by Russell Barth

 
Ottawa ON – I would rather have one than not, but living with a Medical Marijuana License from Health Canada has been a bit of a nightmare. For my wife and I, it has been a stressful and humiliating experience on more than one occasion. The fact that we have to carry “Special Papers” with us to keep us out of jail because we have medical conditions smacks of segregation.
 
Okay, so it isn’t exactly The Gaza Strip or Apartheid or the Warsaw Ghetto, but big things like that often start out as little things like this. I had three of my great uncles go to Europe in the 1940′s to try and prevent exactly this sort of totalitarian nonsense from ever coming to our shores, and now look at us.
 
First, there is living with a debilitating medical condition itself. People who seek a medical marijuana license from Health Canada do not have intermittent back pain or knee aches that keeps them from tossing around the ol’ pig skin with their grandson, or a bit of nausea when they have one too many chili dogs. The people seeking this medical exemption are people living with painful, debilitating, and often life-threatening conditions like MS, arthritis, crohn’s, PTSD, AIDS, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and cancer.
 
Patients are often made to feel worse when they fail to respond to the “standard” medications, and are often accused of trying to hustle doctors into “a prescription to get high”. The irony being, of course, that anyone who has used pot knows that you can get a lot higher with the pharmaceuticals than you can with pot. If getting high were the motive, there are far easier way to go about it than this.
 
Then there is the paperwork. My wife and I have been exceedingly lucky in this regard, as our doctors were not reluctant to sign. Many patients have difficulty getting their doctors to sign, but not because of pot. Usually, it is because the doctors don’t want to have anything to do with the unconstitutional federal program, or because their insurance, or the clinic where they practice, or the College Of Physicians, has told them “you are on your own” if they sign.
 
Read complete article here:
http://cornwallfreenews.com/2011/08/systematic-discrimination-what-its-like-living-with-a-medical-marijuana-license-opinion-by-russell-barth-august-2-2011/

The General Assembly’s attempt at comprehensive sentencing reform crashed and burned in the last session. So prospects for any effort to reduce criminal penalties look like a long shot. But a targeted attempt at addressing marijuana laws could fare better, provided the bill receives a good public discussion before the full legislature considers it.
Financially, Indiana needs marijuana sentencing reform. The legislature’s Criminal Law and Sentencing Policy Study Committee heard last week that reducing or eliminating penalties for possession of small amounts of marijuana could save up to $200 million a year in law enforcement and corrections costs.
Legalizing and taxing marijuana for medical use could bring in $50 million annually in sales tax revenues.
 
Read complete article here:
http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20110802/EDIT07/308029997/1021/EDIT

Written by Brandie Piper

 
Seattle (NBC) – We all love our animals and want to keep them happy. Since it’s hard for them to roll a joint, a Seattle company is developing a medical marijuana patch for pets. Jim Alekson’s Medical Marijuana Delivery Systems LLC has patented a patch called Tetracan that he says could be used on dogs, cats and even horses.
But why would a dog need medical marijuana?
“Because dogs suffer from the same maladies that humans do. It’s a question of quality of life,” said Alekson.
While the patch does conjure visions of pups frolicking in fields of poppies, Alekson says pets suffer greatly from pain, everything from arthritis to cancer. He points to pharmaceutical painkillers that have proven harmful, sometimes fatal in animals.
Alekson, an owner of three Papillons, says the pot patch is far more mellow.
“I’d much rather they were on something holistic as opposed to something chemical that I know is breaking down some of the organs in their body,” he said.
 
Read complete article here:
http://www.ksdk.com/news/article/269280/71/Marijuana-coming-soon-for-dogs

BEVERLY HILLS – The proprietors of Harborside Health Center are on a mission to convert America to the miracles of marijuana and Discovery Channel’s Weed Wars is their calling card.
“I’ve seen what this medicine does for suffering patients,” said Steve DeAngelo, founder and executive director of Harborside. “I’m confident if the American people get to know my staff, my patients, they’re going to support our cause. People don’t really think about how many lives were lost in the labor movement.
“In my family we were taught to stand up for what we believe in, what was right,” he continued, adding that he grew up in Washington D.C. and was taken by his parents to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington to hand out sandwiches.
Harborside began in Oakland, California and now has a second location in San Jose. The clinics service 80,000 patients making it the biggest dispenser of medical marijuana in the country.
Steve DeAngelo, who wears his long brown hair in two braids, appeared at the Television Critics Association with his brother Andrew DeAngelo, Harborside’s general manager, and David Weddingdress, the clinic’s co-founder.
All three men have conditions that require medical marijuana. (Andrew DeAngelo has glaucoma, Steve DeAngelo has degenerative disc disease and Weddingdress has chronic back and knee pain.)
 
Read complete article here:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/weed-wars-stars-are-a-217299

A study of medical marijuana users in California, conducted by The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, has found that medical marijuana users are in some ways just as stereotype would suggest: young men using marijuana for pain relief. In other ways, however, the study reached some startling conclusions, namely that medical marijuana users are less likely to use alcohol, cocaine or prescription drugs than the population as a whole.
 
Read complete article here:
http://coloradoindependent.com/94937/its-true-medical-marijuana-users-tend-to-be-young-males

 
 
Melbourne, Australia–(ENEWSPF)–July 29, 2011.  The consumption of cannabis, even long-term, poses few adverse effects on cognitive performance, according to clinical trial datato be published in the scientific journal Addiction.
Investigators at the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University, Center for Mental Health Research assessed the impact of cannabis use on various measures of memory and intelligence in over 2,000 self-identified marijuana consumers and non-users over an eight-year period. Among cannabis consumers, subjects were grouped into the following categories: ‘heavy’ (once a week or more) users, ‘light’ users, ‘former heavy’ users, ‘former light’ users, and ‘always former’ – a category that consisted of respondents who had ceased using marijuana prior to their entry into the study.
Researchers reported: “Only with respect to the immediate recall measure was there evidence of an improved performance associated with sustained abstinence from cannabis, with outcomes similar to those who had never used cannabis at the end point. On the remaining cognitive measures, after controlling for education and other characteristics, there were no significant differences associated with cannabis consumption.”
They concluded, “Therefore, the adverse impacts of cannabis use on cognitive functions either appear to be related to pre-existing factors or are reversible in this community cohort even after potentially extended periods of use.”
 
Read complete article here:
http://www.enewspf.com/latest-news/health-and-fitness/25723-long-term-marijuana-use-not-associated-with-deficits-in-cognitive-performance-study-says.html

Written by Matt Kanner
When Portsmouth resident Nancy Grossman was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma 12 years ago, she considered herself lucky. As cancers go, she had developed one of the most treatable forms. All you have to do, she said, is listen to your doctor. But that didn’t prove to be as easy as it sounds.
“The main thing was to eat, but immediately, as soon as I started chemotherapy, I lost all interest in food,” Grossman said. “But, being a child of the ’60s, I knew what to do.”
Rapidly thinning, Grossman went looking for marijuana, and it didn’t take her long to find some. Smoking the dried flowers made her cough, so she instead baked it into cookies. The drug helped alleviate her nausea and restore her appetite.
Grossman said her doctor did not recommend any alternative drugs. Had it not been for cannabis, she believes she never would have made it through chemo.
“I could not eat. I could not keep things down. I didn’t have any appetite in the first place, and I could not lose any more weight. So I self-medicated,” she said. “It got me through that whole period. I couldn’t have eaten otherwise.”
 
Read complete article here:
http://www.wirenh.com/news-mainmenu-4/11-news-general/5121-the-cannabis-cure.html

 
On Tuesday, during their 102nd Annual Convention, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People passed a resolution calling for an end to the War on Drugs.
According to the Daily Caller, the resolution was titled “A Call to End the War on Drugs, Allocate Funding to Investigate Substance Abuse Treatment, Education, and Opportunities in Communities of Color for A Better Tomorrow.” It highlighted the fact that blacks are 13 times more likely to be in jail for drug-related crimes than whites in the country’s $40 billion per year “War.”
“We know that the war on drugs has been a complete failure because in the forty years that we’ve been waging this war, drug use and abuse has not gone down,” Robert Rooks, director of the NAACP Criminal Justice Program, said, according to DC. “The only thing we’ve accomplished is becoming the world’s largest incarcerator, sending people with mental health and addiction issues to prison, and creating a system of racial disparities that rivals Jim Crow policies of the 1960s.”
 
Read complete article here:
http://blogs.philadelphiaweekly.com/phillynow/2011/07/28/naacp-officially-opposes-war-on-drugs/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=naacp-officially-opposes-war-on-drugs

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle says she has started talking to police about stopping arrests on people on minor marijuana possession charges, including Chicago new top cop Garry McCarthy.
“It’s pretty well known within the criminal justice system that the judges will dismiss those charges [involving] very modest amounts of illicit drugs,” Preckwinkle said after yesterday’s county board meeting. “I suggested to him that although the law is pretty clear that such possession is a violation of the law, that since the judges routinely and almost universally dismiss such low-level drug charges that the police might stop arresting people for this since it clogs up our jail and these people their cases will be dismissed out anyway.”
 
Read complete article here:
http://progressillinois.com/news/content/2011/07/28/cook-county-officials-want-police-stop-arresting-small-marijuana-possession

Jenny Sugar
 

1. Flaxseed products: One tablespoon of whole flaxseeds has 2.3 grams, one tablespoon of ground flaxmeal has 1.6 grams, and one tablespoon of organic flaxseed oil has a whopping eight grams of omega-3s.
2. One tablespoon of chia seeds sprinkled on your cereal or salad provides 2.5 grams of this healthy fat.
3. Hemp products: Two tablespoons of creamy hemp seed butter offers 2.5 grams of omega-3s, and one cup of creamy Hempmilk contains 0.9 grams.
4. Cooking oils: One tablespoon of canola oil offers 0.8 grams of omega-3s, while the same amount of olive oil may not have much, 0.1 grams, but if you cook with it often, the omega-3s will add up.

Keep reading to see the other vegan sources.
 
Read complete article here:
http://www.fitsugar.com/Vegan-Sources-Omega-3s-18458376