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They may have been the first weed dealers.

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

Evidence suggests that Bronze Age Yamnaya tribespeople established a cannabis trade between Europe and Asia 5,000 years ago. Native to the Caucasus Mountains (roughly), the Yamnaya were horse-riding, cattle-herding nomads who traveled along what later became the Silk Road.

While neighbors Indonesia and the Philippines escalate their wars on drugs, Thailand may reform its famously harsh laws.

Can you find weed growing in the wild? Green Rush Daily investigates.

The Cannabist interviews joint rolling artist Tony Greenhand.

Eugene Monroe, who got cut from the Baltimore Ravens this year after he became the first active NFL player to call for MED use, has retired from the league. He’s one of jocks included on the Men’s Journal list of 18 cannabis activists in sports. The only woman is mixed martial artist Ronda Rousey. Earlier this year The New Yorker discussed “ The athlete’s case for cannabis.”

Tabloid stories about the dangers of drugs appear to fuel greater drug use. Gatherings where everyone stays sober are becoming trendy.

Agneya Singh, director of “ M Cream,” a movie billed as Bollywood’s first stoner flick, says India should decriminalize.

This weekend’s Enchanted Forest Gathering, a rave in northern California, was among the first U.S. festivals to have a MED dispensary on site. Alcohol was not sold.

Clothing company Patagonia, has made a short film ”Harvesting Liberty” to support industrial hemp legalization.

Michael “Dooma” Wendschuh, the central figure in my story “ Ebbu and the rise and fall of a modern weed dealer” has a new cannabis company. According to its LinkedIn page, Toronto-based Province Brands is a “global luxury brand” creating products “which do not feel like marijuana products.”

Some schoolchildren in the U.K. are gardening with cannabis compost.

JoelK75/Flickr
A handful of herbal healing

Rarely does a week go by without a new headline, from a respected publication, coming out highlighting another of the amazing benefits of responsible cannabis use. While critics of medical marijuana ignorantly, and incessantly, argue that a majority of medicinal weed smokers have no real physical ailment, every day more and more people across the country are stepping out of the cannabis closet to treat their illnesses.
The headlines regarding cannabis and health benefits have become so commonplace, that we as advocates need to constantly remind ourselves that while it is a miraculous plant, marijuana is not a “miracle drug”. Still, it comes as a bit of a shock when otherwise respected scientists and researchers rush so quickly to condemn pot as a useless form of pseudo-medicine, as a recent article in the journal of Arthritis Care and Research unfortunately did.

In a new study published this week in Nature Neuroscience, European researchers claim to have proven that smoking weed does, in fact, give you the munchies. Beyond that, they appear to have isolated the specific region of the brain that is affected by THC consumption, and identified the process through which that desire to eat an entire box of Lucky Charms at 2am comes from.

Flickr.com/enerva
So many choices…


In their study, the team of neuroscientists used a mischief of mice to conduct their herbal experimentation on, due to the cognitive similarities that mice share with humans. Roughly half the time, the mice got to get super baked, the other half they had to sit around sober as churchmice, and then…well…what happened to some of the poor critters near the end is downright freaky.

Innovation is inevitable in any industry, and the field of medical marijuana is no different. With laws already in the books in 18 states and more on the way, investors who might not know their Blue Chips from their Blue Dream are flocking to these regions to stake their claim in what they see as the next big commodity.
White-collar Wall Street-types can certainly see the budding upside to sinking money into dispensaries, growing operations, and other cannabis related retail outlets. But those potential gains are often outweighed by the prospects of inventory control, employee management, product naiveté. And of course, the grey area that exists in all current state-level medical marijuana laws that fly in the face of Federal statute. Cue MedBox.

 

The Stoner Blog

 

Worth Repeating
 
By Ron Marczyk, RN
 
Alcoholism and suicide kill more police officers than on the job violence!
Could substituting marijuana for alcohol use greatly decrease rates of burnout, alcoholism, suicide, depression and divorce, domestic violence and PTSD among the nation’s police officers? Police have on average life expectancies 10 years less than the average person; they also kill themselves at higher rates than the average American.
Marijuana is an exit drug for alcohol abuse and is also “an anti-suicide medicine.”
So why not allow police officers to use the safest recreational drug known to science?

UCSF
Hector Vizoso, RN, left, and Donald Abrams, MD, prepare a cannabis vaporizer for inpatient use at San Francisco General Hospital & Trauma Center’s Clinical Research Center.

​A medical study suggests patients with chronic pain could experience more relief if their doctors added cannabinoids — the main ingredients in cannabis or medical marijuana — to an opiates-only treatment. The findings, from a small-scale study at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), also suggest that a combined therapy could result in reduced opiate dosages.

More than 76 million Americans suffer from chronic pain. That’s more people than have diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined, according to the National Centers for Health Statistics.

Bangla DESH

Results Underscore Cannabinoid’s Potential as Basis of Safe Painkillers

Researchers have discovered a new way to enhance the effects of anandamide, a natural marijuana-like chemical in the body that provides pain relief.

A team of University of California at Irvine and Italian researchers, led by Daniele Piomelli of UC Irvine, identified an “escort” protein in brain cells that transports the endocannabinoid anandamide to sites within the cell where enzymes break it down, reports HealthCanal. The scientists found that blocking this protein — called FLAT — increases the potency of anandamide.
Compounds which boost anandamide’s natural abilities could form the basis of pain medications that don’t produce sedation, addiction or other central nervous system (CNS) side effects, according to previous work by the scientists. These side effects are common with existing painkillers such as opiates.

MS News Channel

​Vaporized cannabis “significantly augments” the analgesic effects of opiates in patients with chronic pain, according to clinical trial data published online in the scientific journal Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics.

Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco looked at the use of vaporized marijuana over a five-day period in 21 chronic pain patients who were on a regimen of twice-daily doses of morphine or oxycodone. Participants in the trial inhaled cannabis vapor on the evening of day 1 of the study, three times a day on days 2 through 4, and in the morning of day 5, reports the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).

Four Twenty Studios

​The administration of marijuana cannabinoids after experiencing a traumatic event blocks the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-like symptoms in rats, according to a new study published in the medical journal Neuropsychopharmacology.

“We found that there is a ‘window of opportunity’ during which administering synthetic marijuana helps deal with symptoms simulating PTSD in rats,” said Dr. Irit Akirav of the University of Haifa‘s Department of Psychology, which led the study.
In the study, conducted by Dr. Akirav with research student Eti Ganon-Elazar, the researchers set out to investigate how cannabinoids affect the development of PTSD-like symptoms jun rats, whose physiological reactions to traumatic and stressful events is similar to human reactions.

Graphic: Our Daily Bleed…

​​Welcome to Room 420, where your instructor is Mr. Ron Marczyk and your subjects are wellness, disease prevention, self actualization, and chillin’.

Worth Repeating
By Ron Marczyk, R.N.

Since the 1960s, the major milestones our country has achieved are incredible.
We elected an African-American president, women’s issues have made tremendous progress, and gays and lesbians can marry.
But cannabis is still illegal…?  Not for long! 
As the tsunami of hard empirical positive medical cannabis research builds, it meets the inevitable changing younger demographics of our country, and with the need for new cannabis- based jobs and new tax revenue.
The cannabis legalization tipping point is close at hand!
 
“Cannabis is the people’s medicine” and has overwhelming public support.
Let’s knock this last domino over!
And to that end…
I would like to highlight several 2011 research papers that discuss the most current findings regarding medical cannabis treatment and disease prevention.
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