Alzheimer’s is the third most prevalent disease killer in the Western world after heart disease and cancer, and its rate of diagnosis continues to soar. In addition to the obvious cognitive dysfunctions, Alzheimer’s victims are dysfunctional with mundane matters and daily routines, have little or no recollection of close relatives and friends, and tend to be very grouchy and feisty.
A daughter tells the arduous caretaker story of helping her mother’s final stages of Alzheimer’s by getting her on medical marijuana and off pharmaceuticals in stages. Her mother, who arrived to her daughter’s Oregon home as she was approaching 80 years of age, was not the type who took advantage of holistic medicine and organic foods and supplements. In addition to her Alzheimer’s, she was on several other medications for other ailments.
But the crafty inclusion of some home cooked organic meals and cannabis produced very positive results with the mother’s cognitive abilities. The herb stews made her much more sociable and cooperative instead of feisty, angry, inappropriate and anti-social, which are all symptoms of Alzheimer’s, in addition to the gross absence of memory.
Her mother did pass away peacefully and lovingly at age 83 after the mother-daughter bond was firmly re-established. In other words, she exited the Earthly realm in a much better state than if she had not been exposed to cannabis.
A 2013 in vivo (mice) study in Spain, a vanguard for cannabis research, did a study on cannabis for Alzheimer’s entitled “CB2 cannabinoid receptor agonist ameliorates Alzheimer-like phenotype in AβPP/PS1 mice.”
The researchers concluded that:
“… the present study lends support to the idea that stimulation of CB2 [cannabinoid] receptors ameliorates several altered parameters in Alzheimer’s disease such as impaired memory and learning, neuroinflammation, oxidative stress damage and oxidative stress responses, selected tau kinases, and tau hyperphosphorylation around plaques.”
But that’s not the only Alzheimer’s study of recent that has come to similar conclusions. Researchers who worked on a study published in Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience came up with the most advanced understanding of Alzheimer’s mechanics and how cannabis demonstrates efficacy without toxic side effects. Their study was preceded by similar onesshowing cannabis efficacy for Alzheimer’s.
Gary Wenk, Ph.D, professor of neuroscience, immunology and medical genetics at Ohio State University, told Time Magazine:
“I’ve been trying to find a drug that will reduce brain inflammation and restore cognitive function in rats for over 25 years; cannabinoids are the first and only class of drugs that have ever been effective.”
Let’s hope our brain dead, oppressive government and medical system wakes up to raw cannabis’s medical potentials.
Paul Fassa| Naturalsociety| 16th Aug 2014
A lot of people use marijuana to treat anxiety, finding an almost immediate sense of relief and relaxation after smoking pot. But for others, marijuana use heightens anxiety. It can cause paranoia and produce a completely different set of feelings. To some extent, just about everyone experiences this psychological response when they start smoking, but though these responses appear to vary between individual users, research shows that marijuana can be an effective treatment option for anxiety sufferers.
The relationship between cannabis and the brain is complex but largely complementary; components of marijuana, known as cannabinoids, naturally respond to parts of our brain associated with pain management, mood, and anxiety (to name a few). Humans have natural endocannabinoid systems that regulates anxiety, and when certain cannabinoids are introduced to the body, they have been shown to significantly reduce anxiety.
A 2014 study published in the journal Neuron demonstrated this point. Researchers at Vanderbilt University set out to analyze the effectiveness of self-medicating with marijuana to treat anxiety, and they found compelling reason to believe that people who used the substance in this manner were onto something.
“Chronic stress or acute, severe emotional trauma can cause a reduction in both the production of endocannabinoids and the responsiveness of the receptors,” the researcherswrote in a press release about the study. Because components of marijuana function as endocannabinoids, cannabis can, in fact, provide relief by contributing to the system—centrally located in the amygdala—that regulates anxiety, they continued.
“We know where the receptors are, we know their function, we know how these neurons make their own cannabinoids,” Dr. Sachin Patel, lead author of the study, said. “Now can we see how that system is affected by… stress and chronic [marijuana] use? It might fundamentally change our understanding of cellular communication in the amygdala.”
The research proved so convincing that Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote a blog post about it on the federal agency’s website, stating that Patel’s study “suggests that THC and/or other external cannabinoids found in marijuana may also serve to reduce anxiety by binding to CB1 receptors in the amygdala, rendering neurons less active.”
Collins went on to say that further research was needed and he cautioned against chronic marijuana use, especially for teenagers who might be experiencing high levels of anxiety and might be experimenting with cannabis as a potential treatment option. But still, the blog posts arguably reflect shifting attitudes—even at the federal level—regarding the medicinal value of marijuana for mental health.
Some people experience adverse psychological effects after smoking pot, of course. Even seasoned stoners sometimes feel paranoid and anxious after smoking too much or eating potent, cannabis-infused edibles. Moderating use and selecting strains of cannabis that are commonly recommended for anxiety treatment (i.e. indicas) can help reduce the risk of having an unpleasant experience with pot, but that advice is based on anecdotal evidence.
That said, more research really is needed. Approximately 3.3 million Americans suffer from anxiety, according to the Anxiety Disorders Association of America. It can be a debilitating disorder that affects how people socialize and cope with daily stress. And though there are pharmaceutical options available—including benzodiazepines such as Xanax—the fact of that matter is, those drugs are highly addictive and dangerous. Marijuana is non-toxic and non-addictive, and it is still an effective form of treatment.
By: Kyle Jaeger
So, what makes some marijuana purple? It’s an interesting question to ask since not everyone realizes what exactly makes their strains purple. What is also interesting is that some individuals have asked the question, “Is purple weed better?”
In a new video by StrainCentral, Josh talks all about purple cannabis in response to a question he received in the comments section that asked if purple cannabis is better than other cannabis. In “Is Purple Weed Better (Weed Myths #2)” – Josh breaks down what exactly makes some marijuana purple. If you’re an experience grower, there’s a pretty good chance you know exactly what makes some marijuana purple.
If you enjoy Josh’s video, definitely check out his video where he reviews how different the “high” is when you drink cannabis compared to other methods of consumption. At Josh’s request (and our approval), sit back and smoke, dab, or vape along and learn what makes some marijuana purple!
Sliced thin with flecks of dill peeking out, the salmon looks like any other of gravlax you would have for brunch. But put it on a bagel with a schmear of cream cheese, and you will get pretty stoned eating this delicacy.
The mastermind behind the THC infused salmon – cured in salt, dill, lemon, sugar and a weed tincture – is Josh Pollack, owner of Rosenberg’s Bagels and Delicatessen in Denver.
“I love bagels and lox, and I love cannabis,” Pollack said.
Pollack, a New Jersey native who grew up going to establishments like Russ and Daughters, moved to Colorado for college. He loved the state, but missed the bagels from back east. After graduating, he worked in finance for a while, but tired of that and moved on to a more fulfilling passion: food.
“I’ve always been food obsessed,” Pollack said. “Bagels and lox has always been a comfort food.”
It was tough to find his favorite comfort food, so specific to the New York and New Jersey area, in Denver. So last year, Pollack opened Rosenberg’s Bagels and Delicatessen to serve up classics like bagels and lox.
The idea to infuse salmon with a weed tincture came about as a “fun little thing to do” for the 4/20 “stoner holiday”, as Pollack called it, earlier this year. It was a hit.
“It puts two things that people really love together,” he said. “That’s why I did it. There were people freaking out when they heard about it.”
The first batch of THC-infused salmon, which Pollack and his team passed out to people at a 4/20 event, was a little strong, making it difficult for people to eat a whole bagel covered in the stuff. Through trial and error, Pollack and his team at Rosenberg’s have figured out the right proportion of weed to salmon.
According to Colorado marijuana regulations, edibles sold recreationally must be wrapped individually or distributed in increments of no more than 10 milligrams of activated THC. To meet this law, which Pollack said is a “safe point” for most people, every three ounces of fish – the ideal serving amount for a bagel – should contain 10 milligrams of the tincture.
Pollack is still in the process of perfecting the dish, and said he has gotten more calculated each time they make a batch.
Pollack can’t currently sell the special salmon, but once he perfects the proportions, he hopes to sell it through local dispensaries. Unlike other edibles, salmon is “not a particularly shelf stable product”, so he said he will likely sell it on a special order basis.
The process of giving the salmon what Pollack calls a “tiny herbaceous flavor” is similar to the way he cures all the salmon for his delicatessen. First he makes a tincture by soaking weed in strong alcohol, straining it out and cooking the alcohol out of the remaining green liquid without activating the THC. Then, he adds the tincture to the recipe used for the cure recipe the delicatessen uses on all gravlax – a mixture of spices and a little bit of alcohol that acts as a retaining agent.
The salmon dries in the fridge for 72 hours to let the flavor disperse throughout the flesh and form a hard outer shell, and is then topped with lemon and dill.
“With this application, it goes really well to appropriately mask the flavor of the cannabis,” Pollack said. He said people like it because most edible products are brownies or candies – sweets filled with sugar that don’t really hide the flavor of cannabis, which not everyone likes. Savory items infused with weed, though on the rise, are still rare.
Now, Pollack is working on a new batch of gravlax for the Harvest Gathering, a Jewish food event in Colorado at the end of September, where he plans to teach Jewish chefs how to cook with cannabis. Lox isn’t the only Jewish food Pollack is currently infusing with weed; he’s also trying his hand at matzah ball soup, made with cannabis-infused schmaltz.
“Anything you can cook with fat, you can cook with cannabis,” he said.
Ronda Rousey is standing up to the Nevada State Athletic Commission (NSAC) after they decided on Monday to suspend UFC fighter Nick Diaz for five years for apositive marijuana test.
“I’m sorry, but it’s so not right for him to be suspended five years for marijuana,” Rousey said on Wednesday at a UFC press conference in Melbourne, Australia.
Diaz’s suspension is a result of him testing positive for marijuana for a third time. Lots of people think the suspension is ridiculous. But Rousey, a close friend of Diaz’s, took it one step further on Wednesday, saying she doesn’t think marijuana use should be penalized at all.
“I’m against testing for weed at all. It’s not a performance enhancing drug. And it has nothing to do with competition. It’s only tested for political reasons,” she said.
Spot on, Ronda. Although marijuana is on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Prohibited List, the advantages it can offer athletes during a competition are, by WADA’s own admission, limited to “better focus” and “diminished stress.”
Diaz and many more athletes who regularly smoke marijuana use the drug for non-competitive recreational purposes. Diaz himself is a card-carrying medical marijuana patient in California. But in making its decision, the NSAC effectively stripped away all context behind Diaz’s possible marijuana usage, charging him like a cheater when he’s really just another fighter in pain — a point that infuriated Rousey on Wednesday.
“If one person tests for steroids, that could actually hurt a person, and the other person smokes a plant that makes him happy, and he gets suspended for five years. Whereas a guy who could hurt someone gets a slap on the wrist. It’s not fair,” Rousey said, also adding that she believes marijuana testing is an invasion of privacy.
Perhaps more perplexing: If Diaz had been caught actually taking steroids instead of marijuana, he would have been subjected to a much shorter suspension.
Petty politics within the NSAC may have been behind Diaz’s trumped-up suspension too. The NSAC’s Pat Lundvall reportedly pushed for a lifetime ban against Diaz despite the organization’s own guidelines suggesting a three-year ban for a third positive marijuana test.
Lundvall’s reason for motioning for a lifetime ban? She felt disrespected by Diaz, a fighter who’s never stained the integrity of the sport by testing positive for steroids, and whose harmless marijuana use was for relaxation and pain-relief purposes — a more than understandable choice, especially considering the dangers of pain-killing and anxiety-relieving prescription drugs in certain cases.
Taking all of this into consideration, Rousey was defiant in her support for Diaz and her disdain for marijuana testing, closing out her speech by declaring, “I think we should free Nick Diaz.”
By Justin Block
One of the boogiemen of legalizing a previously banned substance is that fear that our streets will become populated by drug-addled drivers, plowing into family station wagons and school buses. Opponents to legalizing marijuana point to studies that show increases in drivers testing positive for marijuana while driving. Proponents of ending the prohibition on marijuana point to similar studies showing that these people testing positive for marijuana are usually in trouble because they are also drunk-driving. Radley Balko, over at the Washington Post has put together some interesting findings concerning driving fatalities in Colorado, since they legalized pot in 2012:
As you can see, roadway fatalities this year are down from last year, and down from the 13-year average. Of the seven months so far this year, five months saw a lower fatality figure this year than last, two months saw a slightly higher figure this year, and in one month the two figures were equal. If we add up the total fatalities from January through July, it looks like this:
Here, the “high” bar (pardon the pun) is what you get when you add the worst January since 2002 to the worst February, to the worst March, and so on. The “low” bar is the sum total of the safest January, February, etc., since 2002. What’s notable here is that the totals so far in 2014 are closer to the safest composite year since 2002 than to the average year since 2002. I should also add here that these are total fatalities. If we were to calculate these figures as a rate — say, miles driven per fatality — the drop would be starker, both for this year and since Colorado legalized medical marijuana in 2001. While the number of miles Americans drive annually has leveled off nationally since the mid-2000s, the number of total miles traveled continues to go up in Colorado. If we were to measure by rate, then, the state would be at lows unseen in decades.
That’s good news. Even for people against the legaliztion of marijuana, they should be happy that fewer people are dying on the highways—even if this correlation is not a causation. Some people believe that there is a causation in these numbers as (proponents argue) the legal option of getting high on marijuana can replace, in some cases, getting high on alcohol, and driving while high is probably less dangerous than driving while intoxicated on alcohol.
No doubt there are myriad other reasons for the decrease in road fatalities—better cars with better safety features. The important point is that the numbers are down, and while these numbers may have nothing at all to do with the legalization of marijuana, the belief that marijuana legalization might lead to tons of terrible driving accidents, so far, is unwarranted.
By
Lithuanian artist Agne Gintalaite has always been attracted to the “garage towns” of her native Lithuania—large areas filled with storage units for cars that were terribly inconvenient and often bus rides away from the owners’ homes. In her series Beauty Remains, Gintalaite explores the multitude of garage doors she has discovered on her explorations, the brightly colored wooden and metal doors that look as if time has tried to claw them to pieces, yet their vibrancy withstands each passing year.
Her project began after a recent trip to IKEA revealed a sprawling garage town near the megastore filled with hundreds of examples of these doors that outlasted the time when IKEAs were nowhere to be found. “By documenting these objects that are, most likely, about to disappear from Lithuanian society, I wished to communicate to the viewer the ambivalent, aesthetic, but also human significance of these garage doors,” said Gintalaite. “Beautifully painterly, these doors do not need be explained to the beholder. It is the fascinating play of colour and texture that I attempted to capture with my camera.”
In documenting these doors the artist also found herself documenting human dignity as the owners continue to hold onto their property in areas in which big businesses increasingly impede on the urban landscape. “As long as they last,” said Gintalaite, “this uncanny beauty remains.”
Gintalaite received her BA in Art History and Theory from Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania, and is currently a freelance photographer and art director. You can find more of her work on her Tumblr and Behance. (via My Modern Met)
Colossal by Kate Sierzputowski
Yeast is an incredible organism—you can thank it for booze!—and thanks to the marvels of modern genetics, we’ve made it incredibly versatile. Just a month after announcing a method for hacking yeast to produce narcotics, researchers just announced that the creation of yeast that produces THC and cannabidiols.
You’re probably thinking this will yield a whole new industry of beer that will get you high, but the scientists’ focus is much more, well, scientific. (EDITORS NOTE: weed-infused beer already exists.) The THC- and cannabidiol-producing yeast could prove integral to developing more clinical applications for the compounds. The pharmaceutical industry is eager to get its hands on a more efficient method for synthesizing yeast for drug research. After all, the fact that cannabis, the best producer of these chemicals, remains illegal in many parts of the world.
“This is something that could literally change the lives of millions of people,” Kevin Chen, chief executive of Hyasynth Bio, told The New York Times. The newly engineered yeast could not only enable scientists produce THC and cannabidiol more easily but also help them understand how the compounds work.
There’s still work to be done, though. Researchers have been working on synthesizing THC and cannabidoils for years, and the latest breakthrough involves yeast that use precursor molecules to product small amounts of the chemicals. Ideally, they’d use simple sugars, as bioengineers have already done with opiate-producing yeast strains.
Inevitably, scientists say, the real challenge is to come up with a method that works better than cannabis plants themselves. “Right now, we have a plant that essentially the Ferrari of the plant world when it comes to producing the chemical of interest,” explains Dr. Jonathan Page. “Cannabis is hard to beat.”
Truer words have never been spoken.
Image via Shutterstock
Contact the author at adam@gizmodo.com.
PGP fingerprint: 91CF B387 7B38 148C DDD6 38D2 6CBC 1E46 1DBF 22A8
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California lawmakers counted far-reaching but less-ambitious climate change legislation, statewide medical marijuana regulation and a deeply emotional measure to allow aid in dying among the hundreds of bills they passed before closing out the 2015 legislative session early Saturday.
Nearly 20 years after California voters approved the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, lawmakers finally agreed on a package of bills to create the first statewide licensing and operating rules for pot growers and retail weed outlets. They did so in the face of a likely ballot initiative next year to legalize recreational pot.
The framework seeks to manage medical marijuana from seed to smoke, calling for 17 separate license categories, detailed labeling requirements and a product tracking system complete with bar codes and shipping manifests.
“California has fallen behind the rest of the nation and failed to ensure a comprehensive regulatory structure,” said Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, D-Los Angeles. “This industry is the wild, wild west, and we must take steps to address it.”
If enacted as drafted, the legislation would impose strict controls on an industry that never has had to comply with any and provide a template for how recreational marijuana might be treated if it is legalized. The Brown administration helped craft the package, and he was expected to sign it.
By Judy Lin and Juliet Williams, Associated Press