We are accustomed to seeing many people open about smoking marijuana. There are celebrities such as Snoop Dogg or Wiz Khalifa that will openly smoke cannabis in the open. You might even know some close friends or relatives that openly smoke marijuana. However, there is one person that you would probably never expect: someone from Congress.
This week, Dana Rohrabacher, a congressman as well as an advocate of marijuana reform said that he tried medical cannabis to help arthritis pain in his shoulder because of his time surfing.
“I haven’t been able to go surfing for a year and a half, and I’ve been in severe pain,” Rohrabacher said. “And you know what? I tried [a marijuana-infused topical preparation] about two weeks ago, and it’s the first time… in a year and a half that I had a decent night’s sleep because the arthritis pain was gone.”
As the congressman from California confessed that it was surely medical cannabis that he was shown at “one of these hempfests in San Bernardino” (where medical marijuana is legal), he admitted that using marijuana is still illegal under the federal government.
“Now don’t tell anybody I broke the law,” he said. “They’ll bust down my door and, you know, and take whatever’s inside and use it for evidence against me. The bottom line is that… there’s definitely cannabis in there, and it makes sure that I can sleep now.”
One source says that NORML executive director Allen St. Pierre was “stunned by the admission.” Even Rohrabacher’s staff said that it was the first time they had ever heard that the congressman was using medical marijuana. He surely came out of the cannabis closet.
“This is definitely the first legislator in Congress in at least 30-some-odd years who has acknowledged to using marijuana illegally,” St. Pierre concluded.
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Are Women More Easily Addicted to Cannabis Than Men?
New studies from the Women’s Health Research at Yale (WHRY) is poised to study if women are more likely to become addicted to marijuana than males are. The research, which is just a part of an announcement of a project that will be observing ovarian cancer, obesity, heart attacks, and how marijuana affects both men and women. Kelly Cosgrove is leading the study and states that there is surely a difference between how males and females react to smoking marijuana. The main difference comes in addiction as well as withdrawals.
“Cannabis is generally thought of as a safe drug despite a substantial number of studies showing negative, potentially long‐term effects on the brain, including cognitive dysfunction and mental illness,” Cosgrove said in an interview. “Over the past 30 years, cannabis has become increasingly potent, with its major psychoactive ingredient content growing from an average of 1.5 percent before the 1980s to current strains that contain upwards of 25 percent.”
In their older projects, Cosgrove and her team made a sort of neurological scanner so that they may see the difference that goes on in the brains of men and women as they smoke a cigarette. The study is going to be repeated, except instead of smoking cigarettes, the males and females will be smoking cannabis.
“Neurochemical sex differences have been documented for tobacco smoking and alcohol dependence, and we need to find out if there are sex differences in the neurochemistry of cannabis use in humans,” Cosgrove stated. “We need to investigate these differences so people can understand what cannabis does to their brains and — for people who become addicted — allow for the development of gender-sensitive treatments.”
When the funding for this project was announced, a report in 2014 was referred to by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which says that 4.2 million Americans are addicted to cannabis. As a result, the cannabis “causes significant problems with health or the ability to meet responsibilities.”
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Bernie Sanders Supports Cannabis Legalization Initiative in California
The United States’ most left sided candidate in the presidential race recently supported the cannabis legalization act in California, also known as the Adult Use of Marijuana Act; bringing success to the “Let’s Get It Right, California” campaign.
“You’ve got a pretty good ballot initiative coming up in November,” Sanders said to people in California when talking about cannabis policy a few weeks ago. Sanders put down the fact that young people have criminal records for marijuana while those working on Wall Street were never put away after ruining the economy. Recently, Sanders only reiterated that, but louder.
“I do not live in California,” the Vermont senator said at a rally. “But if I lived in California, I would vote ‘yes’ to legalize marijuana.”
Out of all the presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders is the largest supported of marijuana law reform. He claims that he is going to remove marijuana from the federal list of controlled substances and would let states decide whether or not they would like to legalize. His competition for being the nominee is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Although Clinton would also allow states to decide, she would move marijuana to Schedule 2 of the federal list instead of completely removing it.
The probable nominee for the Grand Old Party, Donald Trump, has taken different positions on marijuana, but the most recent decision is that he would allow states to choose what they want. However, he did say that legalization in Colorado is causing issues, ironically, as Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper states that legalization is working for Colorado.
The people of California will be able to vote on marijuana legalization this autumn because of the “Let’s Get It Right, California” campaign supporting the Adult Use of Marijuana Act. The Adult Use of Marijuana Act legalizes up to an ounce of marijuana in public and six plants to grow for adults 21 or older. Adults would eventually be able to buy marijuana in stores like the ones in Colorado and Washington.
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Cannabis Drug Smuggling is Declining
A marijuana plant was seen during the “Blazed and Glazed” event at Mess Hall a few weeks ago in Washington D.C. The evoke that were there learned how to mix marijuana with their daily meals. It is becoming a very common trend in this new age of marijuana reform. Cannabis in places such as Colorado and Washington and others all over the world are creating difficulties for police.
Nebraska and Oklahoma came together and sued Colorado’s legal cannabis market, but the Supreme Court did not want to deal with the case. Officers in nearby states are claiming that Colorado’s legal markets is hurting the states that surround it. A new report said that there was a “flow of high-quality marijuana out of Colorado” and into other regions.
It might seem as though the country is being ruined by cheap marijuana from Colorado. However, federal research says something much less simple: All around the country, federal cannabis trafficking offenses are finally decreasing.
The United States Sentencing Commission (USSC), which researches federal law enforcement efforts, published new data on drug trafficking. In fact, federal cannabis trafficking has dropped significantly since 2012, the year that Colorado and Washington’s voters decided to legalize marijuana. The fall goes on all the way through 2015; data for 2016 has not been released yet.
“The number of marijuana traffickers rose slightly over time until a sharp decline in fiscal year 2013 and the number continues to decrease,” the report indicates.
At the same time, trafficking in other drugs seems to be increasing. That is not to say that cannabis isn’t being taken anywhere at all, though.
“The vast majority of marijuana-related arrests and prosecutions are made by local and state authorities,” Beau Kilmer, a drug policy researcher with the RAND Corp., wrote to reporters.
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