Cannabis can treat both pain and insomnia in people who want to avoid prescription and sleep medications, a study has found.

The study, published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, looked at 1,000 people taking legalised marijuana in an American state.Researchers in the US found that among the 65 per cent of people taking cannabis for pain, 80 per cent found it was very or extremely helpful.

Eighty-two per cent of these people were able to reduce, or stop taking over the counter pain medications and 88 per cent were able to stop taking opioid painkillers.

The study suggested that cannabis could lower opioid use. However, the researchers noted that more needs to be done to understand the potential therapeutic benefits of cannabis.

The cannabinoid cannabidiol has again been explicitly left off the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) List of Prohibited Substances and Methods.

The Prohibited List details substances and methods that are banned in sport. The list is updated annually based on scientific and medical research, trends, and intelligence sourced from law enforcement agencies and pharmaceutical companies.

In order for a substance or method to be added to WADA’s ban list, it needs to meet at least two of the following three criteria:

A Kingston cardiologist and former president of the Canadian Medical Association will be sounding the alarm on Friday at a major meeting of stroke experts over the link between marijuana and heart attacks and stroke.

“I’m not here to demonize cannabis. We don’t need to go back to reefer madness. But we can’t say it does not harm,” said Dr. Chris Simpson, who was president of the CMA in 2014 and 2015 and made the public health implications and possible medicinal uses of marijuana one of the focal points of his term.

“If we have several million people smoking marijuana every day, we want to know what the effects are,” said Simpson, who will be addressing researchers, health professionals and policy-makers at the Canadian Stroke Congress.

Big-name brands, such as Nike and Louis Vutton, are constantly counterfeited, but none have spurned a crisis quite like counterfeit vape cartridges. 

According to research by Oxford University, older adults are the fastest growing demographic of Canadian cannabis users.

The implications, however, of medical cannabis use for older adults are largely unknown. Despite this, there are a number of suggested mechanisms for this increase, including greater medicinal use and decreasing stigma associated with usage.

Researchers at Western University are demonstrating how cannabidiol (CBD) can help diminish the negative psychiatric side effects from tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) during cannabis consumption in rats.

Although researchers were previously aware that high-THC cannabis cultivars could cause such symptoms, the mechanism behind the symptoms was not fully understood.

Cannabis has shown promise for relieving Alzheimer’s Disease, chronic pain, poor appetites, and other issues that affect seniors.

The older we get, the more demands and care our bodies require. One estimate claims that by the year 2030, the current statistics on senior diseases will be doubled, resulting in 15 million adults that will suffer from some sort of ailment. Having this in mind, how can cannabis improve the life of seniors?

For some people with mental illness, prescription medications like SSRIs can be a lifeline. For others, the mixture of chemicals in the system ends in disaster, and that’s why many are now ‘self-medicating’ with CBD.

Vaping products, one of the fastest-growing segments of the legal marijuana industry, have taken a hit from consumers as public health experts scramble to determine what’s causing a mysterious and sometimes fatal lung disease among people who use e-cigarettes.

The ailment has sickened at least 530 people and killed nine. Some vaped nicotine, but many reported using oil containing THC, marijuana’s high-inducing ingredient, and said they bought products from pop-up shops and other illegal sellers. The only death linked to THC vapes bought at legal shops occurred in Oregon.

The Arthritis Foundation says it recently consulted leading arthritis and CBD experts to find out what arthritis sufferers should know about cannabidiol in order to create a guide, which has just been released.

According to the Foundation, more than 50 million Americans have arthritis, so it affects a significant chunk of the USA’s population. Cannabidiol has been shown to have anti-inflammatory properties in animals and therefore may be useful in treating the condition, which comes in various forms. However, there have been no rigorous clinical studies in human arthritis sufferers to confirm this.