Browsing: Say what?

Combining cannabis and sports is a growing trend among amateur and professional athletes alike, but one new club in Denver is taking the term “runner’s high” to a new level. Starting this month, a group of runners interested in using cannabis to help train will meet up once a week for runs in the West Highland neighborhood.

Billing itself as the Runner’s High Run Club, the group will gather every Thursday at the Native Roots Highlands dispensary to run a 4.2-mile sativa route or a hybrid 2.1-mile route sponsored by the dispensary and Stratos, an infused-products company.

The industrial-hemp industry may have gotten a nod of approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration in late May, when the agency clarified that not all compounds of cannabis fall under the Controlled Substances Act. Referencing a 2004 decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that excluded non-psychoactive cannabinoids from the federal government’s definition of marijuana, the announcement came after the DEA says it had received numerous inquiries on the matter.

To get around the guardrails surrounding marijuana research, Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University wants to create a network of 100,000 medical marijuana patients in order to collect definitive information about the plant. Founded “to advance scientific understanding of medical marijuana and its derivatives” by providing evidence-based resources for patients and caregivers, the new mmj.org initiative is working to build the world’s largest database of patients.

Scientists hoping to research marijuana in a clinical setting currently have one option for specimens: the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which sources its marijuana plants from a single contractor at the University of Mississippi. Not only have those plants been criticized for their inferior quality, but the list of authorized marijuana research projects stuck using them is extremely short, with each requiring approval from the Drug Enforcement and Food and Drug administrations.

Botanical art, botanical illustration and flower painting are not the same thing. The emphasis on scientific accuracy and aesthetic value varies among the three, but they all showcase a plant’s composition and beauty. And now, in a show that very well might be the first of its kind, the University of Colorado Boulder is giving cannabis the beauty treatment.

“We have a rich, rich history of botanical illustration in the state of Colorado,” explains Susan Fisher, botany artist and curator of Cannabis: A Visual Perspective. “But there were huge conversations around this subject, because it was, you know, cannabis.”

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