For Immediate Release Weds July 8, 2015 Victoria, B.C.: Less than one month after the Supreme Court of Canada handed down the Owen Smith decision, Health Canada has announced they are starting to issue Licensed Producers an Exemption #56 from the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to allow them to produce and sell cannabis extracts, […]
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Cannabis and the Young Brain: Prohibition’s Forgotten Victims
(image : The Night Dad Went to Jail) Cannabis and the Young Brain: Prohibition’s Forgotten Victims By Judith Stamps Listen to Rona Ambrose, Canada’s Health Minister, or Nora Volkow, America’s Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and you will soon conclude that cannabis prohibition today rests on a single, nearly unassailable platform: it […]
Hand Rubbed Hash
By Owen Smith While not as ideal as dry sifting and making water hash, hand rubbing is the most basic method of separating the medicinal trichome heads from the body of the plant. This important step is at the centre of the constitutional challenge that I took to the Supreme Court of Canada in March […]
The Cannabis Swing Vote
By Jerry Golick Depending on who you talk to, and whose statistics you follow, there are anywhere between one and two million Canadian citizens who use cannabis on a regular basis (for details on how I arrived at this see “Cannabis by the Numbers”: Add to this the number of people who use it infrequently […]
Word Wars: Language Politics and Medical Cannabis
There have always been regimes of truth underpinned by churches or political economies, and supported by laws and law enforcement. Reefer madness comes to mind. But so does the notion that gays are insane (in North America, officially so listed until 1973); that women are not fit to vote (until 1917 in Canada and […]
Making Water Hash
(image: MedicalJane) Water hash is another simple way to extract the trichome heads from the bulk of the cannabis plant. This important step in obtaining the desired medicinal compounds without ingesting the bulk of the plant was at the center of the constitutional challenge that was recently affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada. Using […]
Objections to CMQ Medical Cannabis Guidelines
by Jerry Golick Introduction The recently published guidelines by the Collège des médecins du Quebec (CMQ) with respect to prescribing medical cannabis contravene both the spirit and intent of the current Health Canada regulations. After dithering for over a year on their creation, these “Research Protocols” make it more challenging than ever for a patient […]
Do We Need Large-Scale Randomized Double Blind Clinical Trials for Medical Cannabis?
If you’ve been following current events on medical cannabis, you will have heard its critics claim there have been no clinical trials to demonstrate it usefulness. The critics include, to name a few, the President of the Canadian Medical Association; the Canadian Minister of Health; the Director of the National Institute for Drug Abuse, […]
Making Dry Sift Hash
(Image: Fresh Headies) Making Dry Sift Hash Separating the medicinal ingredients stored in the trichomes head of the cannabis plant from the remaining inert material might prove to be the single most important step in making clean cannabis medicines. The bulbous glandular reservoir dangles precariously, like the cap of a glass mushroom, waiting for the […]
Health Canada Fails Patients
By Beth Cormier After reading this Globe and Mail op-ed, it is clear to me that this journalist has not done their medical cannabis history homework. The Harper Government did not make the initial decision that medicinal cannabis users could only smoke cannabis; rather they have upheld the status quo. The Harper government has continually […]