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Only two medications have been approved in the United States by the Food and Drug Administration to treat the symptoms of autism. Both are antipsychotic drugs that are not always effective and carry serious side effects. But a new study in Israel is trying to confirm anecdotal evidence that Cannabidiol (CBD) is actually helpful for children with autism. According the story in USA Today, recent trials in Israel showed that cannabis helped children with epilepsy by drastically reducing seizures and improving behavior for those who also have autism. Epilepsy afflicts about 30% of autistic children. Israel is one of one of three countries along with Canada and the Netherlands that has a government-sponsored cannabis program. More than 110 cannabis clinical trials are currently underway in Israel. READ MORE

"Back in the day" it was not unusual to find sensational little paperback books at the news stand costing a dime or a quarter - some called them 'dime novels' - many with mystery or crime themes and, shall we say, eye-catching cover art. Demand for these books were part of the social fabric of the time (though whether publishers were leading it or feeding it is up for speculation). Publishers and movie producers created an bawdy subset of this genre were propaganda against cannabis. They preyed upon people's fears of cannabis, and clung closely to the 6 CANNABIS CANARDS, while keeping important research on cannabis' medicinal properties from being conducted for decades. Here's a gallery of some of the titles that kept people distracted and afrai:

While reading Entrepreneur Magazine recently, as one does when studying this booming industry (Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, Bloomberg...) we spotted an article about the Oxford University study focused "on cannabis for treatment of pain, cancer and inflammatory diseases. The goal is to unlock new medical uses for marijuana," This development at one of the world's most prestigious universities is exciting and timely considering that, in American universities, cannabis has not been adequately studied for decades. READ MORE

"With 100 workers on the payroll, [River City Phoenix dispensary is] the largest unionized dispensary in the state. Their employees start at $13 an hour and get bumped to $15 after 90 days. They receive health benefits, and will eventually participate in the UFCW’s pension plan as well." The United Food & Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) has been a force for developing best practices for cannabis dispensaries for years now. They even have a distinct program - "Cannabis Workers Rising" - begun in 2010, which represents tens of thousands of cannabis workers in multiple states and has been instrumental in developing family wage & benefits structures and training programs. A recent article in by Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Times keeps this important industry component front-of-mind.

The US Census Bureau says there are 11,614,373 people in the state of Ohio. That's 23 million eyeballs glued to the screen this weekend as Lebron James and Co. work toward another NBA Finals. (And this is how you doom a post to the dustbin of history...) Using the standard/conservative estimate of 2% of the population being medical cannabis users, one can easily calculate that there are 232,287 cannabis patients suffering from qualifying medical condition(s), who are anxiously waiting for Ohio's growers, processors, and dispensary owners to get the Ohio Cannabis Industry complete applications and begin producing the medicines now allowed by state law. But wait - Julie Carr Smyth of the Miami Herald asks some unavoidable questions that we paraphrase here: + Only 24 licenses will be made available (12 large, 12 small, totaling 336,000 square feet for the entire state)? + Ohio has the highest licensing fee in the US? ($20,000 non refundable application fee; up to $180,000 license fee; and holding $250,000 in liquid assets ...) + There is an insurance requirement but the state board says no such product exists? + There is a banking requirement, but everyone knows that banks won't take cannabis money (to avoid running afoul of federal regulations)? + There is a university-lab-testing requirement, but no universities have agreed to participate? And how many dispensaries will be allowed in the state, to serve the 232,287 patients: Hey, Ohio: the longer you delay delivery of medicines to patients, the longer patients will either have to suffer or utilize the black market. Neither of which is acceptable. And both of which are excellent reasons to get this show on the road. READ MORE

Deeply embedded in cannabis culture is a sense of humor and fun. So it was encouraging to see this Twitter post from the police in Wyoming, Minnesota. Not bad, Wyoming PD! We'll save you the screed on law enforcement "finally lightening up" and acknowledging the relatively lower-risk presented by cannabis than other drugs. But we salute the much more effective strategy of "speaking the language" than "Just Say No", precious as it was. And while we're on the subject of joshing, here's more from 4/20: READ MORE

"A couple years ago, these are dollars that would have been going to the black market, drug cartels. Now money that was used to fund drug cartels is being used to fund college scholarships.” And that's not all, says CBS News: "In the Denver metro area, the town of Edgewater gets 20% of its total sales tax from marijuana sales. The town of 5,300 plans to spend $1.4 million in pot tax revenue on repaving 12 miles of streets and replacing the old city hall with a new $10 million complex. The new city hall will include a police station and library to be finished by 2018." "Adams County has earmarked more than $500,000 for scholarships for low-income students.... In Aurora, the money earmarked to help the homeless will be used to purchase two vans for local nonprofit outreach groups to use to transport people to shelters and for other needs... Another $2.8 million will go toward bonds for a new recreation center in the growing southeast part of Aurora." In 2016-17, lawmakers approved $900,000 to pay for bullying prevention programs, another $900,000 to programs to prevent students from dropping out and $4.4 million for another competitive grant program helping kids learn to read. "The [Colorado Department of Education] is offering new grants up to $40,000 per school per year for bullying prevention. ""As far as we know, we're the only state that is providing such significant funds to prevent bullying in schools," said Dr. Adam Collins, bullying prevention and education grant coordinator for the CDE. READ MORE

The war on cannabis started back in the 1920's ...

Cheers were heard around the country as West Virginia became the 29th American state to legalize cannabis for medical use (for political reasons, we loathe using the term “medical marijuana”, but we aren’t prideful enough to ignore SEO). Governor Jim Justice signed SB 386, which passed the State Senate 28-6 on March 29th, and the House on April 4 by 76024, saying “I think all of us will feel like we’re doing something good for families out there.” That comment gave us pause… Even though Justice is a Democrat, West Virginia has voted Republican for 20 years. Thought those Republicans were law-and-order folks who didn’t approve of cannabis’ legalization? (Oh yeah, the law doesn’t go into effect until 2019…) Well, West Virginia has two HUGE reasons to want cannabis legalized: jobs and opiate addiction. On the economy, though the President promised to bring coal jobs back, technological advances have changed the arithmetic of coal mining – such as “mountain topping”. (“Coal companies in Appalachia are increasingly using this method because it allows for almost complete recovery of coal seams while reducing the number of workers required to a fraction of what conventional methods require.” Doesn’t seem those jobs will come back. Cannabis, on the other hand, is a dynamic job creator. The State of Colorado has seen more than 25,000 jobs created in multiple sectors of the industry in the last few years. And the state could collect an estimated $45 Million in new tax revenue from its new industry annually (counting visitors from neighboring states, estimates climb to $194 Million), as well as reduce law enforcement costs (cannabis arrests are currently half of all drug arrests in the state, according to ACLU data). On the health front, West Virginia has the 3rd highest cancer-related death rate in the US, and the highest rate of opioid-related overdose deaths. Cannabis can be a useful tool in helping patients of each of these, and many other conditions and diseases. So when Governor Justice opens a door to West Virginia families – some facing serious economic and health challenges – everyone rightly applauds. But one questions remains: the speed of implementation. So West Virginia, while trying to solve such big problems, why go slow?

Few would disagree that there’s evidence of a crisis in the United State over high rates of opioid addiction. The US Center for Disease Control says “91 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.” Many call this a problem of epidemic proportions. The US Department of Health and Human Services calls it an “epidemic”; The US food and Drug Administration is “deeply concerned about the growing epidemic of opioid abuse, dependence and overdose in the United States.” And the NY Times calls it “America’s 50-state epidemic.” Interestingly, some suggest that a powerful weapon in the fight against often-deadly, addictive opioids, is cannabis. We use the word ‘interestingly’, of course, because cannabis appears on the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Schedule I list of the most dangerous drugs which are characterized as having “no currently accepted medical use in the United States, a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision, and a high potential for abuse.” And people are still calling it a ‘gateway drug’… but more on those archaic cannabis canards later. Regarding reducing the epidemic of opioid addiction nationwide, one critical question seems to be, “If opioid addicts replace their opiates with cannabis, would it reduce their rates of overuse, addiction, and death?” The answer seems to be “yes”, according to many including Yasmin L. Hurd, PhD, of the Friedman Brain Institute, Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Center for Addictive Disorders, Mount Sinai Behavioral Health System, in New York City. “Epidemics require a paradigm shift in thinking about all possible solutions. The rapidly changing sociopolitical marijuana landscape provides a foundation for the therapeutic development of medicinal cannabidiol to address the current opioid abuse crisis.” (links to research paper available behind paywall). Dr. Hurd also said “It is important to move with a deep sense of urgency to leverage the opportunity presented by increased legalization of medical marijuana to expedite the development of cannabidiol for therapeutic interventions for opioid use disorder, thus curbing the opioid epidemic." Why would an opiate addict turn to cannabis? First, it has to do the primary job of providing pain relief. The “cannabis” used must be the right blend: heavy CBD, little or no THC. Cannabis’ use for pain is approved by several states that have a list of specific qualifying conditions, including Ohio, California, and Pennsylvania. So it’s well known even among lay people and (enlightened) politicians that high-CDB cannabis is a strong pain killer. Would cannabis reduce the likelihood of addiction? A pilot study suggests CBD reduces the urge to seek more drugs. Harvard’s J. Wesley Boyd, MD/PhD quotes the National Institute on Drug Abuse - only 9% of cannabis users become addicted, versus 32% of tobacco users and 15% of alcohol users. 23% of heroin (also an opioid) users become addicted. Last, by substituting opiates with cannabis, are deaths reduced? One important metric is death-by-overdose, and the history of cannabis shows zero overdoses in thousands of years. “The findings suggest that… marijuana could be a safer replacement for opioids, since marijuana doesn't induce overdose," according to Dr. Hurd. So how about other manners of demise? Many studies of traffic deaths, hospital visits indicate they are reduced but perhaps the most compelling and easy to understand is from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine, in which “Marcus Bachhuber, then at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Pennsylvania, examined death certificates in all 50 states between 1999 and 2010. They found that the annual rate of deaths due to overdose on an opioid painkiller was nearly 25% lower in states that permitted medical marijuana. In 2010, that translated into 1729 fewer deaths in those states. The researchers also found that the effect grew stronger in the 5 to 6 years after the states approved medical marijuana.” What’s keeping larger studies from going forward? Politics. Because cannabis is on Schedule I, it can’t be acquired by qualified research facilities. So it can’t be studied, not can data be produced. Without data, it will be hard to get cannabis off Schedule I. Until it is off Schedule I, it can’t be studied, and round and round we have gone for the past 47 years. "We are in a ridiculous catch-22 situation right now," Dr Hurd said. "We could actually move very quickly if there was a federal mandate to put together a consortium that can quickly investigate [cannabis] for opioid use disorder.” Seems people will continue to die at a rate of 91 per day until data and results like the ones listed here can be broadly implemented.

We're very focused on the benefits of medical cannabis here on the American Cannabis Report, but it's been hard not to notice the many recent articles about the International Church of Cannabis, which just opened. (In Denver, natch. On 4/20, natch.) It's the super groovy new home of the Elevationists, as its members are known. The visuals of this place are stunning! And if you really want a most excellent experience, visit the Elevationist website home page and click on "360" in the main image. We grabbed the images from this Huffington Post article -- the images are attributed to Helen R. Richardson via Getty Images.

The beer industry has positioned itself as “American as Apple Pie”. After all, Budweiser was renamed “America” for the summer of 2016 through the presidential election. By claiming to be the equivalent to America itself, the beer industry can now defend itself against any outside aggressor – including cannabis. And to beer, cannabis is the ultimate “outside aggressor” – you can tell because the headline says “Marijuana” Conveniently, cannabis has been called marijuana or “marihuana” (note the “h” in the middle) by politicians since the 1930’s. Don’t believe us? As recently as December 2016, “[Drug Enforcement Administration] … drew attention for its use of the archaic spelling of “marihuana” — with an “H” instead of a “J.” The rule is entitled “Establishment of a New Code for Marihuana Extract,” and uses the H spelling throughout.” The article continues: “In the early 20th century “marijuana” or “marihuana” were primarily colloquial terms borrowed from Mexican Spanish, as the Brookings Institution’s John Hudak explains in his book Marijuana: A Short History. “… after the Spanish-American War [in 1898],” Hudak writes, “American resentment toward Mexicans and Mexican immigrants exploded.” Authorities who wanted to prohibit use of the drug soon discovered that associating it with Mexican immigrants was an effective propaganda tool. The word marijuana – with both “H” and “J” variants – was “popularized in the United States during the 1930s by advocates of prohibition who sought to exploit prejudice against despised minority groups, especially Mexican immigrants,” explained journalist and medical marijuana advocate Martin Lee in his book Smoke Signals. By the way, is beer really losing ground to cannabis? It appears not. “In states where medical marijuana is legal, beer consumption was down 0.6% on average in the three years leading up to legalisation, but rose 0.1% in the three years after. “One does not need to look far into popular culture to see that beer and weed cultures can be highly complementary,” said Bernstein. [ibid] “So far the fears of declining beer drinkers may be just that: fear. In Colorado, 2016 taxes received by the state on alcohol sales actually increased between January and November. Beer tax receipts climbed 4.5%, spirits rose 4.0% and wine increased 3.3%. Tax receipts did decline in the months of April, July, September and October for each of the alcohol categories. It's possible that on certain occasions like 4/20 and the fourth of July, consumers switch to cannabis, but overall alcohol is thriving in Colorado. image source: http://www.fullthrottlebottles.com/images/beer-bottles.jpg