By WMCTV.com Staff – email
 
Ole Miss is home to the only legally grown marijuana crop in the nation and a new development there is creating quite a buzz.
Faculty and student researchers say they created a new pain reliever in the form of a patch.
Dr. Mahmoud Elsohly is a faculty member at the School of Pharmacy at Ole Miss. He and his team have been working inside their marijuana research lab for nearly seven years to find alternative uses for THC, which is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.
 
Full Article:
http://www.14news.com/story/21217891/a-look-ahead-ole-miss-cooks-up-marijuana-pain-patch

By Helga Ahmad

Commercial hemp plants are grown for fiber production in Canada
 
International reports have warned Pakistan for many years about the looming water crisis the country will face if it doesn’t take essential measures to prevent it. A reduced inflow of irrigation water will have a substantial effect on the food chain. But a growing problem that has been ignored is that Pakistan’s canal irrigated agricultural soil is dying because of the massive use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, losing its chemical balance and therefore its carrying capacity.
Seventeen years ago, a group of Dutch scientists led by a Pakistani colleague undertook a study in the rural areas of Sialkot that supply fresh vegetables to Lahore and Islamabad during winter. They periodically tested canal and tube-well irrigated soil, and the growing vegetables, for a full growth cycle. The final samples were taken from vehicles ready to take the vegetables to the market. Volumes of scientific data revealed that they were not fit for human consumption.
At the Shaukat Khanum Cancer Hospital in Lahore, pre-teen girls from rural areas that grow tobacco are being treated for cancer. They are among the many young girls who string up tobacco leaves during the harvesting season for the drying chambers. The tobacco crop requires up to 16 pesticide sprays. An effort to establish an extensive program to raise natural predators for the pest failed. The problem is growing rapidly, and is now even affecting newborns.
Commercial interests played a major role in propagating the “Reefer Madness” hysteria in the US in the mid-1930s
In the cotton growing belt, young cotton pickers are exposed to the dried pesticide residue in the plants. Cottonwood is also burnt as fuel in the nearby villages, and women inhale the fumes while cooking. Some reports say other crops grown in the same soil also acquire the harmful effects of pesticides. This puts a large number of people at the risk of cancer.
A Pakistani dairy company was not allowed to export milk products to Malaysia because the pesticide residue was far higher than the WHO standards. Cottonseed cake, a major animal feed, is also a carrier, besides the fodder that acquires it from the soil. Decades of use of heavy farm machinery rolling over agricultural lands has hardened the top soil, destroying its natural fauna, which used to feed on the dry vegetative matter and was known to build up healthy humus content.
Before things get worse, perhaps we need to look westward where efforts are underway to find alternative solutions to the increasing natural hazards, finally acknowledged to be mainly man-made. The focus today in the West as well as China is on the benefits of hemp (cannabis sativa) – a plant that has been prohibited in our country for decades.
Hemp fiber length is up to 15 feet. Cotton fiber is less than one inch long
It is now an established fact that commercial interests played a major role in propagating the “Reefer Madness” hysteria in the mid-1930s, although industrial hemp was already a major crop in the US. Hemp was then considered a serious competitor to newly developing technologies in the synthetic fiber, textile, timber and paper oil, composite wood, and pharmaceutical industries. Aggressive lobbying for marijuana prohibition began, and the plant is still banned in the US. The industrial hemp that was the basic raw-material for Henry Ford’s car industry was wiped off the map.
 
Full Article:
http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta3/tft/article.php?issue=20130215&page=9
 

By Janet Patton — jpatton1@herald-leader.com

by Phillip Smith

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (wikimedia.org)
 
In his final state of the city address Thursday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that people caught with small amounts of marijuana in the city will no longer be subjected to overnight stays in the city’s jails, but will merely be taken to the precinct for a desk appearance and then released.
 
Full Article:
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2013/feb/14/bloomberg_no_more_jail_stays_min

by Christine LaCroix
 
PHOENIX — Melvin McDonald is a Mormon, a father, a former judge and US Attorney, and surprisingly, an outspoken supporter of medical marijuana.

by Anica Padilla
 
A strong smell of marijuana was reported inside the Colorado Capitol Wednesday morning, 7NEWS Reporter Russell Haythorn confirmed.
The entire Senate chamber smelled like marijuana, said Doug Schepman, communications director for the Senate Democrats.
 
Full Article:
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/strong-smell-of-marijuana-reported-inside-colorado-capitol-wednesday-morning

By TRIP GABRIEL

In the summer of 1952, hemp plants growing wild in a lot in downtown Louisville, Ky., were killed with chemical spray.
 
Attitudes are changing in surprising places. At a hearing on Monday in Frankfort, the Kentucky capital, the state police commissioner’s opposition to hemp growing was challenged by a former C.I.A. director, R. James Woolsey.
“The specter of people getting high on industrial hemp,” Mr. Woolsey said, “is pretty much exactly like saying you can get drunk on O’Doul’s.”
 
Full Article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/us/13hemp.html?_r=0

Written by Gregory A. Hall

Sen. Rand Paul on Kentucky hemp bill: Sen. Rand Paul testifying to Ky. Senate Agriculture Committee in support of industrial hemp legalization bill.
 
A bill that would legalize growing hemp for industrial use cleared a state legislative committee Monday with a unanimous vote after three members of Kentucky’s federal delegation — including U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. — testified for it.
The testimony by Paul and U.S. Reps. John Yarmuth, D-3rd District, and Thomas Massie, R-4th District, marked a rare, if not unprecedented, occurrence for the Kentucky General Assembly.
All three said they would work at the federal level either to pass legislation legalizing industrial hemp or seeking a waiver of federal drug laws that currently classify the plant as a prohibited substance along with marijuana, a fellow member of the cannabis family.
 
Full Article:
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20130211/NEWS0101/302040106/Hemp-bill-clears-committee-unanimously
 

By John Ingold
The Denver Post

Marijuana. (Jupiter Images)
 
A new study by CU Denver professor Daniel Rees and Montana State University professor D. Mark Anderson suggests stoned-driving limits don’t impact traffic fatalities. Rees said he and Anderson looked at fatality data from 16 states that adopted marijuana-limit laws between 1990 and 2010 and found no statistically significant difference between states that did and didn’t have such laws. “We cut the data a bunch of different ways and the estimate just came back zero zero, zero, zero, zero,” Rees said. ”
 
Full Article:
http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_22552419/studies-shed-more-light-debate-around-marijuana-impaired
 

By Norma Love

JIM COLE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Clayton Holton says his use of opiate painkillers is greatly reduced when he uses marijuana. He suffers from muscular dystrophy and has been in a wheelchair since he was 10.
 
At 27, Clayton Holton of Rochester is 5 feet 11 but weighs only 66 pounds.
Holton suffers from a rare form of muscular dystrophy that causes wasting syndrome and complete muscle loss. He has been in a wheelchair since he was 10. He struggles even to eat.
Six years ago, he ended up in a hospital and then a nursing home where he was given Oxycontin. Then friends helped him visit California, where medical use of marijuana is legal. He started using it for pain relief, and he gained 8 pounds.
Now, when he needs relief, he reaches for marijuana.