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Saturday, 04 September 2010 00:00 |
 Marijuana brings an estimated $14 billion a year to California. That number is enough to inspire awe, drool even, when thinking of the slice that could be devoured by the state's hungry coffers.
Add to that number the money saved on enforcing prohibition. In this context, Prop 19, California's initiative to tax and regulate marijuana for recreational use, sounds like a no-brainer. However, if it passes, the RAND Drug Policy Research Center projects an 80% price drop. In that case, projected tax revenues will be pipe dreams, and only those who produce mass quantities will be able to stay in business. Most of the cannabis small business owners I talked to at the recent Hemp Con in San Jose are just that, small business owners of the sort who are supposed to be rebuilding our economy.
Kelly Shaeffer wears a gleaming white hoodie embroidered with nugs; if not for that, you might mistake her for a soccer mom. She and her brother own Plant Providers Plus, a delivery service based in San Jose. "I had a business in landscape design for ten years which fell out with the economy, so I turned his hobby into a business and we're doing very well. We're helping a lot of people, a lot of patients. It's very rewarding." When asked what she thinks about Prop 19, she says, "The drop in prices--that would affect my business greatly. Letting the big guys come in, the pharmaceutical companies. They would take over our industry."
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Friday, 03 September 2010 00:00 |
 LONGMONT, Colo. — The investor saw potential in the scrubby 67 acres tucked away amid multimillion dollar homes: He would turn the land into a vast pot farm and capitalize on the booming medical marijuana industry.
But Scott Mullner, a city councilman from Laramie, Wyo., infuriated his Colorado neighbors with his plan to place a marijuana farm in the midst of their idyllic Northern Colorado countryside.
They say the project will damage property values and attract more unwanted attention than the previous business at the location — an organic egg farm.
"Nobody is going to come out and steal a chicken," said Lance Messinger, 56, who lives less than a mile from the proposed marijuana site. "So it was pretty benign to the neighborhood, is what I'm saying."
Boulder County commissioners will decide Tuesday whether to have a public hearing about Mullner's plan after receiving a flurry of e-mails and calls from residents in opposition.
In addition to upsetting the locals, Mullner's plan is raising questions about the future of growing medical pot in Colorado, one of 14 states where it is legal.
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Thursday, 02 September 2010 00:00 |
 Aug. 30, 2010 -- Three puffs a day of cannabis, better known as marijuana, helps people with chronic nerve pain due to injury or surgery feel less pain and sleep better, a Canadian team has found.
''It's been known anecdotally," says researcher Mark Ware, MD, assistant professor of anesthesia and family medicine at McGill University in Montreal. "About 10% to 15% of patients attending a chronic pain clinic use cannabis as part of their pain [control] strategy," he tells WebMD.
But Ware's study is more scientific -- a clinical trial in which his team compared placebo with three different doses of cannabis. The research is published in CMAJ, the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
The new study ''adds to the trickle of evidence that cannabis may help some of the patients who are struggling [with pain] at present," Henry McQuay, DM, an emeritus fellow at Balliol College, Oxford University, England, writes in a commentary accompanying the study.
Marijuana for Pain Relief: Study Details
Ware evaluated 21 men and women, average age 45, who had chronic nerve pain (also called neuropathic pain). A typical example, Ware tells WebMD, is a patient who had knee surgery and during the course of the operation the surgeon may have had no choice but to cut a nerve, leading to chronic pain after the surgery.
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Wednesday, 01 September 2010 00:00 |
Paris Hilton will be charged with felony cocaine possession, TMZ.com reports. As expected, Hilton is taking the ’ol Lindsay Lohan defense by claiming the cocaine-packing purse actually belonged to a friend. How do we know? Because it wasn’t a designer bag.
Prissy Paris wants you to know she carries only designer duds, and therefore the purse couldn’t have belonged to her. A source said “This purse in question was a high street brand - and by no means up to her high fashion standards. Paris is hoping authorities will see sense and let her off the hook.”
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Tuesday, 31 August 2010 00:00 |
 Smoking marijuana does help relieve a certain amount of pain, a small but well-designed Canadian study has found.
People who suffer chronic neuropathic or nerve pain from damage or dysfunction of the nervous system have few treatment options with varying degrees of effectiveness and side-effects.
Neuropathic pain is caused by damage to nerves that don't repair, which can make the skin sensitive to a light touch.
Cannabis pills have been shown to help treat some types of pain but the effects and risks from smoked cannabis were unclear.
To find out more, Dr. Mark Ware, an assistant professor in family medicine and anesthesia at Montreal's McGill University, and his colleagues conducted a randomized controlled trial — the gold standard of medical research — of inhaled cannabis in 21 adults with chronic neuropathic pain.
Investigators used three different strengths of the active drug — THC levels of 2.5 per cent, six per cent and 9.4 per cent, as well as a zero per cent placebo.
"We found that 25 mg herbal cannabis with 9.4 per cent THC, administered as a single smoked inhalation three times daily for five days, significantly reduces average pain intensity compared with a zero per cent THC cannabis placebo in adult subjects with chronic post traumatic/post surgical neuropathic pain," the study's authors concluded in Monday's online issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
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Visit narconon for information on addiction issues
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