TheBongPlace: The Marijuana Blog

There still seems to be a lot of confusion with growing medical marijuana in the states, the growing laws seem to vary significantly.

To make things more confusing we need to consider state and federal law as well.

San Francisco was considered to be a safe state for medical marijuana growers. Unfortunately Stephanie Lander has been sentenced to 41 months for growing medical marijuana in San Francisco.

Stephanie was under the impression she had approval from the police to grow medical marijuana in San Fransisco, to help people with a range of illnesses.

Please watch the following growing medical marijuana video which reviews the plight of Stephanie Lander.

via medical marijuana blog

AP) — A tiny southwest Missouri hamlet has passed an ordinance allowing residents with a doctor’s approval to grow and possess marijuana for medicinal use. The mayor of Cliff Village says the law is aimed at showing grassroots support for a measure that has repeatedly failed in the state legislature. From the Kansas City Star:

Cliff Village is no college town. It’s barely a town at all. It has no employees and levies no taxes. It gets about $1,300 a year in distributions of state fuel taxes for road repairs and $120 to $200 more in cable TV franchise fees. The 30-year-old mayor, Joe Blundell, said the law came from his own frustration with pharmaceutical painkillers to deal with the aftermath of a train accident that left him in a wheelchair. “When I got introduced to this flower, it not only alleviated my pain, it got me out gardening,” Blundell said. “I’m not just stoning myself out. It allowed me to function.”

The Cliff Village ordinance passed by a 3-2 vote. - KSPR News

Former presidents of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia said the U.S.-led war on drugs has failed and urged President Barack Obama to consider new policies, including decriminalizing marijuana, and to treat drug use as a public health problem.

The recommendations by former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, along with Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Cesar Gaviria of Colombia, were made in a report today by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy.

Among the group’s proposals ahead of a special United Nations ministerial meeting in Vienna to evaluate global drug policy is a call to decriminalize the possession of cannabis for personal use.

“We need to break the taboo that’s blocking an honest debate,” Cardoso said at a press conference in Rio de Janeiro to present the report. “Numerous scientific studies show that the damage caused by marijuana is similar to that of alcohol or tobacco.”

Gaviria, who as president of Colombia from 1990-1994 worked with U.S. anti-narcotics agents to hunt down and kill cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, said he hoped Obama invests in harm reduction and prevention efforts that would relieve Latin America of the burden of fighting drug traffickers.

Recognize the Failure

“It makes no sense to continue a policy on moral grounds without getting the desired results,” said Gaviria, citing an October report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office showing drug reduction goals in Colombia have not been met. “Obama, being a pragmatist, should recognize these failures.”

The group was created last year to focus the global drug debate on harm reduction and prevention efforts and away from policies based on the eradication of production and the criminalization of consumption.

Latin America is the world’s largest exporter of cocaine and cannabis and a major supplier of opium and heroin. It’s also been the main focus of U.S.-led drug eradication and interdiction efforts ever since U.S. President Richard Nixon declared “war on drugs” in 1971.

The GAO report, made at the request of then Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, now vice president, Joseph Biden found that production of coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, increased by 15 percent in Colombia since 2000. The U.S. has provided Colombia with $4.9 billion in anti-narcotics aid since 1999 with the goal of reducing coca production by half.

Gaviria said Mexican President Felipe Calderon should demand Obama do more to reduce drug consumption. The U.S. pledged $400 million and increased cooperation with Mexico last year as part of an anti-drug plan known as the Merida Initiative.

More than 5,300 people were killed in drug-related violence in Mexico last year, and Mexican lawmakers have said the U.S. holds some responsibility for the bloodshed because demand for narcotics has made the cartels powerful.

By: Joshua Goodman

WASHINGTON — The White House won’t say it explicitly. Neither will the Drug Enforcement Administration. Yet there is a whiff in the air that U.S. policy is about to change when it comes to medical marijuana.

The message is clear, said UCLA professor Mark Kleiman, a former Justice Department official and an expert on crime and drug policy.

“It is no longer federal policy to beat up on hippies,” said Kleiman.

Tell that to the DEA.

In California this past week, agents raided four dispensaries in Los Angeles and seized 500 pounds of pot.

“It’s a little bit surprising, because I think current DEA management didn’t get the message,” said Kleiman. “The message is, this is no longer drug warrior time. We are not on a cultural crusade against pot-smoking.”

California law permits the sale of marijuana for medical purposes, though it is still against federal law.

Thirteen states have laws permitting medicinal use of marijuana. California is unique among them for the presence of dispensaries, businesses that sell marijuana and even advertise their services. Legal under California law, such dispensaries are still illegal under federal law.
“Anyone possessing, distributing or cultivating marijuana for any reason is in violation of federal law,” Sarah Pullen, a DEA spokeswoman in Los Angeles, said Thursday.

That may be the law, but it contradicts the medical marijuana position of the new president.

“The president believes that federal resources should not be used to circumvent state laws, and as he continues to appoint senior leadership to fill out the ranks of the federal government, he expects them to review their policies with that in mind,” said White House spokesman Nick Shapiro, repeating past statements.

So on Friday, DEA officials in Washington declined to comment at all on the subject.

As a presidential candidate, Obama repeatedly promised a change in federal drug policy in situations where state laws allow use of medical marijuana.

“I think the basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors, I think that’s entirely appropriate,” Obama told the Mail Tribune of Medford, Ore., in March.

A year earlier at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Obama said: “I would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users.”

At age 47, Obama is part of a generation that had plenty of exposure to pot.

In his memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” he described time spent as a youth struggling with questions about his race and identity, and turning to drugs _ including marijuana and cocaine _ to “push questions of who I was out of my mind.”

The new president is unlikely to make any official change in policy before he has a new DEA chief and drug czar in place.

Yet experts believe it is already clear the Obama administration will change the strategy, if not the law, on medical marijuana.

Philip Heymann, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration who is now a Harvard professor, said it’s time for the agency to put more effort into fighting drugs more dangerous than marijuana.

“I do expect him to appoint an administrator who takes marijuana less seriously than is traditional for the DEA, as I think most Americans do,” said Heymann.

Heymann said he expects the Obama administration will eventually instruct the DEA to emphatically scale back raids on dispensaries, and conduct such raids only in instances where investigators believe a business is abusing the dispensary system as a cover for other criminal behavior.

So last week’s raids in California may be the last of their kind.

“The DEA’s not likely to want to confront a new president,” said Heymann. “It may simply be that they’re behaving as they have traditionally, and they haven’t anticipated the change Obama and his spokesman are signaling.”

____

Associated Press writer Michael Blood in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

The active ingredient in marijuana cuts tumor growth in common lung cancer in half and significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread, say researchers at Harvard University who tested the chemical in both lab and mouse studies.

They say this is the first set of experiments to show that the compound, Delta-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), inhibits EGF-induced growth and migration in epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) expressing non-small cell lung cancer cell lines. Lung cancers that over-express EGFR are usually highly aggressive and resistant to chemotherapy.
THC that targets cannabinoid receptors CB1 and CB2 is similar in function to endocannabinoids, which are cannabinoids that are naturally produced in the body and activate these receptors. The researchers suggest that THC or other designer agents that activate these receptors might be used in a targeted fashion to treat lung cancer.

“The beauty of this study is that we are showing that a substance of abuse, if used prudently, may offer a new road to therapy against lung cancer,” said Anju Preet, Ph.D., a researcher in the Division of Experimental Medicine.

Acting through cannabinoid receptors CB1 and CB2, endocannabinoids (as well as THC) are thought to play a role in variety of biological functions, including pain and anxiety control, and inflammation. Although a medical derivative of THC, known as Marinol, has been approved for use as an appetite stimulant for cancer patients, and a small number of U.S. states allow use of medical marijuana to treat the same side effect, few studies have shown that THC might have anti-tumor activity, Preet says. The only clinical trial testing THC as a treatment against cancer growth was a recently completed British pilot study in human glioblastoma.

In the present study, the researchers first demonstrated that two different lung cancer cell lines as well as patient lung tumor samples express CB1 and CB2, and that non-toxic doses of THC inhibited growth and spread in the cell lines. “When the cells are pretreated with THC, they have less EGFR stimulated invasion as measured by various in-vitro assays,” Preet said.

Then, for three weeks, researchers injected standard doses of THC into mice that had been implanted with human lung cancer cells, and found that tumors were reduced in size and weight by about 50 percent in treated animals compared to a control group. There was also about a 60 percent reduction in cancer lesions on the lungs in these mice as well as a significant reduction in protein markers associated with cancer progression, Preet says.

Although the researchers do not know why THC inhibits tumor growth, they say the substance could be activating molecules that arrest the cell cycle. They speculate that THC may also interfere with angiogenesis and vascularization, which promotes cancer growth.

Preet says much work is needed to clarify the pathway by which THC functions, and cautions that some animal studies have shown that THC can stimulate some cancers. “THC offers some promise, but we have a long way to go before we know what its potential is,” she said.

The DEA raided a dispensary on Jan. 22, the first such act by federal law enforcement since Obama’s inauguration earlier this week.

The raid flies in the face of campaign promises made by Obama, who said he would rein in this type of behavior from federal agencies. Holistic Solutions is was the name of the dispensary, and while cash and marijuana were seized, no arrests were made.

Senator Obama said in an August 2007 statement:

I would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users. It’s not a good use of our resources.

I’m not quite sure if kicking down the doors of an unoccupied, state-sanctioned medical facility is the biggest waste of federal tax dollars (see: Bridge to Nowhere), but it has to be up there.

According to a statement on the Americans for Safe Access Web site, the raid is just one of more than 100 in California in the last two years (roughly two per week for those without a calculator). No surprise, since CA has received an overwhelming share of federal scrutiny for its pioneering of federally-outlawed efforts at medical marijuana.

New Mexico, which recently adopted a MMJ card program, was threatened by the DEA for its plan, according to the same release.

Unfortunately, I’ve got a rather brief answer:

No. There is not.

I should clarify that: There is no reliable store-bought method for passing a urine test.

Oh sure, there are a bunch of different methods out there, but none of them actually work anywhere close to reliably. People will tell you that drinking lots of water will help you beat the test (it will indeed make your urine more diluted, which will in turn decrease the level of various metabolites — but since most labs have started testing the water content of your urine, drinking too much water may cause the test to be invalidated, requiring a retest.) Various companies will sell you a hundred and one shakes, mixes, drinks, pills, and powders, each of them promising to help you “beat a drug test”. The truth of the matter, however, is that they’re more or less all junk. Think about it: if there were a reliable way to beat the test, why would companies bother? Most corporations wouldn’t bother going to the legal and financial trouble of testing if your local grocery store sold something that could guarantee that you’ll pass the test.

There are only two 100% reliable ways to avoid failing a drug test: use clean urine (from someone who doesn’t use drugs) or stop smoking weed. If you stop smoking, it’ll take a while before your urine is clean, so be sure to take that into account — the longer you’ve smoked, the more you’ll have to wait. That said, if it comes down to either strapping a bag of urine to your leg, not smoking, or being unemployed… well… I’d just pack up my bong for a while.

Author: Julius

Many people refute the beneficial properties of cannabis seeds, but is is a real fact that marijuana has proven medical properties; hence researchers have published their finding in an attempt to make legal its use. Marijuana scientific name is Cannabis sativa L and is a plant native to warm temperate zones of America, Africa, India, and Asia. The Latin name cannabis is related to the Cannabaceae, the Hemp family it belongs to.? Marijuana is perhaps one of the plants that is popularly known with so many names that it would be hard to list absolutely all of the unique names. Marijuana seeds, weed and cannabis seeds are the most popular forms, but it is also knows as hemp, hemp seed, bhang, Charas, dagga, Ganja, hashish, Sativa Seeds, KIF, Indica seeds, TA MA, conopli, juanita, and Hanf, among many other names.? The active parts of the plant are its conifer stems, flowers, leaves, seeds, and even the secretions of the plant itself. The marijuana components include cannabin, resin, choline, and essential oils. Although marijuana was widely used in Africa and Asia to fight against illness in ancient times, its therapeutic and commercial value in other continents was only recognized until the early 20th century when the United States began to use with medical purposes.? Marijuana was banned in America in 1937 and since nowadays there is a debate for its legalization not only in USA, but also in many other countries around the world arguing its potential medicinal properties. The plant psychoactive ingredients are cannabinoids, responsible for making people get high. Researchers have found high concentrations of this ingredient in the resin of the plant, being also responsible of the abundant production of plant pistils.? ? Cannabinoids are also the basal ingredient of tetrahydrocannabinol and other ingredients, such as cannabinol, cannabidiol, Delta-8 THC, Tetrahydrocannabivarin, and Cannabichromene. The main effect of marijuana is euphoria and, apart from its interaction with the central nervous system, it has a secondary action that accelerates the heart rate and raises blood pressure? Researchers say that marijuana seeds do not cause habit, but a psychological dependence, thus people can control the way in which is consumed when it is not abused. However, the dispute about its medicinal benefits is disputed because its therapeutic use is supported by anecdotal information rather that a formal investigation in depth and it is unlikely get medical institutions participating actively in the marijuana legalization.? According to the data recorded, cannabis seeds help with glaucoma, reducing intraocular pressure, and relieving pain at the time that slow the degenerative process that leads to blindness. Marijuana is also known for its properties to reduce pain and discomfort caused by multiple factors to people suffering from chronic pain.? Cannabis prevents seizures in some patients with epilepsy, and contributes with anorexia since marijuana stimulates the appetite. In the 1970s, some studies reported that smoking marijuana reduces Asthma problems, and it was recently found that it also overcome vomiting, nausea and appetite loss in AID and cancer patients, although all of these therapeutic effects have mostly tested in animals.

Author: Hanfsamen

Many organizations are pushing for the legalization of Marijuana as a medical drug. Marijuana has many medical advantages which include it being a therapeutic drug for cancer and AIDS patients. Many other research and studies dedicated to Marijuana has shown early signs that it can also inhibit cancer cell growth in animals.

In spite of these recent findings, many other organizations have tried to block the legalization of Marijuana as a medical drug. These organizations cited that only some isolated elements of Marijuana can be regarded as medically helpful and that the practice of smoking it does not necessarily have to be done.

Organizations Lobbying For Legal Marijuana Use

Patients out of Time and Law Enforcement against Prohibition are just two of the numerous organizations asking the government to change its mind regarding the? prohibition of Marijuana use . Patients out of Time is an organization that has dedicated itself to the education of health care professionals and the general public regarding the therapeutic use of cannabis. This organization believes that? Marijuana? can be utilized as a drug to help patients who are suffering from several various diseases and illnesses.

LEAP or Law Enforcement against Prohibition is an organization that consists of former and current officers of the law and other individuals who wish to point out the failure of many drug policies. They believe that having a systematic regulation and control of drugs can benefit the community more than prohibition.

Anti-Marijuana

There are other organizations that believe that legalizing marijuana is a good idea and others also want to veto these suggestions from the pro organizations. Other research studies have also pointed out that using Marijuana can adversely affect the brain and the body. These are lifelong effects that can manifest themselves long after an individual has given up using Marijuana. The anti-marijuana organizations stress that there are other products in the medical market that have the same positive effects of Marijuana with little or none of the negative side effects.

Researches regarding the? use of Marijuana? in some individuals who are already sick have shown that it can complicate the illness and add to the severity of it. Most of these organizations that are against the use of Marijuana as a medical drug urge the government for more extensive research to bring to light the effects of the plant.

As of the moment, the laws enacting the illegality of using and growing marijuana are still in place. The government has not budged regarding the many lobbyists who ask for the lifting of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. In spite of the many advocates of pro-Marijuana use, the studies that have been done regarding the usefulness of the drug is still not enough to convince the government of its efficiency in the medical field. Some states in the United States of America have laws and regulations which are more lenient than other states. This is in lieu of sick people who wish to have release from pain and suffering caused by illnesses but there is a legal limit which needs to be followed.

The move to legalize the use and propagation of Marijuana will always have opposition since this plant is controversial. If the government does allow the use and propagation of Cannabis, there will always be a loophole which will be used by drug addicts and traffickers to be able to make money from the lifting of the ban.

Author: Tarun Gupta