MGC Pharmaceuticals has been collaborating with the University of Sydney Business School community engagement program in the production of a medical cannabis white paper.

The paper, titled Clinical Evidence for Medical Cannabis: Epilepsy, Cancer and Multiple Sclerosis examines existing evidence supporting the efficacy of medical cannabis.

This second collaboration between the two also examines medical cannabis applicability to relieve associated symptoms for a range of health related issues, including pain nausea and loss of appetite.

CITIVA, in collaboration with the University of West Indies, Mona announced today they are donating the first cannabis-based medicine extracted from their well-researched, high-CBD cannabis strain, to be used in a ground-breaking study in Jamaica that will examine its effect on children with Epilepsy. 

Marijuana pioneer Colorado is poised to add post-traumatic stress disorder to its medical marijuana program, joining 18 other states that consider PTSD a condition treatable by pot.

A panel of state lawmakers voted 5-0 Wednesday to endorse the addition of PTSD to Colorado’s 2000 medical pot law. The vote doesn’t have legal effect; it’s just a recommendation to the full Legislature, which resumes work in January. But the vote indicates a dramatic shift for a state that has allowed medical pot for more than a decade but hasn’t endorsed its use for PTSD.

Companies that make prescription painkillers and their allies have contributed more than $366,000 to Mississippi candidates and hired an average of 18 lobbyists yearly in the state since 2006 to push their policies.

The spending comes as Mississippi's use of opioids reached the fifth-highest in the country last year.

A joint investigation by The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity found the organizations spent $880 million nationwide and hired an annual average of 1,350 lobbyists in state capitals around the country from 2006 through 2015. By comparison, groups seeking limits on opioid prescribing spent about $4 million.
 

Canadians physicians, like most Canadian citizens, hold highly polarized views regarding cannabis. Doctors tend to be all for or completely against cannabis, with few taking a nuanced view of both the risks and the potential benefits. To fulfill our duty to protect, promote and restore health, we must become informed leaders, not reluctant followers or reckless zealots.

Some physicians are writing thousands of cannabis prescriptions every year for a wide variety of maladies. Many of their "patients" are not adequately assessed, nor are they informed about or encouraged to try conventional treatment options, which often have far more evidence for their safety and efficacy. Their "patient" wants cannabis and they get cannabis.

States with medical marijuana laws have a quarter less painkiller overdose deaths, and less painkiller prescriptions as well.

Now, leading research institution UC Berkeley, and a cannabis technology company HelloMD, hope to learn more about why.

UC Berkeley and HelloMD announced this week a study of how cannabis affects opioid use. The team will survey HelloMD’s patient database of around 100,000 regarding cannabis and how it affects patients’ use of opioids.

Dr. Ian Mitchell is a Kamloops emergency room physician, with a keen interest in pot.

Specifically medicinal marijuana, and how it might be used as an anti anxiety medication and for people with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dr. Mitchell is sharing what he knows as part of the Kamloops Adult Learners' Society programming for the fall.

To listen to the full interview, play below:

You would think it would be a slam dunk in the Bay State, but recent polls are making for some nail-biting. Still, this thing should win.

No matter how you slice it, there’s a stark statistical reality regarding marijuana reform in Massachusetts over the past decade: it’s undefeated at the ballot box. This includes binding state-wide initiatives that were passed by voters (decriminalization in 2008, medical marijuana in 2012), and a large number of non-binding public policy question (PPQs) that were also run in state House and Senate districts since 2000.

Cannabis as a medicine has an ancient history with anecdotes dating back to the Vedic period (c.1500 BCE) in India and Nepal. It wasn’t until 1839 that William Brooke O’Shaughnessy introduced the therapeutic potential of cannabis to the western hemisphere, and another 75 years after that until Sir William Osler, the father of modern medicine, proposed its use for the treatment of migraines and headaches. The criminalization of cannabis has since hindered our ability to research its potential; to-date, much of what we understand is largely anecdotal or based on animal or tissue culture experiments.