Search Results: veterans/ (5)

The activists put up a long fight.

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

Michigan almost certainly won’t vote on REC this year. The state’s Senate advanced regulation for MED dispensaries.

Both MED initiatives that will appear on the Arkansas ballot “ are simply recreational marijuana masquerading as medicine,” according to Jerry Cox, executive director of the conservative Christian group Family Council. If both initiatives pass, the one with more votes prevails.

In Europe, they drink much more than they smoke cannabis.

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

U.S. teens are more likely to smoke pot than to binge drink according to a new study. A government study says Miamians are more anti-weed than residents of any other U.S. city, a finding at odds with a visit to Miami.

Vice says legalizing can mitigate problems associated with synthetic cannabis.

LAWeekly talks to Dr. Francis D’Ambrosio, an orthopedic surgeon turned pot activist. “Is the medicine working?” he asked a patient. “Well, then it’d be criminal of me not to renew your prescription.”

The long awaited PTSD study for veterans is recruiting volunteers.

A New York doctor is accused of trading a prescription for the powerful opioid Suboxone for a few grams of pot.

Police in Baton Rouge, La., have reduced their enforcement of narcotics offenses since Alton Sterling was fatally shot on July 5.

Marco Vasquez, police chief of Erie, Colo., spoke in favor of legalization at a national law enforcement conference.

Forbes explains how a Congressional career offender provision got Tennessee grower Paul Fields sentenced to 15 years. It was Fields’ third offense. For the second one, he was sentenced to 100 days.

Hundreds of doctors in Georgia have registered to recommend low-THC, high-CBD cannabis oil but there’s no official directory. Word of mouth is the only way to find one of the doctors.

Bruce Schulte, former chair of Alaska’s Marijuana Control Board, was fired by Gov. Bill Walker (Ind.). Schulte said the state is trying to “subvert” the industry.

Anti-REC activists in Arizona say the state’s upcoming initiative would  block employers  from firing people for cannabis use. In fact, the proposed law says the opposite.

Portland City Council appears ready to undo some of the restrictions governing dispensary operations. Humboldt County, Calif. growers are divided on a proposed excise tax.

Veterans Today

By Al Byrne
While the U.S. federal government’s regulators and lawyers, drug czar and others are paid to say whatever is dated and wrong about therapeutic cannabis, medical and nursing professionals are in wonder that so many can so willingly display their ignorance of therapeutic cannabis in public.
On November 23, 2011, the associate director for public affairs of the Office of National Drug Policy (ONDCP), Rafael Lemaitre said, “The Food and Drug Administration has not found smoked marijuana to be either safe or effective medicine for any condition.”
This statement made by a person of responsibility for citizen health in the U.S. is apparently in denial of a decades-long study of cannabis “smokers” by Donald P. Tashkin, M.D., medical director of the Pulmonary Function Laboratory, Professor of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles.
At the Patients Out of Time clinical cannabis conference in Pacific Grove in April 2008, Dr. Tashkin announced his study showed that no patient, of more than 2,200, who smoked only cannabis had lung cancer, COPD or other pulmonary problem other than mild bronchitis.
Smoking cannabis results in no lung cancer. 

Time 4 Hemp
Richard Brumfield claims cannabis prohibition will end November 5, and that he’ll be in charge of all legal production in America. Dude has a healthy sense of self, at least; not so sure about his grip on reality, though.

​Richard Brumfield, a medical marijuana activist from California, is in a unique position — that is, if you believe him. Brumfield claims not only that he is in direct communication with the White House and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, but also that — oh yeah by the way — marijuana prohibition ends on November 5. Did I mention he’d be in charge of all production?

One might rightly ask why the mercurial Brumfield, who vehemently opposed California’s marijuana legalization measure Prop 19 in 2010, would be anointed to be in possession of such important information, rather than, say, letting President Obama or maybe Drug Czar Kerlikowske announce it.
But Brumfield, who if nothing else seems to have quite a healthy ego, insists on his Facebook page and elsewhere that he is the “newly appointed Chief Clinical Director of the IAMB/TbT group” (whatever that is), and further, that clinical trials of medicinal cannabis will begin on November 5, according to a press release from pot podcast Time 4 Hemp.

If Brumfield is to be believed, he has the blessings of both the White House and Vice President Joe Biden (yeah, he even included ol’ Joe in his claims), “along with the support of many organizations such as the National Institute of Health, R.E.A.D.[Editor’s note: ??], and NIDA.”

Graphic: Veterans Today
In a historic decision, the V.A. has announced veterans will no longer be endangering their pain prescriptions by using medical marijuana in states where it is legal.

​In a historic decision, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs will now formally allow patients treated at its hospitals and clinics to use medical marijuana in states where it is legal.

It’s a day to remember, according to Steve Fox, director of government relations for the Marijuana Policy Project. “We now have a branch of the federal government accepting marijuana as a legal medicine,” Fox said.
The policy clarification has been sought by veterans and advocates for years, reports Dan Frosch at The New York Times.
A department directive, expected to take effect next week, resolves the conflict in V.A. hospitals between federal law, which outlaws marijuana for any purpose, and medical marijuana laws in the 14 states that allow medicinal use of cannabis.
Like the decision by Obama’s Justice Department to back off on marijuana dispensary raids in states that have legalized medical pot, the new V.A. policy essentially means the federal government is deferring to state medical marijuana laws.