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Legal Weed in Illinois is Closer Than You Think

 

ILLINOIS- The landslide victory of J.B Pritzker in the November midterms may prove to be the catalyst for legal recreational Cannabis in Illinois.

State Rep. Kelly Cassidy, D-Chicago said one of the obstacles for Illinois to get it legalized had been Gov. Bruce Rauner, who opposed the move.

With Michigan leading the way for recreational marijuana in the midwest many Illinois legislators seem anxious to make Illinois next.

A 2016 Gallup poll found that 60% of Americans support full legalization, a drastic increase from 36% in 2005. Voters seem keen on the idea.

According to dea.gov:

“Schedule I drugs, substances, or chemicals are defined as drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”

States wouldn’t have to spend so much money arresting, trying and imprisoning buyers and sellers as well as the huge tax revenue increases from marijuana sales.

According to potguide.com there are 55 medical marijuana dispensaries in Illinois. Several companies are banking on marijuana in Illinois, and they are poised to make moves once recreational is legalized.

WQAD8

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Opioid Abusers Using Their Pets To Score Drugs?

”To fight America’s opioid epidemic, lawmakers and regulators have clamped down hard on doctors’ prescribing practices.

But one avenue for obtaining prescription opioids appears to have been overlooked, according to a new study.

Millions of Tablets

Veterinarians are prescribing large quantities of opioids to pets, raising concern that some people might be using Fido or Snuggles to feed their addiction.

Opioid prescriptions from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine rose 41% between 2007 and 2017, even though the annual number of visits increased by just 13%, researchers found.

Penn Vet handed out 105 million tramadol tablets, 97 500 hydrocodone (Hycodan) tablets, and nearly 39 000 codeine tablets during the study period, results show.

Not Just For Pets

It’s very likely at least some of these drugs wound up being used by humans, said Emily Feinstein, executive vice president of the Center on Addiction.

The US opioid crisis led to roughly 50 000 overdose deaths in 2017, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Americans now are more likely to die from an opioid overdose than from a car or motorcycle crash, a fall, drowning or choking on food, a report issued Tuesday by the National Safety Council concluded.

Read more at Health 24

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Where does N.J. stand on legal weed as we head into 2019?

Last year was big for cannabis in New Jersey, though not nearly as big as it could have been.

The state saw a substantial increase in the size of the medical marijuana program, both regarding patients and potentially the number of dispensaries. But New Jersey still missed out on recreational marijuana, when this time last year legalization seemed a real possibility.

The next several weeks will be revelatory for the future of legal weed in the state. If lawmakers can sit down and hash out the more excellent details of legalization, it’s possible that Gov. Phil Murphy could sign a bill by February.

From the time Murphy took office in January of 2018, the state seemed on the cusp on legalization. The governor had promised it in his campaign, his election gave Democrats control of all branches of state government, and state Sen. Nicholas Scutari, D-Union, introduced a bill early last year to legalize the possession and personal use of marijuana, as well as create a regulated market.

By late November there was enough agreement on legal weed for the Scutari bill — heavily amended throughout the year — to pass legislative committees in both the state Senate and the Assembly. All it needed then was approval in the full chambers of the state Legislature and a signature from the governor.

Continue Reading at NJ.com

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Like Them or Not, Cannabis Drinks Will Be Huge in 2019

2018 was inarguably the year of CBD: Marijuana’s non-psychoactive, less giggly compound showed up everywhere promising everything from pain relief to anxiety reduction, from LaCroix-esque sparkling water and high-end gumdrops to body lotion and bath salts (not that kind of bath salts). But while CBD consumption can undoubtedly lend a chilled-out vibe at the proper dosage, to get high, there needs to be some THC involved, whether it be smoked or otherwise consumed — and it seems to drink your weed will be a significant trend for the year ahead.

Legal marijuana raked in $9 billion in 2017, and with an increasing number of U.S. states legalizing weed for recreational use, that figure is expected to swell to more than $23 billion by 2022. Far from the stereotypical old image of a tie-dye-clad stoner with bloodshot eyes, marijuana use has been transformed into a full-on lifestyle brand: There are weed-laced coffee capsules to start your day, luxury pipes and smoking accessories with hip Instagram accounts to match, subscription boxes catering to the stoner set, cannabis-infused lubes to enhance your sex life, and weed supper clubs where pot aficionados can gather around the dinner table to get high. Legal weed — and the companies profiting from it — wants to permeate every sector of adult life, from replacing your Ambien to set the vibe for your next boutique hotel stay.

The CBD boom catering to anxious millennials will only grow as cultivating industrial hemp (which does not contain THC) becomes legal in the U.S., but massive corporations (like say, Marlboro) are also increasingly looking to cash in on the kind of cannabis that gets you stoned. Big Tobacco and liquor companies worry that as legal marijuana spreads, people will increasingly replace their cigarettes and beer with weed. And while such corporations getting in on the pot gold rush certainly raises plenty of ethical objections from marijuana advocates, big business goes where the money is, and right now it seems the next big thing is weed drinks, with at least one industry analyst projecting the cannabis beverage market to be worth $600 million by 2022.

Makers of nonalcoholic drinks like Coca-Cola and Pepsi have tentatively expressed interest in the space, too, though they’re clearly more reluctant to slap their iconic brand names on adult-oriented products that are still federally illegal in the U.S. (and still have a hefty stigma attached in many parts of the country).

Read the full article at Eater

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How Might The Drugs We Take Affect Our Children Or Grandchildren?

Amid all the thousands of trials that examine whether drugs are safe for us to use, Vance Trudeau asks who is looking out for our children and grandchildren.

We are the most highly medicated generation in history. Yet Trudeau, who studies hormones and the brain at the University of Ottawa, says we know little about what effects the drugs are taken today may cause decades from now, to future generations.

“These are major, major, important questions,” he said. “In the last 10 years, there are now a few key examples where scientists are showing the effects of certain chemicals that get transferred across generations.”

But how aware are we of possible effects of drugs on future human generations?

“We’re not. That’s why these three studies are super important. Now we have to wake up and ask the question: What are the effects on the next generation?

“Not all pharmaceuticals will give a generational effect. But there is now a pattern developing (where) we have to start asking the question: Is there something beneficial passed on or is there something negative passed on?

The question falls into the field known as epigenetics, literally “beyond genetics.” This looks at how our chromosomes undergo physical changes through our lives, and how we may pass down some changes we acquire during our lifetime to our children, and even to our grandchildren as a kind of “biological memory.”

Read more on Ottawa Citizen

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Weed Becomes Legal This Week In Michigan: 6 Things To Note

MICHIGAN — Weed will become legal across Michigan this week, a month after voters approved Proposal 1 on the November ballot. On Thursday, the law takes effect and marijuana will be legal for recreational purposes, in addition to medicinal, which voters approved back in 2008.

There are still some things to be worked out, but here are six things we know for sure now that weed will become legal:

1. Authorities are looking at convictions
2. How to get marijuana
3. Marijuana won’t be allowed just anywhere
4. Renters may still face problems
5. Driving under the influence of marijuana is illegal
6. Workplaces can still ban it

See the full article at Patch

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Scientists Find Psilocybin Microdosing Can Boost Cognitive Creativity

Recent research on LSD indicates the drug has potential to treat mental disorders and improve our understanding of human consciousness. Meanwhile, studies in recent years have explored the effects of psilocybin—the psychoactive compound occurring naturally in magic mushrooms—on quitting smoking; lowering violent crime; treating depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder; and triggering spiritual epiphanies.

Now, an Oct. 25 study in Pharmacology—the official journal of the European Behavioral Pharmacology Society—adds to this growing body of knowledge. It examines another potential benefit of psilocybin. Researchers from Leiden University in The Netherlands studied the cognitive effects of micro-dosing psilocybin truffles (technically not mushrooms, but instead the hardened vegetative part of a fungus). They found that tiny doses can stimulate brain function and boost creativity without harming reasoning abilities.

Microdoses contain about 10% of the psychoactive components of a standard dose of psilocybin. The idea is to get the benefits but not the downsides of the drug, minimal effects that can stimulate thinking but not lead to extremes, like hallucinations.

For this study, the researchers tested the effects of about .035 grams of a psychoactive truffle on 36 subjects. (They later did a chemical composition analysis of the truffles to make sure psilocybin was evenly distributed throughout the truffles.) They investigated three types of thinking by presenting the subjects with different three tasks—developed by psychologists to test cognition—which was performed both before and after ingesting the drug. The scientists studied subjects’ convergent thought, which involves identifying a single solution for a single problem; their fluid intelligence, or reasoning and problem-solving; and their divergent thinking, the ability to recognize many solutions.

Read more at Quartz

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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 varieties like red dragon kratom, or Nootropics.

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

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Canandaigua Community Leaders Talk About Opioid Crisis

CANANDAIGUA — People have been asking Canandaigua Mayor Ellen Polimeni about the opioid crisis, how serious of a problem it is and what parts of the community are primarily affected.

Narcan is a brand name for naloxone, a medication that almost instantly reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, virtually saving people from the brink of death.

Lynn Seaward, director of community-based services at Finger Lakes Area Counseling & Recovery Agency (FLACRA), talked about various local programs available to help drug and alcohol addicts, including peer services where those recovering can relate to and help abusers find the best services for their individual situations.

FLACRA also recently acquired a mobile crisis van that allows staff and peer counselors to go directly to people in crisis or overdosing. Staff also work with law enforcement and emergency personnel in rescuing people and educating families on the problems that lead to addiction and where to find help.

Read the full article at Daily Messenger

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Are Magic mMushrooms Next On The List of Legalized Drugs?

OREGON — Oregon could become home to the legal, recreational use of magic mushrooms. A campaign to legalize Psilocybin, informally known as magic mushrooms, is making its way to voters.

Psilocybin, after all, is an off-patent, organic agent which creates change through the psychedelic experience it provides, such that a single experience often changes a person’s disposition moving forward,” the group wrote in an open letter to voters. “And the psilocybin model, which includes preparation, psychedelic facilitation, and integration afterward, doesn’t just match the effectiveness of a typical ‘meds and therapy’ regimen. Where typical interventions fail, psilocybin therapy, with impressive frequency, breaks through.

Psilocybin is a naturally occurring hallucinogen found in certain species of mushrooms. There are an estimated 180 species of mushrooms that contain psilocybin. Users typically experience hallucinations when they eat the mushrooms.

Continue Reading at Patch

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Surprising Medical Marijuana Side Effect: More People Claiming Disability

Medical marijuana laws are becoming more popular across the country, but legalizing the drug for medicinal purposes can have a major unintended consequence.

State medical marijuana laws lead to an increase in the probability that people will make Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) claims, according to a new working paper from researchers at Temple University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cincinnati. The tendency to make a SSDI claim rose 9.9% following the passage of a medical marijuana law, while actual SSDI benefits rose by 2.6%. The report, which was distributed by the National Bureau of Economic Research, used data from the Current Population Survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to produce its findings.

The researchers also studied the effect state laws on medical marijuana had on workers’ compensation (WC) claims. While their analysis did not produce any statistically significant evidence for these claims, the researchers said the data suggested generally that the laws do cause an increase. “Expanding marijuana access has negative spillover effects to costly social programs that disincentive work,” the researchers wrote.

More of this news at Marketwatch

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High Number of Applicants for Arkansas Medical Marijuana

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) — Would-be growers and distributors of Arkansas’ initial medical marijuana crop flooded a state office building Monday, turning in thousands of pages of paperwork and handing over thousands of dollars in application fees.

Arkansas voters last year approved marijuana use by people with certain medical conditions. The new state Medical Marijuana Commission will review applications after the names of companies and individuals have been redacted and then select up to five growers and 32 distributors. The Arkansas Health Department has approved 1,200 people for a medical marijuana registry, making them eligible to obtain the drug.

Continue Reading at US News

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Synthetic Salvia May Be An Opiate Alternative Without The Addiction

Painkiller addiction has reached epic proportions and this has spurred a search for suitable alternatives to opiates. We’ve seen some potential novel alternatives, such as sea snail venom and using VR to distract patients from pain. One new potential alternative comes in the form of a hallucinogenic drug call salvia and a synthetic version of it with pain-killing properties.

A newly detailed synthetic version of the hallucinogenic compound in Salvia divinorum may be the key. Researchers with The Scripps Research Institute and the University of Southern California have published a report detailing the process of synthesizing this compound, Salvinorin A, into 20-nor-salvinorin A.

This synthetic salvia was found to relieve itching in mice, and it could also potentially be a painkiller without the same addiction potential as traditional opiates. The synthesized variant addresses some typical troubles presented by Salvinorin A and is reported to be stable. As well, this successful synthesis was performed in 10 steps rather than the 20+ that past methods have required.

Slash Gear

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Are Pain Management Devices An Alternative to Opioids?

“People are afraid of opioids right now. There’s a stigma. Patients don’t want to be on opioids,” Michael Leong, a pain specialist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, told Technology Review. Using pain relief devices can reportedly drastically reduce or eliminate a patient’s need for pain medication, particularly powerful opioids.

Terri Bryant was on fentanyl for her back pain until she took part in a clinical trial of a spinal cord stimulator that was implanted under her skin at the base of her spine. After getting the implant her pain decreased almost immediately and she was able to stop taking fentanyl, which was a relief to her.

The medical community is now looking to develop devices that provide the same sort of relief without needing to be surgically implanted. One such device, Neuro-Stim System Bridge, is placed behind a patient’s ear and gives off electrical pulses to certain areas of the brain.

The device has proved very effective for helping people overcome the pain of withdrawing from opioids and is now used in 30 states to support detox. Patients wear the bridge for the first five days after they stop taking opioids in order to get them through the toughest part of withdrawing.

Yet not everyone is convinced that pain management devices are the answer to America’s chronic pain problem. Edward Michna, a pain management specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said that we need more long-term research into their effectiveness.

The Fix

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Opioid Epidemic Still a Top Priority This Summer

The announcements have come from three major government agencies, and reactions have come from a number of well-known health-related organizations.

“Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain, and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications,” stated the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine in their comprehensive report released last week.

Fewer prescriptions but more deaths

In its latest Vital Signs report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that a number of opioids prescribed in the United States peaked in 2010 and have decreased every year through 2015.

“The amount of opioids prescribed in the U.S. is still too high, with too many opioid prescriptions for too many days at too high a dosage,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, acting director of the CDC in a press statement.

Read more at Healthline News

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Absolution in a Judicial Case of Coca Leaf in Spain

BARCELONA – The unprecedented resolution of a court case for coca leaf imports took place yesterday at the Provincial Court of Girona. F.T., a Colombian citizen living in Spain was acquitted of charges of drug trafficking after a large display of evidence and arguments about the historical, cultural, social and medicinal value of the coca leaf.

“This result represents a victory for human rights in relation to traditional plants victims of drug policies based on ignorance,” says Dr. Constanza Sánchez, Director of Law, Policy and Human Rights Area of ICEERS Foundation.

Accused of receiving “cocaine” and “moved for the purpose of distributing cocaine among third persons,” the Prosecutor’s Office requested 4 years of imprisonment, establishing at the same time that the amount of cocaine that was intended to be obtained was 6.3 grams (note that, according to the doctrine of the Spanish Supreme Court, the threshold for possession of cocaine for personal consumption is set at 7.5 grams).

“Currently, coca leaf use in its natural state is no longer restricted to indigenous territories and populations, but is expanding because of its stimulating, nutritional and medicinal properties,” says Pien Metaal of the Drugs and Democracy Programme of the Transnational Institute (TNI).

“The consumption of coca leaf is incomparable to the consumption of cocaine. There is no scientific evidence that chewing coca leaves is harmful to health. Rather, there is increasing evidence to the contrary, for example, its effect as a stabilizer of blood glucose levels, a benefit of paramount importance with numerous medical applications, “said Dr. José Carlos Bouso, Scientific Director of ICEERS Foundation.

During this process, not only the innocence and honor of F.T. has been demonstrated, but also the historical error of the prohibition of the coca leaf and of cultural practices that surround it.

TNI