OSAGE | A Des Moines-based pediatric nurse practitioner will speak on the potential pitfalls of marijuana legalization Monday at a town hall meeting in Osage.

Concerned primarily with the lack of medical research on usage, Jennifer Sleiter will speak on questions she said still need to be answered if the state would consider any expanded form of marijuana legalization.

The Mitchell County Substance Abuse Coalition will hold the event at 7 p.m. in the Osage High School gym, 820 Sawyer Drive.

State legislation passed last year made it legal to possess an oil form of medical marijuana called cannabidiol, or CBD, but not access it, which some parents have said is a barrier to using it as a treatment.

Wherever there are people suffering, and medical marijuana can help those suffering people, medical marijuana should be legal. I think you would be hard pressed to find any country on the planet that doesn’t have people that would benefit from medical marijuana. Croatia is no exception. The nation of Croatia legalized medical marijuana the last week, sort of. Per ABC:

The legalization formally went into effect on Thursday, but Croatian media reported that no medicines containing THC — the active element in cannabis — have been registered in the country.

Many patients ask us whether cannabis can reverse tumor growth. Below is a list of 37 studies from reputable, peer-reviewed journals showing how cannabis works to kill cancer cells in laboratory studies using animals, and not people. Your oncologist may be interested in these studies, but know that they do not prove cannabis cures cancer in humans. Clinical studies are needed.

37 cannabis and cancer studies 

Cannabis and Biliary Tract Cancer

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19916793

Cannabis and Bladder Cancer

The Turnbull government wants to make it legal to grow medicinal cannabis in Australia this year.

Health Minister Sussan Ley said on Friday she was finalising changes to the Narcotics Drugs Act to allow cannabis to be grown for medicinal and scientific purposes.

Victoria and NSW state governments have indicated they want to legalise medicinal cannabis, and are waiting on a federal regulatory scheme to do so.

Health Minister Sussan Ley Photo: Andrew Meares

A NEW RANDOMIZED, CONTROLLED STUDY FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT SAN DIEGO HAS SHOWN THAT INHALING CANNABIS CAN BLUNT DIABETIC NEUROPATHIC PAIN FOR SEVERAL HOURS.

“We found that the more concentrated the dose, the more relief people got,” says lead author Mark Steven Wallace, MD, chair of the Division of Pain Management at the University of California, San Diego.

Marijuana advocates in New Jersey are planning a gathering in front of the statehouse Saturday to demand that marijuana be legalized in the Garden State. The rally, scheduled for 3 p.m., is the third organized in the Trenton so far this year.

Across the state, marijuana advocates have been pushing reforms to local laws and ordinances, building up to the state level, according to NJ.com. The organizers began their push in June when the town of Asbury Park passed a non-binding resolution calling for marijuana decriminalization in the state. Ultimately, they want that pressure to push Gov. Chris Christie to sign a bill legalizing pot.

TORONTO, ONTARIO (PRWEB) OCTOBER 16, 2015

CanvasRx Inc. (http://www.canvasrx.com) and academic chronic pain physicians Drs. John Hanlon (St. Michael’s Hospital) and Dr. Hance Clarke (Toronto General Hospital) are pleased to announce that they have received research ethics board approval to conduct the largest and most comprehensive observational study of medical cannabis of its kind in Canada.

The study, which will be conducted over a period of 3 years and will follow 1,000 medical cannabis patients will seek to assess the efficacy of medical cannabis on chronic pain, sleep and function.

Cannabis should not be used to prevent postoperative nausea and vomiting (PONV) because of unacceptable side effects and low effectiveness, according to a study published online in Anesthesia & Analgesia.

Maren Kleine-Brueggeney, M.D., from the University of Bern in Switzerland, and colleagues randomized 40 patients at high risk for PONV to either 0.125 mg/kg intravenous tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) or placebo at the end of surgery before emergence from anesthesia.

Medically-prescribed doses of the drug, which otherwise will remain illegal, will be used to ease the condition of the terminally ill suffering pain, nausea and vomiting. The doses also will help children with drug-resistant epilepsy.

And it will be used to treat patients fighting cancer who have to deal with nausea and vomiting from chemotherapy.

An addiction psychiatrist has said smoking marijuana does not necessarily cause addiction to other drugs later in life, contradicting the common theory it is a 'gateway drug'.

Dr Kevin Hill, a director at McLean psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard University was answering questions about marijuana on Reddit, when he shared his opinion.