Medical Marijuana

Margarita’s 13-year-old son, Carlos, usually sits in a wheelchair. He suffered a cardiac arrest just after birth and was diagnosed with near loss of brain function. Since then, Margarita has dedicated herself to taking care of him, becoming well acquainted with his frequent epileptic seizures and spending thousands of dollars on hospitalizations.

Margarita lives in an apartment near the center of Mexico City with the signatures of a modest middle-class life there: a spacious living room, a balcony, plenty of room for her family of four. But when it comes to medical care, “in this country," she said, "only rich people can afford to get sick.” 

The high cost of her son's medical care is one reason why early last year, Margarita started giving Carlos something she got on the black market: oil extracted from marijuana. A container about the size of an eye drop bottle containing the oil cost her about $35. He now seems more connected and the seizures seem to have eased, she said.

Read More:https://www.marketplace.org/2017/08/07/health-care/mexico-has-legalized-medical-marijuana-here-s-who-might-benefit

The National Football League is back in action this weekend—if you count preseason games as "action"—after taking a tiny step toward maybe, possibly, someday letting players use marijuana to treat pain.

NFL owners agreed to work together with the NFL Players Association on a study to determine the effectiveness of marijuana as a medical treatment. Yes, there have already been numerous studies on the medical value of marijuana—29 states have legalized the drug for that reason—but this seemingly small step is a pretty big shift for the league, which has always maintained a strict prohibitionist stanceon pot.

"Certainly the research about marijuana and really more particularly cannabinoid compounds as they may relate to the treatment of both acute and chronic pain, that is an area of research that we need a lot more information on and we need to further develop," Allen Sills, a Vanderbilt University neurosurgeon hired earlier this year to be the NFL's chief medical officer, said in an interview with The Washington Post. Sills said examining the feasibility of players using marijuana to manage the pain that comes from repeated full-speed collisions with other muscle-bound athletes was "really important" to players' long term health.

Read More:http://reason.com/blog/2017/08/06/nfl-owners-agree-to-consider-letting-pla

HONOLULU (AP) — A Hawaii group is helping veterans cope with mental health issues by guiding them through how to use medical marijuana.

Honolulu News Now reported Thursday that Complimentary and Alternative Medicine is teaching vets how medical cannabis can help them with PTSD-induced pain and anxiety.

The push comes as Hawaii ramps up its medical marijuana dispensary program.

Program participants say they stumbled across the group after other options did not work.

Read More:http://hightimes.com/news/hawaii-veterans-turn-to-medical-marijuana-for-help/

Great news for marijuana patients and entrepreneurs came down from the nation’s capital this week as the Senate Appropriations Committee voted for language in the federal budget to prevent the Department of Justice from meddling in matters of medical marijuana users and providers.

To date, it’s the most telling consensus regarding how the Senators feel about marijuana. Their overwhelming support is also a slap in the face of anti-pot U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions who has come out repeatedly in opposition to marijuana.

This decision to allow state-legal medical marijuana business go uninterrupted is not new, it just needed it’s annual renewal.

Read More:https://www.theweedblog.com/senators-renew-protections-for-medical-marijuana/

Often when people smoke marijuana, all of the credit for the high is given to Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), but this isn’t the whole story. Through previous discussions you might recall that cannabidiol (CBD), alone, does not get you high. While this is true, there are some important interactions to consider.

Does CBD affect the high that THC provides and how does it do so?

Our bodies are broken up into many systems (i.e. cardiovascular, respiratory, nervous, etc.), but one important system that doesn’t get much attention is the endocannabinoid system (ECS).

As you may have guessed, our ECS interacts with cannabinoids, such as THC and CBD. But it is more involved than you might imagine. The ECS is imperative to the body’s normal functioning—assisting in the regulation of pain and hunger to name a few.

Read More:http://hightimes.com/medicinal/stoned-science-interactions-between-thc-and-cbd/

We’ve been saying it for a long time, but now scientists are confirming: alcohol negatively manipulates the structure of the human brain and cannabis does no such thing.

The powers that be, especially within the deteriorating administration in the White House, continue to disseminate blatantly erroneous information about cannabis and ignore authoritative academic work, such as one most recent study.

Researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder and the Oregon Health & Science University evaluated neuroimaging data among adults (18 to 55) and adolescents (14 to 18) and identified an association between alcohol use and negative changes in brain structure.

They identified no such association with cannabis.

Read More:http://hightimes.com/medicinal/new-study-alcohol-not-weed-manipulates-brain-structure/