Marijuana

Cannabis use — whether smoked, eaten or vaporized — is associated with a higher number of adverse cardiovascular outcomes, according to a new study.

Published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the research found that risk of coronary heart disease, heart attack and stroke increased with any kind of cannabis use, with heavier use associated with higher odds of negative outcomes.

For daily cannabis users, for example, odds of a heart attack were 25% higher compared to non-users and 42% higher for stroke, the study found.

h/t DS

When Kalpit Sharma started smoking cannabis, he thought it was just part of “living his life” as a university student. After all, he had been told that the drug was relatively harmless.

That all changed in the summer of 2021, when he started hearing voices in his head.

“I would bike around, and the chain of the bike, it came off. And I thought that I could speak to birds, and birds were telling me how to put the chain back on,” said Sharma, who was studying at York University in Toronto at the time.

This is pot legalization’s dirty little secret.

When Mike Babins opened his legal cannabis shop on Jan. 5, 2019, he had a vision of where he’d be in five years — even if it was admittedly pie in the sky.

“I kind of thought I’d be on my private island in the Caribbean with people feeding me grapes, but that was a bit of a pipe dream,” he told CBC News from his Evergreen Cannabis shop in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighbourhood.

Evergreen Cannabis was one of Vancouver’s first two legal pot shops to open that day. There was a lineup around the block and no shortage of enthusiasm from customers.

A few weeks after Canada’s fifth anniversary of cannabis legalization, industry executives gathered in the Crystal Ballroom of the Omni King Edward Hotel in downtown Toronto.

They had travelled from across the country to attend the two-day, invite-only event, with tickets going for $1,800. Now in its third iteration, the room was humming a much different tune than it was in 2021, its inaugural year.

It is an unimaginably gruesome crime: an example of human violence at its most extreme.

In May 2018, Bryn Spejcher of Thousand Oaks, California, picked up a bread knife and stabbed her new boyfriend 108 times — killing him — before turning the blade on her dog.

The 32-year-old, who worked as an audiologist, then proceeded to stab herself — only stopping when police hit her nine times with a baton.

At least 290 American children have suffered brutal, preventable deaths linked to marijuana over the last decade, according to an analysis seen exclusively by DailyMail.com.

The highest proportion of deaths – 95 – involved extreme violence, the dossier of reports show.

This includes the case of a Texan man who murdered his girlfriend and nine-month baby with a pocket-knife while suffering what was believed to be a cannabis-induced psychotic episode.

This is the issue no one wants to discuss.

Gen Z is also turning away from the drug

Last Friday, the rapper Snoop Dogg made a grave announcement. “After much consideration and conversation with my family, I’ve decided to give up smoke,” the rapper posted on social media. “Please respect my privacy at this time.” The terse seriousness of the statement could well be tongue-in-cheek: perhaps Snoop, already a serial entrepreneur in all things weed-related, is about to launch a smoke-free product, like a marijuana vape or edible.

More Ohioans voted for abortion than for marijuana this Tuesday. Discourse about the election focused mainly on Issue 1, which enshrined the right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions” — or, stated honestly, to kill your unborn child. But Issue 2, which legalized recreational marijuana, received decidedly less attention on the national stage.

Canada remains one of the only countries in the world that allows legal and regulated access to recreational marijuana. But five years after the drug’s legalisation, the country’s cannabis industry is struggling for survival.

George Smitherman remembers buying his first legal gram of cannabis in October 2018 from a Tweed shop in Newfoundland.

The cannabis company had made headlines two years prior for signing a marketing deal with US rapper Snoop Dogg, which was hailed at the time as a sign of a new dawn in the marijuana industry.

The shop,Mr Smitherman recalls, was “beautiful”.

This sounds more like an appeal to government to make the Oligopoly even more exclusive. Anything spelled “Smitherman” stinks like shit.

… Cannabis-induced psychosis had the largest relative increase for hospitalizations, the study said.

Both genes and environmental factors predispose some people to using cannabis and to developing schizophrenia. Myron said more research is needed to understand the risk, calling it an area that is under-discussed.

Over a span of 11 years, annual rates of Ontario emergency department visits for cannabis-related traffic injuries surged dramatically, according to a recent study from The Ottawa Hospital.

The study, published Wednesday in JAMA Network Open, looked at cannabis involvement in emergency room visits for traffic injuries between 2010 and 2021 in Ontario. It also examined shifts in cannabis consumption and driving habits following federal legalization in 2018.

A major problem underlying the cannabis industry’s continuing financial struggles has been overcapacity. In provinces that allow private retailers, there are too many shops competing for too few customers to cover costs. And nationwide, producers have been making more cannabis than the retailers need.

Four years ago, the industry looked promising. In 2019, Ontario’s first 24 licensed cannabis shops opened with a bang. Those privately-owned retailers initially averaged about $1-million in monthly sales each, thanks to minimal legal competition and average prices above $12 a gram.