Keep up with the latest news on the fight against marijuana in California and around the country.
Marijuana commercialization and the problems associated with it continue to ramp up in California and elsewhere. “Legal” marijuana is only supposed to come from “permitted”, “regulated” grows that have “tested” marijuana. None of that has been realized and likely never will be.
Read MoreFDA has complete jurisdiction over the production, distribution, and sale of all drugs and medical devices in the United States. ATF has jurisdiction over alcohol and tobacco products nationwide.Creating a special exception for marijuana is dangerous and totally illogical.
Read MoreThe National Institute on Drug Abuse analyzed data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions and found respondents who reported past-year marijuana use in their initial interview had 2.2 times higher odds than nonusers for having a prescription opioid use disorder and 2.6 times greater odds of abusing prescription opioids.i
Read MoreThere is little to no research to support the supposed benefits of medical cannabis, and what evidence exists suggests that using marijuana as medicine may do more harm than good, family doctors’ associations across Canada are telling their members.
Read MoreFour years after legal recreational marijuana went on sale in Colorado, Gov. John Hickenlooper says the black market for marijuana in the state is shrinking and predicted that it "will be largely gone" in a few years.
But new statistics show that arrests for the production of black market pot increased by 380 percent in the 2014-16 time frame, and Colorado law enforcement agencies say they are battling a boom in illegal marijuana cultivation by sometimes violent groups of criminals who rake in millions of dollars by exporting what they grow.
Read MoreA study of four medical marijuana outlets in California suggests that many of their customers don’t fit the profile expected for businesses focused on sick patients.Researchers found that some of the dispensaries attracted many customers outside of their immediate area and appeared to target specific ethnic, gender and/or age groups.
Read MoreProponents first extolled the “medical” benefits of marijuana. They convinced voters to bypass the Food and Drug Administration, substituting popular vote for research, clinical trials and science. They downplayed the harmful health effects and never mentioned that FDA-approved medical marijuana for cancer patients is already legally available in nabilone pills. Ads showing seniors toking to relieve the effects of chemotherapy tugged at heartstrings. Yet in Arizona, fewer than 3 percent of marijuana cardholders have cancer. Statistics suggest “medical” marijuana is a ruse for recreational pot: Cardholders are predominantly male, one-fourth are under 30 and 83 percent use it to relieve self-defined “chronic pain.”
Read MoreSan Diego County has banned pot dispensaries in its unincorporated areas, but the Sheriff's Department can't enforce the ban, because the locations that are shut down just re-open. Spring Valley has become the Wild West for illegal pot shops.
Read MoreGiven more options from which to choose, respondents’ support for legalization dropped by a third, from 60 percent to 40 percent. Apparently, some of the poll respondents who had previously expressed support for legalization assumed they were being asked about the legality of medical marijuana or of personal marijuana possession. The “60 percent support” was thus actually a mix of people who supported legalization and those who opposed it but wanted marijuana to be accessible to severely ill people, opposed criminal penalties for personal consumption, or both.
Read MoreYoung people with cannabis dependence have altered brain function that may be the source of emotional disturbances and increased psychosis risk that are associated with cannabis abuse, according to a new study published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. The alterations were most pronounced in people who started using cannabis at a young age. The findings reveal potential negative long-term effects of heavy cannabis use on brain function and behavior, which remain largely unknown despite the drug's wide use and efforts to legalize the substance.
Read MoreIf Hickenlooper and Gardner cared to lead on this issue, they would tell the world about the rate of pot-involved traffic fatalities that began soaring in their state in direct correlation with the emergence of legal recreational pot and Big Marijuana. They would talk about Colorado's status as a national leader in the growth of homelessness, which all major homeless shelter operators attribute to commercialized, recreational pot.
Read MoreMany of those in prison for marijuana entered a guilty plea to a marijuana charge to avoid a more serious charge. In the US, just 1.6 percent of the state inmate population were held for offenses involving only marijuana, and less than one percent of all state prisoners (0.7 percent) were incarcerated with marijuana possession as the only charge.
Read MorePart of the legalization argument is that regulating and taxing marijuana could give California enforcement agencies the funds they need to eradicate illegal farms. But Gabriel thinks it will take years before enforcement can put a dent in the illegal grows that he estimates pop up by the hundreds every year. He points to Humboldt County, about five hours northwest of Calaveras, where authorities are combing through 2,300 applications for growers who want to start selling in California’s recreational market. But there are also an estimated 12,700 illegal farms in the county.
Read MoreAlthough supporters of recreational pot had the gall to argue that legalisation would lead to decreased use by teenagers, regular use of marijuana among children between 12 and 17 has been above the national average and is rising faster than the national average.
Nor did legalization reduce black market marijuana activity in Colorado. Last year the state’s Attorney General, Cynthia Coffman, told the media: “The criminals are still selling on the black market. ... We have plenty of cartel activity in Colorado (and) plenty of illegal activity that has not decreased at all.”
Homelessness has surged by 50 percent from the time recreational pot was legalized. Surveys at Denver shelters estimate that about 20 to 30 percent of newcomers have moved to Colorado so that they can have easy access to the drug.
Read MoreThe “medipot” industry has been lawless. Those willing to break the law are not likely to obey new, weak and unenforced regulations. Local law enforcement throughout the state, including our own Chief Zimmerman pled for banning commercial pot drug dealing operations. Most jurisdictions in the state have listened. Sadly several cities, including San Diego City, have not.
Read MoreLast week marked the fifth anniversary of Colorado's decision to sanction the world's first anything-goes commercial pot trade.
Five years later, we remain an embarrassing cautionary tale.
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(Natural News) People who turn to medical marijuana are often drawn to the fact that it’s natural. This is indeed a great quality from a health standpoint, but environment-minded marijuana buyers, take note: New research shows that marijuana farming in remote locations is having a negative effect on the environment.
After studying the ecological consequences that marijuana farming had in Northern California, researchers from Ithaca College discovered that small farms were having a surprisingly big impact.
In a press release, the college’s Environmental Science Associate Professor Jake Brenner wrote that cannabis has significant environmental impacts despite its small spatial footprint. He suggests that policymakers put land-use and environmental regulations in place to help control the expansion of cannabis crops before the situation grows more widespread, given the increase in legalization and popularity of the plant. Cannabis now enjoys legalization for varying degrees of medicinal and/or recreational use across 30 states in the U.S. and several other countries.
They reached their conclusions after comparing cannabis cultivation’s environmental effects, including forest fragmentation, the loss of habitats, and deforestation. In fact, the researchers pointed out that cannabis causes bigger changes in several key metrics in terms of unit area compared to timber, although the latter’s overall landscape impact remains greater.
For example, after looking at pot farms in 62 random watersheds in Humboldt County from 2000 to 2013, the crop was shown to cause 1.5 times greater forest loss and 2.5 times more forest fragmentation than timber harvest.
Little is known about the long-term impact of marijuana farming or regulations in the industry as policymaking struggles to stay on top of the industry’s growth. Part of the problem is that California laws state marijuana cultivation must be confined to just one acre per land parcel. By preventing wide-scale industrial marijuana farms, this law is actually encouraging small farms with big environmental impacts to proliferate, breaking up the forest and hurting wildlife habitats.
This adds on to previous studies carried out by the same research team showing that the pesticides used on marijuana farms to keep rodents away can hurt mammals in the area, while irrigation is having a negative impact on local wildlife. Moreover, because their locations are typically quite remote, access roads must be created and land must be cleared for production. That report suggested that growing marijuana in places with gentler slopes, plenty of water sources, and better access to roads could help reduce the threats to the environment significantly. Marijuana can also be cultivated indoors.
Those growing the crop should avoid using chemical pesticides for obvious reasons. It’s not just bad for the environment; it’s also terrible for your health. Indeed, pesticide exposure could be behind the cancer that spurs many people to seek medical marijuana in the first place. Some illegal forest growers have been using pesticides like carbofuran, which has long been banned in the country, and it’s now making its way into the water. This causes headaches, vomiting, muscle twitches, dizziness, convulsions and even death in some cases. California is home to more than 90 percent of the illegal pot farmsfound in the nation.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of profits to be made here, and some of the less scrupulous growers are focusing on profits at the expense of the environment. By raising awareness about the potential impact, it is hoped that such parties will turn to more responsible growing practices in the future. As the scientists in these studies point out, however, there isn’t much research available about land-use science when it comes to cannabis agriculture.
The pot industry has many lies and half truths that are recycled again and again. It is time to take them on point by point.
Read MoreMarijuana makes him carefree and happy. But years of using the drug had a ruinous effect on my family.
Read MoreCannabis users are more likely to commit violent crime, pioneering research has shown. It warned those who smoke the drug regularly run an increased risk of using violence against others. The project is the first to demonstrate that cannabis is not only linked with violent crime but is the cause.
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