• With legalization ahead, nonprofit’s certification program will test businesses offering pot products

    The National Institute for Cannabis Health and Education said its CannabisWise certification will test businesses on quality and safety guidelines
    The Toronto Star (Canada)
    Sunday, December 24, 2017

    Marijuana consumers are likely to have a flood of options when pot becomes legal next summer and now a not-for-profit group is stepping in to help determine which products to trust. The National Institute for Cannabis Health and Education said its CannabisWise certification will test businesses on quality and safety guidelines, similar to the way other voluntary programs regulate pharmacy services or fish products in Canada. The institute’s CEO, Barinder Rasode, said they’ve heard concerns that Canadians are looking for clarity when it comes to buying quality marijuana that is sourced ethically and adhering to laws from all three levels of government.

  • Israeli pot dealers boost business with high tech smokescreen

    Growing popularity of encrypted Telegrass platform comes after Knesset approved blueprint for marijuana decriminalization
    The Times of Israel (Israel)
    Saturday, December 23, 2017

    Telegrass, an Israeli platform for drug-dealing, has won praise from its users but sparked alarm among drug counselors and police. Amos Dov Silver, a 33-year-old Israeli, founded it in March as a channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram. A dual Israel-US citizen, he now lives in the United States “for fear that he’ll be arrested” in Israel, according to the Haaretz daily. Telegrass lets sellers list their wares and prices, exchanging self-deleting messages with buyers to set up deliveries. “We don’t know exactly how many people are using the platform, however we have over 100,000 registered users,” Silver told AFP in an online chat. “We will have better statistics in the future.”

  • The opioid crisis is getting worse, particularly for black Americans

    Drug deaths among blacks in urban counties rose by 41 percent in 2016, far outpacing any other racial or ethnic group
    The New York Times (US)
    Friday, December 22, 2017

    The epidemic of drug overdoses, often perceived as a largely white rural problem, made striking inroads among black Americans last year — particularly in urban counties where fentanyl has become widespread. Although the steep rise in 2016 drug deaths has been noted previously, these are the first numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to break down 2016 mortality along geographic and racial lines. They reveal that the drug death rate is rising most steeply among blacks. Fentanyl-laced cocaine, too, may be playing a role. A study found that cocaine-related overdose deaths were nearly as common among black men between 2012-2015 as deaths due to prescription opioids in white men over the same period.

  • Legal pot: Mexico to sell space cakes, cannabis drinks and marijuana lipsticks

    In June, Mexico legalized the use of marijuana for medical and scientific needs but maintained a ban on recreational use and cultivation
    Newsweek (US)
    Thursday, December 21, 2017

    marihuana amanecerMexico is set to legalize the sale of marijuana-based products early next year, despite the country’s struggles with the illicit drug trade. Mexico’s health regulator announced plans to permit the sale of cannabis-based foods, drinks, medicines and cosmetics in the market. Arturo Tornel, spokesman for health regulator Cofepris (The Federal Commission for the Protection Against Sanitary Risk), said that the agency plans to formally publish the regulation for marijuana-based goods within the next few days, allowing those items to enter the Mexico market in about a month. He added that Cofepris expects distributors and retailers to import the items, with some companies eventually producing items in Mexico using marijuana grown abroad.

  • B.C. pilot project to distribute clean opioids to people at high risk of overdose

    The aim is not to treat addiction, but to stop overdose deaths due to toxic street drugs
    The Globe and Mail (Canada)
    Wednesday, December 20, 2017

    Ottawa has approved a pilot project that will allow health officials in B.C. to distribute clean opioids to drug users to use as they please, marking one of the province's most radical efforts to address a fentanyl-saturated drug supply that has killed more than 1,000 people this year. Details are still being finalized, but Mark Tyndall, executive director of the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), said the idea is that people at high risk of overdose, once registered, will be able to pick up hydromorphone pills at either supportive housing units or supervised consumption facilities, two or three times a day, and self-administer them. Most would likely choose to crush, cook and inject them.

  • Government's cannabis plans include legal defence for terminal patients who use

    400,000 New Zealanders are using cannabis on a yearly basis, but about 42 per cent of those are using it for medicinal purposes
    Stuff (New Zealand)
    Wednesday, December 20, 2017

    The Government will not be legalising the medicinal use of cannabis in New Zealand, but it will allow terminal patients caught growing cannabis to use their illness as a defence to avoid prosecution. New legislation introduced by the Government will also introduce a medicinal cannabis scheme to enable access to medical-grade cannabis products and remove cannabidiol from the schedule of controlled drugs. That meant eventually, patients with a prescription would be able to access medicinal cannabis products at a pharmacy. That scheme would take time to implement, but as soon as the law was passed patients with less than 12 months to live, who had been caught using the raw form of cannabis, would have a legal defence.

  • Canadian cannabis firm licensed to produce in Denmark

    Oils and dried cannabis will be sold under the Spectrum Cannabis brand
    The Local (Denmark)
    Tuesday, December 19, 2017

    Canadian medical marijuana producer Canopy Growth said its joint venture Spectrum Cannabis has been licensed to grow pot in Denmark for sale throughout the European Union. In a statement, the company hailed as a "major milestone" what it called the "first federal production licence issued to a Canadian cannabis producer anywhere in the European Union." With the announcement, Denmark also joins the Netherlands as the only two EU countries with federal permits to grow medical cannabis. Earlier this month, Canopy announced the joint venture with hemp producer Danish Cannabis to establish a 40,000 square metre facility in Odense.

  • Duterte's drug war in 2017: The year of deaths and denials

    Official data shows that 3,993 people were killed in police operations, yet the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte refuses to tag them as extrajudicial killings. Human rights organizations say the world will not be fooled
    Rappler (Philippines)
    Tuesday, December 19, 2017

    It's been a news cycle of deaths and denials in 2017 in the Philippines. Practically every day TV footages, online posts, and newspaper photos showed blood and grief as policemen raided poor villages and shanties to implement the Duterte administration's war on drugs. (Read: The Impunity Series) Despite official data and eyewitness accounts, the government has repeatedly denied that the dead are victims of extrajudicial killings, such as in official declarations – like the one made before the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in September – that the deaths from police operations "are not extrajudicial killings"; the rejection of calls by United Nations member-states to conduct a thorough and impartial probe; and the intimidation of local and foreign human rights advocates.

  • How a secretive police squad racked up kills in Duterte's drug war

    The most prominent police officer from Davao is Ronald Dela Rosa, the national police chief
    Reuters (UK)
    Tuesday, December 19, 2017

    Soon after President Rodrigo Duterte launched his war on drugs, a small group of police officers from his hometown Davao arrived in the Philippine capital. Calling themselves the "Davao Boys," they formed the core of a lethal anti-drug unit. The story of the Davao Boys also highlights a larger dynamic: Many of the drug war’s key police officers hail from or served in President Duterte’s hometown, where the campaign’s brutal methods originated during his time as mayor. A Davao-based human rights group, the Coalition Against Summary Execution, blamed death squads in the city for 1,424 murders there between 1998 and 2015, mostly of petty criminals and drug users. Duterte, who was mayor for much of that period, denied any involvement.

  • Marijuana doomsday didn't come

    Those who thought Colorado's legalization would be a catastrophe were wrong then and are wrong now
    US News & World Report (US)
    Tuesday, December 19, 2017

    It's been a five years since Colorado's voters approved Constitutional Amendment 64, legalizing recreational marijuana in the state. Sales commenced four years ago this January. Although the amendment passed by a comfortable 10-point margin, the debate in Colorado has continued since prohibition ended, most recently flaring up with an editorial published in the Colorado Springs Gazette. The Gazette's editorial board referred to what has happened in Colorado as "an embarrassing cautionary tale," presenting a laundry list of the purported ill-effects of the change in the law. However, evidence from Colorado shows that marijuana legalization does not lead to increased teen usage, does not lead to increased homelessness, and does not lead to societal breakdown.

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