Tag: the war on (some) drugs

Texas House Approves Bill To Expand Medical Marijuana Access With New Conditions, Products And Dispensary Locations

The Texas House of Representatives has given initial approval to a bill that would significantly expand the state’s medical marijuana program.

After clearing committee last week, the bipartisan legislation from Reps. Ken King (R) and Penny Morales Shaw (D) passed the full House on second reading in a 118-16 vote on Monday. It will need a final third reading vote before potentially moving to the Senate.

The measure would expand the types of products patients could buy and also add multiple qualifying conditions for people to become registered patients.

“Back in 2015, Texas passed the Compassionate Use Act that allowed patients with epilepsy to access low-THC cannabis. Since then, the program has been expanded to include additional medical conditions, but Texans still struggle to get access to the medicine they’re legally allowed to receive,” King said on the floor. “There are not enough dispensing organizations licensed in the state, and current law limits how and where the products can be stored and distributed.”

Specifically, the measure would allow patients to access cannabis patches, lotions, suppositories, approved inhalers, nebulizers and and vaping devices. The currently limited list of qualifying conditions would be extended to include chronic pain, glaucoma, traumatic brain injury (TBI), spinal neuropathy, Crohn’s disease or other inflammatory bowel disease, degenerative disc disease and any terminal illness for patients receiving hospice or palliative care.

Military veterans would be able to become registered cannabis patients for any medical condition, and the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) would also be authorized for further expand the list.

HB 46 would additionally mandate that the Department of Public Safety (DPS) issue 11 dispensary licenses within the 11 designated public health regions across the state. It would further allow dispensaries to open satellite locations if approved.

An amendment that was adopted on the floor would grandfather existing medical cannabis satellite locations, amend the patient application process, ensure that cannabis potency dosages are determined by their physicians, create a timeline for when new licenses must be issued, remove a 1.2 gram limit for possession by patients and instead allow doctors to prescribe an amount they see fit.

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Russian Spokesperson Maria Zakharova Responds to Macron, Merz, and Starmer’s ‘Tissue’ Incident on the Train – And She’s Not Buying It

Maria Zakharova is the current director of Information for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.

Zakharova has been the spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation since 2015.

Earlier today video made the rounds online of an incident that occurred during a train ride of Western leaders traveling from Poland to Ukraine. The video included French President Emanuel Macron with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Rumors quickly began to spread that Macron possessed cocaine after he quickly grabbed a crumpled-up tissue. Others speculated that Merz tried to cover a straw or a spoon. And rumors started circulating online that they were sniffing cocaine.

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Mothers Are Losing Custody Over Sketchy Drug Tests

A Georgia mother claims that she lost custody of her newborn daughter due to faulty drug tests from a lab with a documented history of inaccurate results. When a drug court and her OB-GYN ran tests on Kristen Clark-Hassell, her results were clean. But the tests from Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) came back positive, and so the government took her youngest child.

“They literally took her off my breast in the hallway with her screaming after the court hearing,” Clark-Hassell told the Savannah-based outlet The Current. “For her to just be ripped like that just cut a hole in our hearts.”

In a 2021 whistleblower complaint, a former lab director for Avertest—the company that processed Clark-Hassell’s drug tests—claimed that as many as 30 percent of the lab’s test results were inaccurate. She further alleged that “meeting deadlines for test results is more important to Avertest than accuracy” and that the company manipulated data and set arbitrary detection cutoffs, increasing false positives. Avertest settled the Justice Department lawsuit relating to these claims in 2024, paying a $1.3 million settlement.

Clark-Hassell’s legal battle began with a DFCS-ordered Avertest drug screening in 2020. According to documents obtained by The Current, that test was taken on August 5, and it came back positive. Then a test from her OB-GYN taken on August 11 was negative. In September, a court-ordered drug test came back negative, but the DFCS ordered another round of testing in October. That time, her urine sample came back clean, but her hair follicle test was positive—raising serious concerns about the reliability of the results. While it’s still possible that the sporadic positives Clark-Hassell experienced were the result of drug use, this exact circumstance is why accurate testing matters when deciding whether or not to take the drastic step of removing children from their parents’ care.

Clark-Hassell’s case is not unique. Last year, The Marshall Project published two investigations revealing that CPS removed children based on unreliable drug tests. Some mothers tested positive after consuming over-the-counter drugs or poppy seeds. In other cases, hospitals reported women for testing positive for drugs that were given to them during labor.

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Florida Lawmakers Again Failed To Regulate Hemp Products This Session

A year ago, members of Florida’s hemp industry were lobbying Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) to veto a bill regulating hemp-derived THC products that many claimed if signed into law would be a devastating blow to their livelihoods.

Their mission was accomplished when he did in fact veto the proposal last June.

That won’t be required this year; the Legislature failed to pass anything on hemp before unofficially ending the legislative session on Friday night (although they are expected to return to Tallahassee later this month to deal exclusively with budget-related matters).

The central problem appeared to be the substantive differences between the Senate bill sponsored by Polk County Republican Colleen Burton (SB 438) and the House version (HB 7027) sponsored by Panhandle Republican Michelle Salzman.

The two measures would have capped the potency of hemp-derived THC products, placed advertising restrictions, and required hemp to be tested by a certified medical cannabis laboratory. But there were some big differences: The Senate bill (like its 2024 version) called for the outright ban of synthetic cannabinoids like Delta-8 and said that the newly popular hemp-infused drinks could only be sold through a retailer holding a liquor license.

Salzman’s bill in the House did not ban Delta-8. Neither did it call for retailers to have a liquor license, but it did include a 15 percent excise tax on all hemp purchases. Jonathan Miller, general counsel for the U.S. Hemp Roundtable, said the House bill was better for his industry than the Senate’s version, and said he appreciated the work that Rep. Salzman devoted to trying to find the right balance.

“In its final form, we said that it wasn’t perfect, but it was a significant improvement on the Senate bill and so in the end nothing passing was better than the Senate bill passing,” Miller said. He’s “hopeful,” he said, that between now and next year’s legislative session “people will realize that the House version is the model to start working from and hopefully produce something that really both protects farmers and consumers at the same time.”

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Massachusetts Lawmakers Consider Bills To Set Tighter Controls On Intoxicating Hemp-Derived Products

Massachusetts legislators this session are looking to take hemp-derived intoxicating products—which contain the same active ingredient as marijuana but are not regulated the same way—off shelves in gas stations, convenience stores and vape shops across Massachusetts.

The hemp products, which are generally edible and intoxicating like gummies or candies, have already been declared illegal in the state by several state agencies but continue to pop up in certain stores outside of dispensaries. Most of these products come from out of state.

Some business owners who sell the intoxicating products argue that the state agencies haven’t settled the matter because hemp is legal federally—through a loophole in the 2018 federal Farm Bill which legalized hemp. Hemp and marijuana are the same plant, but this law removed hemp from the classification of marijuana as long as it contains less than 0.3 percent THC— the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis—by volume.

Four bills have been filed on Beacon Hill to bring any consumable hemp-derived products like edibles, concentrates, tinctures, oils and capsules, under the purview of the Cannabis Control Commission or give local boards of health oversight to remove these products from stores other than dispensaries. Hemp products that are sold in dispensaries like CBD gummies are already regulated by the commission. These bills would specifically target intoxicating products being sold outside of dispensaries.

“[Hemp products] face no additional tax impositions, no host community agreements, no recall process, no FDA testing requirements, no age limits,” said Rep. Dawne Shand, a Newburyport Democrat, at a Joint Committee on Cannabis Policy hearing on Wednesday. “The intoxicating hemp industry makes a mockery of cannabis laws.”

Shand, a member of the committee, is pushing a bill that would prohibit intoxicating hemp products from being sold without an endorsement from the Cannabis Control Commission.

Rep. Michael Soter, a Republican from Bellingham, has two bills that would address hemp-derived products.

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New York Governor Signs Budget After Lawmakers Remove Her Plan To Let Police Use Marijuana Odor Against Drivers

The state budget bill signed into law by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) on Friday notably does not include a controversial marijuana provision the governor proposed earlier this year that would have allowed police to use the smell of marijuana as probable cause that a driver is impaired and then force them to take a drug test.

Amendments made in the legislature this week removed the provision, which a coalition of 60 reform groups had argued in a letter to Hochul and top lawmakers would “repeat some of the worst harms of the War on Drugs” and allow law enforcement to “restart unconstitutional racial profiling of drivers.”

The governor’s plan drew criticism from not just reform advocates but also the state’s Assembly majority leader and the governor-appointed head of the Office of Cannabis Management (OCM), who’d previously said the plan would undermine the goals of legalization and was “not going to work for New York.”

Historically, New York has been home to some of the country’s starkest racial disparities when it comes to enforcement of laws against marijuana. For example, Black people in New York City in the 2010s were more than nine times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people.

In Hochul’s original budget bill, a line would have added “the odor of cannabis, burnt cannabis or other drug” as a “reasonable cause” for law enforcement to stop and search a vehicle. An amended bill approved by lawmakers this week, however, removed that provision.

After both chambers approved the changes, the legislation went to the governor on Thursday and was signed into law the next day.

As for other cannabis-related provisions in the new state budget, one change eliminates the $229,000 annual salary for the chair of the state’s Cannabis Control Board (CCB).

That official, Tremaine Wright, said this week that she will not leave her post.

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Florida Lawmakers Kill Medical Marijuana Expansion Bills, Including One To Let Military Veterans Register For Free

Several bills to expand Florida’s medical cannabis program have stalled out for the year, including a measure to exempt military veterans from patient ID card registration fees that was passed unanimously by the House of Representatives.

HB 555, from Rep. Alex Andrade (R), was one of a handful of marijuana-related measures withdrawn in recent days. Unlike the other bills, however, it had passed out of the chamber where it was filed, with House members voting 110–0 in favor. Nonetheless, the Senate indefinitely postponed it and withdrew it from consideration without a vote.

The Senate action occurred on May 3. Florida lawmakers have voted to extend the legislative session into early June, though they’re expected to focus mostly on budgetary matters after returning to Tallahassee.

Other bills that have been set aside without votes include proposals to allow patients to cultivate marijuana at home, expand the list of qualifying conditions for the program and protect employment and parental rights of people who use medical cannabis.

As originally filed, HB 555 would have made significant changes to the state’s existing medical cannabis program, for example allowing home cultivation as well as reciprocity for out-of-state patients. But a House committee amendment replaced its language with a two-page substitute that would make only small adjustments to the medical program.

First, the bill would change how often patients need to renew their medical marijuana cards, from the current annual process to once every two years.

Second, it would waive the $75 registration and renewal fees for veterans, specifying that the state “may not charge a fee for the issuance, replacement, or renewal of an identification card for a qualified patient who is a veteran.”

Sponsor Andrade didn’t respond to multiple requests from Marijuana Moment for comment on the bill’s withdrawal and any possible future action.

Kevin Caldwell, Southeast legislative manager for the advocacy group Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), said that whether or not lawmakers find a way to revive HB 555 during the extended session, “it has been a dismal session for cannabis policy reform in Florida.”

“There were a plethora of good cannabis policies submitted for debate,” he said in an email, “but as has been the case in most legislative sessions in the past few years, the legislature simply doesn’t want to even talk about cannabis policy.”

As for the newly withdrawn measure, Caldwell said lawmakers “whittled HB 555 down from a bill that would have created a much more robust medical cannabis program to a bill that would extend the lifespan of an ID card and waive fees for veterans.”

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GOP-Led Wisconsin Committee Cuts Governor’s Marijuana Legalization Proposal From Budget

Republicans in Wisconsin’s legislature on Thursday cut key provisions from a state budget proposal by Gov. Tony Evers (D), including plans to legalize and regulate marijuana.

The changes came in a Joint Finance Committee hearing, where members removed a long list of items included in the governor’s budget. In addition to cannabis legalization, other deleted items include tax cuts for the middle class, tax increases for millionaires and state support for children, farmers and veterans.

Evers said on social media ahead of the vote that “today, Republican lawmakers are gutting my budget that does what’s best for our kids and the folks, families, and communities that raise them.”

The committee’s 21 pages of cuts remove multiple marijuana provisions from Evers’s budget, such as regulation, taxation, licensing and civil and criminal legal adjustments.

The actions are a repeat of two years ago, when GOP members of the same committee removed proposals to legalize marijuana for recreational and medical use from the governor’s biennial executive budget at that time.

A press release from the governor’s office about Thursday’s committee changes says the legalization proposal would have regulated marijuana “much like the state already does with alcohol, which would help Wisconsin compete with other states for talented workers and have more resources to invest in critical state priorities.”

The reform is “a proposal that over 60 percent of Wisconsinites support,” the release notes, pointing to a poll from February.

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Trump Plans To Pull U.S. Attorney Nominee Who Threatened Medical Marijuana Dispensary With Possible Federal Prosecution

President Donald Trump has announced he will be withdrawing his nomination for a U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. who recently warned a licensed medical marijuana dispensary in the District about violating federal law and suggested the possibility of prosecutorial action despite compliance with local policy.

While the president’s decision doesn’t appear to be connected to Ed Martin’s hostility toward cannabis policy in D.C.—and Trump gave ample praise to the now-rescinded nominee despite the prospective withdrawal—the shift could give advocates and stakeholders in the District a sense of relief about the prospects of further federal intervention in its local marijuana policies.

Trump said during an event in the Oval Office on Thursday that he still hopes to see Martin placed in another position with the Justice Department, “or whatever, in some capacity.”

“He was really outstanding. It was, to me, it was disappointing. I’ll be honest,” the president said. “I have to be straight. I was disappointed. A lot of people were disappointed, but that’s the way it works sometimes.”

Martin was embroiled in controversy for reasons unrelated to his actions against the D.C. cannabis dispensary, including his limited prosecutorial experience and defense of those who participated in the January 6 riots at the Capitol after Trump lost the 2020 election.

“We have somebody else that we’ll be announcing over the next two days [to serve as the U.S. prosecutor in D.C.] who’s going to be great,” Trump said.

Martin, for his part, recently gave mixed signals about his approach to prosecuting alleged violations of federal laws by licensed marijuana businesses—saying on the one hand that prohibition must be “abided by,” but also specifying that cannabis operators who are not in compliance with local laws are most at risk of enforcement action.

“Anybody who is selling marijuana better have a license and everything in order, otherwise we will pursue action against them,” he said at the time.

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Using Marijuana Reduces Alcohol Cravings In People Who Drink A Lot, Federally Funded Study Shows

New federally funded research into the effects of cannabis on alcohol use finds that people who used marijuana immediately before drinking subsequently consumed fewer alcoholic beverages and reported lower cravings for alcohol.

“We found that across the entire sample, self-administering cannabis before alcohol significantly reduced alcohol consumption compared to when alcohol was offered without cannabis,” authors wrote in a study preprint published late last month on the open-access website PsyArXiv.

“Furthermore,” they continued, “we found that cannabis and alcohol co-administration was associated with significant acute reduction in alcohol craving compared to alcohol administration alone.”

The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, provides further evidence of a substitution effect, in which users report replacing some or all of their alcohol use with cannabis.

An eight-person research team from Colorado State University and the University of Colorado looked at the behavior of 62 adults who used both marijuana and alcohol and who engaged in heavy drinking for at least three months.

Each person participated in two separate sessions in which they could drink up to five alcoholic beverages—an initial priming drink, followed by up to four more optional drinks offered at 15-minute intervals.

In one of the two sessions, participants were first directed to consume marijuana in a manner of their choosing and at their typical dose, which was weighed and recorded.

When subjects used alcohol alone, they drank on average two self-administered beverages. With cannabis added to the mix, the average number of self-administered drinks was 1.5—roughly 25 percent lower.

And while not every participant drank less after using marijuana, those who did “reported reductions in alcohol craving at several timepoints after consuming cannabis and alcohol compared to alcohol alone,” the report says.

Alcohol cravings among those who drank more or the same after consuming cannabis either stayed level or increased, it notes.

The study concludes that “for some individuals who drink heavily, cannabis may serve as a substitute for alcohol, and craving reduction may be the mechanism through which this occurs.”

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