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A number of mothers, each with a severely epileptic child, are today holding a vigil outside the offices of the Department of Health & Social Care, the London headquarters of NHSE, the Scottish Parliament, and the Welsh Assembly.

The mothers are protesting as medical cannabis is the only medication that works for managing their children’s symptoms but they have been denied NHS prescriptions despite medical cannabis being legalised in November 2018.

No help for families

Private prescriptions, which can cost thousands of pounds, are the only option available to the families, which are unable to obtain medical cannabis through the NHS. The UK Government has told them that it will not offer financial support, despite the devolved administration in Northern Ireland recently stepping in to supporting a family there.

A spokesman for the End Our Pain Campaign said: “Everyone involved from the Government and NHS side says they want to help, but the months drag on and these families have not had any help. Some of the doctors in the leading medical professional bodies constantly say that they want more evidence that medical cannabis works and is safe. What they fail to acknowledge is that these families have got the best evidence of all that it works for their child.

“They have been securing and administering it for months now with dramatic improvements in their children’s wellbeing. Some of the children have gone from being exceptionally ill to going a year seizure free. Given what appears to have happened in Northern Ireland we are pleading with Matt Hancock and the health ministers Jeane Freeman MSP in Scotland and Vaughan Gething MS in Wales to find a way to make this work in their jurisdictions.”

Experts have been predicting marijuana legalization in Pennsylvania since at least as early as 2013, more than a year after the first few states in the U.S. legalized recreational adult use. The state didn’t make medical marijuana legal until 2016 and patients didn’t gain full access to medical marijuana in dispensaries until two years after that. All in all, it’s been a long journey, that some now believe may come to an end with recreational marijuana being legalized in the state thanks to the life-disrupting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While several Pennsylvania legislators have fought against or failed to get marijuana legalization passed, current governor Tom Wolf was the one who ultimately signed medical marijuana into law in 2016, making Pennsylvania one of 33 states to legalize medical cannabis. This is why, in August, when Wolf called on the legislature to legalize recreational marijuana, our ears perked up a bit.

Eleven states and Washington, D.C. have legalized cannabis for adult use. Could the man who garnered enough support for medical marijuana do the same to finally eliminate the prohibition of adult recreational use?

Some argue Republican and Democratic leaders are still too divided on the issue to see anything passed. Others say the one thing that makes the conversation different this time is COVID-19. The pandemic has left the state with a gaping $4 billion budget shortfall. Filling that budgetary hole has become a priority for lawmakers across party lines and revenues from taxes on legal marijuana sales could mean an influx of tax dollars to help make up the shortage.

“In challenging times like these, foregoing the chance to boost small business, minority entrepreneurship, employment and state tax revenue can hardly be passed up. That is true now more than ever,” executive vice president of the National Association of Cannabis Businesses Mark Gorman said in a recent statement.

Celebrations for medical cannabis access being added to Nebraska’s ballot in November turned out to be very short-lived. But the fight goes on.

There is no medical marijuana program in Nebraska currently and no other allowances for patients. That may have changed after the November election.

Late last month we reported Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana had announced its amendment supporting patient access to medical marijuana would appear on the November ballot. More than 182,000 petition signatures were delivered to support the initiative. However, the group expected a legal fight to keep it there and certainly got one.

Late last week, the Nebraska Supreme Court issued an opinion to remove the constitutional amendment from the ballot. Five judges ruled against the amendment’s inclusion and two supported it.

The amendment being dropped was based on a constitutional requirement that all proposed initiatives must be a “single subject”, to avoid voter confusion and attempts to have two separate and different issues being rolled into one to get something over the line. It appears the amendment was viewed to have multiple subjects, the right to access medical marijuana for medical purposes – and supply. But you can’t really have one without the other.

Marijuana possession arrests in the state of Texas dropped 30% in 2019 compared to the previous year, according to data recently released by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).

Texas legalized hemp last year, forcing law enforcement officials to drop low-level marijuana cases across the state due to the crop being virtually indistinguishable from the psychoactive and illegal form of cannabis. 

In order to prosecute someone for marijuana possession, a test proving the seized plant contains a THC content above 0.3% would need to be carried out.

However, as most crime labs in Texas are unable to perform potency tests, prosecutors have been dumping cases involving the possession of small amounts of potential weed, which is punishable with up to 180 days in prison or a $2,000 fine. 

The data released by the DPS showed there were roughly 63,000 marijuana prosecutions in Texas in 2018. Last year, the number dropped to 45,000 as the new law legalizing hemp took effect. Meanwhile, cannabis manufacturing arrests fell from 2,700 to 1,900 during the same period. 

This has been an unforgettably difficult year for many Americans. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has cost lives, jobs, and completely upended our normal societal habits. But amid this chaos is the reality that, in just 51 days, Americans across the country will head to their local voting booth or mail in their ballots to decide who'll lead this country for the next four years.

Keep in mind that it's not just the presidency or the make-up of Congress that'll be decided on November 3, 2020. Residents in six states will be heading to the polls to decide if marijuana will be legalized from an adult-use or medical standpoint.

We entered 2020 with two-thirds of all states having legalized medical pot, along with 11 states that have legalized the consumption and/or retail sale of recreational weed. By the time the November election is over, there could be as many as two new states to legalize medical marijuana and up to four new states that might wave the green flag on adult-use cannabis.

Here are the five states guaranteed to be voting on marijuana in November.

New Jersey

All the way back in mid-December 2019, New Jersey became the first state to guarantee that there would be a marijuana initiative on its November ballot. Interestingly, New Jersey appeared to be very close to legalizing recreational cannabis at the legislative level during the first quarter of 2019. However, momentum for a legislative approval was derailed by a late push for certain social reforms. 

The money was supposed to fund veteran programs but instead Missouri is burning through cash to defend itself in court.

In 2018, Missouri voters approved a ballot measure to legalize medical marijuana in the state. Two years later and licensed sales have yet to occur. Instead, businesses that applied for a license and were rejected have filed more than 800 lawsuits against Missouri. To date, 785 of the cases remain unresolved.

Missouri regulators have spent $1.3 million in court fees defending themselves against the 853 appeals filed. Lisa Cox, the Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) spokeswoman, said these were a one-time fee associated with getting the program off its feet. There were 2,270 facility applications sent to the state, but only 348 licenses were awarded.

“The number of appeals is not an indication of flaws in the process, but rather the high number of applicants,” Cox told The St. Louis Dispatch.

Funds generated from the program support operating and administrative costs. Whatever is left over gets deposited into a newly created Veterans’ Health and Care Fund. Although business application and medical card fees produced $19 million as of December 2019, the Missouri Veterans Commission, which determines how to spend allocations, has yet to receive a penny. However, a state release announced the DHSS had transferred $2.1 million to the Veterans’ Fund over the weekend.

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce approved a bill this week that seeks to improve and accelerate research on medical marijuana in the United States. 

The Medical Marijuana Research Act, introduced by Representative Earl Blumenauer, is a bipartisan piece of legislation that tackles the inefficiency of current cannabis research in the country on several fronts.

First, the bill would streamline the elaborate and lengthy process of obtaining a license to conduct cannabis research. Furthermore, it would help provide cannabis researchers with better quality marijuana, a major sticking point in current research efforts. 

Researchers in the U.S. currently have access only to cannabis grown at the University of Mississippi and run by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), whose crops have been described as “subpar” by scientists. The only existing federally authorized facility for growing research-grade marijuana also appears to be cultivating cannabis that is more akin to hemp.

“With some form of cannabis legal in nearly every state, it’s inexcusable that the federal government is still blocking qualified researchers from advancing the scientific knowledge of cannabis,” Representative Blumenauer said. 

A new U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) interim rule about CBD and hemp manufacturing has sown distress and confusion in the federally legal industry.

Operators say the rule makes it effectively impossible to produce CBD products legally. On his blog, North Carolina cannabis lawyer Rod Kight wrote that the new rule “threatens to destroy” the industry.

The federal government considers cannabis plants and products containing less than 0.3% THC to be hemp, which was legalized in the 2018 Farm Bill. Cannabis containing more than 0.3% THC, however, is an illegal schedule I controlled substance. Hemp businesses have long understood the distinction, and compliant operators strive to grow plants and sell products below the limit.

The rule, which was unveiled August 21 and took effect immediately, says any extract or substance produced during manufacturing or processing which contains more than 0.3% THC is an illegal drug, even if it derives from legal plants and is diluted or refined to legal limits before it reaches consumers. (Read the rule here.) While there are numerous ways to convert hemp plants into CBD products or additives, many if not all involve concentrating the plant matter, resulting in substances that contain more than 0.3% THC.

With the new rule, “It’s almost as if they’re trying to cut the legs out from under the industry,” said Dave DiCosola, CEO of Chicago-based CBD brand Half Day. 

Roughly a mile from the Little Bay de Noc in Michigan’s upper peninsula, tucked in a strip mall off Interstate 2, you’ll find Family Video, the last video rental store in the city of Escanaba. 

Family Video has been a dependable source of entertainment in this post-industrial town for 20 years. Today, the store’s neon green-and-orange marquee reveals the only discernible change to the place in the past two decades: instead of the week’s new movie releases, the letters announce WE SELL CBD NOW! The pivot to cannabis might seem like a major branding miss for a “family” video store in a straight-laced rural area, but Escanaba residents who frequent the store aren’t bothered by the change. They know Michelle Graham manages Family Video, and Michelle can be trusted.

When Michelle started working at Family Video five years ago she was well suited for the job. An extremely personable 35-year-old mother of five, it was easy for her to treat her customers like members of her family, which incidentally was part of her job description. The tedious aspects of the job that would bother most people—patiently nodding through dubious justifications for late rental returns, or listening to a scandalized mother rant about movie ratings—were minor obstacles en route to getting to know and understand her customers more deeply. “I’m like a sponge.” Michelle told me, her brown hair and glasses framing her smile when I spoke with her in July. “I soak up everyone’s stories.”

Today, Michelle’s conversations with customers have higher stakes. Since Family Video started selling CBD in 2019, she has been working with the urgency of an ER physician and the passion of a born-again preacher to deliver the good news about CBD—a cannabis compound that doesn’t contain psychoactive THC—to penny-pinching skeptics and convention-loving “Yoopers”. The vigor of her approach makes it clear why Escanaba’s Family Video is consistently named one of the top ten sellers of CBD products from among the chain’s more than 700 outlets nationwide. The breathless excitement with which Michelle speaks to anyone who will listen about the nuances of CBD, the proper way to use it, the different effects of an oil versus a balm and other details might come across as a sales pitch, unless you know the motivation behind it. For years, Michelle has watched as opioid addiction has devastated her community; in CBD, she sees a potential remedy. For Michelle, Escanaba is a city on fire, and through Family Video she’s found herself in an odd position to fight the blaze.

Twelve years ago Michelle was in a car accident that sent her from the back seat of a car through the front windshield. Since then, she says she’s been “living with the body of an 80-year-old.” She’s had chronic back, nerve, and joint pain, a bone spur, vision loss, carpal tunnel tendonitis, arthritis, and deterioration of tendons and cartilage in her knees and ankles. She had foot surgery for plantar fascitis. She lost her spleen which has left her battling hemorrhoids and severe anemia. And she was only managing three to four hours of sleep a night due to pain.

Led by surging cannabis sales, farm cash receipts in the first half of the year bucked the general decline caused by the coronavirus.

Receipts of $16.7 billion increased 5.2 per cent over 2019, says the Statistics Canada report.

Without a 62 per cent increase — $685 million — in cannabis sales, farm cash receipts would have increased a mere .8 per cent.

Higher crop receipts of $1.3 billion helped offset a $629 million decline in livestock sales. The decrease was caused by market restrictions when COVID-19 broke out.

Lentil receipts tripled to $604 million with better prices and increased exports to India and Turkey.

The Austin Police Department will no longer cite or arrest people for small possessions of cannabis, Police Chief Brian Manley wrote in a July memo. The announcement essentially decriminalized weed possession in the city, but data shows that marijuana arrests were already trending downward statewide.

Cannabis possession arrests declined 30 per cent between 2018 and 2019, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). Although about 63,000 cannabis arrests were prosecuted by the state in 2018, that figure dropped to 45,000 possession arrests in 2019 and actual prosecutions declined by more than half.

These declines are associated with hemp legalization in Texas. THC-rich cannabis remains illegal in the state, but the similarity between the plants have caused confusion among state police. That’s because Texas law technically defines marijuana as any cannabis plant above 0.3 per cent THC.

That caused the dominoes to fall that lawmakers did not intend. Back in February, Texas crime labs announced they would stop testing suspected cannabis in low-level possession cases. Accordingly, state prosecutors began dismissing possession cases without lab reports that proved THC was present in the cannabis.

Since hemp legalization, cannabis manufacturing arrests also dropped from about 2,700 in 2018 to 1,900 in 2019.

When it comes to global cannabis policy, the United States has set the tone for many decades.

Cannabis was first prohibited in the United States in 1937, and since that time the U.S. has imposed its reefer madness will on the rest of the global community.

Many countries have willingly gone along with the U.S.’s push for continued prohibition, however, it’s a safe assumption that some nations would have preferred to take a more sensible approach, yet refrained from doing so out of fear of backlash from the U.S.

International treaties have kept cannabis prohibition in place in many parts of the world.

Those prohibition policies have ruined countless lives while also preventing the cannabis industry from doing its part to boost local economies, generate tax revenues, and create jobs.

A House of Representatives committee voted on Wednesday to approve a bill that would allow researchers to conduct studies using marijuana produced in compliance with regulations in states with legal cannabis. The vote marks the first time a congressional committee has approved a measure to allow scientists to use marijuana produced from sources other than those authorized by the federal government.

With a voice vote, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a substitute version of The Marijuana Research Act of 2019 (H.R. 3797) from Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon. The bill’s new language streamlines the approval process for those applying to cultivate cannabis with the approval of the federal government. The measure also permits researchers to use marijuana and cannabis products manufactured in accordance with programs legal under state law.

Cannabis From The Feds Is Schwag

Under current federal statute, FDA-approved research must be conducted with cannabis produced at a cultivation facility at the University of Mississippi. However, many researchers have said that the marijuana produced by the facility is difficult to obtain and of low-quality, bearing little resemblance to the cannabis products available from state-legal producers.

“As momentum grows in our effort to end the failed prohibition of cannabis, we also need to address failed drug laws like the ones that make it extremely difficult for researchers and doctors to study cannabis. With some form of cannabis legal in nearly every state, it’s inexcusable that the federal government is still blocking qualified researchers from advancing the scientific knowledge of cannabis,” Blumenauer, the co-chair of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus, said in a press release after Wednesday’s vote. “The bipartisan support of our legislation in today’s committee markup is an important step in removing unnecessary barriers to medical cannabis research and ensuring that patients, clinicians, and consumers can fully understand the benefits and risks of cannabis.”

Activists Applaud Bill

Paul Armentano, the deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), said that the “proposed regulatory change is necessary and long overdue. In fact, NORML submitted comments to the US Federal Register in April explicitly calling for this change.”

ARTICLE BY: HILARY BRICKEN

I’ve been practicing corporate, transactional, and regulatory law in the marijuana industry for going on 10 years now. I’ve never understood exactly why folks get excited about, or even remotely interested, when various lifetime politicians in Congress push bills on the federal legalization/rescheduling of marijuana. Why? Because these bills notoriously go nowhere (for a number of what seem to be purely political reasons) and will continue to go nowhere, in my opinion, where marijuana (while extremely popular with most Americans and obviously with certain entire states) is still too politically hot to trust out-of-touch members of Congress to do anything meaningful about it, and especially now given that the nation’s priorities seem to revolve around dealing with COVID-19 (and rightly so).

The House’s planned floor vote in early September around the most recent federal marijuana legalization measure (the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act (“MORE Act” (see the House version here, which was introduced last year)) is no different. While I’m glad to see members of Congress continue to try to chip away at the continued (failed) War on Drugs regarding cannabis, I’m honestly tired of seeing the fanfare attendant with these legalization bills. At the same time, my interest in these things is usually peaked when looking at what members of Congress are willing to push when it comes to nationwide legalization.

Yes, this upcoming vote is still significant and historic because neither chamber of Congress has ever voted on completely removing marijuana from the federal Controlled Substances Act (and the MORE Act is a bipartisan bill, too), but we all know where this is going–the Democratic-controlled House will likely pass the bill and the GOP-controlled Senate will very likely ignore it or shut it down. I also can’t ignore the fact that the bill’s Senate sponsor is Senator (and democratic vice president nominee) Kamala Harris who admittedly has a terrible record on prosecuting marijuana crimes from when she was the Attorney General of the State of California and is now in the past two and a half years miraculously behind supporting marijuana legalization culminating in a presidential election year. Pretty convenient.

What exactly would the MORE Act do? It completely removes marijuana from the federal Controlled Substances Act, decriminalizing/descheduling it altogether and eliminating criminal penalties for everyone in the commercial chain of production, distribution, and sales (which would also mean that the banking access woes and draconian impact of IRC 280E would be over). Right now, marijuana is a Schedule I controlled substance and illegal under federal law, making its home on schedule I next to LSD and heroin. The Act would also expunge marijuana criminal records dating back to May 1, 1971 because it’s retroactive. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is also charged under the Act with collecting and compiling a variety of data on marijuana businesses and their owners. The Act creates the Opportunity Trust Fund with various earmarks to the Attorney General and the Small Business Administration (SBA) (with the SBA allocations meant to support the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act of 2019). A federal tax would also be imposed on marijuana products “manufactured in or imported into the United States . . . equal to 5 percent of the price for which sold.” Importantly, while the Act empowers the Feds to engage in rulemaking for a federal regulatory framework, states would still be in control of licensing, oversight, and enforcement within their borders (very similar to alcohol).

Indian temples that allow using cannabis during specific celebrations to achieve enlightenment may need to rethink their practices if police in the state of Belagavi make good on their pledge to crack down on such uses.

“We’re now starting to crack down wherever it is available,” Raichur SP Prakash Nityam said of cannabis everywhere in the country. “I’m not aware of temples or mutts particularly, but if we receive information we will raid them,” Nityam said, according to the Times of India.

It seems that some temples are using weed during prasada — wherein a deity receives an offering, partakes of it and then returns it to be distributed and eaten by worshippers — at some temples in north Karnataka.

Devotees gather at the Mouneshwara temple at Tinthini during the annual fair in January, notes the Times of India. They are said to receive a small packet of ganja as prasada, which is smoked after praying, a video posted with the article notes.

A member of the temple committee acknowledged to the Times of India that cannabis is used there and anyone can consume it during the fair, some by ingestion after boiling the plant and others by smoking its powder form.

A Mississippi voter initiative that would legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes is receiving the wrath of Phil Bryant, the state’s former Republican governor who left the statehouse in January after being forced out by term limits. In a self-published op-ed replete with passages in all-caps and paragraphs that rarely exceed two sentences, Bryant urged voters not to approve Initiative 65, which would legalize and create a regulatory system for medical marijuana.

In the op-ed, which was reportedly released on Tuesday but dated November 3, Bryant said that medicinal uses for cannabis do not exist.

“They call it ‘medical marijuana’ and appeal to people’s natural concern for the sick,” he wrote. “Who could be against helping the sick? Well, no one, of course. That’s why it is all BIG MARIJUANA ever talks about, but the U.S. Surgeon General has stated there is no such thing as ‘medical marijuana’ and emphasizes that it’s a ‘dangerous drug.’”

Bryant suggested that the initiative’s prime objective was profit rather than treating people with serious medical conditions.

“If you liked BIG TOBACCO, you are going to love BIG MARIJUANA. It’s the same scheme—just decades later,” Bryant proclaimed. “Sell a product that causes permanent damage to people while claiming it has no ill effects and make as much money as you can for as long as you can. They say it’s about compassion, but follow the money.”