Cannabis Cures Cancer

Educate City Hall about medicinal cannabis, prevent an unwarranted crack-down!!

A Medical Cannabis Ordinance is being considered by the Planning Commission of the City of Vallejo, threatening to "crack down" on legal medicinal cannabis dispensaries.

“Future Planning Items for Consideration”, from the report for the Economic Development Department - Planning Division, published in the “City Manager’s Bi-Weekly Report”, Volume 2, Issue 4, December 6, 2013, from Daniel E. Keen, City Manager, City of Vallejo:
 
The list of agenda items is used exclusively by City staff as a draft working document for planning and tentative scheduling of agenda related items and does not represent any final dates for placement and presentation to the legislative body (Planning Commission and City Council). The list provided is an abbreviated version including only the most significant items. The list is subject to change by staff and may not represent all items that eventually will appear on any given final meeting agenda.
Planning Commission Agenda Item
December 17, 2013 (Special Meeting): Medical Cannabis Study Session
January 22, 2014: Medical Cannabis Ordinance


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Yet, in the same report, they tell how they approved more ALCOHOL establishments across downtown Vallejo, the waterfront, and Mare Island.
“Brewpub Approved for Vacant Ferry Building Space”
The Planning Commission recently voted to approve a Use Permit to allow the Mare Island Brewing Company, LLC to operate a brewpub/microbrewery, tasting room and restaurant within the City owned Ferry Building on the waterfront. The project involves use of the vacant tenant space in the west rotunda and includes indoor seating, an outdoor patio area next to the waterfront promenade, and seating on the second story observation deck.
Depending on demand, business hours will vary between 10:00 am to 1:00 am, seven days per week. Along with a minimal amount of beer production on-site, the business intends to provide a limited menu of gourmet appetizers and entrees. The owner anticipates having four employees initially and may employ additional staff as business expands. The project is a result of the 2012-2013 Council adopted code and plan amendments to allow these businesses in the Downtown, the Waterfront and on Mare Island

Uses for High-Cannabidiol Cannabis Extracts

"The Use of High-Cannabidiol Cannabis Extracts to Treat Epilepsy and Other Diseases"
2013-11-25 by Justin Kander, posted to [http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Use-of-High-Cannabidiol-Cannabis-Extracts-to-Treat-Epilepsy-and-Other-Diseases&id=8142665]:
There has been a dramatic rise in news attention to medicinal cannabis in 2013, with reports on CNN, ABC, CBS, and local publications about high-cannabidiol cannabis oil effectively controlling the symptoms of rare epileptic conditions like Dravet syndrome, Doose syndrome, infantile spasms, cortical dysplasia, and more. These diseases can cause hundreds to thousands of seizures a week, while also impairing development in a number of other ways. For families with children suffering from such conditions, the challenges are overwhelming. Due to the extremely complex nature of Dravet and related syndromes, traditional pharmaceuticals are ineffective and often make the problems worse. With no other hope, families have turned to high-CBD cannabis oil, which is proving to work with miraculous efficacy.
To clarify, high-CBD cannabis oil is non-psychoactive and apparently even more beneficial than high-THC cannabis oil. Cannabidiol is another cannabinoid in the cannabis plant, like the more well-known psychoactive cannabinoid THC, with significant research suggesting neuroprotectant, anticancer, antidiabetic, anti-ischemic, antispasmodic, antipsychotic, and antibacterial properties, among others. Furthermore, cannabis oil is a type of extract from cannabis. Such oil contains large amounts of concentrated cannabinoids that can be orally ingested rather than smoked, preserving the medicinal compounds and allowing them to be delivered through digestive system, rather than the respiratory system.
The research suggests that CBD has panacea-like properties, and in practice, this is proving to be the case. On August 11th, 2013, Sanjay Gupta released a documentary on CNN about Charlotte Figi. Charlotte is a young Dravet syndrome patient who was having 300 grand mal seizures a week. No pharmaceuticals or dietary changes could do anything to reduce this number. Charlotte's parents learned about high-CBD cannabis oil, and after literally the first dose, Charlotte's seizures stopped. She now has less than three minor seizures a month. This case is nothing short of miraculous, and it's not isolated. Dr. Margaret Gedde, a Colorado Springs physician, is tracking 11 new patients of the Stanely brothers, the providers of Charlotte's high-CBD medicine. 9 of them have had 90-100% reductions in seizures, which again, is simply miraculous.
The epileptic conditions that CBD is proving to be effective against are extremely complex, and not even the most powerful, well researched pharmaceuticals have been capable of inducing any healing. Yet high-CBD cannabis oil is immediately and potently reducing symptoms, with the only side effects being systemically beneficial - more energy, better learning, improved behavior, and more.
It should not be surprising that results like these have been going on for years. Just like research shows cannabinoids are therapeutically effective against epilepsy, there is research suggesting they can eliminate cancers and control other serious diseases. And in practice, for epilepsy and these other conditions, the results are translating to humans. People have been reliably eliminating cancers for years and mitigating diseases like diabetes, Crohn's, fibromyalgia, heart disease, chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, and more. This is as serious as it gets, and more attention must be brought to this issue.
As you can see, the use of medicinal cannabis is extremely important. This isn't about alleviating the side effects of chemotherapy or improving appetite - this is about putting serious diseases into remission, eliminating cancer in humans, and improving all aspects of human health. To see the scientific and experiential evidence supporting this, including medical documentation of terminal cancer patients now in remission, visit CannabisExtractReport.com.

Mendocino County Court finds valid medicinal cannabis ID card to pre-empt probable cause for Police vehicle search

"Ukiah Attorney Eric Rennert fighting for right of valid 215 patients to NOT have their car searched for probable cause"  
2013-11-09 from "Mendocino Country Independent Newspaper"
Eric Rennert writes: Hello, all. I just won my 1538.5 on the issue of probable cause to search a vehicle with the presence of marijuana when my client presented a valid 215 card. It is a case of first impression in California and I'm hoping the DA will file an appeal so I can move this up through the courts and get it published-then to the C/A, and, in my wildest dreams, to the Cal Supremes.
Obviously, the courts have been dodging the issue since the Compassionate Use Act passed in '96. It is almost the perfect test case. I will make Judge Moorman's written decision available to all and am still trying to figure out how I can use it, for the time being, as at least persuasive authority here in our local jurisdiction.
I will try to post it here, and also on the Claraweb/CPDA site. Carly Dolan, recently promoted to Assistant Public Defender for Mendocino County wrote the brief, and I took the case on with an extensive oral argument which started with the Rule of Lenity, on to the Founding Fathers, the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th and 10th Amendments, with my theme being, "Porn, Pills, Pistols, Pot." (Context is everything, and no, the possession of marijuana does not require and 'Affirmative Defense')
The case is: The People vs. Kevin Hawkins, SCUK CRCR 13-71986, 11/8/2013, Judge Ann Moorman, Superior Court of California, County of Mendocino. Not Published (yet). "The defendant's motion to suppress the search of the car for lack of probable cause is granted. (annie at el sol)

Solano County invites public to support medicinal cannabis clinics

"Solano County sets meetings on marijuana dispensaries"
2013-10-23 by Tony Burchyns from "Vallejo Times-Herald":
Solano County's evolving medical marijuana debate continues next week as leaders begin the first in-depth look at allowing dispensaries in unincorporated areas.
 Five public-outreach meetings are scheduled throughout the county, including one for the Vallejo-Benicia area set for 6 p.m., Oct. 30, at Vallejo City Hall. The other meetings will be held in Vacaville, Dixon, Fairfield and Winters.
The approach is new for Solano's county government, which has banned dispensaries in the past. It also contrasts with the policy of the local cities. For a number of reasons, including possible conflicts with federal law, no Solano County city allows dispensaries.
The board of supervisors' attitude on the issue shifted, however, after the 2012 election added two new members who favor medical marijuana regulations over outright bans.
"We had a moratorium in place, and it was about to expire," said Supervisor Linda Seifert, whose district includes Benicia and parts of Vallejo. "We were put in the place of either adopting a ban or adopting some kind of regulatory process."
In unincorporated Vallejo, four parcels have been identified as possible dispensary sites -- all located near Lemon Street and Benicia Road, within Seifert's district.
Seifert has been a proponent of regulating dispensaries rather than banning them, noting that a majority of county voters in 1996 supported Proposition 215, which legalized medical marijuana in the state.
However, she added it's still too early to know if the county will actually end up allowing dispensaries.
County officials say the meetings will allow for public input on the controversial issue, including -- but not limited to -- the potential placement of dispensaries in certain areas.
State law prohibits dispensaries within 600 feet of schools. County officials, however, are recommending a 1,000-foot buffer between dispensaries and schools, daycare centers and churches.
The board is set to consider the public feedback, along with further advice from staff, in December. County officials also plan to reach out to local city and law enforcement officials as well as representatives of the medical marijuana industry.
The effort stems from a July 30 board of supervisors decision to look at possible regulatory options for dispensaries. The county's current dispensary ban expires on July 29.
Supervisors Seifert and Erin Hannigan, whose districts both cover parts of Vallejo, support dispensary regulations. Supervisor Skip Thomson -- whose district spans Rio Vista, Elmira and parts of Vacaville, Fairfield and Suisun City -- also supports researching and drafting a medical marijuana law. Thomson and Hannigan joined the board after the last election.
Supervisors Jim Spering -- Fairfield, Suisun City -- and John Vasquez -- Vacaville, Dixon -- have supported a permanent ban, arguing that roughly 96 percent of the county's population lives in cities that don't allow dispensaries.
Locally, Benicia has outlawed dispensaries since 2009. The City Council also voted 4-1 in 2011 to revisit the issue at some point, but there's been little interest so far.
In Vallejo, the council has been deeply split over the issue. Voters overwhelmingly passed a dispensary sales tax in 2011, but the city has delayed drafting regulations. Meanwhile, police raided several dispensaries last year, but all of the cases fell apart because, lawyers argued, the establishments were following California law.


Medical marijuana meetings -
Solano County is holding a series of public outreach meetings to discuss options for regulating medical marijuana dispensaries in unincorporated areas:
* Vacaville/Elmira, 6-8 p.m., Oct. 29, Nut Tree Airport, First Floor Conference Room, 301 County Airport Road, Vacaville

* Vallejo/Benicia, 6-8 p.m., Oct. 30, Vallejo City Hall, 555 Santa Clara St., Vallejo

* Dixon/Rio Vista, 6-8 p.m., Nov. 5, Dixon May Fair, Tremont Hall, 655 S. First St., Dixon

* Fairfield/Suisun City/Birds Landing, 6-8 p.m., County Administrative Center, first floor multi-purpose room, 675 Texas St., Fairfield

* Winters, 6-8 p.m., Winters City Hall, 318 First St., Winters


Supervisors' medical marijuana votes:
2009 -- Board adopts 45-day moratorium on dispensaries in unincorporated areas. It was not extended.

July 26, 2011 -- On a 3-2 vote, board denies proposed zoning amendment allowing dispensaries in certain areas

Aug. 23, 2011 -- On a 4-1 vote, board enacts second 45-day moratorium.

Oct. 4, 2011 -- On a 4-0 vote, board extends moratorium by 10 months, 15 days

Aug. 7, 2012 -- On a 4-0 vote, board extends moratorium a year

July 30, 2013 -- Board opts against proposed dispensary ban, chooses instead to develop a regulatory framework for dispensaries.

California State Committee to investigate legalizing of medicinal cannabis

"Newsom, ACLU look to legalize marijuana"
2013-10-17 by Joe Garofoli from "San Francisco Chronicle" [http://www.sfgate.com/politics/joegarofoli/article/Newsom-ACLU-look-to-legalize-marijuana-4904985.php]:
Marijuana advocates took a step toward making California the third state to legalize the drug for adult recreational use Thursday when Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the American Civil Liberties Union opened a campaign intended to land a measure before voters during the next presidential election.
Newsom, who came out in favor of legalization last year, will lead a panel of academics, drug policy experts, law enforcement authorities, and officials from Colorado and Washington - the two states whose voters legalized recreational use last year.
The panel's goal: to answer legal and practical questions about the state-endorsed sale of marijuana before advocates move forward with a measure to tax and regulate the estimated $1.5 billion cannabis industry in California.
Backers intend to go to the voters in November 2016 - coinciding with the presidential election, when the electorate is likely to skew younger than average and thus more marijuana-friendly.
Even older voters, however, are becoming more open to marijuana legalization, according to a pair of recent polls.
One, which the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California released last month, found that 60 percent of likely voters overall backed legalization. A survey by San Francisco pollster Ben Tulchin, commissioned by the ACLU and released Thursday, found that 65 percent of 1,200 respondents considered likely to vote in 2016 would support a measure to tax and regulate marijuana.
The state's voters rejected a legalization measure in 2010 by 53 to 47 percent.
"The fact is that the public's support for marijuana is increasing," Tulchin said. "The key, though, is that they want regulations and limits on this. And they want the revenue (from taxation) to fund essential services.
"They don't want to be able to go to Costco and buy it in bulk," Tulchin said.

What legalization entails -
At a San Francisco press conference Thursday, members of the ACLU panel acknowledged that voters will have many questions about what legalization would entail. Over the next year and a half, the group will travel around the state, holding town hall meetings and periodically issuing recommendations.
"People want to know what a DUI would be. Employers want to know what happens if their employee shows up stoned at work," said Craig Reinarman, a panel member and professor of sociology and legal studies at UC Santa Cruz who has written about drug policy for 30 years.

Looking elsewhere -
For answers, advocates will turn to officials and activists from Colorado and Washington, who have been wrestling with such issues since legalization measures passed in their states last fall. It wasn't until this week that Washington's Liquor Control Board adopted rules that will permit 334 retail marijuana stores to open statewide next year.
California advocates said they'd like to be able to outline what a regulatory system would look like before they go to the voters.
A large incentive for advocates is that federal officials are demanding more structure and regulation from states where some form of marijuana use is legal, in exchange for leaving them alone.
Federal prosecutors have periodically cracked down on medical marijuana dispensaries in California, including some that local officials have characterized as model operations. In August, however, U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole declared that federal authorities would go easier on "states and local governments that have enacted laws legalizing marijuana in some form" and have "strong and effective regulatory and enforcement systems."
California is not one of those states.
Legalization "is not going to happen unless the public and, frankly, the federal government are persuaded that this can be done in a way that's safe, that makes sense and is tightly regulated," said Allen Hopper, director of criminal justice and drug policy for the ACLU of California.
Star attraction
Hopper said that although the ACLU and Newsom support legalization, several members of the panel do not.
As its chairman, Newsom is the centerpiece of the newly formed group and political star attraction. He's believed to be the highest-ranking elected statewide official in the country who supports legalizing marijuana.
But Tulchin, who was Newsom's pollster during his 2010 lieutenant governor campaign, and others say fronting this issue isn't a political suicide mission.
Same-sex precedent
Newsom, Tulchin pointed out, was considered in political no-man's land back in 2004, when he allowed same-sex couples to marry at San Francisco City Hall. Less than a decade and many court battles later, hundreds of elected officials support gay and lesbian marriage rights.
"That gives him a lot of credibility on this," Tulchin said.
Other legalization groups are talking about going to the ballot in 2014. Hopper said the ACLU is not going to run any ballot measures or decide who should.
"We want to make sure that whatever coalition ends up doing this has the data and the facts and the research to do it right," Hopper said.

2013-08-29 "Justice Department Announces Update to Marijuana Enforcement Policy"

from USA Federal Department of Justice - Office of Public Affairs [http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2013/August/13-opa-974.html]:
Today, the U.S. Department of Justice announced an update to its federal marijuana enforcement policy in light of recent state ballot initiatives that legalize, under state law, the possession of small amounts of marijuana and provide for the regulation of marijuana production, processing, and sale.
In a new memorandum outlining the policy, the Department makes clear that marijuana remains an illegal drug under the Controlled Substances Act and that federal prosecutors will continue to aggressively enforce this statute. To this end, the Department identifies eight (8) enforcement areas that federal prosecutors should prioritize. These are the same enforcement priorities that have traditionally driven the Department’s efforts in this area.
Outside of these enforcement priorities, however, the federal government has traditionally relied on state and local authorizes to address marijuana activity through enforcement of their own narcotics laws. This guidance continues that policy.
For states such as Colorado and Washington that have enacted laws to authorize the production, distribution and possession of marijuana, the Department expects these states to establish strict regulatory schemes that protect the eight federal interests identified in the Department’s guidance. These schemes must be tough in practice, not just on paper, and include strong, state-based enforcement efforts, backed by adequate funding. Based on assurances that those states will impose an appropriately strict regulatory system, the Department has informed the governors of both states that it is deferring its right to challenge their legalization laws at this time. But if any of the stated harms do materialize—either despite a strict regulatory scheme or because of the lack of one—federal prosecutors will act aggressively to bring individual prosecutions focused on federal enforcement priorities and the Department may challenge the regulatory scheme themselves in these states.
A copy of the memorandum, sent to all United States Attorneys by Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole, is available below.
Related Material: DAG Memo 8-29-13 (http://www.justice.gov/iso/opa/resources/3052013829132756857467.pdf) 13-974, Office of Public Affairs

SF Chronicle newspaper columnist argues against war on medicinal cannabis

2013-08-27 "Getting high - everybody's doing it"
by Jon Carroll from "San Francisco Chronicle" [http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/carroll/article/Getting-high-everybody-s-doing-it-4765758.php]:
Well, this is unfortunate: According to Bob Egelko of this very newspaper, the feds have come up with a new way to harass medicinal-pot sellers in Oakland - and probably elsewhere as well.
Marijuana is a fraught subject just now. The Justice Department really doesn't want any high-profile cases, so it's not busting the pot stores. Selling marijuana is, after all, legal under California law - provided that your buyers have prescriptions and provided that your city has not passed a law forbidding pot sales within city limits.
The current state of affairs is something of a mess, although commerce is winning out in many areas. There's gold in them thar buds, friends, and lots of people are aware of that and jumping on the bandwagon. If the Justice Department were to back off, we'd see a vigorous free market at work.
Anyway: According to the folks at Harborside, Oakland's upscale, perky-people, "have a nice day," one-stop-shopping marijuana purveyors, the feds are now pressuring armored-car companies not to do business with the pot clubs, threatening possible prosecution for criminal conspiracy. That doesn't look good on any company's resume.
Previously, the feds - it's not clear which agency is doing this, DOJ, DEA, some other three-letter acronym - had leaned on credit card companies not to accept business from marijuana dispensaries. As a result, it's become more of a cash business, with the attendant dangers.
Hence, the need for the armored cars. But now, I guess, it's "toss the bundles of cash into the old Subaru and hope for the best."
Look, everyone agrees that our drug laws are a mess, partly because we are so confused in our own attitudes. We love drugs - we get prescriptions for painkillers and drink nice Scotch whisky - and yet we also abominate them. Crack cocaine, we hate you; you're a whole different kind of drug.
I wouldn't know; I never tried it. I do point out that which drugs I tried was largely determined by my class and friendship affiliations. Drug laws based on the evilness of one drug over another are bound to be farcical. It's all culturally determined.
Medically, I suppose, alcohol is the most dangerous. Factor in drunken driving and domestic violence, and you've got a pretty nasty syndrome going. But the people who are using it are responding to the almost-universal desire to get a little loaded once in a while.
Either we accept that urge or we fight against it. Personal choice, there. But we can't both accept and fight; it's crazy-making.
There is, however, no large push among the citizenry to reform the drug laws. The people in Washington, which is where the solution has to come from, see no urgency to propose bills or hold hearings or mount an executive-office crusade. Politically speaking, it's a big loser.
So with no relief in sight, what to do? Back in the old days, selling alcohol was illegal in parts of many Southern states, even after Prohibition was repealed. Bootleggers ran through the forests evading federal agents, and that's how NASCAR was born. (A little off the point, that last bit, but it's a fascinating fact - the early NASCAR drivers had grown up outrunning revenooers on bad roads.)
Even though it was illegal, the several states always collected taxes on the profits. Not even the law could stand in the way of sound fiscal practices.
Same deal here. The Justice Department could decide unilaterally to just back the heck off. The pot clubs would be permitted to act like the shadowy companies they are, still technically illegal under federal law but otherwise OK. Tens of thousands of customers would be able to buy what they want to buy, and things would be messed up but a little less messed up than they are now.
I understand that this doesn't make sense. There are pockets of illogic everywhere. But I am not persuaded that we have any chance of rational drug laws anytime soon, and all our closely reasoned arguments about why change is necessary profiteth us not. So please, Mr. Obama, sir, call off the dogs. Let Oakland have its nice revenue stream, and let the people have a little muggles to make the day go smoothly.
I don't think the federal government needs any more wars against its citizens. Those NSA revelations were bad enough. The motto of law enforcement should be the same as the motto for doctors: "First, do no harm." Don't mess with something that's working. Let the state worry about it. Look, people are fracking! Go bother them.
Not to mention all the people who are helped through chemotherapy by marijuana.

2013-08-21 "LSD, "magic mushrooms," and other psychedelics not linked to mental health woes"

by Ryan Jaslow from "CBS News" [http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57599578/lsd-magic-mushrooms-and-other-psychedelics-not-linked-to-mental-health-woes/]:
New research out of Norway shows that taking LSD, "magic mushrooms," and peyote -- so-called psychedelic drugs -- won't raise risk for mental health problems as previously thought.
Published in the Aug. 19 issue of PLoS One [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0063972], the study says that some psychedelic drugs may even reduce risk for psychological problems.
"After adjusting for other risk factors, lifetime use of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline or peyote, or past year use of LSD was not associated with a higher rate of mental health problems or receiving mental health treatment," study author Pal-Orjan Johansen, a neuroscientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, said in a statement [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/nuos-lao081813.php].
Psychedelic drugs have similar structures to naturally-occurring neurotransmitters, which are chemical messengers found in the brain, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The exact way they work is unclear, but they're thought to temporarily interfere with neurotransmitter action, leading to rapid emotional swings and hallucinogenic "trips" that can last hours (on average six hours for magic mushrooms, or psilocybin, and up to 12 hours for peyote and LSD).
A 2007 government survey found about 1.1 million people aged 12 and older had used a psychedelic drug for the first time in the year prior to being surveyed, NIDA reported.
There haven't been properly controlled studies on these drugs, according to the government drug agency, but some case reports and smaller studies suggest there could be long-term effects like flashbacks, impaired memory, and risk of psychiatric illness.
For the new study, researchers analyzed data on more than 130,000 randomly chosen Americans who took a drug use survey between 2001 and 2004, including 22,000 who had used a psychedelic drug at least once. They were also asked about any mental health symptoms and treatments that took place in the year prior to being surveyed. The symptoms in the survey were associated with mental health woes including psychological distress, anxiety disorders, psychosis and mood disorders.
They found no association between the drugs and this range of mental health problems. Instead, the researchers found lifetime use of psilocybin or mescaline and use of LSD in the past year were linked to lower rates of major psychological distress. Lifetime LSD users were also less likely to receive outpatient mental health treatment, such as from a therapist, or take psychiatric prescription medications.
The research only found links to mental health benefits, not a cause-and-effect relationship, and the study's design made it impossible to determine why these results were occurring.
While they can't rule out the possibility that using these drugs might negatively affect mental health, Johansen and colleagues pointed out that recent studies have also failed to find evidence of lasting harmful effects from psychedelic drugs. The researcher added that studies of people who used psychedelics hundreds of times for religious ceremonies found no evidence of health or social problems.
If there are negative effects from these drugs, they may be counterbalanced at the population level by people experiencing positive mental health effects, according to the researchers.
"Early speculation that psychedelics might lead to mental health problems was based on a small number of case reports and did not take into account either the widespread use of psychedelics or the not infrequent rate of mental health problems in the general population," study co-author Teri Krebs added in the statement.
Previous studies have also suggest psychedelics may have protective benefits for mental health. Two studies released in Jan. 2012 found reduced risk for depression in psilocybin-takers [http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57364710-10391704/magic-mushrooms-may-help-treat-depression-how/].
Krebs and Johansen also teamed up for a March 2012 study that found LSD may help serious alcoholics stay sober. Many of the alcoholics who took LSD reported "greater self-acceptance and openness," and said they gained a new appreciation for their problem and new motivation to address it [http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57394097-10391704/lsd-should-be-considered-for-alcoholism-treatment-study-says/].
"Having personally worked in mental health and trained in psychiatry, I am yet to see any individual suffering from significant mental health problems as a result of using psychedelic," Dr. Mark Bolstridge, a research fellow at the Centre for Neuropsychopharmacology of the Imperial College of London in the U.K., said to Medscape. "Alcohol, amphetamines, and cannabis, yes, but never psychedelics," added Bolstridge, who was not involved in the research. "I think the paper is an important addition to the scientific literature, and it can only help in dispelling the myths surrounding these much maligned substances and in reinforcing the case for continued investigations into how these fascinating compounds work in the brain."
Dr. Matthew Johnson, a psychologist in the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, told NPR that the new study does not guarantee that people taking these drugs won't face mental health harms [http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/08/19/213550995/study-finds-no-link-between-hallucinogens-and-mental-problems].
"This should not be taken to state that there are never individual cases of harm," he said. "We know that there are. It's a question of how frequent they are and under what circumstances they happen."

New York City government report in favor of government regulation and taxation of private cannabis use

Regulating and Taxing Marijuana: The Fiscal Impact on NYC
[https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/NYC_RegulateMarijReport.pdf]

LIU: LEGALIZE MARIJUANA IN NEW YORK CITY
Comptroller Seeks End to Wholesale Arrests of Minority Youth; Generate More Than $400 Million Annually for Higher Education
(From the Office of New York City Comptroller John C. Liu)
PR13-08-155 NEWS RELEASE
Contact : E.J. Kessler, (212) 669-3747 August 14, 2013
[comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/liu-legalize-marijuana-in-new-york-city/]:
Full Report [comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/NYC_RegulateMarijReport.pdf]
Report Summary [comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RegMarij_Summary.pdf]

NEW YORK, N.Y. — City Comptroller John C. Liu today proposed regulating and taxing the sale of marijuana for personal use by adults in New York City. In a report released today, the Comptroller’s office argued that the change would curb the significant social damage caused by prohibiting the substance and generate more than $400 million annually for higher education.
“New York City’s misguided war on marijuana has failed, and its enforcement has damaged far too many lives, especially in minority communities,” said Comptroller Liu. “It’s time for us to implement a responsible alternative. Regulating marijuana would keep thousands of New Yorkers out of the criminal justice system, offer relief to those suffering from a wide range of painful medical conditions, and make our streets safer by sapping the dangerous underground market that targets our children. As if that weren’t enough, it would also boost our bottom line.”
Liu proposed that the City use the revenues generated by the regulation of marijuana to reduce CUNY tuition by as much as 50 percent for New York City residents. “In this way, we’ll invest in young people’s futures, instead of ruining them,” he said. “By regulating marijuana like alcohol, New York City can minimize teens’ access to marijuana, while at the same time reducing their exposure to more dangerous drugs and taking sales out of the hands of criminals.”
Under Liu’s proposal, adults age 21 and over could possess up to one ounce of marijuana, which would be grown, processed, and sold by government-licensed businesses for recreational or medicinal purposes. A strict driving under the influence enforcement policy would be implemented concurrently, and marijuana use in public would be prohibited.
To study issues related to regulation, Liu called for the creation of an interagency task force comprised of the NYPD, Administration for Children’s Services, Department of Education, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, District Attorneys, and Department of Consumer Affairs. The task force would work with the New York State Senate and Assembly in order to pass the appropriate legislation authorizing the full implementation of the plan.
New York City’s current market for marijuana is estimated to be around $1.65 billion annually. Basing its calculations on average consumption rates and the approximate number of users among New York City residents and commuters, the Comptroller’s office estimated that taxing the sale of marijuana would generate approximately $400 million annually, of which roughly $69 million would go to the State and MTA in the form of higher sales taxes. The office calculated that the City could save another $31 million by reallocating time and resources expended by law enforcement and the judicial system on marijuana-related arrests. It did not analyze other economic benefits, such as the reduction in associated incarceration, costs of those arrested, and potential tourist-generated tax revenue. For a detailed explanation of the estimation and methodology, please view Regulating and Taxing Marijuana: The Fiscal Impact on NYC [https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/NYC_RegulateMarijReport.pdf].
But the social arguments for legalizing marijuana are even more compelling, the study found. Because of stop and frisk, minority communities disproportionately bear the consequences of marijuana arrests in New York City — especially the long-term damage to opportunities for employment, post-secondary education, and housing. Combined, blacks and Hispanics make up 45 percent of marijuana users in New York City, but account for 86 percent of possession arrests. By contrast, whites and Asians constitute 55 percent of users but only 14 percent of arrests. In 2012, 1 out of 627 white New Yorkers was arrested for misdemeanor marijuana possession, compared to 1 out of 175 Hispanics and 1 out of 94 African-Americans.

More than half (56 percent) of marijuana possession arrests in New York City are of those age 25 and under — a group for whom the negative effects of an arrest or criminal record is especially acute. Convictions can affect people’s eligibility for federal student loans and NYCHA housing, and a history of arrest can bar them from many jobs.
Low-level marijuana arrests have skyrocketed during Mayor Bloomberg’s Administration and are directly related to the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk strategy. Since Mayor Bloomberg took office in 2002, there have been almost 460,000 misdemeanor marijuana arrests. The number of these arrests is on track to reach 37,000 in 2013 alone.

Liu’s proposal comes on the heels of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement that the Administration was overhauling federal sentencing guidelines to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders. Liu hailed the Holder move as “a solid step forward” but said the plan did not represent enough real progress for New Yorkers because it did not address the need to decriminalize marijuana or the growing conflict between state and federal laws in this area.


2013-08-14 "New York City Comptroller Releases Report Detailing the Financial and Human Costs of Marijuana Prohibition; Report Calls for the Taxation and Regulation of Marijuana for Adults, Advocates Demand a Comprehensive Overhaul of New York's Racially Biased and Broken Marijuana Policies"
from "Drug Policy Alliance" [http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2013/08/14-6]:
DPA Network is the nation's leading organization working to end the war on drugs. We envision new drug policies based on science, compassion, health and human rights and a just society in which the fears, prejudices and punitive prohibitions of today are no more.
---
NEW YORK - August 14 - Today, New York City Comptroller John Liu released his report calling for a system to tax and regulate marijuana for adult recreational use [http://comptroller.nyc.gov/press/pdfs/NYC_RegulateMarijReport.pdf]. The report comes just two days after Federal Judge Shira A. Scheindlin condemned the city’s police department’s use of stop and frisk – which has resulted in 600,000 unlawful arrests for marijuana possession since 1997 – as racially-biased. That same day, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called for Americans to rethink the “unintended consequences” of the war on drugs. Comptroller Liu’s report details the problems associated with marijuana arrests in New York City -- including racial disparities and the impact of saddling young people with a permanent criminal arrest record -- and the overall financial costs of marijuana prohibition.
In growing shift, the federal government and states around the country are engaged in a significant review of drug policies generally and marijuana policies in particular. On Monday, Attorney General Holder noted that the war on drugs has resulted in “the decimation of certain communities, in particular of communities of color” and directed federal prosecutors to develop guidelines for some drug sentencing issues to be handled on the state or local level. Many states have already moved ahead with significant reforms to marijuana policy. Twenty states now permit the use of medical marijuana; fourteen states, including New York and, most recently, New Hampshire, have some kind of decriminalization law on the books; and voters in two states – Colorado and Washington – recently voted to end prohibition by taxing and regulating marijuana for recreational use for adults over the age of 21. By creating a regulatory regime, Colorado and Washington are bringing under the rule of law the production, sale and use of marijuana. Recent national surveys find that a majority of Americans now favor the legalization of marijuana.
“New Yorkers, like people elsewhere around the country, are questioning our broken polices related to marijuana,” said gabriel sayegh, New York Director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Comptroller Liu’s report offers another important opportunity for New Yorker to examine the issues and discuss the range of options for fixing these laws – including ending failed prohibition. An increasing number of elected officials in the City and state agree that our marijuana policies are broken—resulting in racial disparities, Constitutional violations, fiscal waste and needless suffering. While there may not be widespread agreement about how to fix these problems, it’s critical that we have an open and vigorous debate about the issue.”
New York leads the nation in marijuana possession arrests, making more arrests than every other state in the country, including California, Florida and Texas. As noted in a recent ACLU report, in 2010, 97% of all marijuana offenses in New York were for possession only. The vast majority of those arrested (85%) are Black and Latino, mostly young men, even though numerous government studies report that young white men use marijuana at higher rates.
Marijuana policy is also being debated, examined and revised at the international level. In May, the Organization of American States produced a report [http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2013/05/oas-secretary-general-presents-historic-drug-policy-report-president-santos-colombia], commissioned by heads of state of the region, predicting a likely hemispheric move towards marijuana legalization in the coming years. And in an effort to undercut the violence related to drug prohibition, the Uruguayan House of Representatives recently approved a bill to legally regulate marijuana and create the world’s first government-regulated system of production, distribution and dispensing.
Studies show that criminalizing and arresting people for marijuana possession does little to prevent the use of marijuana. In national surveys, young people consistently report that it's easier to buy marijuana than alcohol, and under our current punitive system of prohibition, 20.5% of New York high school students report using marijuana in the past 30 days versus the 12.5% who have used cigarettes, which are carefully regulated. Many experts see the taxation and regulation of marijuana as a more effective way of controlling teen use than our current failed approaches.

Studies have also shown that these arrests have little to no public safety value. A recent report by Human Right Watch showed that the vast majority of people who enter the criminal justice system with an arrest for public possession of marijuana rarely go on to commit violent crimes. However, these arrests exact a profound human toll and can have far-reaching adverse consequences for those arrested, including lessening their opportunities for employment, education, housing, and loans.

Recent estimates show that New York state spends approximately $675 million a year enforcing marijuana possession laws, and most of these arrests occur in New York City. Fixing New York’s marijuana laws would save hundreds of millions every year, which could be reinvested into the community increasing the quality of life for all New Yorkers. By enacting a regulatory framework, the City and state could capture tax revenue that is, currently, largely under the control of criminal enterprises.

Legislators in Albany have been taking steps to address the myriad problems in New York’s current marijuana policies. Last year, the Governor proposed legislation to address police misconduct and racial disparities in marijuana arrests by standardizing some marijuana possession laws, making possession of marijuana in public view a violation, rather than misdemeanor. Legislators continue work to pass a medical marijuana proposal, with the Assembly passing a tightly-crafted bill earlier this year. And this spring, Senator Liz Krueger announced her intention to introduce a bill that will tax and regulate marijuana like alcohol in New York State. At the City level, the NY City Council has passed resolutions in favor of state legislation both to allow access to medical marijuana and standardize possession of marijuana in public view. And New York City mayoral candidates, such as Democrat Sal Albanese and Republican Joe Lhota, have called for the full legalization of marijuana.

“The data are clear – our current marijuana policies are doing more harm than good. They’re racially biased, ineffective, wasteful, and counterproductive,” said sayegh. “We need to rethink how we can enhance the health and safety of all New Yorkers through sensible reforms, informed by research and sound science. We can enact reforms that make good moral and monetary sense; we can address human costs as well as save millions that can be reinvested in our communities. Tackling these issues will require a vigorous, informed debate. Hopefully this report and other emerging developments – from Holder’s comments to Judge Scheindlin’s ruling on top and frisk to the growing number of reform initiatives at home and abroad – will spur such a discussion, because we can do better, and in fact we must.”

Dr. Sanjay Gupta discovers medicinal properties of cannabis

2013-08-08 "Why I changed my mind on weed"
By Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent [www.cnn.com/2013/08/08/health/gupta-changed-mind-marijuana/index.html]:
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
* Dr. Sanjay Gupta says we have been "systematically misled" on marijuana
* DEA lists marijuana as a schedule 1 substance with "high potential for abuse"
* Most recent research on marijuana has been on its negative effects, Gupta says
* Studies on marijuana require approval from National Institute on Drug Abuse
(CNN) -- Over the last year, I have been working on a new documentary called "Weed." The title "Weed" may sound cavalier, but the content is not.
I traveled around the world to interview medical leaders, experts, growers and patients. I spoke candidly to them, asking tough questions. What I found was stunning.
Long before I began this project, I had steadily reviewed the scientific literature on medical marijuana from the United States and thought it was fairly unimpressive. Reading these papers five years ago, it was hard to make a case for medicinal marijuana. I even wrote about this in a TIME magazine article, back in 2009, titled "Why I would Vote No on Pot." [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1552034,00.html]
Well, I am here to apologize.
I apologize because I didn't look hard enough, until now. I didn't look far enough. I didn't review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.
Instead, I lumped them with the high-visibility malingerers, just looking to get high. I mistakenly believed the Drug Enforcement Agency listed marijuana as a schedule 1 substance because of sound scientific proof. Surely, they must have quality reasoning as to why marijuana is in the category of the most dangerous drugs that have "no accepted medicinal use and a high potential for abuse."
They didn't have the science to support that claim, and I now know that when it comes to marijuana neither of those things are true. It doesn't have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works. Take the case of Charlotte Figi, who I met in Colorado [http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/07/health/charlotte-child-medical-marijuana/index.html]. She started having seizures soon after birth. By age 3, she was having 300 a week, despite being on seven different medications. Medical marijuana has calmed her brain, limiting her seizures to 2 or 3 per month.
I have seen more patients like Charlotte first hand, spent time with them and come to the realization that it is irresponsible not to provide the best care we can as a medical community, care that could involve marijuana.
We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that.
I hope this article and upcoming documentary will help set the record straight.
On August 14, 1970, the Assistant Secretary of Health, Dr. Roger O. Egeberg wrote a letter recommending the plant, marijuana, be classified as a schedule 1 substance, and it has remained that way for nearly 45 years. My research started with a careful reading of that decades old letter. What I found was unsettling. Egeberg had carefully chosen his words:
"Since there is still a considerable void in our knowledge of the plant and effects of the active drug contained in it, our recommendation is that marijuana be retained within schedule 1 at least until the completion of certain studies now underway to resolve the issue."
Not because of sound science, but because of its absence, marijuana was classified as a schedule 1 substance. Again, the year was 1970. Egeberg mentions studies that are underway, but many were never completed. As my investigation continued, however, I realized Egeberg did in fact have important research already available to him, some of it from more than 25 years earlier.

High risk of abuse -
In 1944, New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia commissioned research to be performed by the New York Academy of Science [http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/studies/lag/lagmenu.htm]. Among their conclusions: they found marijuana did not lead to significant addiction in the medical sense of the word. They also did not find any evidence marijuana led to morphine, heroin or cocaine addiction.
We now know that while estimates vary, marijuana leads to dependence in around 9 to 10% of its adult users. By comparison, cocaine, a schedule 2 substance "with less abuse potential than schedule 1 drugs" hooks 20% of those who use it. Around 25% of heroin users become addicted.
The worst is tobacco, where the number is closer to 30% of smokers, many of whom go on to die because of their addiction.
There is clear evidence that in some people marijuana use can lead to withdrawal symptoms, including insomnia, anxiety and nausea. Even considering this, it is hard to make a case that it has a high potential for abuse. The physical symptoms of marijuana addiction are nothing like those of the other drugs I've mentioned. I have seen the withdrawal from alcohol, and it can be life threatening.
I do want to mention a concern that I think about as a father. Young, developing brains are likely more susceptible to harm from marijuana than adult brains. Some recent studies suggest that regular use in teenage years leads to a permanent decrease in IQ. Other research hints at a possible heightened risk of developing psychosis.
Much in the same way I wouldn't let my own children drink alcohol, I wouldn't permit marijuana until they are adults. If they are adamant about trying marijuana, I will urge them to wait until they're in their mid-20s when their brains are fully developed.

Medical benefit -
While investigating, I realized something else quite important. Medical marijuana is not new, and the medical community has been writing about it for a long time. There were in fact hundreds of journal articles, mostly documenting the benefits. Most of those papers, however, were written between the years 1840 and 1930. The papers described the use of medical marijuana to treat "neuralgia, convulsive disorders, emaciation," among other things.
A search through the U.S. National Library of Medicine this past year pulled up nearly 20,000 more recent papers [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=medical+marijuana]. But the majority were research into the harm of marijuana, such as "Bad trip due to anticholinergic effect of cannabis," or "Cannabis induced pancreatitits" and "Marijuana use and risk of lung cancer."
In my quick running of the numbers, I calculated about 6% of the current U.S. marijuana studies investigate the benefits of medical marijuana. The rest are designed to investigate harm. That imbalance paints a highly distorted picture.

The challenges of marijuana research -
To do studies on marijuana in the United States today, you need two important things.
First of all, you need marijuana. And marijuana is illegal. You see the problem. Scientists can get research marijuana from a special farm in Mississippi, which is astonishingly located in the middle of the Ole Miss campus, but it is challenging. When I visited this year, there was no marijuana being grown.
The second thing you need is approval, and the scientists I interviewed kept reminding me how tedious that can be. While a cancer study may first be evaluated by the National Cancer Institute, or a pain study may go through the National Institute for Neurological Disorders, there is one more approval required for marijuana: NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It is an organization that has a core mission of studying drug abuse, as opposed to benefit.
Stuck in the middle are the legitimate patients who depend on marijuana as a medicine, oftentimes as their only good option.
Keep in mind that up until 1943, marijuana was part of the United States drug pharmacopeia. One of the conditions for which it was prescribed was neuropathic pain. It is a miserable pain that's tough to treat. My own patients have described it as "lancinating, burning and a barrage of pins and needles." While marijuana has long been documented to be effective for this awful pain [http://www.jwatch.org/ac200704300000001/2007/04/30/marijuana-painful-peripheral-neuropathy#sthash.e8PMYHlU.dpuf], the most common medications prescribed today come from the poppy plant, including morphine, oxycodone and dilaudid.
Here is the problem. Most of these medications don't work very well for this kind of pain, and tolerance is a real problem.
Most frightening to me is that someone dies in the United States every 19 minutes from a prescription drug overdose, mostly accidental [http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/14/health/gupta-accidental-overdose]. Every 19 minutes. It is a horrifying statistic. As much as I searched, I could not find a documented case of death from marijuana overdose.
It is perhaps no surprise then that 76% of physicians recently surveyed said they would approve the use of marijuana to help ease a woman's pain from breast cancer.
When marijuana became a schedule 1 substance, there was a request to fill a "void in our knowledge." In the United States, that has been challenging because of the infrastructure surrounding the study of an illegal substance, with a drug abuse organization at the heart of the approval process. And yet, despite the hurdles, we have made considerable progress that continues today.
Looking forward, I am especially intrigued by studies like those in Spain and Israel looking at the anti-cancer effects of marijuana and its components [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090401181217.htm]. I'm intrigued by the neuro-protective study by Lev Meschoulam in Israel, and research in Israel and the United States on whether the drug might help alleviate symptoms of PTSD [http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/the-case-for-treating-ptsd-in-veterans-with-medical-marijuana/251466/]. I promise to do my part to help, genuinely and honestly, fill the remaining void in our knowledge.
Citizens in 20 states and the District of Columbia have now voted to approve marijuana for medical applications, and more states will be making that choice soon. As for Dr. Roger Egeberg, who wrote that letter in 1970, he passed away 16 years ago.
I wonder what he would think if he were alive today.

Vallejo Drug War propaganda against cannabis concentrate

Vallejo City's Holy War against medicinal cannabis
[northbayentheogen.blogspot.com/2013/04/vallejo-citys-holy-war-against.html]

The following propaganda piece was published originally in the Vallejo Times-Herald's Sunday edition, formatted in a way that even if the newspaper were not purchased, the message would still be seen by anyone in Vallejo's supermarkets and gas stations or wherever the newspaper is publicly displayed.
The story has been picked up nation-wide by the monopolized press which seeks to uphold the illegal Drug War against the People, a war whose benefits are seen in the high return on investments in militarized police equipment and private prisons filled with non-violent cannabis users.
The story actually admits that only ONE person so-far in Solano County has been a victim to a concentrated form of cannabis, that this person has had no toxic effects after the initial experience, and that he was mis-treated by police while in the hospital ("his hands were handcuffed to the bed rails"). This young man was not a violent criminal, his only "crime" being a sensitive person who couldn't handle the effects of a substance he had no knowledge of... in other words, the article's purpose is plainly to act as a "public service" propaganda piece to sway public opinion against a cannabis concentrate which kills nobody, as opposed to alcohol.

The article even says that the cannabis concentrate is "dangerous to certain people", without explaining what kind of people, or that, again, NO ONE HAS DIED FROM CANNABIS CONCENTRATE, EVER!!!

2013-09-18 Letter by R.E. Humphry to the "Vallejo Times-Herald" in response to the article:


"Potent Plants - Officials: Little known locally about 'earwax' variety, its dangers"  
by Marie F. Estrada from "Vallejo Times-Herald" [http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts/ci_23753026/norh-bay-officials-little-known-locally-about-earwax]:
Contact staff writer Marie F. Estrada at (707) 553-6840 or mestrada@timesheraldonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @MarieVTH.
---
Two minutes after taking a five-second hit from a vaporizer, Josh felt the effects of the ear wax marijuana rushing over him.
"I felt like I was gonna die," the 17-year-old recalled. "The movie we were watching started to look 3-D. I kept seeing lights."
What the others in the group Josh was with had failed to tell him when they offered the drug to him, was that ear wax marijuana can include up to 90 percent THC.
In short, it's highly hallucinogenic. And, knowledgeable sources say, it can be very dangerous to certain people.
Officials on Solano County's Alcohol and Drug Advisory board, say they know little about ear wax marijuana -- its nickname derived from its appearance -- or its potential dangers.
The night Josh was under the drug's influence, someone telephoned Rhonda, Josh's grandmother. She picked him up and drove him to the hospital -- where his hands were handcuffed to the bed rails and he was later arrested.
(Josh and Rhonda agreed to be interviewed for this article under the condition that certain details of Josh's experience the night he tried ear wax be excluded.)
The effects of the drug didn't end with Josh's arrest. The ear wax was so intense that Josh's high lasted three days, all of which he spent in juvenile hall.
A year of probation and $7,000 in fines later, Josh is just beginning to get over the experience.
But he isn't the first -- and won't be the last -- teenager who has tried a modified form of marijuana. Even former Vallejo dispensary employees said that ear wax marijuana is a common concentrate to have in stock.
Despite this, most teenagers are unaware that a high THC content in their bodies can have short- and long-lasting detrimental effects on their bodies and their lives.
And what's worse, say some experts, the cannabis plant itself, whether as an ear wax variety or other type, is now bred to be increasingly potent.
Christie DeClue, a Solano County Alcohol and Drug Advisory board member, said marijuana has come a long way from the days of hippies and disco.
"In the 1970s, (people) were primarily smoking the leaves of the plant," DeClue said "Now users are smoking (the more potent) buds of the plant."
DeClue is also concerned that the starting age for many marijuana smokers also has changed.
Where most in the 1960s might have started while in college, today, children as young as 12 are experimenting, which can result in long-term damage.
Andy Williamson, a substance abuse administrator in Solano County, said using marijuana before age 25 can lower a person's IQ by up to 8 points since a young individual's brain is still developing.
Robert Lunch, a former volunteer for the Highway 29 Health Care dispensary in Vallejo, said many local dispensaries have ear wax in stock. It is for patients with a high tolerance and need the high potency medication, he said.
Lunch said the ear wax marijuana, which gets its name from its yellow-brown appearance, ranges in potency from 50 to 90 percent THC -- depending on the source.
Regardless, juveniles don't have to wait around for a friend with a marijuana card to pick up some ear wax -- they can make it themselves.
After officials confirmed that it was ear wax that Josh smoked, Rhonda Googled the substance and found numerous "how-to" Youtube videos.
What disturbed Rhonda the most was not that the ear wax exists -- but that the recipes are so easy to find -- and not one video explains the high THC content or potential risks.
Donald Poston, Josh's former counselor, said the substance is fairly easy to make, but can be incredibly dangerous.
"The ear wax is made with aerosol butane and the resin of the leaves and buds of the female plants. The result is a yellow-green waxy material," Poston said.
A substance abuse counselor for Youth and Family Services of Solano County in Fairfield, Poston said Josh was the first person he met who had tried the drug.
Since then, it has been coming up more in group meetings with other juveniles.
The consensus? It is too strong.
On June 17, CBS Detroit reported two people have been sent to the hospital in Detroit after using ear wax.
In the article, reporter Sandra McNeill wrote the two 36-year-olds -- both medical marijuana patients -- suffered episodes of psychosis.
Director Susan Smolinske, of the Children's Hospital of Michigan Regional Poison Control Center, told McNeill the two, "needed to be sedated because they were so agitated that they could not be controlled."
Josh can relate.After an intense year of fines, probation, weekly meetings and anger management, Josh said he thinks back to his decision and wishes it were different.
"I think what if I hadn't stayed (with the group) and what if I had just called my (grandparents)," he said.
But for the most part, he just had to stop thinking about it and move on.
All he can do now is discourage his younger brother from trying drugs and start to pay his grandparents back for his fees.
"I paid when I could, but they'll get all of their money back one day," Josh said. "I'm not gonna let them lose all of that money for one deed that I did."
In August, Josh will turn 18 and his advice to others is to take marijuana more seriously.
"What people are telling me is that (marijuana) is not a drug, that it's just an herb," Josh said. "That's bullsh--! If it gets you high, it's a drug, so don't do it."
The reality of it all, Rhonda said, is that it this could happen to anyone.
While there are groups that people might think are more at risk, many juveniles are unaware of the potency differences, she said.
"(Josh) is not, 'that kind' of kid. And I'll tell you, I don't think half of them are," Rhonda said. "I think it could be any kind of kid because marijuana is so downplayed. They just get caught up."


2013-08-02 Search Results for "Potent Plant Earwax" from Google.com shows that the article's main purpose was to act as propaganda in the monopolized press across the United States and world-wide, providing false or misleading information about cannabis, and utilizing only one person's anecdote about the effects on his mental behavior.

Enthegenic Cognitive Enhancement

"How Psychedelics Enhance Cognition, Boost Intelligence, Expand Cognitive Studies" 
by Thomas B. Roberts PhD [www.realitysandwich.com/expanding_cognitive_studies]:
The following is excerpted from The Psychedelic Future of the Mind, published by Inner Traditions, Bear & Company [store.innertraditions.com/isbn/978-1-59477-459-1].
---
Current research offers some tantalizing support for claims that psychedelics can be used to enhance cognition, improve intelligence, and strengthen cognitive studies. Experimental evidence of psychedelic cognitive enhancement comes from studies of practical problem solving, abstract concepts, and psychotherapy.

The Sleeping Giant of Psychedelics' Future: Innovative Problem Solving  -
A significant instance of problem solving resulted in a Nobel Prize for Kary Mullis. Until the invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a common problem in biology was that biological samples were often too small to analyze, but Mullis solved that and won a Nobel Prize. He described how LSD aided him in doing so.
"PCR's another place where I was down there with the molecules when I discovered it and I wasn't stoned on LSD, but my mind by then had learned how to get down there. I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the [indistinct] go by. . . . I've learned that partially I would think, and this is again my opinion, through psychedelic drugs . . . if I had not taken LSD ever would I have still been in PCR? I don't know, I doubt it, I seriously doubt it." (Mullis 1998; "Horizon: Psychedelic Science" 1997)
From the point of view of psychedelic cognitive studies, Mullis's example is noteworthy because he did not have his insight while taking psychedelics but instead used psychedelics to increase his ability to visualize, then transferred that cognitive skill back to his ordinary mindbody state. This confirms the idea that some skills learned in one state can be transferred to another. Transference and nontransference between mindbody states is itself a cognitive process that deserves study -- learning to remember dreams, for example. Learning to increase this flow, if it is possible, would increase access to stores of information and possibly to new cognitive skills.
Unlike Mullis's experience of transferring a skill back to his ordinary state, most instances of psychedelic problem solving occur while the person's cognitive processes are psychedelically augmented. This is most clearly illustrated by "Psychedelic Agents in Creative Problem Solving: A Pilot Study," by Willis Harman, a professor of engineering economic systems, and a team of researchers at Stanford Research Institute. Working with twenty-seven men who were "engaged in various professional occupations, i.e., engineers, physicists, mathematicians, architects, a furniture designer, and a commercial artist and had a total of 44 professional problems they wanted to work on," the Stanford Research Institute team divided them into groups of three or four and gave them 200 milligrams of mescaline, followed by a quiet period of listening to music. Then they had snacks and discussed their problems with their group. Following this they spent three or four hours working alone on their problems. As a result of psychedelic enhancement, the practical results were impressive.
"Pragmatic Utility of Solutions. The practical value of obtained solutions is a check against subjective reports of accomplishment which might be attributable to temporary euphoria. The nature of these solutions was varied; they included: (1) a new approach to the design of a vibratory microtome, (2) a commercial building design accepted by client, (3) space probe experiments devised to measure solar properties, (4) design of a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, (5) engineering improvement to magnetic tape recorder, (6) a chair design modeled and accepted by manufacturer, (7) a letterhead design approved by customer, (8) a mathematical theorem regarding NOR-gate circuits, (9) completion of a furniture line design, (10) a new conceptual model of a photon which was found useful, and (11) design of a private dwelling approved by the client." (Fadiman 2011, 132)
James Fadiman, one of the coauthors of this study, describes it and other psychedelic approaches to problem solving in his 2011 book The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide. His valuable descriptions of their process as seen by an investigator -- insider and quotations from the problem solvers themselves draw attention to this sleeping giant of psychedelics' future practical problem solving. It is time for researchers to awaken this giant and for federal agencies and local institutional review boards to move forward and encourage creative invention.
It is a widely known "inside secret" that psychedelics also contributed to the rapid innovation and growth of the personal computer industry (Markoff 2006), and probably the greatest monetary payoff from using psychedelics occurred when the problem of a little start-up software company vying with other start-ups for the eyes of potential customers was solved.
"The big quandary for software companies was getting into the market place, finding shelf space. But there was a new way of doing that I thought of called 'shareware,' and I think the concept was very unusual, and I think the concept came to some extent from my psychedelic experience. . . . So that worked. It worked pretty well." (Wallace 1997)
Bob Wallace's idea was to give away programs and ask people to pay whatever they could and wanted to. Because they were free, thousands of people started using them, and this helped his little, unknown start-up company grab market share so that eventually it could charge for its products and begin to turn a profit: micrograms for Microsoft.

Experimental Studies of Abstract Concepts -
Much research in the cognitive sciences has to do with memorizing things not worth memorizing, solving silly puzzles, and other unrealistic tasks that lend themselves to clean laboratory research designs but have little relevance in life. This barrier was broken and cognitive studies advanced to higher level thinking thanks to psilocybin. In 2006 and 2008, experiments showed that psychedelics can extend cognitive studies to topics that are important in people's lives but were previously beyond experimentation-meaningfulness and significance among others (Griffiths et al. 2006, 2008, 2011).
In previous chapters we've looked at the implications of these experiments for values and religion; here our concern is their implications for higher level cognitive psychology. They found, "at 2 months, the volunteers rated the psilocybin experiences as having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance and attributed to the experience sustained positive changes in attitudes and behavior consistent with changes rated by community observers" (Griffiths et al. 2006, 268). To account for the possibility that their volunteers might overrate their own behavior, the Hopkins team interviewed friends and close family members to see if they noticed any changes, which they confirmed. This experiment illustrates how psychedelics can advance experimental studies far beyond trivial attention span and boring digit-memory tasks to the high level abstractions that give meaning to people's lives.
Three written comments express the essence of the participants' experiences.
 * "The understanding that in the eyes of God -- all people . . . were all equally important and equally loved by God. I have had other transcendent experiences, however, this one was important because it reminded and comforted me that God is truly and unconditionally loving and present."
 * "Freedom from every conceivable thing including time, space, relationships, self, etc. . . . It was as if the embodied "me" experienced ultimate transcendence-even of myself."
 * "A non-self self held/suspended in an almost tactile field of light." (629)
These three samples of enhanced spiritual cognition demonstrate that psychedelics provide a breakthrough for the cognitive sciences: instead of being limited to surveys, random self-reports, and lightly grounded speculation about higher level cognitive processes such as meaningfulness, sacredness, and significance, psychedelics enhance cognitive sciences with an experimental method of investigating these and similar high-level, abstract conceptualizations.

Experimental Religious Studies -
With its heavy reliance on words, beliefs, and text, current religion, of course, is heavily cognitive, so it provides another avenue for advancing cognitive studies. "Experimental religious studies" sounds impossible, but thanks to psychedelics it isn't. The findings of Griffiths's group and other reports illustrate one way to use psychedelics to study higher-level abstractions, in this case religious ones.
As mentioned earlier, the best example of the long-term influence of psychedelics on thinking is Rick Doblin's 2001 study "Pahnke's Good Friday Experiment: A Long-term Follow-up and Methodological Critique." Doblin is the founding executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Its website is one of the richest of the psychedelic Internet domains. MAPS is primarily interested in psychotherapy, but reading its publications and website from a cognitive perspective is like stumbling into a great hidden treasure. Doblin's follow-up study documenting the effects of psilocybin given to seminarians a quarter of a century earlier speaks to the power of psychedelics as experimental treatments and to mystical experiences as experimental variables. I look forward to reading a "Journal of Experiential Religion."

Cognitive Aspects of Psychedelic Psychotherapy -
Psychedelic psychotherapy is more than a treatment. It has implications beyond health; it provides clues to how our minds work. How does thinking change during successful psychotherapy, such as when psilocybin is used to reframe death anxiety in the work of Charles Grob and his coresearcher Alicia Danforth, or MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is used to reduce post-traumatic stress disorder in patients who have been intractable to other treatments, as in the work of South Carolina psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer?* Other clinical leads suggest treating cluster headaches, obsessive-compulsive disorder, neuroses and psychoses, depression, alcoholism, and addiction.
Except for cluster headaches, these cures are usually correlated with mystical experiences. Cognitively, what phenomenological shifts occur during mystical experiences, with the power to reframe thoughts, emotions, and identity so much that they apparently often cure death anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and addictions and alcoholism? Hood's mysticism scale and similar measures of mystical experience may provide clues. In his 1996 "The Facilitation of Religious Experience," Hood summarizes the evidence that psychedelics often produce mystical experiences, and in his 2006 "The Common Core Thesis in the Study of Mysticism," he compares phenomenologically derived and empirically derived models of mystical experience. For cognitive scientists who want to study higher order processes experimentally, the items in Hood's scale may be clues to how to study this type of cognitive reframing.

Improving Intelligence  -
Howard Gardner, best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, defines intelligence as "the ability to solve problems or produce goods of value to society" (1983). The instances cited above meet his standard for intelligence. Unfortunately, Gardner, like other scholars, defines and describes intelligence as it exists only in our ordinary, default mindbody state. A full view of intelligence would include the skillful use of all states. Recognizing that varieties of intelligence exist in states other than our usual awake state raises the question of whether other cognitive processes have their analogs in other mindbody states too, suggesting a future for multistate cognitive science -- researching the question, "How does cognition vary from mindbody state to mindbody state?"
In The Triarchic Mind, Robert Sternberg suggests another criterion for intelligence, defining it as "mental self-management" (1988). By that standard, someone who can access a large collection of information-processing programs and their resident abilities is more intelligent than someone with a smaller repertoire. Kary Mullis's learning to strengthen his visualization capacity and transfer it to his usual state is an example. What about someone who is highly skilled at selecting mindbody states, achieving them, and using their resident abilities? Because selecting mindbody states is an executive function prior to the use of specific states, the word metaintelligence may be useful when discussing this kind of intelligence.

Enriching Cognitive Studies  -
Not only can cognitive science investigate cognitive enhancement, but by surpassing its current boundaries it can also accelerate the pace of its own scientific progress. Identifying and characterizing cognitive processes (and other processes) that exist in all mindbody states will demand new talents for skilled psychologists, phenomenologists, and neuropsychologists. In order to develop this agenda, a new generation of researchers needs to become comfortable studying these states both objectively and subjectively.
Cognitively, psychotechnologies are ways of installing information-processing programs in our minds. Among the many possibilities, psychedelics illustrate a vast multistate frontier for the future of cognitive studies, one in which mindbody states are sometimes "independent variables" -- the things that experimenters change -- and sometimes "dependent variables" -- the things that change as a result. To put it another way: independent variables are the inputs and dependent variables are the outputs. For example, in the Johns Hopkins studies, psilocybin was the independent variable, and people's experiences were the dependent ones.
Examples include the clinical laboratory experiments we have already looked at in earlier chapters such as those by Griffiths, Grob, Mithoefer, and Grof. Hood's mysticism scale and Lerner and Lyvers's study of values and beliefs of psychedelic users illustrate survey methods. Walsh and Grob's 2005 Higher Wisdom and Badiner's 2008 Zig Zag Zen present in-depth phenomenological interviews. Nichols and Chemel connect chemistry and religious cognition in their article 2006 "The Neuro­pharmacology of Religious Experience." An Internet search of clinical trials using hallucinogens (excluding cannabis and related compounds) locates more than a dozen current trials, while the MAPS website keeps readers up-to-date on completed, current, and planned research.
Perhaps the most curious and exciting prospect psychedelics offer is their impact on humanistic and religious concepts such as meaningfulness, significance, portentousness, values, transcendence, self-concept, aesthetic perception, identity, beliefs, and sacredness. These abstractions form the vitals of humanistic studies, but until psychedelics, they have been hard to study in experiments. The provocative psychedelic studies throughout this book indicate that these abstractions may become dependent variables when mindbody states are the independent variables.

Consilience -
In 1998 biologist Edward O. Wilson, author of two Pulitzer Prize- winning books and recipient of other honors and awards, challenged the scientific community to build a multidisciplinary cognitive structure that integrates all branches of knowledge. He called his book and the project Consilience. Psychedelics are a natural for this major league intellectual project. They are naturally interdisciplinary. They link topics from the neurochemistry of our brains to Greek mythology and film criticism. As the Griffiths et al. studies of the effects of psilocybin on personal meaningfulness and sacredness exemplify, psychedelics provide one way to overcome the problem of integrating different lines of inquiry into a multilayered scaffolding of empirical evidence.
How do the chemical, biological, psychological, cognitive, and social levels influence each other? With psychedelics questions such as "How do biochemical changes affect beliefs?" are open to experimentation. Conversely, researchers can experimentally examine the question "How do someone's beliefs and cognitive expectations influence the outcomes of biochemical experimental treatments?" By providing models for independent variables on one level and dependent variables on others, meditation, psychedelics, and other mindbody psychotechnologies provide ready-made roads to advance the consilience project.
Wilson recognized this. "Shamans preside over the taking of hallucinogenic drugs and interpret the meaning of the serpents and other apparitions that subsequently emerge" (1998, 72). He reports, "[The shaman's] drug of choice, widely used in the communities of the Rio Ucayali region, is ayahuasca [pronounced eye-uh-WAHS-ska], extracted from the jungle vine Banisteriopsis." Illustrating consilience, he follows this with, "The sacred plants, which have been analyzed by chemists, are no longer mysterious. Their juices are laced with neuromodulators that in large oral doses produce a state of excitation, delirium, and vision" (73). Wilson recognized that chemical input yields cognitive output, yet another instance of the chemical-cognitive relationship that most of the researchers mentioned above have implicitly noted.

Discovering Hidden Parameters of the Mind -
Although the mentioned studies have implications for the cognitive sciences, they were not expressly designed to do so. Shanon's The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience intentionally hybridizes cognitive psychology and psychedelics.
"Not only can a cognitive-psychological analysis make a crucial contribution to the study of Ayahuasca, the converse is also the case -- the study of Ayahuasca may have implications of import to our general understanding of the working of the human mind. Ayahuasca (along with other mind-altering substances) expands the horizons of psychology and reveals new, hitherto unknown territories of the mind. Thus the study of Ayahuasca presents new data pertaining to human consciousness, and thus new issues for investigation, new ways to look at things, new questions, and perhaps even new answers." (2002, 37)
Shanon claims that one contribution of studying nonordinary mindbody states is "rendering the parameters of the cognitive system apparent and revealing the various possible values these parameters may take" (196). Will additional explorations into other mindbody states using other psychotechnologies discover still more of cognition's hidden parameters? Many assumptions that singlestate cognitive psychologists make about "givens" are based on data only or predominantly from our usual awake state. Some of their supposedly stable assumptions are really unrecognized variables, taking on other values in other states. By illustrating how the cognitive sciences and psychedelics can inform each other, his work models an enhanced multistate cognitive science.

The Omitted Evidence -
Current professional discussions of cognitive enhancement (e.g., the 2008 Committee on Military and Intelligence Methodology for Emergent Neurophysiological and Cognitive/Neural Science Research in the Next Two Decades) and articles in consumer periodicals (Greely et al. 2008; Greely 2009; Talbot 2009) omit the strongest evidence. These omissions all have to do with psychedelics. While the contribution of psychedelics to music (Bromell 2000), art (Masters and Huston 1968; Johnson 2011), religion (Smith 2000; Roberts 2012), medicine (Winkelman and Roberts 2007), and psychotherapy are becoming recognized, recognition of their contributions to cognitive enhancement lags. Whether this omission is due to a simple lack of information or scientists' and scholars' fear for their careers by touching a taboo topic is hard to say; it is probably some of both.
Whatever the reason, the scientific climate is changing, as the title of Morris's 2008 editorial in The Lancet put it, "Research on Psychedelics Moves into the Mainstream" (1,491). It is time for the cognitive studies to wake up. Dormant leads from the 1950s to the 1970s are being picked up now, and four decades of updated research methods in the neurosciences are moving this frontier forward again. Society benefits from intellectual work. If chemicals make that work more efficient, insightful, and creative, isn't it a professional duty for intellectuals to work as well as they can by using chemical cognitive enhancers?

Summary  -
As important as psychedelics are for enhancing cognition, strengthening intelligence, and fulfilling cognitive studies, the psychedelic group is only one group of mindbody techniques among others. Meditation, biofeedback and neurofeedback, the martial arts, yoga, breathing techniques, contemplative prayer, and selected exercise routines, rites of passage, and vision quests are other ways of producing a fuller range of mindbody states. They deserve careful attention too. Chapters parallel to this one could be written for each of them and for others.

Cannabinoids are an edible enhancement against life's problems

More information about this can be found at [www.projectcbd.org/].
Science of the Endocannabinoid System [www.erowid.org/plants/cannabis/cannabis_pharmacology2.shtml]

"High on Health: CBD in the Food Supply"
by Allan Badiner from "Reality Sandwich" [www.realitysandwich.com/high_health_cbd_food_supply]:
Endocannabinoids are naturally occurring compounds found within the human body. They've been there for 600,000 years or more, but we've only just noticed it! One of the remarkable things about endocannabinoids is their striking similarity to the active ingredients of cannabis called phyto-cannabinoids. In fact, it was the effort by scientists to understand the exact mechanism by which cannabis works in the body that led to the discovery of the Endocannabinoid System little more than a decade ago.
The science of endocannabinoid medicine has progressed to a dizzying degree in the past few years. There is wider awareness that the 'endocannabinoid system' is the largest neurotransmitter system in the human body, regulating relaxation, eating, sleeping, memory, and, as noted by the Italian scientist Vincenzo Di Marzo, even our immune system.
Cannabinoids promote homeostasis, the maintenance of a stable internal environment despite external fluctuations, at every level of biological life, from the sub-cellular, to the organism. For example, endocannabinoids are now understood as the source of the runner's high. The endocannabinoids naturally found in human breast milk, which are vital for proper human development, have virtually identical effects as cannabinoids found in the cannabis plant. Amazingly, the mechanism at work after smoking or eating cannabis, when adults get the "munchies, is essentially the same as what causes breastfeeding babies to seek protein-rich milk.
Universally accepted following its discovery in 1995, the endocannabinoid system asserts it power to heal and balance the other systems of the body by turning on or off the expression of genes. Cannabinoids hold the key that unlocks receptor sites throughout the brain and immune system triggering potent healing and pain-killing effects.
The endocannabinoid anandamide, (Ananda = bliss in Sanskrit + amide = chemical type) a naturally neurotransmitting lipid compound made by all mammals, is basically a self-manufactured "natural THC" circulating within. Anandamide and THC act through the cannabinoid receptors and have similar effects on pain, appetite, and memory, etc.
There are two types of cannabinoid receptors in the body -- the CB1 receptors found primarily in the brain and the central nervous system, and the CB2 receptors that are distributed but primarily found in the immune system. These receptors respond to cannabinoids, whether they be from breast milk, or from a cannabis plant.
Aside from the cannabinoids produced by the body and those found in cannabis, there are numerous substances that interact with the endocannabinoid system, such as cacao, black pepper, echinacea, tumeric and even carrots. But it is the Cannabis plant that produces the most powerful cannabinoids mimicing most closely those produced by the body. No downsides, no side-effects, no drug interaction issues, and so far, no giving up your hard earned funds to big pharma.
Make no mistake, I'm not referring to THC, of which Americans smoke more of per person than any other people on Earth, but rather the "other," non-psychoactive cannabinoid called Cannabidiol (CBD), a prominent molecular component of the cannabis plant. While CBD does not bind to either the CB1 or CB2 cannabinoid receptors directly, it does stimulate endogenous cannabinoid activity by suppressing an enzyme that breaks down anandamide. CBD is also a counterbalance to the action of THC at the CB1 receptor, mitigating or muting the psychoactive effects of THC. Weed enthusiasts would be wise to keep some CBD on hand for when things get... out of hand.
If just 10% of what research doctors are now saying about CBD is true, then this is a discovery with significance similar in medical impact to the discovery of antibiotics. Myriad serious scientific peer-reviewed studies in Europe have pointed to CBD as having almost unprecedented healing power over an extraordinary variety of pathologies. Even the stodgy National Cancer Institute has referenced this on their website [www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam/cannabis/healthprofessional/page4].
Surprisingly, there is still little awareness of this outside of the medical research community. Surely an unknown plant newly found in a remote rainforest with the same medical profile would be heralded as a miraculous cure. But in the last half-century, this particular plant has been better known as an intoxicant than a medicine.
The stigma that obscures wider awareness of its beneficial nature has been carefully cultivated. For decades, Hearst newspapers bombarded Americans with images of Mexicans and African Americans led into vice and violence by the evil weed. In the public mind, cannabis was transformed from an obscure ingredient in patented medicines with pharmacy sales rivaling aspirin, to an intoxicant the use of which would lead inevitably to decline and debauchery.
In a spectacular confluence of politics, racism, corporate greed, and political corruption, the federal government managed to outlaw cannabis for all purposes in 1937, with medical research becoming virtually impossible in the U.S.
Now, in California and around the country, research doctors are peer-reviewing the recent explosion of clinical studies from abroad, as well as conducting their own pre-clinical research without humans [scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,23&q=Cannabidiol&scisbd=1]. Persuasive evidence abounds that CBD is effective in easing symptoms as well as reversing of a wide range of difficult-to-control conditions, including: rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, alcoholism, PTSD, epilepsy, antibiotic-resistant infections, neurological disorders, and muscular dystrophy [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,23&q=Cannabidiol&scisbd=1].
CBD has no side effects and becomes very effective as an anti-psychotic when given in larger doses [www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0100-879X2006000400001&script=sci_arttext]. With more antioxidant potency than either vitamin C or E, CBD has consistently demonstrated neuroprotective effects, and its anti-cancer potential is, by all accounts, enormous. Sean McAllister, PhD at California Pacific Medical Center [www.cpmc.org/professionals/research/programs/science/sean.html] said "CBD could spell the end of breast cancer," and claims it could render chemotherapy and radiation a distant 2nd and 3rd options for cancer patients [abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/health&id=9057615].
Don Abrams M.D. at UCSF says the studies point to "a remarkable ability of CBD to arrest cancer cell division, cell migration, metastasis, and invasiveness." The vast impact of the endocannabinoid system on human health explains and validates anecdotal reports of cannabis used effectively for a wide range of health conditions. Studies on the efficacy of CBD treatment are already driving the design and development of precision targeted single-molecule medicines. Indeed, we are hard-wired for cannabinoids.
The US government may not admit the medical efficacy of cannabis, but the global pharmaceutical industry has been researching it for many years. Some 350 scientists from drug-company labs including Merck, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, and Allergan (maker of Botox and silicone breast implants) regularly attend meetings of the International Cannabinoid Research Society. They are all trying to develop synthetic drugs that confer some of the health benefits of cannabis without the psychoactivity. "It's a foregone conclusion," says Julie Holland, M.D.,"that the next decade will see a new generation of Big Pharma medications based on cannabis."
According to Martin A. Lee, author of Smoke Signals [www.smokesignalsthebook.com/], vitamin D combined with CBD could become "the killer public health app of the post-prohibition era." A new CBD/THC medicine for cancer pain called Sativex from the British company, GW Pharmaceuticals, is finishing the final FDA-approval process. While there is no time limit on enduring prejudice, as science reveals more about how the cannabinoid system works, the stigma associated with cannabis use is expected to fade.
CBD-enriched health foods, tinctures and oils are the next revolution in food and medicine. There is currently an explosion of entrepreneurial activity and creativity around making up for lost time with CBD. LA-based cannabis physician Allan Frankel explains that [www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD0SnDDLq8s], "up until this past year, it has been impossible to help patients using CBD. Cannabis growers were focused on the stoniest weed," hence, CBD which is non-psychoactive, was nearly lost. Now, more CBD rich strains are turning up, in part because there are laboratories that can accurately assess how much of which cannabinoid is present and check for mold and pesticides.
We are still in the early stages of understanding the synergistic effects of all the cannabinoids, not to mention the terpenoids--the sticky aromatic terpenes that give cannabis its characteristic smell [terpenes.weebly.com/]. Research, as well as results in the field, shows that the presence of some THC and other cannabinoids in smaller amounts potentiate the healing effects of CBD. The combined effects of the cannabinoids, terpenes and perhaps another 200 other molecules all working together and carefully balanced in nature is what Dr. Ethan Russo calls an "Entourage Effect" [cannabisclinicians.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/OS-2011-Terpenes+Minor-CBs.pdf].
The burgeoning edible cannabis industry until recently was focused on making food items so radically THC dominant that you could easily become catatonic 3 hours after ingestion. Anecdotal evidence suggests while most people enjoy these powerful treats, many people have had challenging experiences, replete with anxiety, panic, and functional psychosis.
 Fortunately, for seekers of good health or for those targeting disease, there are now CBD-rich edibles that don't make you high, such as raw organic cacao from the Green Cacao Company [sespecreekcollective.org/raw-cacao-a-medicinal-superfood/], multi-flavored CBD dominant lozenges CBD-OOS [www.stickyguide.com/dispensaries/the-apothecarium/products/cbd-oos], and other similar products delightful to the palate as well as therapeutically effective.
As the health benefits are better understood, the huge market potential of non-psychoactive CBD-foods will likely be recognized. CBD-rich tinctures, such as Dew Drops Hemp Oil from Denver based Dixie Botanicals sells their industrial hemp oil over the internet with no medical marijuana permit required [dixiebotanicals.com/products/dew-drops-hemp-oil-supplement/]. Before long, there will be a plethora of food products rich in CBD, essentially creating a new food sector more legitimately called "health food," than what is currently found in natural foods stores.
CBD-rich foods need not make any health claims thus avoiding issues with the FDA [www.unitedpatientsgroup.com/blog/2012/10/08/taking-a-quick-look-at-hemp/]. Imagine creamy CBD enhanced peanut butter, cooking oils, cereals, and beverages. Don't be surprised that in a few short years, you will be hearing doctors (not just cannabis physicians) advise their patients to "exercise, and get your CBD." Obtaining enough CBD to make a medically significant difference requires edible, vapor, or sublingual delivery thus avoiding the health risks associated with smoking.
In this fast and fanciful look forward, one should not leave out the inevitable resurgence of large-scale cultivation and production of fiber hemp, a versatile, ecologically sustainable plant with more than 25,000 known industrial applications--everything from hemp clothing, cosmetics, and foods (hemp seeds are a powerful source of protein), to oil-free plastics, hemp surfboards, insulation, and car panels.
Practically speaking, CBD, or what Robert Louis Stevenson called the "golden oil," is but a by-product of the non-psychoactive hemp plant. As you read this, thousands of industrial hemp farms are stripping the CBD-rich leaves and stems from the desired fiber and composting them. It's reasonable to suppose that the tragedy of losing all that medical value for victims of cancer and other maladies will not be lost on those that follow us [www.davoil.ro/documente/the-composition-of-seed-oil-and-its-potential-as-an-important-source-nutrition.pdf].
If the cannabis plant hasn't done enough for us--providing wellness for the body and change for the mind, it can also help us pull the petroleum out of our economic jugular, possibly giving rise to a healthier vegetable-based organic life-support system for our children.