Filed under: Hemp&Law, HempTherapy, hemp in general | Tags: AIDS, cancer, cannabis, Detroit, ganja, hashish, hemp, HIV, marijuana, medical cannabis, medical marijuana, Michigan, multiple sclerosis, pot, proposal n.1, Proposition 215, skunk, therapeutic use, weed
Michigan — Marijuana has proven benefits in limiting pain and reducing the side effects of other medicines used to treat certain illnesses. Proposal 1 would allow the use of marijuana for these limited medical purposes. Voters should say yes to Proposal 1.
Proposal 1 would legalize doctor-prescribed marijuana. The Detroit News has reported that upwards of 500,000 Michiganians with “debilitating medical conditions” — HIV/AIDS, cancer, Hepatitis C, Crohn’s disease, Alzheimers, multiple sclerosis and the like — will qualify. It can be useful, for example, in controlling nausea during chemotherapy in cancer treatments.
Anyone found to be lying about their medical condition or distributing marijuana to friends would be barred from future participation.
The proposal contains other safeguards. If voters accept Proposal 1, the Michigan Department of Community Health would create a state medical marijuana registry, and each user will be given an identification card. Anyone without such a card, debilitating illness or not, is still subject to state law. And Michigan law is harsh on marijuana. The penalty for possession is up to one year of imprisonment and up to $2,000 in fines. Dealers risk $10 million in fines and imprisonment for up to 15 years — and these are for first offenses. None of that would change with Proposal 1.
Proposal 1 would also protect the over-21 primary caregivers who handle marijuana for and administer marijuana to sick family or friends. Users are protected from the threat of prosecution and the possibility of losing custody of their children due to smoking medical herbs.
The law would no longer view primary caregivers administering marijuana as drug dealers. And compassionate doctors will no longer have to risk their medical licenses and livelihoods every time they prescribe marijuana to ailing patients.
There are also standards for registered users. All the normal laws apply to smoking in public. No one will be permitted to smoke in public places or near schools or prisons, and “drugged driving” will still be illegal.
Employers won’t be forced to allow use of medical marijuana in the workplace. Insurance providers can decide for themselves whether to cover it.
Twelve states allow the use of marijuana for medical purposes. The record is that it can be properly administered as one more part of the mix of medicines available to physicians.
Proposal 1 seems to have been written to anticipate and address concerns that it is a backdoor route to full-blown legalization. The standard for obtaining a registry card is high and the penalty for misuse is steep.
Proposal 1 won’t make pot any more publicly visible or available than it already is; all it will do is allow doctors, primary caregivers, and most importantly patients another option in managing serious and painful illnesses. Vote yes on Proposal 1.
Source: Detroit Free Press
Filed under: Hemp&Law, HempTherapy, hemp in general | Tags: AIDS, California, cancer, cannabis, ganja, grow, hashish, hemp, marijuana, medical cannabis, medical marijuana, pot, seattle, skunk, weed
Seattle, WA — The state Health Department on Thursday defined a two-month supply of medical marijuana as 24 ounces of usable pot and up to 15 plants, a limit designed to end a decade of confusion over how much patients are allowed to have.
But patient advocates criticized the limit as arbitrary and insufficient, saying it could leave sick people in danger of going to jail, and they threatened to sue to prevent the rule from taking effect.
“We looked at what appears to make sense for most of the patients in the state,” said department spokesman Donn Moyer. “There will be some who don’t need as much, and there may be some who need more.”
Washington was among the first states to approve the medical use of marijuana to treat AIDS, cancer and other debilitating illnesses. The law, passed in 1998, allowed patients a 60-day supply of marijuana, but didn’t say how much that was. Over the years, several patients with a doctor’s authorization to use marijuana have been arrested by police who deemed them to have more pot than necessary.
Patients who need more marijuana than allowed by the new rule can make that argument to a judge if they’re arrested.
The limit adopted Thursday takes effect Nov. 2, and nearly matches the rule used by Oregon, which allows 24 ounces plus six mature plants and 18 immature ones. Some California counties allow more marijuana, but many of the dozen states with medical marijuana laws allow much less than Washington’s new rule – just an ounce or two, in some cases.
The Health Department decided against using a mature immature plant distinction largely because it didn’t want police to have to determine what constituted a mature plant.
Instead, officials went with a limit of 15 plants at any stage of growth.
Law enforcement officers “really just want a line in the sand,” Moyer said, and the 15-plant limit allows patients flexibility to decide how to grow them.
Patient advocates scoffed at that. Douglas Hiatt, a Seattle attorney who represents patients, noted that only female marijuana plants are usable as medicine, and about half of all plants growing from seed grow to become male. So to get to 15 usable plants, a patient or provider might have to plant 30 – in violation of the law.
“No patient I know of anywhere in the state is in compliance with that number,” Hiatt said.
And, he said, the 24-ounce limit for dried bud might work for patients who smoke marijuana, but not for those who eat it. He called the limits “completely nonscientific.”
“We all know this is a political decision that doesn’t have anything to do with the reality of patients’ lives.”
The Health Department initially considered setting the limit at 35 ounces plus 100 square feet of plant canopy. But Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire found those numbers too high and urged officials to get more input from law enforcement and doctors.
The Health Department did so, and cut the numbers accordingly. Law enforcement had worried that drug dealers could use a higher limit to conceal illicit marijuana growing operations.
The Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs’ policy director, Joanna Arlow, did not immediately return a call seeking comment Thursday. But she previously called the 24-ounce limit “reasonable.”
Steve Sarich, a patient and advocate from Kirkland, said he would go to court to seek an injunction to prevent the rule from taking effect. He argued that it was arbitrary, and he took no comfort in knowing that patients could try to prove in court they need more than the limit – something that would likely require a doctor’s testimony.
“How is the doctor going to prove you need more plants? Is the doctor going to prove you’re not very good at growing,” he said. “Where is the clarity this rule was supposed to provide?”
Source: Associated Press
Filed under: Hemp&Law, HempTherapy, hemp in general | Tags: AIDS, cancer, cannabis, ganja, glaucoma, grow, grow houses, hashish, hemp, Hepatitis C, HIV, marijuana, medical cannabis, medical marijuana, multiple sclerosis, pot, skunk, weed
Michigan — If people who are seriously or chronically ill can convince their doctors that using marijuana will make them feel better, the State of Michigan should not stand in the way.
Proposal 1 on the statewide ballot Nov. 4 would allow Michigan residents to cultivate and possess small amounts of marijuana for medical reasons with a doctor’s approval. Voters should say yes to this proposal, which was placed on the ballot by a petition campaign that collected almost 378,000 signatures.
This is not about drug use. It’s about compassion. The initiative would amend Michigan law to allow seriously ill people to seek authorization from a doctor to grow up to a dozen marijuana plants and possess up to 2.5 ounces of the weed, strictly for personal use. The continuing, regulated sale of alcoholic beverages poses more of a problem for society than will passage of this law.Voters in five Michigan cities — Detroit, Ann Arbor, Flint, Ferndale and Traverse City — and a dozen other states have already approved similar statutes without the dire consequences forecast by federal drug-control authorities who fear the start of a slippery slope toward broad drug legalization.
While there are other prescription drugs available to control the pain or anxiety that afflicts the seriously or terminally ill, some such patients find more relief with less loss of control and fewer side effects from marijuana. These are not people who will start peddling the products of their little pot gardens to neighborhood kids. They won’t have that much and will need all of it for their own use. And such sales would still be illegal under the proposed law.
Last month, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a national survey showing Americans rank marijuana well behind other illicit drugs, prescription drugs and alcohol among substances that pose a threat to society.
The national Marijuana Policy Project, which provided nearly all of the $1.1 million spent to put this question on the Michigan ballot, acknowledges a larger goal of replacing “marijuana prohibition with a sensible system of regulation.” But that may be a long way off, if, indeed, it happens at all. Meantime, Proposal 1 is about helping sick people feel better.
Sidebar: Proposal 08-1
A legislative initiative to permit the use and cultivation of marijuana for specified medical conditions. The proposed law would:
• Permit physician approved use of marijuana by registered patients with debilitating medical conditions including cancer, glaucoma, HIV, AIDS, hepatitis C, MS and other conditions as may be approved by the Department of Community Health.
• Permit registered individuals to grow limited amounts of marijuana for qualifying patients in an enclosed, locked facility.
• Require Department of Community Health to establish an identification card system for patients qualified to use marijuana and individuals qualified to grow marijuana.
• Permit registered and unregistered patients and primary caregivers to assert medical reasons for using marijuana as a defense to any prosecution involving marijuana.
Source: Detroit Free Press
Filed under: HempTherapy, hemp in general | Tags: AIDS, cancer, cannabis, ganja, glaucoma, hashish, hemp, Hepatitis C, HIV, marijuana, medical cannabis, medical marijuana, Michigan, multiple sclerosis, pot, skunk, Wagoner, weed
MI — Michigan voters will decided whether or not to legalize medicinal marijuana in a state wide ballot initiative this November. Although polls show there is growing support for the move, getting people to speak openly about the subject can be bit more difficult.
According to a September poll by the Michigan Resource Group of Lansing, 67 percent of voters said they would support the proposal, while 29 percent said they opposed it.
If passed, the law would permit physician approved use of marijuana for patients with “debilitating medical conditions” including cancer, Glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, multiple sclerosis, as well as other conditions approved by the Department of Community Health.
Those patients permitted to use marijuana would be given an identification card and the right to grow marijuana plants in an enclosed, locked facility. The last portion of the law would also permit care givers and patients the right to used medical reasons as a legal defense in marijuana prosecutions.
Joshua Snider, a 30-year-old Petoskey resident, advocated for the use of marijuana as medicine for a variety of medical conditions. Snider said his own mild temporal epilepsy was improved with occasional use of marijuana.
Besides working as a pain killer and an appetite stimulant, Snider asserted that marijuana also has antispasmodic qualities.
“It works a lot better than any other prescribed medicines,” he said. “A lot of them can make you pretty sick, they mess with your stomach.”
Snider is an outspoken advocate for marijuana and helped collect signatures to get the measure on the statewide ballot, he said it is not uncommon for people to shy away from speaking about marijuana in public.
“All of it is fear,” Snider said. “Right now it’s dangerous to use it under the current law.”
While the current ballot initiative would allow patients with glaucoma to use marijuana, Dr. Tim Jarvi, an ophthalmologist in Petoskey, is not convinced that marijuana is better other pharmaceutical treatments already on the market. While marijuana can reduce ocular pressure, Jarvi pointed out that it also decreases blood pressure and therefore makes it more difficult to pump nutrients into the eye through the optic nerve.
“It’s impractical,” he said. “Even if it was legal we wouldn’t use it.”
Dr. George Wagoner, a retired obstetrician and gynecologist in Manistee, admitted that he had no scientific experience with marijuana. But during his wife’s unsuccessful battle against severe ovarian cancer in 2007, he said they turned to the illegal drug and found it helped her cope with the pain better than anything else.
Wagoner said his wife developed intractable nausea and vomiting during her chemotherapy and that other pharmaceutical drugs were ineffective.
“When my wife inhaled the smoke twice, she said the nausea was gone,” he said. “It took practically none to be effective. I think everyone in her situation should be allowed to do this legally.”
However, there are those, even with a personal knowledge of cancer, who do not support the current ballot initiative’s scope.
Bob McCullough, a 74-year-old Petoskey resident, is in remission from multiple myeloma and said he understands the need for medicinal marijuana, but was uncomfortable with people being given the legal right to grow it. He said that would open up the possibility of people selling it illegally for profit.
“There is such a strong desire for this stuff, I think it needs to be done through a pharmacy,” he said. “I would like to see it made available, but only a month’s supply at a time. That way a doctor would know if you are starting to abuse it.”
Although marijuana is illegal under federal law, and classified as a schedule I drug, 12 states have passed medicinal marijuana legislation. In 2005, Traverse City passed a city ordinance to make the prosecution of medicinal marijuana cases the lowest priority. However, both the offices of the county and city prosecutors referred requests for comment to one another, preferring to stay mum rather than weigh in on the taboo subject.
Charlevoix County Sheriff George Lasater deferred a request to comment to his successor, Don Schneider, after admitting he was not familiar with the ballot language. Although Schneider had yet to read the language, he said his first reaction was that legalization of medicinal marijuana would compound the issue of prescription drug abuse and marijuana use further.
“I think there’s always the potential for it to be grossly misused,” he said. “There are some doctors, although they are few and far between, that lack integrity and will give a prescription for anything.”
Source: Petoskey News-Review
Filed under: Hemp&Law, HempTherapy | Tags: California, cancer, cannabis, ganja, marijuana, medical cannabis, medical marijuana, pot, weed
California — It is almost certain that the 56 percent of California voters who approved Proposition 215 in an attempt to legalize medical use of marijuana did not intend for employers to discriminate against persons who take advantage of the law they passed.
As it has evolved since passage, the 1996 initiative lets cities and counties issue medipot usage cards to users who smoke the weed to ward off pain caused by ailments from migraine headaches to a wide variety of cancers. Where they exist, the cards can only be obtained with a doctor’s recommendation.
With that background, the question before the state Supreme Court earlier this year was whether an employer can fire a worker for using medical marijuana with a doctor’s recommendation.Given that court’s longtime background as a bastion of civil liberties, most recently seen in a gay marriage decision very much in line with its tradition of ensuring Californians have even more rights than the U.S. Constitution guarantees, the answer was surprising.
Yes, the court said, a worker can be fired for using medipot with a doctor’s permission even if that use has zero effect on his or her job performance.
“The Compassionate Use Act (Proposition 215) does not eliminate marijuana’s potential for abuse or the employer’s legitimate interest in whether an employee uses the drug,” said the 5-2 majority opinion written by Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar.
She somehow thought she was backing up that statement by adding that “Under California law, an employer may require pre-employment drug tests and take illegal drug use into consideration in making employment decisions.” What about legal drug use, as defined by California voters?
The case itself was totally new judicial ground. Because California and only a few other states have okayed any form of legal medical marijuana use, no similar case has reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the only venue whose decisions form a binding precedent for the top state courts.
It’s clear the court majority reacted with a knee-jerk against any kind of pot use.
That’s essentially what dissenting Justices Joyce L. Kennard and Carlos Moreno said in their minority opinion. The court ruling “renders illusory the law’s promise that responsible use of marijuana” will not be penalized, they said.
In this case, neither employer RagingWire Communications of Sacramento nor anyone else ever claimed that computer technician Gary Ross was less than competent during the 11 days he worked there.
Rather, company lawyers said the firm feared it might be subject to federal raids if Ross stayed.
Federal agents have staged hundreds of raids on city- or county-sanctioned medical marijuana clinics and arrested many medipot growers. But never on those who employ users.
Prosecutors maintain federal laws making all uses of pot illegal trump the state initiative and any local ordinance designed to make it work. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed in 2005, ruling Proposition 215 does not exempt medical marijuana users from prosecution, no matter how severe their illness.
So when a standard pre-employment test detected Ross’ pot use, the state’s high court said, RagingWire was free to bounce him even though he had shown his medipot card prior to the drug test.
When Ross sued, the company responded that it would “arguably be complicit in an activity that’s illegal under federal law” and might lose federal contracts if it kept Ross.
All this left medipot activists frustrated until the state Assembly in late May passed a bill essentially revoking the court decision. This putative law would let medipot patients work, like anyone else. But they could not smoke on the job.
Yet to be determined is whether the state Senate will go along.
If it does, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger – an admitted pot smoker with no medical justification during his bodybuilding and movie days – would have to be a complete hypocrite to veto it.
If that law doesn’t pass, the message delivered by several medical marijuana backers at a news conference just after the court decision came down will stand. “People are going to endure pain and suffering because Supreme Court justices don’t feel marijuana has any medical value. It doesn’t matter what citizens and patients say. It doesn’t matter what doctors say.”
What’s more, the dissenting justices were absolutely correct in saying the decision, if it stands, means medipot users can be punished for trying to kill their pain. They would then continue to face what Kennard called a “cruel choice” between losing their jobs or giving up the only medication that provides significant comfort in coping with some illnesses and with cancer chemotherapy.
The ruling also opens up other problems for patients who use legal narcotics like morphine for pain.
They, too, could fail a drug test, get fired and have no legal recourse. For if employees can be dumped for using one drug, who’s to say they can’t also be fired for using another?
Thomas D. Elias is a syndicated columnist who covers California issues.
Source: Long Beach Press-Telegram (CA)
Website: http://www.presstelegram.com/
USA — Once again the cancer diagnosis of a well-known national figure — in this case Sen. Ted Kennedy — has sparked a flurry of interest in efforts to treat and cure this frustrating, complex and deadly illness. One of the most promising areas of research involves a group of chemicals whose origins may seem shocking.
The chemicals, called cannabinoids, are the active components in marijuana.
Yes, marijuana, the very same drug that seems to generate endless controversy here and abroad, and that our government still claims causes cancer — a claim that appears to stand reality on its head.
The first solid data showing the anti-cancer effects of cannabinoids was developed by U.S. government researchers and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute back in 1975. The scientists found that THC, the component that produces marijuana’s “high,” inhibits the growth of lung-cancer cells in the test tube and in mice.
In a world that made sense, this discovery would have set off a frenzy of new research. After all, President Richard Nixon had declared “war on cancer” just a few years before, and vast sums of money were being spent investigating new approaches. But Nixon had also declared “war on drugs,” with marijuana at the top of the demon-drugs list, so our government — by far the world’s largest source of medical research funding — never pursued these remarkable findings. Research ground to a near-complete halt until the late 1990s.
Since then, THC and other marijuana components have been shown to block growth not only of lung tumors but a variety of other cancers, including leukemia, lymphoma and cancers of the breast and skin. These effects seem to occur through a variety of different cellular mechanisms.
As Spanish researcher Dr. Manuel Guzman, one of the world’s leading experts in the field, wrote in a 2003 review in the journal Nature Reviews: Cancer, “Cannabinoids are selective anti-tumor compounds, as they can kill tumor cells without affecting their non-transformed counterparts. It is probable that cannabinoid receptors regulate cell-survival and cell-death pathways differently in tumor and non-tumor cells.”
That is exactly what you want in a cancer drug: Something that kills the malignant cells without harming healthy cells. It’s because most chemotherapy drugs aren’t selective enough that they cause such terrible nausea, vomiting, hair loss and other side effects.
One of the most fruitful areas of research has involved gliomas, the same type of brain tumor that Sen. Kennedy is battling. A search of PubMed, the U.S. government’s medical database, using the search terms cannabis (the scientific name for marijuana), cannabinoid, and glioma turned up 94 scientific-journal articles, most of them published since 2000.
Most are lab or animal studies, demonstrating various mechanisms by which these marijuana chemicals kill glioma cells or stop glioma tumor growth. Amazingly, despite all this evidence, there has been only one, tiny, human study thus far, conducted by Dr. Guzman.
Guzman and colleagues injected THC directly into brain tumors in a handful of patients with recurring, inoperable gliomas — patients considered terminal. It was primarily a safety study, and the THC injections proved completely safe.
Although the researchers concluded that the injection method they used may not have adequately distributed the medicine to all parts of these large tumors, two patients seemed to show definite (albeit temporary) improvement because of the treatment. The researchers urge that additional trials testing THC and other cannabinoids in this and other types of tumors be undertaken.
This is an exciting area of research, but one that has been needlessly — and perhaps lethally — slowed down by the U.S. government’s slavish devotion to anti-marijuana dogma. That most of the work testing these marijuana derivatives as anti-cancer drugs is occurring outside the United States is a sad commentary indeed.
Bruce Mirken, a longtime health journalist, serves as director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project: http://www.mpp.org/
Source: Providence Journal, The (RI)
Filed under: HempTherapy | Tags: AIDS, cancer, medical cannabis, multiple sclerosis
Source: Greensboro News & Record
Greensboro, NC — A Guilford County representative wants to get the legislature fired up to study the benefits of medical marijuana. But similar efforts in the past went up in smoke.
If the bill sponsored by Rep. Earl Jones should pass, the Legislative Research Commission would determine the feasibility of legalizing marijuana for medical purposes.
“Medical use of marijuana has already been demonstrated to manage the health problems related to Alzheimer’s, AIDS, arthritis, cancer, multiple sclerosis,” said Jones, a Democrat. “There are a number of organizations that have endorsed medical marijuana.”
But legalizing marijuana for any purpose still is not approved by the federal government, and previous attempts to study the issue in North Carolina have failed.
Rep. Paul Luebke, a Durham Democrat, filed a similar bill in 2003 that failed in the state House.
“What happened five years ago is that legislators were a little afraid of taking up the topic,” Luebke said. “There were not that many constituents around the state who had advocated for the benefits of medical marijuana. I could not find the necessary support to get a study commission.”
Recent attempts to legalize marijuana for pain-relief purposes in South Carolina and Tennessee also failed.
Nancy King, a medical ethicist at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, said medical drug use carries complicated consequences.
“Using marijuana in a medical context is not distinguishable from using it in a context of illegal drugs from the perspective of law enforcement,” King said.
But Jones and Luebke think the tide of public opinion on medical marijuana may be turning.
Twelve states allow doctors to prescribe marijuana to relieve pain and other symptoms, and only in California has the federal government intervened.
Ray Warren is the director of state policies with the Marijuana Policy Project, a group that lobbies for legalization of marijuana. He said the California law allows patients to cooperatively grow their own marijuana. Other states do not.
“You simply don’t hear about any issues in Rhode Island or Vermont or Montana,” Warren said. “In my mind, North Carolina would be a very receptive place to a compassionate marijuana law.”
John Rustin, director of government relations for the N.C. Family Policy Council, disagrees.
Rustin said his group believes that legalizing marijuana for any purpose sends a mixed message to young people and hinders the fight against teen drug use.
“The legislature now is dealing with a lot of the tension focused on gang prevention and gang activity,” Rustin said. “Of course, a lot of those activities or problems are related to illegal drug use. We don’t think it’s necessary to study this. The real purpose of a study would be to move toward legalization of marijuana.”
But Jones said the proposed study may not lead to that end.
“I’ve found the best route to take on something like this is to have a study committee where people can get accurate facts and information and draw their own conclusions,” he said. “They already have the myths and misinformation.”
Should legalizing marijuana for medical use be studied?
Cannabis may be bad for the lungs, but the active ingredient in marijuana may help combat lung cancer, new research suggests.
In lab and mouse studies, the compound, known as THC, cut lung tumor growth in half and helped prevent the cancer from spreading, says Anju Preet, PhD, a Harvard University researcher in Boston who tested the chemical.
While a lot more work needs to be done, the results suggest THC has therapeutic potential, she tells WebMD.
Moreover, other early research suggests the cannabis compound could help fight brain, prostate, and skin cancers as well, Preet says.
The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.
The finding builds on the recent discovery of the body’s own cannabinoid system, Preet says. Known as endocannabinoids, the natural cannabinoids stimulate appetite and control pain and inflammation.
THC seeks out, attaches to, and activates two specific endocannabinoids that are present in high amounts on lung cancer cells, Preet says. This revs up their natural anti-inflammatory properties. Inflammation can promote the growth and spread of cancer.
In the new study, the researchers first demonstrated that THC inhibited the growth and spread of cells from two different lung cancer cell lines and from patient lung tumors. Then, they injected THC into mice that had been implanted with human lung cancer cells. After three weeks, tumors shrank by about 50 percent, compared with tumors in untreated mice.
Preet notes that animals injected with THC seem to get high, showing signs of clumsiness and getting the munchies. You would expect to see the same thing in humans, so if this work does pan out, getting the dose right is going to be all important, she says.
Paul B. Fisher, PhD, a professor of clinical pathology at Columbia University, says that though the work is interesting, it’s still very early.
The issue with using a drug of this type becomes the window of
concentration that will be effective. Can you physiologically achieve what you want without causing unwanted effects, he tells WebMD.
By Charlene Laino
References: http://www.cbsnews.com/
