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Lawmakers pass anticipated legislation that reduces possession of small quantities to a petty offence and paves way for medical cannabis industry Jamaican lawmakers have passed an act to decriminalise small amounts of marijuana and establish a licensing agency to regulate a lawful medical cannabis industry on the island. After several hours of debate legislators in…

A new study has quantified the risk of death associated with an array of legal and illegal drugs to find that alcohol was the deadliest of them all, followed by heroin and cocaine. Marijuana, on the other hand, was associated with the lowest risk of death. The study even suggests that we’ve been overestimating how…

Alaska’s voter initiative making marijuana legal takes effect Tuesday, placing Alaska alongside Colorado and Washington as the three U.S. states where recreational marijuana is legal. The new law means people over age 21 can consume small amounts of pot — if they can find it. It’s still illegal to sell marijuana. “You can still give…

The original paper can be found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/pdf/srep08126.pdf 1Epidemiological Research Unit, Technische Universita¨t Dresden, Klinische Psychologie & Psychotherapie, Dresden, Germany,2Chemisches und Veterina¨runtersuchungsamt (CVUA) Karlsruhe, Germany, 3Social and Epidemiological Research (SER)Department, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Toronto, Canada, 4Institute of Medical Sciences, University of Toronto(UofT), Toronto, Canada, 5Dalla Lana School of Public Health, UofT,…

In plain English: No brain shrink from the ganja. The mainstream media last year was nearly in hysterics to report structural changes to the brain due to marijuana. They were following a study conducted at Northwestern University and sponsored by the always truthy Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). A headline in the Los…

Leading at the ballot box from Alaska to Washington, D.C., Americans are charting a path to a saner national drug policy The conservative wave of 2014 featured an unlikely, progressive undercurrent: In two states, plus the nation’s capital, Americans voted convincingly to pull the plug on marijuana prohibition. Even more striking were the results in…

No pressure, Colorado and Washington, but the world is scrutinizing your every move. That was the take-home message of an event today at the Brookings Institution, discussing the international impact of the move toward marijuana legalization at the state-level in the U.S. Laws passed in Colorado and Washington, with other states presumably to come, create…

A new report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice adds to the growing body of evidence that legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana does not lead to any number of doomsday scenarios envisioned by legalization opponents. Looking specifically at California, where full marijuana decriminalization went into effect on Jan. 1, 2011, the report finds that…

A 2012 Duke University study made international headlines when it purported to find a link between heavy marijuana use and IQ decline among teenagers. Other researchers questioned the findings almost immediately: Columbia University’s Carl Hart noted the very small sample of heavy users (38) in the study, leading him to question how generalizable the results…

The effects of chronic marijuana use on the brain may depend on age of first use and duration of use, according to researchers at the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas. In a paper published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers for the first time comprehensively…