By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
 
MEXICO CITY — A comprehensive report on drug policy in the Americas released Friday by a consortium of nations suggests that the legalization of marijuana, but not other illicit drugs, be considered among a range of ideas to reassess how the drug war is carried out.

The 420 Times

 
As we enjoy the incredible momentum within the cannabis law reform movement, it’s important to remember one of the founders of the movement. It’s hard to imagine being where we are today without the life and work of Jack Herer.
A longtime activist and champion of hemp, Jack wrote The Emperor Wears No Clothes, which was published in 1985 and has sold over 600,000 copies to date. The book chronicles that many uses of hemp and the story of why it was outlawed in the first place, along with its cannabis cousin, marihuana. It even provides a history of hemp and its long-standing place in society, especially in the first 150 years of the U.S. being a country.
“If you substitute marijuana for tobacco and alcohol, you’ll add eight to 24 years to your life.” — Jack Herer
 
Full Article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-/remembering-the-godfather_b_3282858.html

Bill Piper – Drug Policy Alliance, Director of National Affairs

 
On Thursday, the Drug Policy Alliance will release An Exit Strategy for the Failed War on Drugs. This comprehensive report contains 75 broad and incremental recommendations for legislative reforms related to civil rights, deficit reduction, law enforcement, foreign policy, sentencing and re-entry, effective drug treatment, public health, and drug prevention education. The guide will be released at a forum on the Hill cosponsored by Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), both of whom fought for major drug policy reform at the local level before running for Congress and winning. This new generation of legislators has demonstrated that support for drug policy reform is no detriment to electoral success — and in fact that it can be a key asset.
 
Full Article:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-piper/drug-war-exit-strategy_b_3281145.html

special to Drug War Chronicle by investigative reporter Clarence Walker, cwalkerinvestigate@gmail.com
 
 
Dispensaries providing marijuana to doctor-approved patients operate in a number of states, but they are under assault by the federal government. SWAT-style raids by the DEA and finger-wagging press conferences by grim-faced federal prosecutors may garner greater attention, but the assault on medical marijuana providers extends to other branches of the government as well, and moves by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to eliminate dispensaries’ ability to take standard business deduction are another very painful arrow in the federal quiver.
 

The IRS employs Section 280E, a 1982 addition to the tax code that was a response to a drug dealer’s successful effort to claim his yacht, weapons purchases, and even illicit bribes as business expenses. Under 280E, individuals involved in the illicit sale of controlled substances — including marijuana, even medical marijuana in states where it is legal — cannot claim standard business expenses on their federal taxes.
“The 280E provision which requires certain businesses to pay taxes on their gross income, as opposed to their net income, is aimed at shutting down illicit drug operations, not state-legal medical marijuana dispensaries,” said Kris Hermes, spokesman for the medical marijuana defense group Americans for Safe Access.” Nonetheless, the Obama Administration is using Section 280E to push these local and state licensed facilities out of business.”
 
Full Article:
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2013/may/15/stopping_irs_war_medical_marijua

By Eric W. Dolan

 
Research published online May 14 in Social Psychological and Personality Science has uncovered that marijuana buffers people from experiencing social pain.
“Prior work has shown that the analgesic acetaminophen, which acts indirectly through CB1 receptors, reduces the pain of social exclusion. The current research provides the first evidence that marijuana also dampens the negative emotional consequences of social exclusion on negative emotional outcomes,” Timothy Deckman of the University of Kentucky and his colleagues wrote in the study.
The four-part study, which included a total of 7040 participants and three methodologies, was based on previous research that found an overlap between physical and social pain. Acetaminophen, which is used in over-the-counter medications like Tylenol, has been found toreduce physical and social pain.

For their first two studies, the researchers examined cross-sectional data from major national surveys. The first study used data from the National Comorbidity Study and found marijuana users who reported being lonely had higher levels of self-worth and mental health than non-marijuana users who reported being lonely.
The second study used data from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. This second analysis found those used marijuana relatively frequently and experienced social pain were less likely to experience a major depressive episode during the past 12 months.
 
Full Article:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/15/study-finds-marijuana-buffers-against-negative-psychological-effects-of-social-exclusion/

Huanlei Wang †‡, Zhanwei Xu †‡, Alireza Kohandehghan †‡, Zhi Li †‡*, Kai Cui ‡, Xuehai Tan†‡, Tyler James Stephenson †‡, Cecil K. King’ondu†‡, Chris M. B. Holt †‡, Brian C. Olsen †‡, Jin Kwon Tak §, Don Harfield §, Anthony O. Anyia §, andDavid Mitlin †‡*
 

We created unique interconnected partially graphitic carbon nanosheets (10–30 nm in thickness) with high specific surface area (up to 2287 m² g^–1), significant volume fraction of mesoporosity (up to 58%), and good electrical conductivity (211–226 S m^–1) from hemp bast fiber. The nanosheets are ideally suited for low (down to 0 °C) through high (100 °C) temperature ionic-liquid-based supercapacitor applications: At 0 °C and a current density of 10 A g^–1, the electrode maintains a remarkable capacitance of 106 F g^–1. At 20, 60, and 100 °C and an extreme current density of 100 A g^–1, there is excellent capacitance retention (72–92%) with the specific capacitances being 113, 144, and 142 F g^–1, respectively. These characteristics favorably place the materials on a Ragone chart providing among the best power–energy characteristics (on an active mass normalized basis) ever reported for an electrochemical capacitor: At a very high power density of 20 kW kg^–1 and 20, 60, and 100 °C, the energy densities are 19, 34, and 40 Wh kg^–1, respectively. Moreover the assembled supercapacitor device yields a maximum energy density of 12 Wh kg^–1, which is higher than that of commercially available supercapacitors. By taking advantage of the complex multilayered structure of a hemp bast fiber precursor, such exquisite carbons were able to be achieved by simple hydrothermal carbonization combined with activation. This novel precursor-synthesis route presents a great potential for facile large-scale production of high-performance carbons for a variety of diverse applications including energy storage.
 
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn400731g

Please vote in the poll!
http://missoulian.com/do-you-agree-with-the-federal-government-s-crackdown-on/poll_3254fa98-bbd2-11e2-935c-001a4bcf887a.html

By Margaret Storey
 
My 9-year-old daughter has Aicardi syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes extremely hard-to-control seizures, debilitation, disability and early mortality. She began having seizures at three months of age, and since that time has had multiple seizures every day, with rare exception — probably to the tune of nearly 200,000 seizures in her lifetime.
For most families, even one such day would be an emergency. For ours, it is the norm.
My daughter is a beautiful, loving girl who goes to school, enjoys music and parks, loves to be read to and adores looking at big, modern art in museums. She cannot walk independently, cannot talk and wears diapers. Every day she is at risk of Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy, or SUDEP, which accounts for 34 percent of all sudden deaths in children.

She is one of the 3 million Americans who have epilepsy, and one of the 40 percent whose seizures cannot be controlled by anti-seizure drugs. She has tried 10 anti-seizure medications as well as a high-protein/low-carbohydrate diet called the ketogenic diet; she takes three anti-seizure medications at once and has a vagus nerve stimulator implant that sends mild electrical pulses to the brain. These drugs help her, but she nonetheless experiences an average of three seizures every day. Moreover, the medications cause persistent side effects that negatively impact her quality of life, particularly her gastrointestinal, bone, dental, cognitive and mental health.
The Illinois Senate Executive Committee recently voted, 10-5, to move the House-passed medical marijuana legislation to the Senate for a vote. The bill is expected to pass, and though Gov. Pat Quinn has not committed to signing it, the general expectation is that the bill will become law. This should be received as great news for the many people with “debilitating” conditions that the bill is supposed to help — people for whom medical science has documented real, measurable and safe outcomes of the controlled use of cannabis or its component of chemical compounds.
It’s too bad that the legislature has ignored the medical needs of some of the most debilitated, and most vulnerable, patients in the state: children with epilepsy.
 
Full Article:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0515-marijuana-20130515,0,6000568.story

JEREMY LAURANCE
 
Smoking cannabis may prevent the development of diabetes, one of the most rapidly rising chronic disorders in the world.