The Marijuana Dispatch

Colorado has about 3,300 medical marijuana caregivers, and only 24 of them are registered to more than five patients. One caregiver serves 82 patients.

via Colorado to crack down on medical marijuana patients and caregivers – The Denver Post.

Roycroft says more than 2,000 people have come to the clinic since he opened several years ago. “We do Skype appointments for people in other provinces,” he says. “This is a consultation with our doctor in British Columbia, so we’re able to help people right across the country.”

Is Medical Marijuana As Helpful As We Think?

Marijuana was made illegal in all 50 states by the mid 1930′s. In a recent poll, over 60% of Americans said they would be in favor of legalizing marijuana. Not only is it less dangerous than alcohol, but it helps treat over 300 medical conditions. Read on to see how it can be beneficial. Please note that we do not condone the use of illegal drugs.

Commercializing that has been the hurdle,” says Mark Gobuty, CEO of The Peace Naturals Project, one of the dozen producers licensed to sell medical marijuana in Canada. “Having an industry that wasn’t regulated, where you didn’t have the 8-5 shift and seven days a week operation, absolute reporting, cameras everywhere — it’s counterculture to cannabis.” “Like anything else there’s an evolution because you’re working with a regulator who truly isn’t intimate with cannabis and they’ve been ordered to provide safe access.”

How do you determine quality? Purity, safety and efficacy.

“You have to safely produce cannabis within a safe working environment within a repeatable procedure and be able to have the wherewithal and credentials and polices and protocols to have everything tested validated and safe,” Gobuty said. “The guidelines say you can have zero detection of mould, bacteria or fungus,” Gobuty said. But the process is a continual learning curve. When Gobuty first began, it took them four days just to fill out all the reports required, he said.

“Productivity will suffer!”

Fifty-five percent of people who have never smoked marijuana work full or part time. But 70.6 percent of people who have smoked pot are working. Even monthly pot smokers are more likely to be employed (64.4 percent) than people who didn’t smoke pot this month (61.7 percent).

There is strong evidence that medical marijuana pills may reduce symptoms of spasticity and pain reported by multiple sclerosis patients, but little proof that smoking pot offers the same benefit, according to new alternative treatment guidelines released by the American Academy of Neurology. The research study was published Monday in the journal and are among the first from a national medical organization to suggest that doctors might offer cannabis treatment to patients.

Clinicians might offer oral cannabis extract for spasticity symptoms and pain, spasticity symptoms and pain (like central neuropathic pain) and even long-term pain and spasms.

More than 40 years ago, psychiatry professor Lester Grinspoon wrote a groundbreaking book on marijuana that the New York Times dubbed at the time “the best dope on pot.” Like many in the medical marijuana community, Grinspoon started out as a skeptic intent on researching marijuana’s harms. But his perspective shifted after a personal experience: He had a son with leukemia who found relief only after he started using marijuana before his chemotherapy treatments. Once he started researching marijuana, Grinspoon found that existing information about marijuana was based on propaganda rather than rigorous scientific study. “I came to realize that I was the one who was misinformed — that despite my training in science and medicine, I had been brainwashed like just about every other citizen of this country.”

“Medicinally I think that folks are beginning to see if there are things which the medical community can help on and has specific ways that they can then I think the legislature might consider that but to move beyond that I would say is a bridge too far but that bridge has not yet been built.”

I feel, at the age of almost 64 years old, that what I’m doing about medical marijuana in my life is probably, and forgive me I loved raising my four sons… this might be the most important thing I’ve ever been involved in in my life. -Ellen Lenox-Smith, Rhode Island

Ellen is in so much pain she can’t climb the stairs, so she uses a motorized chair to get to the basement where she grows her marijuana. “It’s the only thing I have,” said Smith, “This is it. We wouldn’t be having this conversation. I wouldn’t be alive. I mean, I don’t have anything else to turn to.”

“After controlling for a host of known factors related to changes in crime rates — we accounted for factors such as poverty, employment, education, even per capita beer sales, among other things — we found no evidence of increases in any of these crimes for states after legalizing marijuana for medical use,” Morris said. “In fact, for some forms of violence — homicide and assault — we found partial support for declines after the passing of this legislation.” Data for the study came from state websites, FBI Uniform Crime Reports, the census, The Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Beer Institute.

Some evidence is mounting that heavy pot use among young teens can cause permanent emotional and physical damage. But surveys of teen pot use, however, tend to dispel the theory. The research is complicated, but so far, the numbers are reassuring. Pot use among teenagers has barely changed since 1996, when California broke the medical marijuana ice and became the first state to legalize its use.

Supreme Pharmaceuticals is in the process of purchasing a company in B.C. that is working on getting a licence to sell medical marijuana and Satori announced they have hired an advisor for the agri-mining and agri-pharmaceutical sectors. Boyle laughs when I call him a weed expert. Scott Walters isn’t an expert is smoking or rolling it. He’s a Bay Street veteran with more than 20 years of experience. In 2001, he started a hedge fund.

Republican Rep. Pat Garofalo of Farmington was hoping to attach an amendment that would legalize medical marijuana to a separate health bill. But that bill has been pulled from Wednesday’s docket until after the Legislature’s Passover/Easter break that begins the next day.

Garofalo’s amendment calls for a broader medical marijuana law than Gov. Mark Dayton has said he is willing to back. Dayton didn’t issue a veto threat Tuesday but said legislators “have hidden behind their desks” while he strained to bridge concerns of advocates and law enforcement.

But there are issues, like the bill currently doesn’t allow people to grow their own marijuana and penalizes smoking, even for medical reasons. That’s pretty limiting for a lot of patients who need to keep costs to a minimum and want to know exactly what strain they’re getting so they can target specific medical needs like pain, depression, nausea, vomiting, etc.

Heather Azzi, the director for Minnesotans for Compassionate Care, a group that supports legalization, says it might be a good thing that the vote is delayed. “It’s important that we take more time with it,” she said. “We know that we need the governor’s signature to get a medical marijuana bill enacted in Minnesota.”

California became the first state to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes when voters passed the landmark Proposition 215 in 1996. But since then, the state has failed to establish uniform regulations to govern the industry, leaving the implementation of a vague medical cannabis law to local municipalities instead.

Some cities, like Oakland and San Francisco, have enacted clear-cut rules that dictate where dispensaries can operate and levy fees that generate revenue for local government. Other places, like Los Angeles and San Diego, remain largely unregulated, with very little control over the number of dispensaries or the criteria for doctor recommendations.

Since marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, the lack of a statewide standard has left California vulnerable to crackdowns.

So California is looking to tighten their regulations so the legal side of medical marijuana is clear and more cut and dry. That makes good sense, seemingly.

Recent polls have suggested a majority of Californians support legalizing marijuana for recreational purposes. A national drug reform coalition, backed by Lieutenant Gov. Gavin Newsom, plans to put a legalization initiative on the state’s 2016 ballot.

In the meantime, advocates believe strict statewide rules are a necessary next step. “We need to show that California has the ability to regulate marijuana,” Angell said. “This would help further demonstrate how tax revenue can be generated and put into needed programs.”

Through a network of nonprofit groups, Mr. Soros has spent at least $80 million on the legalization effort since 1994, when he diverted a portion of his foundation’s funds to organizations exploring alternative drug policies, according to tax filings.

His spending has been supplemented by Peter B. Lewis, the late chairman of Progressive Insurance Co. and an unabashed pot smoker who channeled more than $40 million to influence local debates, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. The two billionaires’ funding has been unmatched by anyone on the other side of the debate.

Medical marijuana is, potentially,  a $785 million industry in Florida if voters legalize it in November. More medical marijuana companies in Central Florida can help spur demand for services and real estate.

Carr said the plan right now is on the education side, but the eventual plans are to get into the dispensary side of medical marijuana as well.

Customers can’t simply show a medical marijuana card to get in anymore. Now they also have to provide a photo ID before being buzzed through a locked door to an inner sanctum where the marijuana is kept. Security cameras record each transaction. Customer purchases are entered into store computers, accounting for every gram entering and leaving the facility. One reason for all this is to keep Oregon medical pot from being sold on the black market.

This new law would allow certified physicians to help patients obtain medicinal marijuana through a state-approved distribution network of dispensaries.

Under the law enacted last year, responsibility for administering the medical marijuana program was given to academic medical centers, but none was willing to participate.

Under the compromise that passed Monday, the state’s existing marijuana commission would certify physicians with the ability to recommend that their patients receive the drug. Those patients would then obtain ID cards from the commission that would allow them to obtain the drug from a network of state-licensed growers and dispensaries.