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.

When Windy Borman started making her documentary on women in the cannabis industry in 2015, women held 36 percent of its senior leadership roles, compared to 22 percent across all industries in the United States. But by the time her film, Mary Janes: The Women of Weed premiered at the Alamo Drafthouse in Littleton March 3 to a sold-out crowd, the latest news showed that that statistic had dipped nine points, to 27 percent.

The new number “gives the film’s call to action a new meaning,” Borman said in a panel discussion after the viewing. “Geena Davis says, ‘If you can see it, you can be it.’”

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.

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