Search Results: joint/ (6)

In California it can be even cheaper.

Here’s your daily round up of pot news, excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek.

A month’s supply of MED costs $1,000 in New York, three times as much as in Colorado.

Some teens like to vape pens filled with fruit flavoring. Modern Farmer visits a grow trying to get certified as pesticide free.

Responding to criticism of his escalating war on drugs, Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to leave the United Nations. CNN went inside a very crowded jail in the country. The N.Y. Times tells the story of a father and son killed in custody. The L.A. Times goes out with “ Nightcrawlers,” the journalists covering the bloodshed.

It’s a controversial theory.

The following is excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek. Get your free and confidential subscription at WeedWeek.net.

In Esquire, author Don Winslow argues that legal weed is responsible for the opiate epidemic. As demand for Mexican marijuana has fallen, The Mexican Sinaloa Cartel “increased the production of Mexican heroin by almost 70 percent, and also raised the purity level, bringing in Colombian cooks to create ‘cinnamon’ heroin as strong as the East Asian product. They had been selling a product that was about 46 percent pure, now they improved it to 90 percent.

Just your average, .32-gram joint here.

The following is excerpted from the newsletter WeedWeek. Get your free and confidential subscription at WeedWeek.net.

A ProPublica investigation finds that field drug tests widely-used by police are unreliable and can turn up false positives.

A study in JAMA Psychiatry found that cannabis use disrupts the reward processing mechanism in the brain. The journal editorializes that more research into the plant’s effects on the brain is urgently needed.

Smoking cannabis and tobacco together, a practice more common in Europe than the U.S., may contribute to dependency on both, a study found. See the study here.

In Canada, border authorities have cracked down on shipments of CBD oil. In Australia, some children with epilepsy will have access to the CBD-based drug Epidiolex before trials are complete.

The average joint contains .32 grams of marijuana, researchers have learned. This is an important figure for tax assessments and public health studies, the Washington Post says.

The .32 number was obtained by a statistical analysis of arrest data. In the past, researchers have tried to learn it by asking subjects to compare joint-size to common objects or having subjects roll joints with oregano.

Uruguay’s law allows pharmacists to sell weed, but most don’t want to. A small political party in Japan wants to lift the national ban on MED research.

Synthetic cannabis is still very dangerous.

President Obama’s clemency initiative has commuted the sentences of more than 300 offenders with a focus on non-violent drug offenders. The New Yorker asks why nearly 12,000 prisoner petitions remain undecided.

A case in South Dakota highlights the practice of urine tests obtained by force, with a catheter. State Attorney General Marty Jackley (R) defended the practice on legal grounds, but said “I don’t think anyone wants to go through that methodology.”

The Texas Tribune tells the story of a U.S. Border Patrol agent who got romantically involved with a marijuana smuggler.

The Kind profiles Jeff Mizanskey, who until his release last year was the only man in Missouri serving life for a non-violent marijuana offense. He spent 21 years in prison.

NASA

Video from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory on Monday showed a “fast moving jet of particles produced by a rapidly rotating neutron star,” scientifically speaking. But a more poetic view of the footage, according to The Raw Story, is that it resembles the mask from Phantom of the Opera or “God smoking a joint.”

The Vela pulsar was formed after the collapse of another massive star, according to NASA’s description provided with the video, and “it may provide new insight into the nature of some of the densest matter in the universe,” reports David Edwards at The Raw Story.

The video “has the unnerving appearance of the Phantom of the Opera — wearing not only a mask, but also a steam-blowing hat like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz,” wrote Universe Todays Nancy Atkinson.

Photo: Briarpatch
It’s not going to be Easy Going for you if you want to buy hash at this coffee shop — unless you’re Dutch.

​The Netherlands can ban over-the counter sales of marijuana in Dutch “coffee shops” to nonresidents to end drug tourism from other countries, a senior advisor to the European Union high court said Thursday, reports The Associated Press.

The advisor, Yves Bot, senselessly claimed a Dutch city’s ban on foreign customers in the shops is a “lawful and necessary measure” to cut crime and keep the peace, reports Stephanie Bodoni at Bloomberg.
“As drug tourism represents a genuine and sufficiently serious threat to public order in Maastricht, the exclusion of non-residents from coffee shops” is a “necessary” way of protecting residents, Bot said.

Graphic: Aural Wes
Wesleyan students chose Giant Joint over two human competitors for the student assembly.

​Wesleyan University students have elected “Giant Joint” to the student assembly, beating out two human competitors for the seat.

In the election last month, Giant Joint, a consistent vote-getter in representative elections since 2006, finally achieved victory with 416 votes, reports Aviva Markowitz of The Wesleyan Argus.
The genesis of Giant Joint took place in 2006 when Bev Allen, who graduated from the Middletown, Connecticut university in 2008, walked around the campus dressed as a giant joint.
The first year Allen ran for the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) as Giant Joint, she got 50 votes.
What began as a protest against a Student Health Advisory marijuana safety campaign resulted in a new Wesleyan write-in tradition: Giant Joint for WSA.
“I am proud and excited,” Allen said in an email to The Argus. “I definitely wanted Mr. Joint to live on after my graduation.”