A major story in marijuana-related news during the short holiday week comes from a study by King’s College in Pennsylvania where researchers reported a correlation between smoking a high-potency strain of cannabis called “skunk” with changes in the white-matter connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Other earlier studies have linked marijuana to psychosis and schizophrenia. In this recent study, the damage to the white-matter was present in skunk smokers regardless of whether or not the users showed symptoms of psychosis.

Skunk is a widely-used term for marijuana with a THC content exceeding 10% and in some cases approaching 30%. THC is the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.

The study’s author, Paola Dazzan, told Forbes:

We found that frequent use of high potency cannabis significantly affects the structure of white matter fibres in the brain, whether you have psychosis or not. This reflects a sliding scale where the more cannabis you smoke and the higher the potency, the worse the damage will be.

It is important to note that the correlation does not demonstrate causation. Still, the study does indicate that high-potency cannabis could be related to psychosis, and that should be enough to give users a reason to think harder about their practices.

Here are other important news stories for the week.

Banking on the Marijuana Industry?
It is legal to sell marijuana in 23 states. But pot businesses can’t deposit their money in banks because of federal banking laws. While the dilemma has been a back-burner issue in Congress for several years, a solution may be in the works.

A provision in the upcoming financial services spending bill would prevent the federal government from spending money on penalizing financial institutions that accept legal marijuana businesses as clients. That would greatly reduce the ability of federal agencies’ to prosecute the banks.

Increased access to banking would, in turn, decrease the currently cash-only businesses’ risk of robbery by allowing customers to pay with debit and credit cards, reduce the likelihood that the business could be used as a money-laundering front and solve the nightmare of trying to pay taxes with cash.

Read more at U.S. News & World Report.

Canada’s Health Minister Studying Marijuana Legalization Methods
Canada’s brand new top health official is actively looking into the best way for the country to legalize marijuana.

Minister of Health Jane Philpott, who assumed office a little more than three weeks ago, told the CBC that government scientists are already briefing her on possible legal regulations for cannabis.

“The world is going to be looking to Canada to make sure we do the job well,” she said.

Even though the government doesn’t yet know all the details of how it wants to regulate marijuana, Philpott didn’t hesitate to harshly criticize the current prohibition model.

“I think if any of your viewers, if they ask their teenage children, they can verify for them that [marijuana] is far too accessible. And obviously there’s issues around safety and concentrations that are available in certain products are very dangerous,” she said. “Often the products are not pure, and that’s something that’s a serious health concern for us.”

Read more at Marijuana.com.

Marijuana Arrests More Likely for African Americans in Shelby County
If you are black in Shelby County[, Tennessee, which includes Memphis], you are four times [more] likely to be arrested for marijuana than if you are white.

A study by the American Civil Liberties Union found Shelby County has one of the highest arrest rates for African Americans in the country.

Some may say since Shelby County has a high percentage of African Americans living here that is the reason. However, the study made the statistical adjustment for race and it still found that African Americans are arrested in Shelby County on pot charges at a much higher rate.

“The war on drugs has not been a war on drugs, It has been a war on poverty,” said State Rep. Antonio Parkinson.

That’s why Parkinson says marijuana laws in Tennessee have to change.

Read more at LocalMemphis.com.

Insiders Win While Patients Lose on Medical Marijuana
There is a verb from the Psychedelic ’60s that describes a particular kind of selfish act: bogart.

Floridians can slightly adapt the derisive term to describe the behavior of agribusinesses and politicians who are rigging the state’s medical marijuana law for the benefit of a few influential people.

Instead of sharing the business — passing it along, as it were — they are trying to “bogart” it for themselves. This selfish act is made particularly disgusting because it has delayed relief to tens of thousands of Floridians expected to benefit from the medical marijuana measure the Legislature passed in 2014.

Rather than adopt an open-market model, the Legislature severely restricted the number of nurseries that would be granted licenses to grow the non-euphoric types of medical marijuana frequently referred to as Charlotte’s Web. Not only that, the Legislature adopted criteria for acceptable growers obviously designed to favor certain nurseries.

Read more at the SunSentinel.

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