Grow Life 420

California's legalization of medical marijuana in 1996 was followed by a drastic reduction in the state's suicide rate, according to researchers at the University of California Irvine.

"In particular, for all suicides, our results demonstrate that California's 1996 intervention led to an average reduction of 398.9 suicides per year and a cumulative reduction of approximately 3,191 suicides during 1997–2004," reads the recently published study. "Similarly, legalization led to a reduction in gun suicides of 208 per year on average and a cumulative reduction of approximately 1,668 fewer gun suicides during 1997–2004."

Their data was sourced from state suicide records spanning the years between 1970 and 2004. While reduced suicide rates were seen across the board, the decrease in gun-related suicides appears to be the most related to medical marijuana legalization. Researchers said it was not certain why medical marijuana seems to have such an impact on gun-related suicides, but suggested it may have to do with marijuana as a means of fighting depression and anxiety.

"If marijuana alleviates the acute stress associated with these disorders, we expect suicide risk to decrease following legalization of medical marijuana," the authors wrote. "The evidence for this is mixed, however."

Some researchers argue that the study's key finding has less to do with cannabis itself and more to do with America's gun laws. According to the Gun Control Act of 1968, people who use cannabis or any other federally prohibited substance are banned from owning guns. That means California's drop in gun-related suicides could actually stem from the fact that medical marijuana patients have less access to firearms, say the study authors.

Protecting gun rights for medical marijuana patients has been fiercely debated as medical marijuana legalization has continued to spreads across the country. And while many have argued that patients should be able to access both medical marijuana and keep their Second Amendment right to own a firearm, the reduction of gun-related suicides may be one unintended benefit of the ban.

h/t Marijuana Moment

There are a small handful of people in America who get legal medical marijuana directly from the federal government. Irvin Rosenfeld is one of them.

Right now, medical marijuana is legal in 33 US states, but it remains federally prohibited. That means all medical marijuana patients are criminals in the eyes of federal law. Well, almost all of them. There are a handful of exceptions like Rosenfeld, who is one of only a small number of patients that were granted federal permission to use medical marijuana.

Every month, Rosenfeld receives 300 joints from the FDA—all of which comes from the only federally licensed cannabis cultivator at the University of Mississippi. That might sound like a dream come true, but the stuff Rosenfeld gets is low potency and not particularly high quality. Still Rosenfeld says it fulfills his needs.

"If you're talking about a connoisseur who wants to get high, they would be disappointed in the quality of the cannabis," Rosenfeld told Vice. "But I'm looking for the medicinal aspect and what I get sent to me is enough."

The condition that Rosenfeld was cleared to treat with medical marijuana is a rare bone disease called multiple congenital cartilaginous exotosis. Basically, he has hundreds of tumors covering his bones causing near constant pain. For years Rosenfeld was reliant on huge amounts of traditional painkillers to help manage his condition. But once he began experimenting with cannabis as a college student in the early seventies, everything changed.

"That's when I realized this illegal drug called marijuana was the only medicine that was doing this for me," Rosenfeld said.

Later on, Rosenfeld linked up with the late Bob Randall - the medical marijuana activist who became the first person to successfully petition the federal government to use medical marijuana. Together they opened the doors for the FDA's Investigational New Drug (IND) program.

Previously, the program allowed patients suffering from conditions like AIDS and rare forms of cancer to access the federal supply of marijuana. However, the program was shuttered by the Bush administration in 1992 and only 13 patients were grandfathered into the new regime. Rosenfeld was one of them.

While Rosenfeld is happy to see so many US states allow access to medical marijuana within their jurisdictions, he's still pushing for medical marijuana legalization on the federal level.

"In 1982, Bob Randall and I made a pact," said Rosenfeld. "We were going to teach the entire world about the benefits of medical cannabis. That's what we set out to do, but we haven't won yet for everybody. It's frustrating when the feds keep saying there is no medicinal benefit to cannabis because we know there is. We're living proof that this works."

The TSA will no longer prevent you from bringing federally legal CBD on your flight.

Cannabis' status as a federally banned substance means it's technically illegal to bring on any planes within the US. While several airports in legal states have loosened rules around traveling with cannabis in recent months, most still hold strict bans on flying with weed.

But as of this week, certain cannabis products are now allowed on all US flights. The TSA has updated their cannabis policies to be more in line with changes to federal law that saw certain cannabis products legalized nationally at the end of last year.

"Products/medications that contain hemp-derived CBD or are approved by the FDA are legal as long as it is produced within the regulations defined by the law under the Agriculture Improvement Act 2018," reads the TSA's new cannabis policy.

CBD in a non-intoxicating cannabis compound largely used for its medicinal qualities. It's commonly found in all types of cannabis, but only hemp-derived CBD is federally legal (thanks to President Trump signing the Farm Bill into law last fall). However, the TSA began work on updating their cannabis policy last year, when the FDA approved the cannabis-based anti-seizure medication Epidiolex.

"TSA was made aware of an FDA-approved drug that contains CBD oil for children who experience seizures from pediatric epilepsy," a TSA spokesperson told Marijuana Moment. "To avoid confusion as to whether families can travel with this drug, TSA immediately updated TSA.gov once we became aware of the issue."

TSA maintains that any cannabis product containing the intoxicating compound THC is still illegal and can't be brought aboard an airplane. People trying to bring these products with them will be reported to the authorities.

So while this new policy isn't perfect, it will certainly make air travel a whole lot more convenient for many medical marijuana patients across the country.

Last week, CBC reported that police in Ontario seized a substance described as an opioid-based drug that resembled cannabis. While the substance might have looked similar to ground up cannabis flower, police reported that it was in fact the dangerous opioid drug carfentanil.

Following the seizure of the drug, police have begun warning people to exercise caution when purchasing cannabis outside of the legal system. However, Cynthia Olsen of the Ontario Harm Reduction Network (OHRN) said cannabis consumers aren't likely to be fooled by the imitators. Most people should be able to tell the difference if they see the stuff up close.

"It actually had no resemblance to cannabis...by its weight, or by its scent, or by its texture," Olsen told CBC. "There was no indication that that substance was being marketed or sold as cannabis."

People shouldn't be too concerned about buying cannabis mixed with carfentanil or other opioids either, she said, as Canada has not seen a single documented case of cannabis being intentionally laced with opioids. And we probably won't see that happen in the near future. The high price of opioids and the relatively low cost of cannabis mean that "it makes no sense" financially for dealers to cut their marijuana with drugs like carfentanil.

"It's not being deliberately changed or laced or cut with fentanyl or carfentanil," Olsen said. "That, I think, is some of the important messaging."

However, Olsen does say there is a possibility that illicit cannabis may be unintentionally cross-contaminated with opioids—though not likely to dangerous levels. Still, she advises cannabis consumers look to legal retailers to ensure they're getting the safest product possible.

Cannabis consumers might just be less likely to die following a heart-attack. 

That's what a group of researchers from the University of Colorado found after analyzing the hospital records of 1,273,897 patients who suffered from heart-related emergencies, or Acute Myocardial Infarctions (AMI), between 1994 and 2013. Of those, 3,854 were cannabis consumers.

The researchers had originally hypothesized that cannabis consumers would suffer more negative effects after being admitted to hospital with AMI than non-consumers, but that wasn't the case. Cannabis consumers were actually at a decreased risk of going into shock, less likely to need certain artery surgeries and even less prone to die as a result of their heart condition.

"Perhaps the most striking finding of our study is that marijuana use prior to AMI was associated with decreased in-hospital mortality post AMI," the study authors wrote.

The researchers said they can't say for certain why cannabis consumers seem to fare better post-AMI, though they did give a couple of possible explanations.

One was that "marijuana use may have provided a cardioprotective effect to users." They pointed to studies that suggest cannabis may increase blood flow, helping reduce the risk of stroke.

However, another possible reason why cannabis consumers have higher AMI survival rates is a little less positive. Cannabis consumption may simply increase the risk of less dangerous heart-attacks. This suggestion comes from the fact that cannabis consuming AMI patients tended to be ten years younger on average than their non-consuming counterparts.

"Lastly, marijuana use may be associated with an increased incidence of smaller, non-fatal AMIs (in a younger population that may not have otherwise experienced a cardiac event)," noted researchers.

Despite that possibility, the research team accentuated the positive conclusions of the study by saying, "we would strongly suggest that marijuana use is associated with a significant decrease in in-hospital mortality."

h/t Green Entrepreneur

A Louisiana coroner recently claimed that a 38-year-old women is the first ever person to have died from a marijuana overdose, but experts aren't so sure.

Last week St. John the Baptist Parish Coroner Christy Montegut said he had recorded the first death caused by a person ingesting an excessive amount of THC, the primary intoxicating compound found in cannabis. Montegut reported that he could not determine anything else that might have resulted in the death of the Louisiana woman.

"It looked like it was all THC because her autopsy showed no physical disease or afflictions that were the cause of death. There was nothing else identified in the toxicology—no other drugs, no alcohol," Montegut told The New Orleans Advocate. "There was nothing else."

Montegut said he believed the deceased experienced "respiratory failure" after she "vaped this THC oil."

Despite Montegut's bold statement, drug experts aren't so sure cannabis really is to blame for the woman's death. The coroner's toxicology report showed that the woman had a THC concentration of 8.4 nanograms per milliliter of blood. That would be enough to intoxicate somebody, but not nearly enough to kill them, according to Bernard Le Foll - an addictions researcher from the University of Toronto.

"That number is not very high," Le Foll said

In fact, Le Foll estimated that in it could take as much as 1,000 times that amount of THC to be lethal. Getting that much THC in your system could mean smoking as much as 20,000 joints by some estimates, an amount that by all means would likely be impossible for most people to consume quickly enough.

Moreover, if THC could be deadly at small amounts, we would probably have discovered that by now, according to Keith Humphreys - a former senior policy advisor for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

"We know from really good survey data that Americans use cannabis products billions of times a year, collectively. Not millions of times, but billions of times a year," said Humphreys. "So, that means that if the risk of death was one in a million, we would have a couple thousand cannabis overdose deaths a year."

Still, Montegut is leaning on the recent case as a prime example for why lawmakers in Louisiana should consider opposing efforts to legalize recreational cannabis in the state.

But Humphreys says there is no reason for lawmakers to take this as a valid argument against legalization. Even in the unlikely case that this woman did die from THC exposure, said Humphreys, it would still make the event so statistically insignificant as to essentially be a non-issue.

"Let's assume [that the woman died from THC] is a fact," he said. "What do you conclude from that? It doesn't justify really anything from a policy viewpoint. It's just so incredibly unlikely."

New research shows that consuming cannabis isn't likely to make you more at risk of suffering a stroke.

Past research has shown mixed results about whether or not consuming cannabis effects a person's likelihood of suffering a stroke. In the past, physicians have been particularly particularly concerned that cannabis use could increase the risk of ischemic stroke, which results from reduced blood flow to the brain. However, the latest study on the topic published earlier this month suggests consuming cannabis does not put people at increased risk of stroke.

After analyzing data collected from 9,350 patients, researchers from the University of Mississippi found that cannabis consumption didn't appear to have much effect one way or the other on stroke risk.

"Consistent with some studies, this study shows that recent cannabis use is not an independent risk factor for ischemic stroke," wrote the authors.

This finding goes against a number of earlier studies suggesting that marijuana does, in fact, increase the risk of stroke. A 2018 study noted a nearly 30 percent increase of stroke cases among cannabis consumers across the US between 2010 and 2014.

Another study from a few years earlier in France similarly found that cannabis consumers faced an increased risk for stroke. Here, however, the researchers noted that it was the smoking, not the cannabis itself that caused the increased risk factor.

Meanwhile, other studies have shown that cannabis may actually help reduce the risk of stroke. A 2017 study from the University of Texas found that THC - cannabis' main intoxicating compound - "relaxes arterial walls resulting in lower blood pressure and increased blood flow to tissues." This increased blood flow means reduced risks of blood clots and stroke, reported the researchers.

All this means that researchers need to delve deeper into the subject before they can reach a conclusion on how cannabis impacts the risk of stroke risk.

h/t: Weedmaps

A non-profit group of over 150 current and former athletes is calling for marijuana to be removed form the World Anti-Doping Agency’s prohibited substances list.

Medical marijuana legalization is spreading across the US, but most pro-athletes are still prevented from accessing it. That’s because most major sports leagues follow drug guidelines set by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which bans athletes from using cannabis even outside of competition. Players can receive suspensions if caught using cannabis.

Now athletes are pushing back for the safe of their health. And they’re coming equipped with studies that suggest cannabis is a safer, more effective and less addictive pain medication than the opioids most commonly prescribed to athletes.

– Read the entire article at Civilized.

A bird trained to tipoff drug dealers has been seized by police in Northern Brazil.

It's not uncommon for people dealing in illegal substances to have some sort of early warning system to let them know if the authorities are approaching. Silent alarms, watchdogs and human guards are all common. But, at least one Brazilian drug dealer was using something a little more unusual: a parrot.

Last April, Brazilian authorities took a parrot belonging to a drug trafficker in to custody after the bird tried to alert its owner of an incoming police raid. As officers approached the house, the bird reportedly began shouting "Mummy, police!"

"He must have been trained for that," said one officer involved in the operation. "As soon as police got close he began shouting."

At least one person was arrested at the scene and the bird was confiscated by police.

And it seems that the parrot is no snitch either, as police have apparently been unable to get any more information from the bird.

"Lots of police officers have come by and he's said nothing," said local vet Alexandre Clark who is overseeing care for the parrot.

The parrot is now being transferred to Teresina Zoo where presumably it will proceed to warn the other animals about any unwanted visitors.

h/t: Independent

Legendary heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne used to make headlines for abusing just about every drug on earth. Now he's in the news for turning to the non-intoxicating cannabis compound CBD to help him deal with a rather serious injury.

Back in April Ozzy was forced to postpone all of the 2019 dates for his farewell tour, 'No More Tours II' after sustaining a serious back injury. And that's only the most recent setback in a rough year for the 70-year-old metal icon, according to his wife Sharon Osbourne, who revealed that Ozzy suffered the flu earlier this year that progressed to bronchitis, then a case of pneumonia that eventually found him hospitalized. However, just as Ozzy's health was improving, he took the tour-cancelling tumble.

"He was hospitalized, came out, was well on the road to recovery, and he gets up in the middle of the night to go to the loo," said Sharron on a recent episode of 'Loose Women.' "And on the way back, he tripped up on the carpet that was under our bed and fell against the corner of the night table, which is made of mirror."

The fall was particularly bad given Ozzy's injury history. Several years ago, he had metal rods inserted into his back after motorcycle accident. The recent fall caused those rods to become misaligned, which required surgery to fix.

The whole thing left Ozzy in "terrible pain" and at risk of relapsing into addiction. When asked if Ozzy's history with addictions made her concerned about Ozzy's use of painkillers following the accident, Sharon said Ozzy isn't taking dangerous opioid medications this time around and opting for medical marijuana instead.

"He's off all [prescription painkillers]. He had to have it after he was operated on the last time. But now for pain, he has that CBD—whatever it's called—and he's dealing with it that way."

Sharon said Ozzy is recovering nicely and has been "pining" to be " back on the road, back on his tour, back with his band." All of his upcoming tour dates have been rescheduled for 2020.

h/t: Blabbermouth

Several 2020 presidential candidates have signed onto Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries' (D-NY) promising federal cannabis reform bill.

Presidential hopefuls Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) have all added their names to the list of co-sponsors to a new bill that would see marijuana removed from the Controlled Substances Act.

While the bill would not legalize cannabis federally it would leave the door open for states to set their own cannabis laws without fear of federal prosecution. The bill would also set aside funding for removing small cannabis convictions from some criminal records.

However, there are a few presidential frontrunners and legalization supporters who as of yet have not chosen to co-sponsor the bill. Notably, Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) are missing from the list.

Booker's absence from list of co-sponsors isn't too surprising as the Senator filed his own legalization bill earlier this year and has previously criticized legalization bills like Warren's 2019 version of the STATES Act for not going far enough, refusing to co-sponsor that one as well.

Sanders, Warren, Gillibrand and Harris have all co-sponsored Booker's bill.

Likewise, Gabbard has also filed her own bill that would see Controlled Substances Act, though it has yet to receive support from any of the aforementioned presidential candidates.

What all this proves is that while these top presidential candidates may not agree on exactly how the US should move forward on federal cannabis reform, they certainly all believe it's something that needs to happen.

h/t Marijuana Moment