CBD 101: A Cheatsheet For Beginners

CBD is a popular yet complex compound. Here’s a breakdown of the basics.

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Texas leads the way with 7% of all illegal cannabis sales.

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Activists plant the capitol with high hopes for fair ordinances.

5 Common Benefits Of Sativa Strains

Cannabis strains aren’t as important as people think they are. Still, some key effects have been associated with sativas separate from others.

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Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and several other leading advocates for marijuana reform took part in a virtual meeting on Tuesday to discuss cannabis policy ahead of a planned House of Representatives vote on a comprehensive legalization bill.

The senator was joined by Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Drug Policy Alliance Executive Director Kassandra Frederique for the conversation, which was organized by The Appeal and NowThis.

The main topic at hand was the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, a bill that would federally deschedule cannabis and promote restorative justice. House leadership recently announced that the legislation would be getting a floor vote next week.

Watch the lawmakers and advocates discuss marijuana reform and the MORE Act below:

Booker is an original cosponsor of the Senate version of the legislation, which was introduced by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), now Joe Biden’s vice presidential running mate. Blumenauer, meanwhile, is the architect of a step-by-step blueprint to federal legalization and a leading champion of marijuana reform in Congress.

“I am just really excited about this historic vote that’s about to happen on the MORE Act and really looking forward to seeing and hearing about the House’s momentum that I think could carry us into a Congress if we should take back control of the Senate in this election,” Booker said.

There have been some reports that Democratic support for holding a vote on the MORE Act at this time has waned somewhat, with certain members reportedly voicing concern that passing the bill amid the coronavirus pandemic could be bad optics. But so far there’s been no indication from leadership that the legislation is being pulled.

Blumenauer agreed that “the momentum is building” around marijuana reform in Congress and argued that it only serves to benefit lawmakers to get on board.

“Members of Congress who take a bolder stand are rewarded. Nobody’s losing an election over this. There’s blowback if they aren’t being heard,” he said. “The dawn has settled, and I think the momentum has swelled. I think we’re going to see not just a strong vote in the House, but I think there’s a chance that this is going to move through the Senate, with the leadership of Senator Booker.”

Pressley said that “the war on drugs has criminalized addiction and substance use disorders in a way that has devastated our communities.”

“The thing is this hurt, this harm, was not naturally occurring. These were policy choices,” she said. “For generations, we have had a first row seat to the firsthand grave consequences of this. Now we must be as precise in legislating healing and justice as those policies were inflicting hurt and harm.”

Democrats won’t be the only ones voting in favor of the reform, as three GOP members so far have gone on the record saying they will be “ayes” when it comes to the floor. The latest to say as much, Rep. Don Young (R-AK), said he’s “confident” it will pass the chamber.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), the sole GOP cosponsor on the bill, said earlier this month that he would be voting “yes” on the MORE Act, though he expressed criticism about a provision that would impose a federal excise tax on marijuana sales to be reinvested in communities most impacted by the drug war, calling them “reparations.”

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) also said “I intend to vote yes on the bill” in a recent interview with Politico. “With respect to timing, I do find it ironic that the only small businesses the Democrats seem to be worried about is cannabis shops, but I would support this bill whenever it is brought to a vote,” he said.

McClintock, along with Gaetz, voted for the MORE Act when it was marked up by the Judiciary Committee last year.

If the House approves the bill, there will still be an open question about whether the Republican-controlled Senate would follow suit. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is a strong advocate for hemp, but he’s maintained steadfast opposition to broader marijuana reform. That said, he did hold closed-door meetings with industry representatives last year.

McConnell’s office on Monday sent a press release highlighting some apparent Democratic discontent with plans to hold a vote on the MORE Act.

It’s possible the House action could spur the Senate to take up the STATES Act, however. That bipartisan bill is sponsored by Sens. Cory Gardner (R-CO) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

Gardner could use that legislative win as he trails behind former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) in his reelection race. And to Gaetz’s point, President Trump has expressed support for the proposal.

The vote on the MORE Act will not be the first time the House has taken up cannabis reform on the floor this Congress.

The chamber approved a coronavirus relief package in May that includes provisions to protect banks that service state-legal marijuana businesses from being penalized by federal regulators. It also approved the standalone Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act last year.

Last week, a House committee approved a bill designed to promote cannabis research, in part by allowing scientists to access marijuana from state-legal dispensaries.

Advocates were disappointed after lawmakers declined to include marijuana legalization as part of a recent policing reform bill the House passed. Several legislators made the case that it was an appropriate vehicle for the policy change, as ending cannabis criminalization would minimize police interactions.

Featured image by Craig At The Capitol/Shutterstock

This article has been republished from Marijuana Moment under a content-sharing agreement. Read the original article here.

The post Lawmakers and advocates discuss cannabis legalization bill ahead of House vote appeared first on Weedmaps News.

The proposal has been met with a lot of criticism.

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Germany’s leading health insurance provider has covered €75 million ($88.8 million) worth of medical cannabis sales so far this year, continuing a trend of strong annual growth.

The German National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Funds (GKV), which covers the public health insurance for 90 percent of the country’s population, recently released data on medical cannabis sales for the second quarter of this year. Like most countries, there was a massive spike in cannabis sales when COVID-19 lockdowns began in March, but since then, sales have dipped back to pre-COVID levels.

Since 2017, German doctors have been authorized to prescribe medical cannabis to treat cancer, depression, multiple sclerosis, and many other severe conditions. But unlike most other countries, many patients are able to have the cost of these medications covered by their health insurance. As the industry has matured, and more patients have become aware of the medicinal powers of cannabis, sales have grown year over year.

Germany is now the world’s second-largest importer of medical cannabis, after Israel. Most of this medical pot is sourced from the Netherlands, but a Spanish cannabis cultivator has just been approved as an importer. Germany has also been trying to kickstart its own domestic cannabis cultivation industry, but the country’s first three licensed domestic producers do not expect to make their first harvests until next year.

In the US and Canada, smokeable flower remains the most popular form of cannabis, but in Germany, flower sales only account for 49.8 percent of all insured sales, according to GKV. Even though overall medical marijuana sales are up, flower sales are declining in favor of full-spectrum extracts and capsules. Cannabis market data firm Prohibition Partners speculates that this shift could be due to the fact that oils and capsules make it easier to measure out a precise dose of cannabis.

Synthetic cannabinoids and magistral preparations are also gaining in popularity. Sativex, a synthetically-derived blend of THC and CBD used to treat multiple sclerosis, accounted for 30 percent of all insured sales in the first quarter of 2020. The country is also working to import a larger supply of dronabinol, a synthetic form of THC used to treat appetite loss and nausea in cancer and AIDS patients. And magistral preparations, or extracts prepared from dried cannabis flower, made up 14 percent of first-quarter insured sales.

The GKV data does not account for Germans who are paying for their own medical cannabis out of pocket, so the country’s actual total medical cannabis sales are likely much higher.

Texas, a longtime bastion of pot prohibition, continues to spark up surprises in the ever-changing landscape of 2020 cannabis reform.

Last week, Texas’s top agricultural official enthusiastically declared medical marijuana should be legal and available to anyone in pain. Now meet Dr. Tre Pennie, a Black military veteran and former police sergeant who’s running for congress as a Republican, largely on a platform of legalizing weed to benefit the populations most decimated by the War on Drugs.

Pennie, who’s running against incumbent Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, has authored a proposal titled Economic-Academic-Reward-Network-In-Training (EARN-IT) Cannabis Plan. The proposal aims to create educational and job training programs for citizens seeking to enter the cannabis industry, with a particular focus on elevating those from disadvantaged communities.

Talking to Marijuana Moment, Pennie elaborated on EARN-IT’s details. The plan’s release, Pennie said, is timed to influence next week’s scheduled House of Representatives vote on the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act. If it ultimately passes, the MORE Act would federally legalize marijuana.

Still, even if the MORE Act eventually does become law, individual states will not be required to adopt all its tenets, starting with legalization. And while Texas has taken some unexpected steps toward weed reform, possession and use of pot there will still get you locked up.

That hardline anti-weed stance comes mainly from Pennie’s fellow Republicans, including the state’s idiot Speaker of the House who recently babbled that legalization “could be a help” to his constituents, but he’d still vote against it.

Party politics, Pennie said, have no place in what he’s proposing. “This shouldn’t be a partisan position that we’re taking,” Pennie said, “and I think what we’ve done is, especially within the GOP, we’ve begun to wrap social and moral issues into … economic policy.”

Pennie is not alone in this thinking. Three GOP lawmakers in Congress have also pledged to vote in favor of the MORE Act.

“From a Republican perspective,” Pennie continued, “we don’t want people relying on the government, right? So we’ve got to teach them a merit-based skill to be able to take care of themselves. We can’t talk about people picking themselves up by their bootstraps if we won’t give them any boots to pick themselves up by.”

Before finalizing EARN-IT, Pennie said he visited Colorado cannabis stakeholders and concluded that thorough regulation of the industry is crucial in order to fully unlock weed’s positive potential.

“If done right,” the EARN-IT plan states, “with proper federal regulation, oversight, and training, we can begin to lift failing communities out of poverty, reduce minority incarceration rates related to marijuana offenses and create sustainable markets resistant to online marketplace monopolies.”

Since legalizing hemp in 2019, Texas pot busts have declined by 30 percent, and prosecutions have even dropped by more than half. As a result, Texas crime labs have simply stopped testing for marijuana in misdemeanor cases.

So, indeed, we can now add the emergence of a Republican congressional candidate who advocates weed legalization with intense federal oversight to create restorative justice programs as just one more step Texas may finally take in the direction of marijuana sanity.

Here’s Why Using A Weed Grinder Is A No-Brainer

You don’t need grinders to smoke marijuana but you should still use one anyway. You’ll thank us later.

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