The proposed legislation would legalise the sale and consumption of cannabis at licensed premises.

Cookie Time founder Michael Mayell has partnered with Abe Gray, the founder of New Zealand's first cannabis museum to build a cannabis education centre in the historic Shands and Trinity buildings.

The Trinity building was formally Trinity Congregational Church. It was damaged in the Christchurch earthquakes.

The community hub will contain a museum, a hemp emporium, a plant medicine shot bar, a cannabis dispensary, a café, a hemp eatery and an alcohol-free night club.

"After the earthquakes and the subsequent re-developing of the city, Christchurch lost a great deal of its heritage," says Mayell.

"More than 1300 buildings in the inner city have been demolished".

"It's wonderful to have the opportunity to preserve such beautiful buildings as these."

Trinity will be used for the museum during the day, an education space Mayell dubbed "cannabis university" in the evenings, and for the alcohol-free plant shot bar at night.

The café and restaurant would sell hemp food, a boutique with a range of hemp products and an alcohol-free plant shot bar.

Hemp seeds will be cultivated and used to make milk for ice cream, butter and cheese and the bar would have kombucha on tap, medicinal teas and mushrooms in the diner.

The business is trading as the Whakamana Museum Limited.

Whakamana launched a Pledge Me campaign to transform the church building on November 12.

On December 5, with 11 days to go, 219 people had pledged $126,531. The minimum target is one million dollars

Whakamana shares are also available for purchase.

Source

• facebook
• stuff.co.nz
• cannabisinstitute.ac.nz
• pledgeme.co.nz
• Image: screen shot pledgeme.co.nz

St Paul's College, Ponsonby, headmaster Kieran Fouhy said that legalising cannabis, when New Zealand already has an issue with alcohol, is just asking for trouble. Continue reading in NZCatholic

Though the legal purchase age is 21 in Colorado and Washington, parents, educators and physicians say youths are easily getting hold of edibles infused with tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the psychoactive component that causes a high, and concentrates such as "shatter," a brittle, honey-colored substance that is heated and then inhaled through a special device.

Each poses serious risks to adolescents' physical and mental health.

"Underage kids have unbelievable access to nuclear-strength weed," said Andrew Brandt, a Boulder, Colo., software executive whose son got hooked while in high school.

With some marijuana products averaging 68 percent THC — exponentially greater than the pot baby boomers once smoked — calls to poison control centers and visits to emergency rooms have risen.

In the Denver area, visits to Children's Hospital Colorado facilities for treatment of cyclic vomiting, paranoia, psychosis and other acute cannabis-related symptoms jumped to 777 in 2015, from 161 in 2005.

The increase was most notable in the years following legalization of medical sales in 2009 and retail use in 2014, according to a study in the Journal of Adolescent Health published in 2018.

"Horrible things are happening to kids," said psychiatrist Libby Stuyt, who treats teens in southwestern Colorado and has studied the health impacts of high-potency marijuana.

"I see increased problems with psychosis, with addiction, with suicide, with depression and anxiety."

It is unclear whether all of this means years of generally stagnant pot use among children are coming to an end.

Surveys finding little change with pot since 2014 "may not reliably reflect the impact of legalization on adolescent health," the authors of that 2018 study concluded.

Washington's latest Healthy Youth Survey showed 20 percent of eighth-graders and nearly half of seniors "perceive little risk of regular marijuana use."

Many teens consider it less risky than alcohol or cigarettes.

As more than a dozen states from Hawaii to New Hampshire consider legalizing marijuana, doctors warn of an urgent need for better education — not just of teens but of parents and lawmakers — about how the products being marketed can significantly affect young people's brain development.

The limited scientific research to date shows that earlier and more frequent use of high-THC cannabis puts adolescents at greater jeopardy of substance use disorders, mental health issues and poor school performance.

The critics also insist that more must be done to maintain tight regulation of the industry. That's not been the case so far, they argue, with dispensaries opening near high schools in Seattle and with retail and medical pot shops in Denver outnumbering Starbucks and McDonald's locations combined. Continue reading

• Image: She Knows

The conference notes the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches the use of drugs except on strictly therapeutic grounds is a "grave offense," and the Vatican Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry in 2001 stated that the use of cannabis is "incompatible with Christian morality."

If voters legalize marijuana in California Nov. 8, the cannabis industry can expect sales to increase to $6.5 billion by 2020, a new cannabis industry marketing report predicts.

Cannabis investors can expect 18.5 percent sales growth a year in California if Proposition 64 passes, according to "The State of Legal Marijuana Markets," published by New Frontier Data and ArcView Group.

The 2016 report says: "Legalization of cannabis is one of the greatest business opportunities of our time and it's still early enough to see huge growth."

In 2015, medical marijuana sales in California were $2.7 billion, the study noted.

Meanwhile, a just-released Colorado study of the effects of legalization found marijuana-related traffic fatalities increased 62 percent from 71 to 115 people from 2013 to 2015, youth use increased 20 percent and adult use increased 60 percent based on questions about past-month use.

Marijuana-related hospitalizations nearly doubled from 6,305 in 2011 to 11,439 in 2014, two years after the Rocky Mountain state legalized recreational use, according to the September report by Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which tracks the impact of marijuana legalization in Colorado.

Proposition 64 "is written for the fat cats who are going to get richer," said Kevin Sabet, a former Obama administration drug policy adviser and co-founder with former Democratic Congressman Patrick Kennedy of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a national anti-legalization organization.

Source

• Crux
• Image: medicalnewstoday.com