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Many people who use cannabis do it for the euphoric effects caused by the main psychoactive ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol, often called THC. But THC can also cause unpleasant side effects like paranoia, dissociative thoughts, impaired memory or even psychotic episodes. As cannabis has become more potent, it is becoming more likely that some users will experience those effects. But another compound present in the plant, the non-psychoactive cannabidiol, actually works against THC and can block those negative effects.

Now a team of researchers led by Steven Laviolette, a neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, has figured out how the two compounds interact in the brain, and how CBD, as cannabidiol is also known, balances out the negative psychiatric side effects of THC. Their work was published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Working with rats, Laviolette focused on an area of the brain called the ventral hippocampus, which is involved in emotional control and is known to be vulnerable to some of the long-term effects of high-potency THC. Rats who were given THC exhibited many of the acute negative side effects in behavioral tests, such as anxiety about new environments, and problems with social interaction, memory, and their ability to filter out unnecessary sensory data. When they examined the rats’ brains after the tests, the researchers determined that the effects were caused by an overactive cellular signaling molecule called extracellular signal-regulated kinase, or ERK.

“We found that THC is overstimulating the ERK pathway, altering oscillation patterns in the brain linked to schizophrenia and disturbing the dopamine system,” said Laviolette.

Rats given both CBD and THC had normal ERK signals, and did not show signs of anxiety, paranoia or memory loss in the behavioral tests. The researchers believe that means that the CBD prevented the overstimulation of the ERK pathway.

Daniele Piomelli, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the study, said CBD has been long suspected to modulate the effects of THC, but the mechanism has remained unclear. “This study is interesting because it provides at the molecular and synaptic level a mechanism by which CBD can counter THC,” he said.

Some previous studies suggested that CBD may counter THC by interfering with its ability to bind to THC’s main molecular target in the brain, the CB1 receptor. But Piomelli said that CBD’s modulating effect may not involve the CB1 receptor itself.

CBD is “pharmacologically messy,” said Laviolette, binding to a wide variety of different receptors in the body. Laviolette’s work shows that at some point in the intracellular machinery the two compounds share some kind of mechanism by which they can modulate each others’ actions, but “whether that is happening at the CB1 receptor, we still need to figure that out,” said Laviolette.

Piomelli said that this study is important because sorting out the biological mechanism will provide background for much-needed studies in humans on how CBD can affect the short- and long-term effects of THC. “It opens the door and offers insights that future studies in people could build upon,” he said.

While blocking many of the psychotropic effects of THC may seem counterproductive to recreational users, Laviolette said there are many people who use cannabis for medical reasons who may want to avoid them. “People using it for pain relief, anxiety, multiple sclerosis or glaucoma are not looking to get high,” he said. “If you want to avoid the negative effects, you may want to use strains that have a high CBD content.”

Most US banks shun people like Hope Wiseman, who runs a dispensary that sells marijuana for medical use.

But a bill designed to open up banking to those in the pot industry, such as herself, is sparking optimism as it makes its way through Congress.

Wiseman, who operates a dispensary called Mary and Main, in Capitol Heights, Maryland, just outside Washington, serves patients who suffer from migraine headaches, chronic illnesses or depression.

She feels lucky to already have an account at a bank, but says she is at the facility's mercy, since it could close it at any time.

Marijuana for medical use is legal in 33 states and the US capital of Washington, 12 of which have also legalized it for recreational use.

But under federal law, pot is still classified as a hard drug, just like cocaine. Most banks fear being charged with money laundering if they work with people in the legal marijuana industry.

Wiseman's bank is one of few that accept merchants like her as customers.

"We are charged very high fees because the business is so special, and we are just subject to their mercy," said Wiseman, who opened her dispensary last year.

Transactions are carried out mainly in cash, and when the money is deposited it takes several days to show up in her account, making it difficult to pay bills and employees' wages.

Wiseman's debit card only works with online transfers of crypto currency. The bank will not give her a credit card, deeming her a risk. And the bank can shut down her account over the slightest suspicion that a transaction is illegal.

- A small step ahead -

This wariness on the part of the banks also affects organizations that are regularly or occasionally involved with the marijuana industry.

Jenn Michelle Pedini, head of development at NORML, one of the main organizations lobbying for legalization of marijuana, said she had problems with the government when she helped a marijuana vendor set up a company under a consulting firm that she operates.

The pot industry is indeed booming, generating more than $10 billion a year in revenue which could hit $56 billion by 2025, accord to pro-legalization lobbies.

But of the 11,000 banks and other lenders operating in the United States, only 700 work with people in the marijuana sector, according to Treasury Department figures.

Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill designed to protect pot industry professionals and associated companies from running afoul of the federal government. It now goes to the Republican-controlled Senate.

Supporters of the SAFE Banking Act also say it reduces the risk of burglary and violent robbery in an industry where cash is king.

Critics of the bill say it gives drug cartels easier and less-monitored access to the financial sector.

Tanner Daniel, vice president for congressional relations at the American Bankers Association (ABA), called the bill's passage "a necessary incremental step forward."

- Taxing pot revenue -

"ABA is not taking a stance on legalization. 99 percent of members state that clarification is needed on the state and federal level," Daniel said at a recent forum in Washington.

Daniel added that 75 percent of ABA members have closed the accounts of customers potentially tied to the pot industry.

Republicans in the Senate tend to frown on use of marijuana.

Michael Correia, of marijuana lobbying group National Cannabis Industry Association, said Congress "is not ready to debate the merits of legalization."

"Politicians have been waiting for the polling and the public. It will be state, after state, after state, before the federal level," Correia said.

That is what Thiru Vignarajah, a former deputy attorney general in Maryland and candidate for mayor of Baltimore, wants to do -- legalize pot in the city, and hope the state eventually follows suit.

He also proposes taxing pot sales with a city-backed and -regulated crypto currency and using that money to invest heavily in education.

Legalization would also help in the fight against crime in Baltimore, one of the most violent cities in America, he said.

"The murder rate is among the highest in the country. The drug war between gangs is fuelling the overwhelming majority of it," Vignarajah told AFP.

He admitted, however, that pot is just part of the drug problem and legalizing it is no panacea.

A new poll demonstrates shifting views on how to treat drug offenses in the country. Instead of jail time, most Americans favor recategorizing drug offenses.

In news that would’ve seemed inconceivable a decade ago, a new poll from libertarian think tank The Cato Institute found that 55% of American favor drug offenses not resulting in jail time. Instead, the majority of Americans favor “recategorizing drug offenses from felonies to civil offenses.” This would result in drug possession violations to “be treated like minor traffic violations rather than crimes.”

The news falls in line with a new trend of enforcing drug laws across the country. Last year, a Gallup poll reported that two-thirds of all Americans support legalizing marijuana. It also coincides with major American cities where cannabis has been legalized, like Seattle and San Francisco, expunging past marijuana convictions.

Unsurprisingly, the support for decriminalizing all drugs was favored more by Democrats (69%) and Independents (54%) than Republicans (40%) in the Cato Institute’s polling. To reach these conclusions, the Cato Institute surveyed more than 1,700 Americans through phone calls. Respondents were then asked whether they “favor or oppose re-categorizing drug offenses from felonies to civil offenses, meaning they would be treated like minor traffic violations rather than crimes.”

The questions comes at a time when American political leaders have reconsidered the negative impact brought by the War on Drugs, particularly on disenfranchised communities of color. Many presidential candidates for the Democratic nomination have announced they’d legalize marijuana should they be elected. Sen. Kamala Harris and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke have displayed the most aggressive marijuana reform, with O’Rourke calling for drug war reparations.

In addition, a Canadian lawmaker recently proposed legislation that would repeal federal law that prohibits the possession of illicit substances. Though Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith’s bill has a low chance of passing, it would effectively decriminalize all drugs in the country. Erskine-Smith believes drug offenses and addiction as a public health issue, not as a crime.

The first European deal for Canadian firm MediPharm Labs will see its medical cannabis products made available to 20,000 German pharmacies.

With dual listings on the Ontario and Frankfurt stock exchanges, MediPharm says this new deal is an important milestone in its global ambitions.

And, it follows hot on the heels of its first ever international agreement in the Australian market, earlier this year. In a stock market statement MediPharm highlights why it has targeted Germany as its first European port of call.

Up To 50,000 Cannabis Patients

It says the German medical cannabis market currently serves up to 50,000 patients; a very rapid advance since its introduction in March 2017. With a population of over 80 million it is set to be Europe’s largest medical cannabis. 

MediPharm’s ‘white label’ agreement with German pharmacy ADREXpharma will see its supply ‘high quality, purity assured, cannabis concentrate derivative products, including THC and CBD oil, for sale and distribution under the ADREXpharma brand’, it says in the market release. 

ADREXpharma is licensed wholesale distributor of controlled drugs and medical cannabis, saying it serves almost all of Germany’s 20,000 pharmacies. 

MediPharm; ‘The Ideal Partner’

Mario Eimuth, Chief Executive Officer, at ADREXpharma, said MediPharm shares its ‘patient-centric focus’ and is its ‘ideal partner’. Founded in 2015, MediPharm specializes in the production of purified, pharmaceutical-grade cannabis oil and concentrates, utilizing Good Manufacturing Practices and hosting ISO standard clean rooms. 

It has five primary extraction lines with an annual capacity of 300,000 kg of  dried cannabis with complementary wholesale and white labelling capabilities. MediPharm is set to shortly complete construction of a new extraction facility in Wonthaggi, Victoria, which will feature supercritical carbon dioxide extraction, it says in a second market release.

This will  be able to process up to 75,000 kg of dried cannabis annually, as well as incorporating secondary processing equipment for the manufacture of purified and high-concentrate cannabis distillate. 

It has agreed terms, initially for one year, with an Australian Licensed Producer to source dried flower for the facility.

Advertised on the shingle hanging above the merchant’s door is a representation of the wares offered within. The butcher and the baker and the haberdasher alike all make their presences known in this way; why should anything be different for the purveyor of herbal wellness remedies? Because marijuana, that’s why!

CBD Kratom is a particularly successful chain of 27 stores in three states that sell, as the name suggests, among other things, CBD and kratom. Kratom is the plant with sedative and other psychotropic effects that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration believes has killed at least 44 people; it has never been banned. CBD is a cannabinoid found in the cannabis sativa plant — the history of which is full of bans.

Added now to that history is CBD Kratom’s sign: a relatively straightforward affair, the words “CBD KRATOM” in a sort of sleek futuristic-type font, adorned with an unmistakable green leaf with seven long, spindly fan leaves. It’s a pot leaf, it’s a weed leaf, it’s a cannabis leaf. What it’s not, at least not according to the FDA, is a marijuana leaf, as long as the plant represented therein has 0.3% or less THC, the legal line dividing Farm Bill-approved hemp from Controlled Substances Act-prohibited marijuana in the United States.

None of this should matter much in 2019 and certainly not in Chicago, a city in the state of Illinois, where recreational cannabis was legalized earlier this year and where recreational marijuana shops will soon open for business. CBD Kratom isn’t that, but CBD Kratom has nonetheless been prohibited by its landlord from hanging its sign outside its new downtown Chicago Loop location, as the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported. The store has since filed suit against its landlord, alleging breach of contract.

According to the suit, filed by St. Louis-based MNG 2005, the organization’s new landlords prevented CBD Kratom from hanging its preferred sign after making “references to the signage as promoting marijuana usage.”

Separate, but related, is a move by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot to ban recreational marijuana stores from popular well-trod areas in Chicago, including the downtown Loop and nearby Navy Pier, in an attempt to keep the tourist traps “family-friendly.”

As anyone who has tramped around the hucksters’ den that is a major city’s tourist destination knows, there are plenty of unscrupulous merchants with whom you would not trust your junk mail, let alone a member of your family. So while that reasoning may not make sense, what makes even less sense is agreeing to rent to a place called CBD Kratom, which has a cannabis leaf in its logo, and then telling CBD Kratom it can’t use its sign.

According to the suit, CBD Kratom was told that it could not use its sign shortly before the store opened two weeks ago — six months after the store signed its lease, and roughly around the same time Chicago was doing what almost every city does in the marijuana legalization era by figuring out ways to make retail marijuana sales slightly less legal.

The landlord also made statements to the effect that CBD Kratom was “engaged in illicit activities, specifically the promotion and sale of marijuana and marijuana-related products,” according to the suit.

While a property owner is free to make decisions with regard to whom they allow to lease their space, it seems a little hard to believe that CBD Kratom’s landlord didn’t know what CBD Kratom did and what they looked like while doing it. And so now everybody gets to look at each other in court. This is America’s perverse fascination with the cannabis leaf, a symbol with great and terrible power as well as some benefit. As to when the benefit of being able to sell the plant in peace will arrive, well, who can say?

For nearly a decade, cannabis arrests were on a steady decline in the United States. But over the past three years that trend has reversed and arrests are on the rise again. According to data from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report, police arrested 663,367 people for marijuana-related violations in 2018 alone. That amounts to one arrest every 48 seconds – and is significantly up from the 659,700 cannabis arrests in 2017 and the 653,249 recorded in 2016. 

“Americans should be outraged that police departments across the country continue to waste tax dollars and limited law enforcement resources on arresting otherwise law-abiding citizens for simple marijuana possession,” NORML Executive Director Erik Altieri said. 

Not only is that a clear increase over the last three years, but it is 21 percent higher than the number of people who were arrested for violent crimes in the same year (521,103). You might want to believe that these were traffickers, drug dealers and people who are dealing with illicit substances other than cannabis – but 90 percent (608,776) of those arrests were solely for cannabis possession offenses. 

Considering the vast change in the landscape of cannabis laws throughout the country, you would think the number of arrests would decrease in the past several years, not steadily increase. Unfortunately, it seems that members of law enforcement are still finding ways to arrest people for cannabis – whether it be in states where the substance remains illegal, or finding ways around legal cannabis, such as arrests for public consumption.

“Prohibition is a failed and racist policy that should be relegated to the dust bin of history,” Altieri, of NORML, said. “An overwhelming majority of Americans from all political persuasions want to see it brought to an end. Instead of continuing the disastrous practices of the past, it is time lawmakers at all levels begin to honor the will of their constituents and support a sensible marijuana policy focused on legalization and regulation.”

While this doesn’t reach the 2007 record of 872,721 marijuana-related arrests, this is a cause for concern. Where law enforcement has the option to focus their efforts on more meaningful problems – violent crimes, dealers who sell harmful substances like crack, heroin, methamphetamine and other opiates – instead they are continuing to arrest people for possession of a plant that does more to help people than any perceived harms. As NORML’s Erik Altieri said, we should be furious with this increase in arrests at a time when public opinion and the laws themselves are clearly going in the other direction. 

A new study from the Mayo Clinic weakened a popular theory about the cause of the vaping illness. Now what?

Ever since news broke of the vaping illness outbreak, scientists have rushed to solve what caused it. More than 800 cases have been reported with at least 12 people dying from vaping. Vitamin E acetate was an early culprit by the New York Department of Health, among others. Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said their latest findings “suggest THC products play a role in the outbreak.”

While a number of the illnesses have been tied to the cannabis black market, “THC products” don’t provide specific answers to the cause. A group of Mayo Clinic researchers may provide a stronger suspect in the illness. In what these scientists have called a first, the Mayo Clinic analyzed 17 tissue samples from lungs of patients who suffered from the vaping illness, including two fatalities.

As published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the scientists said the samples compared to tissue damage following exposure to toxic chemicals. Previous studies suggested the vaping illness represented exogenous lipoid pneumonia, but none of the Mayo Clinic’s cases had such findings.

“What we see with these vaping cases is a kind of severe chemical injury that I’ve never seen before in a tobacco smoker or a traditional marijuana smoker,” study co-author Dr. Brandon Larsen said. “I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.”

It’s important to note that analysis of 17 biopsies can’t stand in for more than 800 cases nationwide. While the study’s authors believe the illness is caused by “a form of airway-centered chemical pneumonitis from one or more inhaled toxic substances,” whatever “the agents responsible remain unknown.” The study remains significant because it poked holes in a popular theory that vaping fatty oils, including flavoring agents, was the cause behind the outbreak.

“Investigators believe, but have not yet confirmed, that one or more of the additives used in the underground manufacturing process has led to a toxic product when inhaled,” the Marijuana Policy Project wrote.

The lingering mystery behind the vaping illness has led some states to place a temporary ban on all vaping products. But this could cause more problems than it solves.

“Regulating cannabis use is effective public policy, and we strongly urge states to regulate — not ban — vapor products,” the MPP wrote.​ “Bans will simply make a difficult situation more dangerous by driving more consumers away from regulated businesses and toward illicit sources.”