2017 promises changes that border on the torrential, some good, far too many, bad. Astoundingly good is the promise of Cannabis legislation in Canada, or at least new steps in that direction. Not good is the Trudeau government’s demonstrated sympathy with Canada’s hyper regulated, hyper securitized Licensed Producers, set, if they get their way, to […]
Tag: Judith Stamps
Editors Note – Creative Optimism: The Only Way To Go
Judith Stamps Welcome to Issue 48 of Cannabis Digest. If you have, with any passion, been watching the changes in Canada’s cannabis scene, you will have experienced days of confusion, giddy exuberance, and angst. The landscapers have been at work. Cannabis extracts are legal. Denying patients the right to grow is illegal. Dispensaries are legal […]
The Lift Cannabis Forum: Banishing the Prohibition Monsters…Maybe
Judith Stamps Last Thursday evening, November 12th 2015, it was my privilege to attend a forum on the future of cannabis in Canada, planned and hosted by Lift, a web-based, independent communications hub established in 2013 by Tyler Sookochoff and directed by David Brown. The forum, held at UBC’s downtown campus at Robson Square, was […]
Cannabis and Capital in the Twenty-First Century
By Judith Stamps Prior to World War I the context for cannabis policy in the US was racial anxiety over Mexican immigrants. In the interwar years it was anxiety about the newly liberated black culture forming around the American jazz scene, with some spill-off onto Canada via our own prohibitionist, Emily Murphy. In the 1950s […]
Editors Note – Autumn Leaves
By Judith Stamps Here we are in the season of Home Canning, Harvest festivals, Thanksgiving, Halloween, and the dreaded Federal Election, a festival of sorts that we add once every four years. It isn’t an enjoyable festival, though, and it is hardly an ancient tradition. On some days it is so tedious, so juvenile, and […]
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, […]
Mr. Harper and the Developing Brain
Veblen-Inspired Reflections on the Recent Federal Anti-Drug Campaign If you’re not already acquainted, allow me to introduce you to Thorstein Veblen, an early 20th century economist who provided a biting analysis of upper middle class and wealthy citizens in modern nations. He called them the leisure class. They’re also the governing class. In Veblen’s view, […]
Some Thoughts on Thomas King Forcade
(High Times: Jan 1993) By Judith Stamps We remember Thomas King Forcade, if we remember him at all, as the creator of High Times, the Cannabis magazine that turned forty in 2014. We are unlikely to recall much more, however, as Forcade kept an aggressively low profile. His name never appeared on the masthead. […]
Timeline – Marijuana Prohibition in the UK
A Timeline of Marijuana Prohibition in the UK [i] The Years 1928-1945 In 1928, the UK’s Dangerous Drugs Act comes into force, making marijuana illegal in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This date places the UK at the midpoint of the dark era. Dates of prohibition for other areas in the English-Speaking […]
Absurdities in the War on Drugs: A New Timeline
1. The Indian Hemp Commission was carried out in India at the behest of British Parliament. Some of the wealthier classes had complained that “Indian Hemp,” as Cannabis as called, was making the working classes lazy. The Commission found the “hemp drug” innocuous. 2. Albert Hofmann discovered LSD in 1938. In 1943 he took […]