A 17 year-old athlete is raising big questions about medical cannabis in Georgia. CJ Harris, a football player in Warner Robins, takes cannabidiol (CBD) oil four times a day to treat his epilepsy. Because his public high school won’t allow him to bring the medicine on campus, Harris’s father has to pick him up from school, as reported by the Associated Press.

Everyday, Curtis Harris comes to Warner Robins High School, signs his son out of class, takes him to another location where the cannabis oil can be legally stashed, administers it, then drives CJ back to school.

Before CJ started treating his illness with CBD, he suffered one or two grand mal seizures a month. The seizures prevented him from giving his top performance in sports, and made it legally impossible for him to get a driver’s license. For awhile, CJ had pharmaceutical treatment in the form of Keppra anti-convulsion pills. But the pills made CJ irritable and could have potentially caused more seizures if a dose was missed.

That’s when the Harris family considered putting CJ on CBD oil. CJ got on the state’s cannabis oil registry and gets his supply, awesomely and hilariously, from his state representative Allen Peake. As we reported earlier this month, Peake is going above and beyond his civic duty and actually distributing cannabis oil to his constituent MMJ patients free of charge.

Since he started taking the oil in January, CJ hasn’t had a single seizure. The Harris family started breathing a sigh of relief until CJ switched schools from a private Presbyterian school to a public high school, which opened up a new host of problems.

Cannabis, even the medical, non-psychoactive variety, is still a controlled substance as far as the federal government is concerned. Public schools which depend on federal funding are going to be wary of allowing their students to break federal law, according to Justin Pauly, director of communications for the Georgia School Boards Association. “It puts the school systems in a very difficult position,” Pauly told the AP.

For now, families like the Harrises have to keep up an inconvenient, but workable solution while hoping that schools start to figure out ways to help give their son the medical treatment he needs, instead of being obstacles for that treatment.

“Stories like this are happening and will be happening all over our state as the medical cannabis law continues to expand,” said Rep. Peake. “I’m looking for education administration officials to show some courage and do what’s in the best interest of students.”

How tough it must be to be a stoner teen in the year 2017. “Weed, weed everywhere, but not a hit for me.” Though weed is more legal now than it’s been in since the 1930’s, following a wave of recreational and medical cannabis legalization in recent years, teens are actually finding it harder to get their hands on ganja than they have in 24 years.

That’s according to the 42nd annual report from Monitoring The Future (MTF), a study which surveys roughly 45,000 adolescent and teenage students in 380 schools around the U.S. Survey respondents fall into three different categories: 8th graders, 10th graders, and 12th graders, as reported recently by the Extract.

Only 34.6 percent of 8th graders said that marijuana was “fairly easy or very easy to get,” a 2.4 percent drop from the year before and an all time low in the history of the survey, which began asking that question in 1992. 10th graders with an easy connect are also at an all time low, with just 64 percent saying they have a guy. 12th graders, on the other hand, actually reported a slight uptick in weed availability last year. 81 percent said they can get some green with ease, over 79.5 percent in 2015. Cannabis aquirability has stayed relatively constant for this demographic since 2012, and is down significantly from a decade ago when 84.9 said they had easy access.

The development has reversed expectations for some drug policy experts. “I don’t have an explanation. This is somewhat surprising,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We had predicted based on the changes in legalization, culture in the U.S. as well as decreasing perceptions among teenagers that marijuana was harmful that [availability and use] would go up. But it hasn’t gone up,” Volkow told U.S. News & World Report.

But some cannabis advocates were not surprised. “We’ve always argued that taking marijuana out of the unregulated criminal market and putting sales into the hands of responsible retailers would actually make it harder for young people to get,” Tom Angell of the Marijuana Majority told the Extract. “The new data bear this out, and it’s just common sense.”

But Angell’s explanation might not be the only one for the decreasing availability of weed to teenagers. The MTF study also found a steady decrease in use of cannabis among teens. 8th and 10th graders have both dropped off in their weed use in recent years. Black market drug dealers, ones that are receptive to the market anyway, might not want to spend their energy targeting a group who’s less and less interested in weed. If that were true, it would mean there were fewer weed dealers for teens to turn to, which means less access to weed.

The spliff. Other than the size of our cars and the width of our toilet seats, one of the big differences between Americans and our European sisters and brothers across the pond is how we consume our cannabis, and what we consume it with. While relatively few Americans roll their weed up with tobacco, the spliff is the primary weed consumption vehicle for E.U. potheads.

The most recent Global Drug Survey reports that, while only 8 percent of cannabis consumers in the U.S. mix tobaccy in with their wacky, the majority of Europeans do: 77 percent in the UK, 89 percent in the Netherlands, and 94 percent in Italy.

With all that weed and tobacco comingling, a few researchers in England found that very little was actually known about how tobacco affects the effects of cannabis. “Surprisingly little research has been done on how tobacco might alter the effects of cannabis,” the study’s lead author, clinical psychologist Chandni Hindocha, told University College London. “As cannabis gets legalized in more countries, it is essential that any changes in cannabis policy consider their interrelationship.”

And what is that interrelationship? It works on a few different levels. While inhaling tobacco with weed didn’t seem to affect the high (in terms of euphoria and groovy good vibes), it did affect both cognitive impairment from smoking weed and the physiological reaction from smoking.

While smoking cannabis by itself was found to impair both verbal memory (remembering passages read to them before smoking) and working spatial memory, smoking a cannabis/tobacco combo fatty lessened that cognitive slowness. Nicotine, the researchers said, improves concentration. Essentially, after you smoke a spliff the weed and tobacco fight over whether to sharpen or dull your memory.

This push-pull effect of the cannabis/tobacco mixture can also be felt in the heart and blood pressure. Adding tobacco to a sesh increased the participant’s blood pressure and heart rate by a moderate amount. The authors of the study said this could mean that a spliff is worse for your cardiovascular system than a pure flower joint.

“There is a clear public health implication here, suggesting that smoking tobacco with cannabis does not improve the stoned feeling but is still worse for physical health,” said Val Curran, a clinical pharmacology professor who also worked on the study.

Photo via Flickr user Chuck Grimmett

Everyone knows at least one version of the shady origins of cannabis prohibition in the United States. The most popular myth (and a true one) is that marijuana prohibition stemmed from racism in the U.S. government, as authorities used drug laws to control and incarcerate ethnic minorities.

In the 1930’s, while gearing up for marijuana prohibition, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics issued anti-pot propaganda that was overtly racist in its demonizing of the plant. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers,” one statement from the agency read, as reproduced by the Foundation for Economic Education. “Their Satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.” Yikes!

But there were other forces at work behind the prohibition of cannabis, ones almost as evil as the racist ones outlined above. In particular, Big Business. It all goes back to the early 20th century, when hemp was involved in industrial America. Back then, hemp was used as a raw material to create products including plastics and fuel. The original Ford Model T had hemp ethanol in the gas tank, the drivers sat on hemp upholstery, and the body had a hemp acrylic skin.

A recent piece in the Huffington Post went so far as to posit that the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 had a profound effect on the future of business in America and our country’s international policies. “Were it not for the Marijuana Tax Act we almost certainly would have Ford cars running on ethanol, the demand for oil would be less and we would not have been mired in the second longest war in American history,” the article claimed.

In the way-back-when of pre-cannabis prohibition America, hemp fiber was considered an alternative to petroleum in the making of cellophane-like wrapping material. The DuPont Company had patented cellophane and very much wanted to limit competition from substitute packaging materials. DuPont, in fact, later came under scrutiny later for essentially owning a monopoly on cellophane, since no other company made it and no substitute product existed. Part of the reason there was no competing product was that hemp had been essentially outlawed under the Marijuana Tax Act. The bill was carried in the house by Rep. Robert Naughton (D-NC), a lawmaker the Huffington Post termed “a frequent DuPont errand boy.”

DuPont was not the only Big Business force with a vested interest in keeping cannabis outlawed. The infamous media mogul William Randolph Hearst ran wood pulp paper mills and feared hemp paper as an alternative to his product. Meanwhile Standard Oil did not care so much for the alternative fuel source that hemp provided.

That’s how the Huff Post article posits that, had cannabis never been banned in America, we would not have been so dependent on foreign oil that we would have to engage in armed conflicts such as the war in of Afghanistan. Maybe it would have curbed climate change too. That’s right. Legal weed could have maybe saved the world.

Photo via Flickr user Sarah Nichols

High Times Magazine, the New York Times of weed publications and the Playboy of cannabis centerfolds, was acquired by an investment group, as announced by the publication last week.

The publication has had the same ownership since 1974. The new owners are an investment firm called Overa Capital. The face of this firm, and interim CEO, is Adam Levin. Levin made very clear his vision for the future of the company (or “brand”) in press interviews and statements after the purchase’s announcement.

“We are going to build on the strong base they created to bring HIGH TIMES from the authority in the counterculture movement to a modern media enterprise,” Levin said in an article published by the magazine. “It has great brand equity and a solid audience base. But I think most would agree it was not executing business at max potential under the legacy framework established by the founders.”

So what does this mean for the future of cannabis culture and news? It means, for one thing, that the most recognizable name in marijuana culture is going to now be run by very aggressive investment folks.

“To say we are bullish about the opportunities to expand HIGH TIMES would be an understatement,” Levin said. And he told news source Cheddar that Overa’s plans include expanding High Times’ merchandising, as well as planning many new Cannabis Cups around the country and globe.

One clue to how the company will be run in the future may come from the article “New Highs! High Times Acquired by Tech and Entertainment Conglomerate.” The article has no problem with being misleading before you even click on it. For one, it’s not an article, as one might be led to believe considering they found it on a news site.

Instead, it’s a press release filled with self-aggrandizing hyperbole for the publications’ new owners, as can be seen in the headline itself. To call Overa a “tech and entertainment conglomerate” would be an overstatement. Crunchbase, an investment database, numbers Overa’s acquisitions at just one company: High Times.

A similar misleading overstatement is made in Levin’s interview with Cheddar wherein he says that the purchasing of High Times by his firm “was valued at $70 million.” The New York Times says that “Oreva Capital, bought a controlling interest at a price that values the magazine at $70 million,” which means that Overa didn’t necessarily actually spend $70 million, only enough to control a business worth $70 million. Crunchbase values the actual purchasing price of the controlling interest at only $42 million, about 40 percent less than Levin suggested it was.

The release suggests new owners who are very, very into branding and diversification and revenue and self-promotion, and not really into, what’s that word again, oh yeah, weed.

Photo via Flickr user Shinya Suzuku

Your brain isn’t the only thing that’s going to get lifted once recreational nugs and gooey grams become legal later this year in major markets like California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada. Rent prices, too, are projected to get higher than your state of mind after a triple weed brownie sundae.

Los Angeles, Boston, and other cities with newly-minted legal recreational weed are expected to go the way of Denver and Seattle before them. According to CoStar Group Inc., a firm which tracks commercial property data, cities with legal marijuana tend to see rents rise significantly faster than in cities without it.

Denver saw its rent increase 33 percent in the last three years since legalization, as reported by The Cannabist. Industrial rents in Portland and Seattle both rose by 27 percent in the same period, when both Washington and Oregon implemented legal cannabis sales. Rents in all three states rose significantly more than the 19 percent rent increase seen in other major US cities.

CoStar believes Boston and Los Angeles are about to experience the same kind of accelerated rent hikes. “It’s had a tremendous, positive impact on rents and property values for the markets where this has been legalized,” said CoStar’s director of industrial research Rene Circ. “Taking the experiences from the markets that have been at this for a few years, the suggestion is this will have a positive impact in these new markets.”

“Positive” for landlords and real estate professionals anyway. Maybe not as much for people who pay rent, and maybe especially not for cannabis cultivators.

The reason for the rent hike after legalization, CoStar says, is that cannabis growers not only need to buy up a lot of property, they also tend to buy up property that isn’t particularly valuable to other businesses. Ganjapreneurs like to buy up smaller spaces that are less desirable to other industries, partly because of the need to control the environment and safeguard against fires.

There’s also the risk factor which sometimes hurts cannabis business people. Even where marijuana is locally legal, many businesses are squeamish about lending services like renting property or doing banking with people in the marijuana industry because the plant is still banned at the federal level. Those companies that will work with marijuana businesses then are in a privileged position. “We have factors that limit supply, with a lot of demand,” Circ said. “So the rent growth is being pushed from both ends of the spectrum.”

Photo via Flickr user Mark

On Thursday former FBI Director James Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee about a lot of stuff like Trump and Russia and obstruction of justice, something about a dinner in the White House’s Green Room. The writers at Dabs Magazine tried to follow this most crucial story to the future of American democracy and report it to our readers. We honestly did. But this Girl Scout Cookies shatter we just got in the office was a little stronger than we thought and our minds started to wander a little bit…

Green Room… weed room… Russia… Putin… What does Putin think of weed? That’s a legit journalistic question, right? He’s a major world leader and we’re a weed magazine, so let’s do a little investigating and see what’s out there, right? Right. So we dug and found a few things of note…

Putin’s Administration Thinks When You Legalize Weed, “Everyone Becomes A Drug Addict”

That’s what Russia’s Health Ministry’s chief drug specialist Yengeny Bryun said when Washington D.C. legalized recreational cannabis in 2015. “When the authorities take their cue from the sinister interests of the population, what happens is everyone becomes a drug addict,” Bryun said at the time.

The autocratic bureaucrat then walked back this statement to say he didn’t really mean everyone in DC was going to become a drug addict, just that pretty much everyone was going to become a drug addict. “The path from marijuana use does not always lead to hard drugs in 100 percent of the cases,” he said. “But there is a pattern. The use of marijuana is a gateway to more serious drug addiction, and people who have genetic and inherent risk factors will definitely become drug addicts.”

Cannabis is “Decriminalized” In Russia, But You Can Still Go To Prison For It

Possession of cannabis under 6 grams is not a formal crime in Russia, but that doesn’t mean all that much. Carrying under that limit is still considered an “administrative violation of the law,” and sentences rely on super loose guideline tables which give authorities flexibility in sentencing. A report on the country’s drug policy revisions in 2006 said that, “According to this table, a large amount is considered to be, for example, 0.1 g of marijuana.”

Putin Is Accused Of Participating In A Drug Ring

Let them that is without sin cast the first stone. Who wasn’t part of a drug-smuggling ring between their stints as a KGB officer and an authoritarian global menace? President Putin, along with head of Russia’s narcotic agency were implicated in a drug smuggling and money laundering ring back in the 1990s. An ex-KGB officer spilt the beans about the affair two years ago. Surprisingly, the Russian government is yet to launch an investigation into the matter.

At first it seemed like Hawaii’s medical marijuana program would only be good for rich people. When it was first signed into law two years ago, the state only allowed for a total of eight dispensaries, all of which had to put up a cool $1 million to qualify for a license, basically ensuring that the state’s cannabis profited only venture capitalists and successful business owners.

But now it seems that equality has won out. It turns out that the Aloha State’s MMJ program isn’t good for anyone.

Though dispensaries were legally allowed to open last July, various administrative holdups have stopped licensed dispensaries from actually being able to sell cannabis products. Dispensaries that did open have been hemorrhaging cash, having to pay rent and other operating fees despite not having any source of income. This pickle has cost the businesses up to $100,000 a month, according to the Associated Press.

The most recent setback for Hawaii’s would-be medical cannabis entrepreneurs is the state’s requirement of safety testing for all cannabis products to be put on the market, which becomes a big problem when you take into account that the state has yet to certify a single lab to do any safety testing. Dispensaries hope to clear the hurdle soon, but it’s only the latest in a series of hindrances put on the state’s medical marijuana industry.

Hawaii law has allowed for medical cannabis since 2000, but up until 2015 the only legal way to get medicated was to grow your own. Two years ago, dispensaries were made legal, with provisions for them to open their doors in 2016. Unfortunately, the state government didn’t exactly make things easy for MMJ businesses and patients after that.

First there was that bullshit about having to be a millionaire to open a dispensary. Then there was a state Supreme Court ruling that prevented lawyers from assisting legal marijuana businesses. Then, when the dispensaries went live in 2016, they couldn’t sell anything because the state hadn’t set-up the seed-to-sale tracking software that it mandated be implemented. And then there was this whole lab certification thing. It almost makes you think the state of Hawaii’s heart isn’t in this thing.

“The dates that were in the legislation were unrealistic,” Keith Ridley of the Department of Health told the AP. “I think we need to reset our timeframes.”

“People are hoping for dispensaries to open, but they’re just waiting and waiting,” said Jari Sugano, the mother of an 8 year-old MMJ patient who suffers from severe epilepsy. “In the end, the delays are going to come back on the patient to pay back.”

Photo via Flickr user Daniel Ramirez

One of the biggest reasons people like to smoke weed is that it chills them out. 40 percent of cannabis users say their primary motivation is relaxation. And yet getting lit does not always lead to this desired effect.

Research shows a substantial increase recently among people in cannabis-legal states for emergency room trips due to weed consumption, as reported by The Cannabist. Most of these trips are because of stress. People smoke or dab or eat too much and they have a panic attack that gives them the feeling that they might be dying.

So what happened to chilling? Well, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, these people just aren’t doing it right. According to the authors of a new study, some THC will make a person’s stress decrease, but a lot will make their stress shoot up, as reported by The Washington Post.

Researchers at UIC gave stress tests to three different groups of test subjects. One of them consumed 7.5 milligrams of THC, another took 12.5 mg of THC, and another took a placebo. The stress tests consisted of putting them in the shoes of a teenage stoner in pretty much the most anxiety-producing situation imaginable. They had to take exams while high.

First they were made to give a five minute speech, then to take an oral math test for two interviewers while being videotaped. Tests were then scored and each subject was asked to rate their anxiety level.

Versus a placebo, a little bit of THC did the trick. It “reduced the duration of negative emotional responses to acute psychosocial stress, and participants’ post-task appraisals of how threatening and challenging they found the stressor,” according to the researchers.

But more THC actually took you over the hill and back down again, producing a “small but significant increases in anxiety, negative mood and subjective distress” before and during the tests.

Of course, tolerance, context, and consumption method can change things. A hardcore dabaholic inhales 12.5 mg of THC between just to keep their high up and an average joint contains 33 to 39 mg, according to The Cannabist. But everyone is different. The trick is, if you wanna avoid the heeby jeebies while toking, to just go slow and feel your high out.

Photo via Flickr user Nina A. J. G.

Weed science has come along the way in the last few decades. Two generations ago our understanding of weed was pretty much that if you rolled up a bunch of it in a little piece of paper and lit one end of it, you would get high. These days we have purified decarboxylated concentrates made from hydroponic-perfected buds. We get high in ways our parents never even imagined possible. We’re even unlocking the cannabis genome.

And yet some simple weed problems still populate our weed understanding. Like, for instance, how do you keep your eyes from getting squinty and bloodshot? And why do they get like that anyway?

Well, never fear. The weed scientists are here. Let’s tackle these problems one at a time.

Bloodshot Eyes

Cannabis lowers blood pressure. The effect this has on your eyes is to widen your veins and capillaries so that blood flows more easily. This is the reason why doctors sometimes recommend cannabis to relieve ocular pressure in glaucoma patients. It also means there is more blood in your eyes than usual, which can give you that bloodshot look.

The reason why some strains give you bloodier eyes than others is the THC count. THC is the cannabinoid that is worse for bloodshotness (or better for glaucoma, depending on your point of view).

Some people get really bad bloodshot eyes when they smoke, so bad that even eye drops like Visine don’t help. You could also drink lots of water (to keep your eyes moist) or smoke low-THC varieties of cannabis (if that’s your sort of thing).

Squinty Eyes

There’s a little less science on this. In fact, we have to go by folk wisdom to answer it. But basically, there are three different reasons we know of why cannabis makes you squint.

1. It dries your mucus membranes, which makes your eyes dry. This is the same reason you get cottonmouth, and it’s often unrelated to being dehydrated.
2. It makes your eyes more sensitive to light, which makes you squint (for duh).
3. Cannabis makes you sleepy and fatigued. The look that someone gets when they’re really, really stoned isn’t just squinty, red eyes. It’s like the muscles on their face don’t work right, not dissimilar from someone who just woke up.

There you have it. Hope you just got some knowledge because knowledge is power.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote a letter to Congress asking him to free the Department of Justice to prosecute state-licensed medical marijuana providers. The letter was written last month, but went public on Monday, as reported by The Washington Post.

This makes for a pretty eventful week for the rookie Attorney General, who also appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee this week to stammer his way through explaining why he lied under oath about his contact with Russian officials and how recommending the firing of FBI Director James Comey was not an effort to help the president obstruct justice.

But, even with accusations of perjury and treason, Sessions has made time for an issue he obviously considers of urgent importance to the American people: waging a war on marijuana. You know, marijuana, that plant that is legal to use for medical purposes in most of the country and is considered to be mostly harmless by an serious study on the subject and which most Americans support the legalization of.

Sessions’ letter to Congress asked them to roll back protections against medical marijuana providers because, in his words, the Justice Department “must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives.” He requests specifically that Congress ditch the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, a rule which bars the DOJ from spending federal funds to fight state-legalized marijuana business.

His request is perfectly logical if you consider medical marijuana collectives who have been vetted and licensed by state governments to be “dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives.” But pretty much no one does. So what exactly is he talking about?

In the letter, Sessions connects the sale and use of marijuana to the country’s “historic drug epidemic” and its “potentially long-term uptick in violent crime.” The Attorney General is staunch denier of cannabis health claims, particularly ones which claim (via rigorous scientific research) that legalized medical marijuana can actually decrease the use of the addictive opiates. “Give me a break,” Sessions said of these claims in February, calling them, “almost a desperate attempt to defend the harmlessness of marijuana or even its benefits.”

In a speech to leaders of local, state, and federal law enforcement, Sessions chose to spend more time talking about cannabis legalization than either the opioid epidemic or gun violence, and called cannabis use “a life-wrecking dependency” that is “only slightly less awful” than heroin addiction.

You may be inhaling carcinogens roughly equal to smoking a cigarette when you hit a weed vape pen. Cancer-causing agents including formaldehyde and acetaldehyde can be released from cannabis extracts when heated in a vape pen, according to a study from researchers in the cannabis industry and published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine earlier this year.

The study’s authors say that the carcinogens are not in cannabis itself, nor even in the sometimes controversial solvents such as butane used in the extraction process. On the contrary, the authors claim that vaporizing marijuana has fewer potential respiratory risks than smoking raw flower. The problem, they argue, is in the thinning agents added to extracts to make them work well in a vape pen.

Vape pens “generally require the cannabis oil to flow easily from the cartridge to the heating element to enable vaporization,” the study states, but unfortunately raw cannabis oil “does not easily flow. Therefore, in a practice borrowed from the e-cigarette industry, many cannabis oil manufacturers combine the oil with thinning agents to improve flow.”

Popular thinning agents are, as you might expect, FDA approved. But they are FDA approved for use in foods, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. Many have not been tested under the high temperatures required for vaporization. In these conditions, the agents can release toxic aerosols, which are then inhaled.

One thinning agent in particular was troubling to the researchers: polyethylene glycol 400. PEG 400 is commonly used as a thinning agent in hash oil (this is confirmed by one extraction company we talked to). At a temperature of 230° C (446° F) it releases much, much larger amounts of vaporous acetaldehyde and formaldehyde than other agents. One inhalation at that temperature would give you 1.12 percent of your daily limit of formaldehyde. By comparison, smoking an entire cigarette gives you 1.42 to 2.35 percent, so a person hitting their vape pen all day is potentially inhaling the same amount of carcinogens as a regular cigarette smoker.

That’s pretty alarming, but there are some caveats to these findings. Most of them involve the lack of testing of these effects. The authors of the study are the first to admit that there is a lack of information on the effects of vaporized thinning agents. Because of federal limitations on cannabis research, even they have not been able to observe what happens when PEG 400 is vaporized in combination with cannabis extract, which could change the effects either positively or negatively.

Temperature can also play a big role in the amount of carcinogenic aerosols released while vaping. Lower temps could release healthier vapor, but again more testing would be needed.

Photo via Flickr user Vaping360

Now you have another reason to be jealous of New Zealanders. If your envy wasn’t stoked by the fact that they live in Middle Earth and or that some of them probably know Russell Crowe, it will get properly stoked by the fact that they now have a better medical marijuana program than the U.S. and most other countries.

On Friday the country’s Ministry of Health announced a new loosening of laws that will allow doctors to prescribe medicinal CBD extract to pretty much whoever they see fit, just like every other drug, as reported by the Kiwi outlet Stuff. It’s a big deal for a country that up until now had an MMJ program that was even more cumbersome than the ones in most American states.

As the law currently stands, every single patient who wants to receive CBD treatment has to get reviewed and approved by the Ministry of Health. Using CBD without their OK is considered an offence of misusing prescription drugs. But all that will change in just two months when the new regulations go into effect.

The movement to change MMJ laws in New Zealand was headed by an epileptic boy Alex Renton, who with his family fought publicly for the right to use CBD oil. Renton died in 2015 after falling into “status epilepticus,” bringing even more attention to the issue. Cannabis extract lessened his symptoms, but couldn’t save his life. His mother Rose believes that if Alex had been able to start CBD treatment sooner, his life might have been spared.

Rose Renton said her son would be proud of the new medical cannabis laws. “His soul is lighter, knowing he paved the way to help people get relief legally, that’s what his life has ended up being about,” she said.

The new rule on CBD oil is a won battle, but not the end of the war. Renton argues that it’s “only half the plant” and says she intends to keep advocating for the proliferation of THC and other cannabinoids in the country’s medical marijuana program.

There’s also the issues of cost and availability. As several states in America have observed, just because you make cannabis legal doesn’t mean there’s an effective infrastructure for getting it. Pharmac, a company that subsidizes prescription drug costs in New Zealand, isn’t covering CBD treatment. This will make prolonged use “unsustainable” according to Stuff.

The country might not even have enough CBD product to administer to its patients once the floodgates open, according to Drug Foundation executive director Ross Bell. “For doctors to prescribe them they’re still going to need to source the product from overseas and have that imported into the country,” he said.

What the hell do you do when you’re running a business that the government has over 75 sets of laws governing? In the U.S., the federal government has one set of laws concerning the Schedule I controlled substance. In addition, every state in the union also has its own particular bunch of laws concerning marijuana within its borders. Most states even have two different groups of cannabis laws, one for medical and one for recreational. Now how do you go about putting long-term plans in place when the laws governing your business are contradictory and vague?

One alternative is start governing yourself. Like settlers in a new land forced to self-organize or face total chaos, the U.S. marijuana industry has formed the National Association of Cannabis Businesses. The self-regulating organization aims to implement its own regulations which will be non-legally binding, but will create new standards and practices across state lines.

The NACB comes in the tradition of self-regulating organizations (SRO’s) in other industries, including the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a non-government group which regulates the NASDAQ, the American Stock Exchange, and the New York Stock Exchange, as well as the Distilled Spirits Council (DSP), which oversees the alcohol industry.

The DSP in particular is an inspiration to the new cannabis group. “Cannabis cannot be so insular that we miss an opportunity to learn from other highly regulated industries how to make our own better,” Ean Seeb, a member of the the NACB advisory panel Denver Relief Consulting co-founder, told The Cannabist. “Similar to cannabis, those founding SROs represented a substance that was legal and then made illegal through prohibition. When prohibition was overturned, these groups helped spirits navigate the new regulatory and taxation landscape.”

The group’s slogan is “Be ready,” as in “be ready and start regulating yourself so that the federal government doesn’t feel they have to do it for you once it legalizes your product.

For the moment, the NACB is based in Colorado and, to an extent, on Colorado. Among the group’s seven founding members are three Colorado cannabis businesses. “The state has been at it longer than anybody else, so it provides the largest window into what works and what hasn’t worked,” NACB president Andrew Kline said. He added that “testing standards it developed are replicable in other states as we see in Oregon, for instance. But it’s also scalable to a national level.”

Kline himself is a former assistant U.S. attorney and Washington insider, who has served as a special counsel in the Federal Communications Commission’s enforcement bureau and as a senior advisor to Vice President Joseph Biden.

Cannabis being such a young industry and all, it wasn’t until 2011 that someone came up with a hard number on just how much energy it takes up. According to University of California researcher Evan Mills, that number was one. 1 percent of all energy in the country, he tabulated, was consumed by indoor cannabis grow houses.

And that was in 2011, before a single state had legal marijuana. In the last six years, eight states (and D.C.) have legalized recreational weed while another 13 okayed medical marijuana. So, you know, it’s probably time for a new study, but jeez, that’s a lot of power.

How do these little weed plants suck up all that juice? Well, a lot of different ways. To grow weed indoors at maximum efficiency, you need very hot lights, very cold air conditioning to make sure they don’t wither and die, an irrigation system, and a dehumidifier and fans to keep the air dry but still circulating, as pointed out in a recent Guardian article. That’s without even adding the energy used in transportation or extraction techniques.

But the biggest energy-suck by far (about 50 percent) are lights. LED lights, which might save some on electricity, are not seen as efficient or even effective by many growers. Paul Isenbergh, the owner of three marijuana cultivation warehouses in Denver, told the Guardian that he pays a monthly electricity bill of at least $4,000.

“We are consuming a lot of energy compared to what we would with LED lights,” he said.  “We tried LED but we couldn’t get the right yield from the plants. And this is a weight game. The LEDs just don’t have the horsepower.”

This all creates a little bit of a paradox for hippies who like to think green in both senses of the word. Denver has become a Mecca for the cannabis industry partially because of its hippy-ish sensibilities. But now the weed industry itself may threaten the city’s environmental goals. Denver signed up to meet Paris climate agreement goals and intends to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by the year 2050. But the city is actually increasing its electricity use by 1 percent per year, with nearly half of that due to cannabis grow houses.

Be that as it may, Evan Mills thinks that legalizing cannabis is the only way to stop the regulate its energy consumption, as he argued in an op ed last year. “Until then, some of the nation’s hard-earned progress towards climate change solutions is on the chopping block as regulators continue to ignore this industry’s mushrooming carbon footprint,” he wrote.

Photo via Colorado.gov

Last week’s acquittal of former Minnesota police officer Jeronimo Yanez on all charges related to the fatal shooting of Philando Castile leaves a lot of unsettling questions. The greatest of these is not concerning marijuana and the fact that Yanez told state attorneys more than once that the smell of smoked marijuana in the car contributed to his need to use deadly force against Castile. But that isn’t the least important issue either.

In an interview last July, only one day after Castile’s shooting, Yanez spoke to attorneys from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. According to transcripts of the conversation, the smell of cannabis in the car made a major impact on how serious of a threat the officer considered Castile to be.

The officer told the attorneys that the first thing he noticed on approaching Castile’s car was “a odor of burning marijuana.” When Castile told the officer calmly that he had a firearm in the car, the officer the made the assumption that Castile was probably a drug dealer moving a substantial amount of weed. “… being that the… inside of the vehicle smelled like marijuana, um, I didn’t know if he was keeping [the gun] on him for protection, for, from a, a drug dealer or anything like that or any other people trying to rip him,” Yanez said.

According to Yanez’s statement, the fact that Castile was a marijuana smoker not only escalated the situation, but also figured prominently into his thoughts as Yanez pulled the trigger. The officer said that knowing Castile would let his young daughter ride with him in a car where cannabis had recently been smoked made him think that Castile might also be capable of murdering a police officer who had stopped him for a traffic violation.

“I thought if he’s, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five year old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing then what, what care does he give about me. And, I let off the rounds and then after the rounds were off, the little girls was screaming.”

So, in the heat of the moment, just before he decided to take the life of Castile, Officer Yanez says what was on his mind was the second hand weed smoke that Castile’s daughter might have inhaled. And then he “let off the rounds.”

Yanez was acquitted of second-degree manslaughter and two counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm last Friday. He was terminated from the St. Anthony, Minnesota police department on the same day, shortly after the judge’s ruling.

America is becoming a monkey in the middle when it comes to marijuana legalization in North America. Canada is going all-the-way legal next year and this week Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto signed a decree legalizing medical cannabis across the country, as reported by The Washington Post.

But fans of medical marijuana and/or narcotic decriminalization may be a little premature if they start the celebration now. Like its neighbor to the north, Mexico too has a labyrinthine, confusing bureaucracy in place to make sure new rollouts in government policy happen neither quickly nor smoothly.

While Peña Nieto’s decree does legalize MMJ in Mexico, in effect it’s more like a plan to have a plan to have medical marijuana in the country. The policy calls for the Ministry of Health to basically create a medical cannabis program wholecloth, with a new set of regulations and strategy regarding the implementation of “the medicinal use of pharmacological derivatives of cannabis sativa, indica and Americana or marijuana, including tetrahydrocannabinol.” That could take awhile.

The agency is also tasked with researching marijuana to see how it actually works in medical treatment (since many other countries, such as the U.S., are reluctant to legalize cannabis research).

While the measure found overwhelming support in the Mexican government (it passed in the Lower House of Congress 347-7), one place it doesn’t have support is among Mexican citizens. A poll found that 66 percent of Mexicans oppose marijuana decriminalization.

In a fervently Catholic nation, the Holy C wrote in a news editorial decrying efforts to legalize marijuana in any form. “A drug is a drug even if it’s sold as a soft medicinal balm. Bad Mexican copycats emulate the neighbor to put on the table of ‘sane democracy’ a bleak, absurd and counterproductive debate,” it said. “Recreational marijuana is a placebo to ease the pain of the social destruction in which we irremediably wallow.” Yikes!

Even President Peña Nieto at one time opposed drug legalization, but has lately changed his tune in step with other Mexican politicians. He now says he considers drug use and addiction a “public health problem” instead of a criminal one. The president has even called out for similar legislation in other countries. “We must move beyond prohibition to effective prevention,” Pena Nieto told the General Assembly Special Sessions earlier this year. “So far, the solutions implemented by the international community have been frankly insufficient.”

Photo via Flickr user Dank Depot

Charles and David Koch are known as bigwigs in conservative politics. The efforts of these extraordinarily rich brothers and their network have pledged nearly $900 million toward political influence and are said by Politico to have “an infrastructure that rivaled that of the Republican National Committee.”

They spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fight climate change science, government-sponsored healthcare, and regulation of big business, so it seems like they should be able to get along with the the Trump White House. But on at least one issue, they have starkly different views.

At a three day retreat for one of their umbrella organizations, Mark Holden, a top leader in the Koch network and general counsel for the brothers, told reporters that the network is very unhappy with the direction the Trump administration has been taking the drug war, as reported by the Denver Post. “You are never going to win the war on drugs,” he said. “Drugs won.”

In particular, Holden and the Kochs are none too pleased with Attorney General Jeff Session’s efforts to move on state-sanctioned medical marijuana businesses. He wrote a letter to Congress last month asking them to free the Department of Justice to prosecute legal cannabis providers.

The Koch’s brand of conservatism leans a little more heavily into the libertarian end of things than do Trump’s and Session’s, it seems, favoring little interference from federal government in state rights and general criminal justice reform.

Holden said at the retreat that medical marijuana “should be off-limits” to federal prosecutors. “I’m not here to say our position is legalize drugs or anything else,” he clarified, “But I don’t think that we should criminalize those types of things and we should let the states decide.”

He added that Session’s stance on marijuana was not pragmatic, but “based on fear and emotion in my opinion.”

Koch and company’s displeasure with Session’s drug policy and the government’s controversial health care bill could lead to a rift in the Republican party during the upcoming midterm elections, when the Koch network plans to spend $300 to $400 million on campaigns and other politically influential activities.

“When you think about it, what did I really do? I crossed an imaginary line with a bunch of plants.” So says fictionalized drug smuggler George Jung as played by Johnny Depp in the 2001 film Blow.

That’s what happens when you cross state lines with marijuana. Imaginary lines. A bunch of plants. Even if those plants are legal on both sides of that imaginary line (as cannabis is on, for example, either side of the Oregon-Washington border) taking them across that line is still a federal crime. In fact, it’s a state crime in Oregon too.

In Oregon, as in California and Nevada, there are legal regulations on the importing and exporting cannabis to and from the state. Depending on the amount, these can even constitute state felonies.

But all that’s nothing compared to federal restrictions, which make taking any amount of cannabis or cannabis extracts a potential felony. In the eyes of the U.S. government, there is no such thing as a legal cannabis state and according to the law of the Schedule of Controlled Substances, any amount of cannabis (50 kilograms or less) trafficked across state lines is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million.

Sounds pretty scary, but most people who take a dime bag from Illinois to Indiana don’t have to worry about hard prison time. “The risks you’re running in theory are much bigger than in practice,” Alison Malsbury, an attorney at Canna Law Group, told Leafly recently.

“You’re still, by crossing the state lines, falling within the jurisdiction of the federal government. Even if cannabis is legal in both states, it’s that crossing of the border that puts you at risk,” she said, but “the chances of feds or the DEA sitting at the border waiting to catch someone–that’s just not happening. It’s not practical or worth their time.”

The real concern lies in charges for people arrested for other marijuana crimes, like distribution in a 420-unfriendly state. If that happens, then “taking cannabis across the border is considered an aggravating factor,” by authorities, Malsbury said, and that could lead to harsher sentences.

Federal easing of interstate cannabis transport would not only be helpful to wanderlusting stoners, but to the industry too. Legal cooperation between a cannabis business in California and another in Oregon is nearly impossible as it is. And that’s not likely to change until a slightly more chilled-out administration takes residence in the White House.

Over the last several years, one major industry in American culture has been on the rise while another has been on a downtrend. At least that’s the perception when it comes to the film business and the cannabis industry.

In film, while major players like Disney are having record years at the box office, smaller independent films struggle to find audiences in the vast video on demand landscape. At the same time, the once black market cannabis industry grew 30 percent last year and is expected to continue to grow at a steady rate over the next several years.

Is it possible that these two industries, one on shaky ground and the other jsut taking off, might be able to scratch each other’s backs? That’s the bet that The World’s Best Ever (TWBE), a marketing agency and culture website, took when it started cross-promoting cannabis products and independent films.

TWBE has clients in both worlds, marketing products like the High Kite and the LAVC Dispensary alongside prestige wide release films like Room and A Most Violent Year. At some point, the zeitgeisty super-hip film distributor A24 approached TWBE with the idea to promote their film Tusk using TWBE’s cannabis connections.

The agency marketed the film, which was directed by stoner icon Kevin Smith (Clerks, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back), with the “Toke N’ Tusk” campaign, branding two strains of medical marijuana with the Tusk name and supplying it to the Los Angeles dispensary Buds & Roses. In addition, TWBE bought advertising space in pothead hotspots of the internet such as High Times and The Cannabist.

It worked so well the agency tried it again with A24 on last year’s comedy Swiss Army Man, marketing a movie tie-in bong (like when Happy Meals come with Transformers toys, but for a slightly more mature crowd).

Most recently, they’re running trailers for the new film The Hero inside dispensaries equipped with TV screens. These screens had been used to run ads for marijuana products, but TWBE decided to use it for a brand new purpose: to market a soon-to-be-released theatrical film. The Hero had been advertised in other markets, but a new trailer emphasizing the weed-smoking aspects of the film was cut and shown in front of the right bloodshot eyeballs.

According to TWBE’s co-founder David Wilfert, the advertising capability of the weed industry has been greatly underestimated. “Pot smokers also do everything that non-pot smokers do,” Wilfert recently told Leafly. “I think in time they’ll started getting traditional consumer ads.”