluted Courtland shares. The company plans to delist from the TSX Venture Exchange and instead pursue the listing on the CSE. Courtland will change its name to TOK in the reverse merger.

TOK Chairman Michael Caridi explained that TOK and Courtland make a great partnership moving forward in their quest to becoming a medical cannabis industry leader. Caridi cites the sheer magnitude of the medical cannabis market, and looks forward to the “ability to mature and expand [their] reach into the markets [they] are in and plan on entering.”

Pot Network

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How Opioid Addiction Alters Our Brains To Always Want More

At a hearing on Capitol Hill earlier this year, U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander asked an important question: Why are most of the treatment for opioid addiction more opioids?

In response, Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, did their best to assure the senator – and thus the nation – that scientists are hard at work developing treatments for addicts that are not just more of the same.

Hacking the Human Brain

The hopeful news regarding the opioid crisis is that scientists are searching for promising targets in developing non-opioid treatments for addiction. For example, this year a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee voted to approve the high blood pressure medicine lofexidine as the first non-opioid medication to treat opioid withdrawal symptoms.

Earlier this year, the NIH launched an initiative called Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) that takes an important step forward in doing just that. It funds research into potential new treatments aimed at the brain reward pathway – the regions of the brain where neurons release the neurotransmitter dopamine, which gives you a jolt of pleasure, makes you feel good and signals you to repeat this pleasurable behavior in the future.

Continue Reading at The Conversation

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Health Summit On Opioid Crisis Held

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (WAND) – More than 150 people gathered Wednesday for a conference on the Opioid Crisis.

The event called “Opioid Crisis Next Door” included speakers addressing challenges to treating opioid abuse, the experience of people in treatment, Naloxone use, coalition-building and other matters.

“It’s about all of us coming together,” said Pat Schou, executive director of the Illinois Critical Access Hospital Network. “Coalitions shouldn’t just be healthy people or public health people or the coroner or police officers or legal. It’s about everybody together.”

National speaker psychiatrist Dr. Omar Manejwala described the opioid crisis as a “wicked problem”: lacking a definitive definition and a stopping rule that shows when a solution has been found.

Wand 17

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Bitpay Bans Payments to Merchants of Explicit Content, Cloud-Mining and Gambling

Bitcoin was originally created to free people’s money from the control and censorship of regulators, banks and governments. Companies in the ecosystem are supposed to be infused with this ethos, but as they strive to become more mainstream some, like Bitpay apparently, adopt the more prevailing standards in the business world.

Bitpay, the digital asset service provider based in Atlanta, Georgia, updated its Terms of Use agreement on February 2. The binding contract states that the use of the company’s services is subject to several important restrictions, including the sale of explicit sexual content.

Additional “prohibited activities” include the sales of narcotics, research chemicals or any controlled substances; cash or cash equivalents, and virtual currencies; items that infringe or violate any intellectual property rights; ammunition, firearms, explosives (including fireworks) or weapons; transactions that show the personal information of third parties; transactions that support pyramid, Ponzi, or other “get rich quick” schemes; transactions that are related to cloud-mining; credit repair or debt settlement services; any services which compete with Bitpay such as Kraken Exchange; and the sales of Kratom or Nootropics.

You can read more about the changes at news.bitcoin.com.

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London’s First Marijuana Producer Ready To Grow

London’s first licences cannabis producer is gearing up for a major expansion.

INDIVA is holding a private open house on Wednesday to kick off the expansion of its facility in a south London industrial park.

INDIVA spokesperson Susan Mutterback said the company is focused on the medical cannabis market but can expand to include the recreational marijuana market when it becomes legal.

Niel Marotta, the CEO of the publicly traded company, is based in Ottawa but Pete Young, the master grower, is based in London and was a director of the London Compassion Society, which has been providing medicinal marijuana to its carefully screened members since 1995.

At full capacity, INDIVA expects the London facility to produce more than three million grams of high-quality dry flower annually using the latest hydroponic growing systems and LED lighting. The plant will also be able to process more than 1,000 kilograms of cannabis oil. The expansion is expected to be completed later this year. Full production capacity should be reached in 2019.

The London Free Press

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What Ever Happened to Denver’s Magic Mushroom Initiative?

Nearly three months ago, a group of Denverites made a big splash with their campaign to decriminalize magic mushrooms, chanting “free the spores” and holding up signs that read, “I am a psilocybin patient,” outside of the Denver City and County Building.

They vowed to turn Denver into a safe space for psychedelics users and, they said, private research. After all, Denver has a history of progressive drug policies; it decriminalized possession of cannabis in 2005, years before statewide recreational legalization.

But the campaign Denver for Psilocybin — backed by members of the cannabis community such as weed doctor and neuroscientist Michele Ross and Straight Hemp CEO Devin Alvarez — has faced hurdles in its bid for the ballot since making its bold announcement in early March. It’s still struggling to get its petition language approved and has been denied twice by the city, most recently on May 7. With little time left to gather signatures before the August deadline, there’s a chance that Denver residents may not see the initiative this November.

Even if Denver for Psilocybin has its petition approved on the third attempt, it would be on a huge time crunch to turn in the requisite 4,726 valid signatures in a little more than a month.

Read the full article at Westword

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What You Need to Know About Kratom

It’s banned in six states and three American cities but still legal — for now — as far as the feds are concerned.

Kratom is the controversial herbal supplement you might not know about.

Fans who take kratom in capsule form or drink it in tea say it can can alleviate a host of ills. Some say it is a natural cure for opioid withdrawal symptoms; federal health officials say that is not true.

Federal authorities cracked down this week on kratom sellers as talk arose again of making it illegal at the federal level.

The drug agency is “still waiting for analysis” before taking that step, special agent Melvin Patterson of the Drug Enforcement Administration told KIRO in Seattle this week.

The DEA has already considered designating kratom a Schedule 1 drug, which would effectively ban it.

Federal concerns about health risks and potential abuse of the supplement manifested in a public health advisory from the Food and Drug Administration last year that said the FDA was aware of reports of 36 deaths associated with the use of products containing kratom.

Continue Reading at The Kansas City Star

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Some Good News From The Fight Against Opioids

SOME 382,000 Americans have overdosed on opioids—a group of drugs that includes prescription painkillers, heroin and synthetics—since the year 2000. That is greater than the number of American combat deaths in the second world war and the Korean and Vietnam wars combined. Despite this epic toll, there are early signs that at least one battle may be ending.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provide the best data for tracking the opioid epidemic. Its latest data, which cover the 12 months to the end of October 2017, show that opioids were responsible for some 46,041 deaths (see chart) in that period. While provisional and subject to revision, that number was at least not dissimilar to the previous month’s figure of 46,202.

The precise workings of the epidemic in recent months are not well understood, but a few elements stand out. The first is that deaths from prescription medication are likely to have been pushed down by lower availability of those drugs. Official data from the CDC show that prescription rates were nearly 20% lower in 2016 than at their 2012 peak. IQVIA, a health consultancy, reckons that prescriptions fell by another 10% in 2017. Donald Burke, dean of the University of Pittsburgh’s graduate school of public health, thinks there is “almost certainly cause and effect” between prescription rates and deaths.

Experts agree that the most effective way to fight addiction is with medication-based treatment, such as methadone. But just one-third of Americans live in counties with treatment centers providing these kinds of drugs. For real progress it is necessary to look north. Vancouver has pioneered the use of safe-injection sites. Seattle and other progressive enclaves of America would like to follow their lead but they face stern opposition. America’s attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, has threatened to prosecute such sites under the “crack house statute”. Such sites, claims the Department of Justice, will only “encourage and normalize heroin use”.

The Economist

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Forget Protein Shakes. The Newest Workout Supplement? Marijuana.

Like many other fitness-minded young professionals, a 25-year-old Boston resident named Cameron adheres to a fairly typical pre-workout routine. There’s the 20 minutes of stretching, generally followed by some light cardio.

As marijuana legalization has pushed the drug further toward the mainstream — and a longstanding social stigma has begun to dissipate — more individuals are taking up before hitting the weight room, sports field, or mixed martial arts mat.

While the idea might seem inherently counterintuitive — weed, after all, is a substance more commonly paired with Doritos than deadlifts — there is a passionate contingent that swears by it.

“It’s a weird phenomenon, but it’s an increasingly common phenomenon,” says Peter Grinspoon, a primary care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital and author of the book “Free Refills: A Doctor Confronts His Addiction.” “The fact that a lot of people are saying it helps them can’t be ignored.”

Research into marijuana’s benefits has been notoriously scant, due in large part to the drug’s federal classification as a Schedule 1 substance — meaning that, along with heroin, LSD, and ecstasy, it’s deemed to have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” And the few studies that do exist offer relatively little insight into the drug’s effects during physical activity, beneficial or detrimental.

Read the full article at Boston Globe

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New Migraine Drug: A Neurologist Explains How It Works

Migraine typically runs in families, with about 90 percent of people with migraine having close relatives with this disorder. It affects 1 of every 7 adults in the U.S. It is three times more common in women than men.

That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. According to the research group Global Burden of Disease, migraine was ranked the sixth most disabling disease. What is more, among neurological disorders, migraine is the second most disabling after stroke.

The FDA announced approval on May 17 of a novel preventive treatment for migraine headaches. Aimovig is the first in a new class of migraine-specific drugs that works by blocking an action of a protein that is increased in people with migraine during headache attacks.

If over-the-counter medications are not effective, a class of drugs called triptans can be very effective. Triptans, the first drugs developed specifically for migraines, were developed in the 1980s and have remained the best option for treatment of individual migraine attacks. Triptans are not pain killers but rather work through serotonin receptors involved in the development of migraine.

Triptans can also cause medication overuse headache. And, they have the potential to cause the spasm of blood vessels. Therefore, triptans should not be used if a person has had a heart attack, stroke or peripheral vascular disease.

Read more at The Conversation

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Myanmar Embraces Silkworms Over Poppies

Zhou Xing Ci’s family have farmed poppies for as long as anyone remembers, scraping the flowers’ sticky brown sap to produce opium.

Along with many other farmers in the hills of eastern Myanmar, the crop – much of which ends up as heroin sold on foreign streets – has in recent years put Myanmar behind only Afghanistan as the world’s leading source of opium.

A Chinese company working with farmers like Zhou hopes the silk-producing larva can help the farmers, and their country, quit the drug.

“Growing opium is too tough. It’s only one harvest every year and a rain can easily destroy a whole year’s work,” said Zhou.

The UN agency has assisted more than 1,000 farmers to switch from opium to another cash crop, coffee, since 2014, said Troels Vester, UNODC country manager for Myanmar.

Still, 41,000 hectares of poppy was planted in Myanmar last year, the agency said. Farmers in conflict areas were less likely to have moved to licit crops, it added.

In the corner of Myanmar where Zhou lives, bordering China’s Yunnan province, various armed groups operate and the law is barely enforced, providing a haven for opium traders, as well as heroin producers and meth-lab operators.

Read more at News.com

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First, Marijuana. Are ‘Magic’ Mushrooms Next?

In Oregon and Denver, where marijuana is legal for recreational use, activists are now pushing toward a psychedelic frontier: “magic mushrooms.”

Groups in both states are sponsoring ballot measures that would eliminate criminal penalties for possession of the mushrooms whose active ingredient, psilocybin, can cause hallucinations, euphoria and changes in perception. They point to research showing that psilocybin might be helpful for people suffering from depression or anxiety.

The recent failure of a nationally publicized campaign to decriminalize hallucinogenic mushrooms in California may not portend well for the psilocybin advocates in Oregon and Denver — though their initiatives are more limited than California’s.

In Oregon, advocates face a steep climb to qualify their measure for the ballot, because such statewide initiatives typically require hiring paid signature gatherers, said William Lunch, a political analyst for Oregon Public Broadcasting and a former political science professor at Oregon State University.

Still, familiarity with recreational marijuana may have “softened up” voters and opponents of drug decriminalization, he said. Oregon legalized marijuana for recreational use in 2015, Colorado in 2012.

Read more at Oregon Live

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Time To Tax Narcotics As War On Drugs Will Never Be Won

The war on drugs was lost the moment it started but it continues relentlessly, morphing into a narrative favored by dystopian novelists.

One of the growth areas of academic finance in recent years has resulted in psychologists winning Nobel prizes for economics. The ways in which we are different to the rational, utility-maximising caricature of the textbooks has been usefully explored by researchers and has yielded a stream of insights that have guided policymakers in many jurisdictions.

Researchers are fond of finding weird anomalies in human behaviour that conflict with standard predictions, coming up with theories about why we behave in this way and then suggesting policy “nudges” that lead to better outcomes for both individuals and societies.

Each year, drug use rises. The range and availability of drugs rise. Terrorists rely on valuable income from drugs. The United Nations estimates that up to 85 per cent of Afghanistan’s poppy cultivation is under the control of the Taliban, with half of its income coming from heroin – and most of the world’s supply of that drug is from those fields. Even waging actual war doesn’t work.

In the UK, the Royal College of Physicians, the Faculty of Public Health and the Royal Society for Public Health have joined the calls for decriminalization. All these bodies are keen to stress that they do not condone drug taking but have just looked at the facts and concluded that the current legal framework is not fit for purpose. It simply doesn’t work: drug use is not deterred. Drug users need education and treatment, not legal sanction.

Continue Reading at Irish Times

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Here’s How Much Marijuana Costs in the United States vs Canada

In the United States, medical marijuana is now legal in 29 states. Not only that, but the recreational use of marijuana is now legal in 10 states. You can walk into a licensed store in places like California, Oregon and Colorado and purchase cannabis nearly as easily as buying beer.

Similar dynamics are taking place in Canada. Medical marijuana consumption was first legalized in 2001, and in 2017 legislation paved the way for the legalization of recreational use throughout all of Canada — a development that’s expected to be implemented in the summer of this year.

We analyzed data from Priceonomics customer Wikileaf, a company that tracks cannabis prices at dispensaries across the US and Canada and aggregated the data at the national level and find out the answers.

We discovered that cannabis is 30% less expensive in Canada than the United States. When you look at different cities, the price differential can be even more pronounced. Legal marijuana is 39% cheaper in Vancouver than San Francisco, for example.

Across dispensaries tracked by Wikileaf in the United States, the price of an eighth of marijuana is $40.0, compared to $27.9 in Canada, where it is 30% cheaper.

Read more at Priceonomics