Medical marijuana cards will now be available to those suffering from debilitating diseases in Georgia.

Georgia mother Corey Lowe has been waiting for the day medical marijuana would be legal.

Her 13-year-old daughter, Victoria Lowe, suffers from epileptic seizures and the family learned the seizures would stop when she tried cannabis oil in Colorado.

“It worked remarkably,” Corey Lowe said.

The new medical marijuana law allows families like the Lowes to possess up to 20 liquid ounces of low grade THC cannabis oil.

But first you have to qualify. The Georgia Department of Public Health said in order to get the oil people have to live in Georgia for at least a year and an application would have to be submitted by a doctor.

It started when Jali was four months old. The boy squirmed under convulsions, muscle twitching. The epileptic seizures occurred in the following years repeatedly, often several times a day. In order not to get hurt, the child was wearing a helmet. The parents lived in constant worry, the two brothers felt neglected. "The disease has determined our lives," says mother Jael Bracha.

Today Jali is seven years old - and symptom-free. He owes this apparently to an agent that is illegal and controversial everywhere in many places: cannabis. Three times a day Jali gets several drops that contain the active ingredients tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). Since the start of therapy he had not a single attack more, says the mother.

A novel form of marijuana involving the inhalation of highly potent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) created via butane extraction is becoming increasingly common, placing both producers and users at risk for fires and burns, warn US researchers.

The practice, known as dabbing, uses less potent parts of the cannabis plant to create concentrated butane hash oils (BHO), which are crystalized, then heated with a blowtorch so that the vapors can be inhaled.

John M. Stogner, PhD, from the University of North Carolina, at Charlotte, and Bryan Lee Miller, PhD, from Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro, warn that there is a lack of research into the practice, although a number of accidents and injuries have been reported.

It was more than 20 years ago that Bradford McIntyre began purchasing edible doses of medicinal marijuana from the Compassion Club on Commercial Drive.

Now, as the city looks to finally bring Vancouver’s over-the-counter cannabis sales under a regulatory framework, McIntyre said in a phone interview he’s worried that the plan to normalize patients’ access will have the opposite effect for thousands of people who rely on cannabis but prefer not to smoke the drug.

“Edible medicinal-marijuana products have been available in British Columbia for decades,” McIntyre told the Straight. “The city is out of touch.”

According to a recent report from Europe's drug monitoring agency – the EMCDDA – the amount of Britons aged 15 to 34 using cannabis has almost halved in little more than a decade.

The statistics show that in 2000, almost 20% of the country's young adults were using marijuana whereas the most recent figures, from 2013, indicate that this has dropped to just above 10%.

When first embarking on this research, the question was simple: has Britain fallen out of love with cannabis? The answer, however, was not so clear.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Since the 1970s, advocates of an aggressive drug war have maintained that any liberalization of drug laws would “send the wrong message” to kids and increase adolescent drug use. This claim has been asserted repeatedly particularly in the debate over medical marijuana laws.

But there’s an ever-growing body of peer-reviewed research suggesting otherwise, and the latest such study comes from a group of researchers at Columbia University in New York and elsewhere in this week’s journal of Lancet Psychiatry.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — 

Nurseries across Florida can begin submitting their applications to grow medical marijuana on Wednesday.

The state plans to chose five nurseries that will be allowed to grow marijuana to produce Charlotte's Web, a special oil form of medical marijuana.

But Channel 9 found out that the process to apply is so intense that it could take six more months before the nurseries are growing anything.

Gov. Rick Scott signed the Compassionate Medical Cannabis Act in June 2014, but Charlotte's Web is still not available.

"You're growing a whole new industry in Florida and these things don't come easily," said Louis Rotundo, with the Florida Medical Cannabis Association.

Critically ill patients, including children with severe epilepsy, could gain faster access to medical marijuana under a bill passed by the state Senate on Monday and by the state Assembly earlier this month.

And for one local mother who has a daughter who has numerous seizures, access to medical marijuana can’t come soon enough.

That legislation, sponsored by state Sen. Joseph Griffo, R-Rome, would provide a process to give expedited access to medical marijuana to certain patients before the state’s medical marijuana program begins early next year.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has proposed a massive increase in the amount of marijuana it will allow to be produced this year in the hopes of meeting the demand of researchers studying new medicinal uses for the drug, it has announced.

Background

In the US, the manufacture and production of marijuana is controlled by the DEA, whose authority to do so stems from the Controlled Substances Act (CSA)—a law which categorizes drugs in accordance with their risk of abuse and medical benefit.

Celiac disease can be devastating to those who suffer from it, but evidence suggests that there is a natural plant treatment that can mitigate or even cure the ailment: cannabis.

People who have celiac suffer from autoimmune attacks on their small intestine after eating glucose, which can lead to pain and an inability to absorb nutrients, as well as diabetes, multiple sclerosis and cancer over the long term.

Gluten is ubiquitous in the Western diet and people who take pains to avoid eating it are still likely to consume some by accident on occasion, and even in small amounts gluten can lead to extremely painful and embarrassing episodes. Fortunately, marijuana may be able to help.