Browsing: Medical

Add this year’s Girl Scout cookies season to a long list of blown opportunities for me. I walked by more than a dozens stands of Thin Mints, Tagalongs and Do-si-dos outside of grocery stores, breweries and even pot shops, but I kept abstaining, confident there would be another time to buy. Alas, now that time is gone, and my freezer never saw one box of Thin Mints.

Luckily for me, Denver’s dispensary scene is still providing chances to purchase Do-Si-Dos, but this version is getting stuffed into pipe bowls, not dipped in glasses of milk.

Heather DeRose realized she had to take a hard look at her lifestyle and eating habits after college. She was forty pounds overweight and routinely felt sick after eating. A doctor told her she was allergic to eggs, dairy and wheat, which she found on the label of nearly everything in her pantry.

During that overhaul, DeRose found hemp. Now, she and her husband, Antonio, run MJFITNUT, a website that promotes using cannabis to supplement a healthy and active lifestyle.

For most generations, Hercules (or Heracles, if you want to get technical) denotes strength and resiliency. But for mine, he was a cartoon taking orders from a minotaur voiced by Danny DeVito, or a loud kid who made childhood obesity funny in The Nutty Professor. Still, when I found a cannabis strain named after the Greek demigod, I couldn’t help but feel a bit intimidated.

In fact, given Hercules’s generally powerful reputation, I was surprised that the mythical hero hadn’t already inspired a variety of cannabis when I came upon a hybrid bearing his name.

Advocates often say that legal marijuana has the potential to combat America’s opioid crisis, but anti-pot groups are claiming just the opposite. In a recent letter sent to legislators in states with forms of legal marijuana, drug-prevention organization Drug Free America claims that pot use is associated with an increased risk of abusing prescription opioids and warns against using medical marijuana to treat opioid-use disorder.

Despite numerous media reports on marijuana’s role in declining opioid deaths in states with legal pot laws, DFA says people are losing sight of the big picture. “The marijuana lobby is pushing states to expand medical marijuana access to include opioid use disorders. The evidence that increased access to marijuana has reduced opioid overdose deaths however is weak and shortsighted,” the letter reads.

John Lyons was set to retire from four decades of training horses and sell his seventy-acre training facility in Parachute, Colorado. Instead, he started one of the country’s first nutraceutical and medical hemp research and treatment facilities, the Colorado Hemp Institute.

“I was retiring, selling the place, taking the money and running,” Lyons says. “[But] God had a different plan for my life than that.”

Trying a new strain without showing it the proper respect can end up messy, as I was reminded last week when I dove head-first into an intergalactic abyss not just once, but twice. I should’ve expected as much from a strain named Cosmic Railway, a sativa-leaning hybrid that left me feeling abducted and probed like a drunk Appalachian farmer that none of the townspeople will listen to.

Cannabis can treat a number of medical conditions, but by far the most common affliction listed on medical marijuana patient applications is pain. Of the 93,095 active patients on the Colorado Medical Marijuana Registry, 86,317 — nearly 93 percent — listed severe pain as a qualifying condition, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

Unfortunately, several of the most effective cannabis remedies for extreme pain aren’t available at recreational dispensaries in Colorado because of their high production costs; current regulations don’t allow others to be sold commercially. But there are still some good options out there to combat pain, including these five:

My mother would’ve quashed any hint of homophobia in our house, but thanks to Freddie Mercury, she didn’t have to. Queen songs such as “Fat Bottomed Girls,” “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “We Will Rock You” made Mercury one of my role models as a child, and learning that he died of AIDS days after I was born was like finding out that Santa Claus wasn’t real: I couldn’t fathom it. But that also made him even more supernatural in my eyes.

My allegiance to the mustache-mic god created a soft spot in my heart for Killer Queen, a sativa-leaning hybrid that shares the name of one of the band’s first big hits in America. Bred from Cinderella 99 and G13 genetics, the cannabis strain wasn’t the same immediate hit as the song, but Killer Queen has built up a formidable shelf-life since its debut.

Last year, then-eleven-year-old Colorado resident and medical marijuana patient Alexis Bortell joined other plaintiffs in a lawsuit against pot-hating Attorney General Jeff Sessions over federal scheduling of cannabis. Yesterday, February 26, a judge with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the suit, but Bortell, now twelve, wasn’t distressed. Shortly after the news went public, a post appeared on her Facebook page reading, “We were ready. Smile. We know #SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] is where we are probably going.”

The note ended with the hashtags #IStandWithAlexis and #AlexisBortell.

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