Rolling Cannabis Politics Thread

xp. have heard people speak highly of the analgesic effects of cannabis but it does nothing for me in that respect :/

it's not effective for 100% of patients but it is with enough that you'd think we'd allow doctors to have it in their arsenal before moving on to dangerous addictive opiates

this is not even getting into the fact that there are actual studies that have demonstrated cannabis having strong effects in a number of disorders but god forbid we should let dr's decide to do w/ such a dangerous plant. hillary's cowardice on medicinal ("let's see what the science says before doing anything") alone makes me want to vote for sanders.

oh all political opposition to it is obv based on idiocy or - as im sure in Hilary's case - doing what is politic by not scaring the puritans

At his last visit my 69-year old father's 70-something doctor was bemoaning the lack of medical marijuana in Texas to help my dad's back pain and diabetic neuropathy. I'm sure that it's partially my social/political bubble but I can't figure out how we're not more rapidly approaching the cusp of decriminalization nationwide if not legalization.

Aside from private prisons and cop unions, where is the support for blanket criminalization?

oh all political opposition to it is obv based on idiocy pharma companies and that's your answer milo

xpost to say nothing of using cannabis as a safe replacement for xanax, ativan, etc

(that's the basis of my prescription)

it's interesting that when they put the THC in a proprietary delivery system and call it marinol they're allowed to prescribe it

and by interesting i mean total fucking bullshit >angryface<

my cousin just got out of prison for a non-violent marijuana offense - he got the privilege of spending the last month in solitary bc his roommate was caught with contraband. there are so many reforms that would make the US a better country but none that seem as obvious, w/ a lot of voter approval, and capable of making a huge difference in a ton of major US crises from healthcare to incarceration.

This was very powerful (series looks to be pretty good!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlNQMDcZHMo

Motherfuckers! Caught me with a fake movie. Anyway, the actual episode is great. I'll try to find it online.

Gotta have cable:
https://www.viceland.com/en_us/video/stoned-vets/56cdd0654e3a0a6d5eaa13c3

solitary confinement? that sucks.

nah i'm sure whoever decided doctors can prescribe opiates and not marijuana to patients had a really good reason for it

sadly opiates have been a constant in medical practice since at least medieval times. pretty sure they were adopted largely bc nobody had a clue about the human body and treatments were often more harmful than the malady, yet pain killers always did the trick of relieving suffering so they stuck w that.

my cousin just got out of prison for a non-violent marijuana offense - he got the privilege of spending the last month in solitary bc his roommate was caught with contraband

so fucked up, glad he's out

feel like it's important to make a distinction here w/r/t THC vs. CBD, the legal stuff that you can buy here in OR and WA that is "recommended" for pain (in scare quotes because oooh it's not real medical advice) is almost entirely CBD extracts in capsule form with very little THC content.

I'm really hoping for a Schedule 1 delisting within the next five years (obv that hangs on the election to a degree). That would open up a lot of research opportunities that haven't been public so far.

i think that's a fair pt and i'll add that I spoke to an Israeli researcher / marijuana cultivator who said that they think the ratio of THC to CBD makes a difference in terms of optimal responses to say seizures v. ibs v. pain treatment. obviously bc of the schedule 1 categorization the field is in its infancy (this researcher's country does allow medicinal + research). the truth is that (surprise) i think recreational marijuana should be legal as well but the moral/health case for medicinal is just so overwhelming to me that it's generally an easier one to make. there is an actual study that was published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology where researchers at Meir Medical Center had a 50% complete remission rate for patient's using prescription cannabis. this is a disorder whose strongest treatments (last i checked) come w/ a list of side effects and where complications can result in emergency surgery and in rare cases death. so 50% remission rate is a big deal! i'm sorry i kno i'm a broken record on this and i'm preaching to the choir as well.

(sorry i should specify the disorder was for crohn's. but there are many studies and lots of good if sometimes incomplete research that demonstrates serious medicinal benefits for a variety of issues)

i have crohn's and yeah cannabis has been extremely helpful and appears to have put me into remission. the heavy extramedical use i lapsed into has certainly attracted its own cluster of problems but nothing like what would have developed had i continued to pop black-market vicodin to get myself to class in the morning.

(also my relationship to it would probably have been different had i been prescribed the stuff in a medical context instead of becoming a stoner in an unrelated move and one day wondering why it had been so long since i shit blood)

wow @ all that, v interesting

HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania House on Monday took up legislation to allow the medical use of marijuana in the state, beginning to prepare the bill to send back to the Senate later this week.

By a vote of 152-38, the House approved a comprehensive amendment from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Ron Marsico, R-Dauphin, that would establish a system of growers and dispensaries to provide marijuana to patients with certain conditions who receive certification from a doctor. The House considered a number of other amendments before adjourning for the night, with plans to continue today.

The plan now is for the House to pass the bill Wednesday, Republican spokesman Steve Miskin said.

Speaking on the House floor, state Rep. Ed Gainey, D-Lincoln-Lemington, said that if doctors can prescribe opioid drugs, patients should also have access to marijuana.

“Medical marijuana helps to relieve a lot of this pain, and we need to give the family every tool that they need to help them,” Mr. Gainey said. “For if we don’t, we have not done our jobs as leaders.”

halle-fucking-lujah

"Last night, the House added Autism to the approved list of conditions thereby increasing the availability of safe, medical-treatment options to more than 17,075 Pennsylvanians and 36,261 by 2020.

The House has also adopted the common-sense repeal of the arbitrary and capricious 10% THC cap (thanks in part to our friends in Israel who have extensively documented the therapeutic benefits of 23% strands- especially in the treatment of Crohn's Disease)."

House votes to legalize medical marijuana in Pennsylvania
http://www.wpxi.com/ap/ap/pennsylvania/final-votes-loom-to-allow-medical-marijuana-in-pen/nqmhX/

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-court-marijuana-states-20160321-story.html

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a conservative challenge to the marijuana legalization laws adopted in Colorado and elsewhere that permit adults to buy, sell or use one ounce of the drug.

By a 6-2 vote, the justices turned away a lawsuit brought by Nebraska and Oklahoma, whose state attorneys complained that illegal marijuana was pouring into their states as a result of Colorado's liberalized laws.

also, the first MONTH of tax revenue from Oregon exceeded their YEARLY projection by almost half a mil:

http://www.oregonlive.com/marijuana/index.ssf/2016/03/first_month_of_taxed_recreatio.html

sounds like a smashing success. can we finish "waiting and seeing" and just legalize the damn thing nationwide?

ive been thinking about that, what the picture needs to be among the states to finally change the federal scheduling. 10 states? 15 states? just an unlikely state? ohio could've been that but it will be a while for them again

any "red" states on the bubble? always had an unsupportable intuition that Texas might go for it sooner rather than later.

nevada

All of the state tax money is creating a lot of compliance issues for their deposit banks, which are relying on some pretty narrow technical rulings from the OCC to allow them to handle funds derived from an activity that the federal government still considers illegal. Federally charted banks still can't go anywhere near any actual dispensaries or related businesses.

Every time a state treasurer's office deposits a (literal) heap of stinking weed money, the cash vault employees freak out and some poor AML analyst (cough) has to spend hours reviewing all their transaction activity and sign off on it.

I wouldnt be surprised if the banking issues drive changes at the fed level

i thought you could bank as long as you're not touching the weed yourself

ie it's mostly a problem for growers + dispensaries

You technically can, but in practice this only applies to governments handling the tax revenues and they themselves have every transaction go through a ridiculous song and dance compliance process. If a bank suspects that a person is involved with a dispensary in any way (this includes investors, owners, and employees), they will probably report the suspicious activity to the federal government and immediately sever the banking relationship. A lot of this comes down to not saying dumb things to tellers and making sure your cash deposits don't physically smell like weed.

"your dollars are smelling awfully green, comrade"

a (literal) heap of stinking weed money

An acquaintance works at one of the stores here and once told me that the backroom of the place had pyramid of cash as tall as her just sitting around because they hadn't yet been able to figure out what to do with it all and the banks didn't want to touch it. This was a while ago though.

any "red" states on the bubble? always had an unsupportable intuition that Texas might go for it sooner rather than later.

As weird as we are about taxes and shit, you'd think the promise of windfall money would do it, but Southern Baptists in the GOP have managed to beat back every form of gambling beyond horse tracks and the lottery (where tax money is actively headed just across the borders to Louisiana and Oklahoma), hard to imagine them giving in on weed.

so Washington & Colorado have recreational - Oregon too, or nah? anybody else looking in that direction or is medical the main focus for the foreseeable?

this didn't quite make it cuz I think Newsom dropped the ball: https://ballotpedia.org/California_Cannabis_Legalization_Initiative_%282016%29

https://www.leafly.com/news/headlines/what-states-are-most-likely-to-legalize-in-2016

posted in 12/2015 but updated last week

xp

Xxp Alaska and Oregon legalized, I don't think Alaska has stores set up yet.

In "I'm too old for this shit" news: I picked up a brownie from a local compassion club over the weekend. I'm in Toronto, and though the weed's not quite legal yet, shops catering to medicinal users are popping up all over the place.

There was no recommended dosage or serving size on the package, so I played it safe and only ate half. Within 20 minutes, I was already feeling the butterflies. By the hour mark, I was tripping full-blown: seeing shifting colours, hearing music, oppressed by the patterns in the room, etc. My head felt strapped to a missile, I scared the shit out of my wife, and had the paranoid realization that I wasn't playing the game I thought I was: "Oh, you thought you were playing the take a little break from reality game? Turns out you were playing the take your life in your hands game."

Two days later and I'm still a bit groggy. I'm guessing as cannabis — and in particular edibles — becomes more widely available, this sort of experience will be more common. I'm also guessing that the resulting stroke or heart-attack risk will be more than negligible.

I'm all for a new legal regime, but care needs to be taken with how the product is labelled and distributed. This shit is no joke.

I would have asked at the store about the dosage tbh. eating cannabis when you don't know the dose is a sure fire way to get way too high and lose your shit if you aren't careful.

yeah they sell brownies at my dispensary that are 20 doses!!!

I'm not a user, but I have the impression that edibles for medicinal use tend to require ingesting only a very small amount, because the user is often very ill and doesn't want to eat much.

"I played it safe and ate way too much," is what you mean to have typed there. (In the US, everything is labelled clearly with potency and dosage etc, btw.)

I'm also guessing that the resulting stroke or heart-attack risk

there is no lethal dosage of marijuana, and there is no risk of stroke or heart attack.

fyi