Recent News

The New York Times 19 June 2019
Family First Comment: “A diverse coalition of law enforcement officials, parent-teacher associations and health professionals celebrated the news of the bill’s failure, calling it a victory over a “predatory pot industry” that they said would threaten traffic safety and victimize communities already suffering from drug abuse.”
#SayNopeToDopeNZ

CA Finance 12 June 2019
Family First Comment: As predicted, here comes Big Tobacco 2.
Same corporates.
Same objectives.
Same addiction.
New product.
#VoteNO

THC BioMed Intl Ltd. (“THC BioMed“, or the “Company“) (CSE:THC.CN – News) is pleased to announce that it is the first Canadian Licensed Producer to automate the pre-rolling of cigarettes containing 100% cannabis (the “Pure Cannabis Cigarettes”). In the same way automation changed the tobacco industry, THC BioMed is confident the automation of Pure Cannabis Cigarettes will bring meaningful changes to the current cannabis industry and its bottom line.

The automated cigarette manufacturing plant has been installed at THC BioMed’s flagship Acland Road location.  THC will begin the production and sales of commercial-grade Pure Cannabis Cigarettes, a first in Canada.

The Pure Cannabis Cigarettes are to be packaged in lots of 3 and 20. Each Pure Cannabis Cigarette will be intended for a single-use session and will come with a commercial-grade cigarette filter. There will be no tobacco in the Pure Cannabis Cigarettes.

“We are very pleased to offer Canadians a better way of smoking cannabis, as we monitored an increase in demand for our best-selling pre-rolls, we acknowledged that it was our duty to ensure we distribute the best products possible. We are pleased to be the first cannabis producer to put filters between the cannabis we are selling, and our consumers. Filters were invented to protect the consumer and not degrade the experience. “We promise our Pure Cannabis Cigarettes will offer the same potency as our regular best-selling pre-rolls. I am predicting consumers will gravitate towards this finished type of product and the old way of rolling joints will be something of the past,” said John Miller, President and CEO of THC BioMed.

The automated cigarette manufacturing plant is capable of producing up to 5,000 cigarettes per minute.

“We also expect our CBD line of Pure Cannabis Cigarettes to be very popular, as we expect regular cigarette users will find it easier to transition to our CBD product, which we think is better than smoking tobacco,” said Mr. Miller, “Automating our systems now gives us a clear path to profitability. We work diligently to bring shareholder value through more traditional and tested ways such as being a profitable company, patience is required.”

THC plans to offer the following strains in Pure Cannabis Cigarette form, other strains may follow:

THC Sativa Landrace;
THC Indica Landrace;
THC Hybrid Landrace; and,
CBD Landrace.

THC expects its Pure Cannabis Cigarettes to be available soon via its website for medical patients and through provinces with distribution agreements with THC.
READ MORE: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/pure-cannabis-cigarettes-introduced-canadian-120000115.html

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NZ Herald 19 June 2019
Family First Comment: Lawyers prosecuting Lewis in 2016 said his decision to take marijuana before getting behind the wheel had “the direct consequence” of taking another life, local media reported. His defence lawyer also admitted Lewis’ driving ability had been impaired by the amount of marijuana in his blood and that he had battled drug addiction since being exposed to cannabis as a child. Semb feared legalising cannabis would lead to more people using the drug and driving while high. She doubted the law would be enough to deter them from driving while impaired.

Los Angeles Times 17 June 2019
Family First Comment: “Our findings suggest that as the marijuana retail outlets become more visible and more numerous, they may influence the way that young adults perceive and use marijuana,” 

The Washington Post 16 June 2019
Family First Comment: “The first two states to legalize recreational marijuana are starting to grapple with teenagers’ growing use of highly potent pot, even as both boost the industry and reap huge tax windfalls from its sales…. “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.”…
#saynopetodope

The first two states to legalize recreational marijuana are starting to grapple with teenagers’ growing use of highly potent pot, even as both boost the industry and reap huge tax windfalls from its sales.

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 brain is abnormally vulnerable during adolescence,” said Staci Gruber, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who studies how marijuana affects the brain. “Policy seems to have outpaced science, and in the best of all possible worlds, science would allow us to set policy.”

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.
READ MORE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/potent-pot-vulnerable-teens-trigger-concerns-in-first-states-to-legalize-marijuana/2019/06/15/52df638a-8c9a-11e9-8f69-a2795fca3343_story.html?utm_term=.0935499226a8

New York Post 13 June 2019
Family First Comment: People shouldn’t get locked up for having a joint in their pocket. Legislators can look to advance criminal justice reforms concerning possession of small amounts of marijuana without throwing the doors open to a predatory industry that will have significant and irreconcilable impact on public health. That’s real social justice.

Lobbyists and lawmakers everywhere like to make bold-but-reality-challenged claims to advance legislation. But in its push to legalize commercial weed, the marijuana industry has taken legislative myth-peddling to brazen new lows.

New York’s lawmakers have a few days left to show the nation they won’t be duped. Here are some of the tallest of the tales that have swirled around Albany, thanks to the pot industry:

First, the industry claims high-potency commercial weed will provide social justice and economic opportunity for minority communities.

African American legislators in New Jersey didn’t fall for that, and their New York counterparts shouldn’t, either. The pot industry — backed by Big Tobacco and wealthy, mostly white Wall Street investors — is looking to line its own pockets. These multinational forces aren’t getting into pot to help minority entrepreneurs.

Remember when liquor stores and smoke shops were clustered in largely low-income and minority neighborhoods? Pot shops selling high-potency drugs engineered to create regular customers won’t lead to any more empowerment and opportunity for urban populations than clustered vice stores did.

There has been no quantifiable positive economic impact for such communities in legalized states. In fact, taxpayers and communities have had to shoulder an estimated $4.50 in social costs for every $1 in revenue, according to researchers at the Centennial Institute.
READ MORE: https://nypost.com/2019/06/13/what-big-pot-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-costs-of-legalizing-marijuana/

NewsTalk ZB 13 June 2019 
A US drug investigator is pushing back against claims legalised cannabis is a good thing.

Colorado Drug Investigators Association president Ray Padilla told Mike Hosking since legalising cannabis, the societal issues they’re dealing with have shot up.

He claims deaths from people driving after taking marijuana in the state have increased by 151 percent.

Padilla says emergency room numbers and poison cases are sky-rocketing.

“Definitely an increase in visit due to a lot of different things. A lot of psychotic issues, a lot of mental issues, our rehab clinic, there is rehab for marijuana, so you can get addicted to it.”

He says there’s more organised crime than ever before in Colorado.

“When you can get it on the black market, number one its much cheaper. Number two, you are going to have gangs and those here who are going to grow it here in Colorado and then ship it out of state.”

Padilla says marijuana is worth up to $1,200 a pound in Colorado, whereas on the East Coast, gangs can get up to $7,000.
https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/mike-hosking-breakfast/audio/ray-padilla-colorado-cannabis-expert-slams-legalisation/

This morning on Newstalk ZB, Mike Hosking said that Green MP Chloe Swarbrick had recommended Colorado as a great place where cannabis legalisation had worked. So Mike contacted law enforcement there to get the facts.

Oh dear. Not a good recommendation by the Green Party. Have a listen to the interview with Ray Padilla from the Colorado Drug Investigators Association (CDIA)

We’ve already documented all of this on our website…

HAVE A READ

Or download our Fact Sheet

NewsTalk ZB 11 June 2019
Family First Comment: “Middle New Zealand doesn’t want a bar of this Government’s barking madness over drug liberalisation.”
#saynopetodope

Comment: In a world where polls are no longer to be trusted, and just before we completely throw them in the bin, I draw some genuine pleasure from the latest 1 NEWS Colmar Brunton poll.

Whether its numbers around National and Labour and Simon Bridges are accurate is one thing, but a simple count around the cannabis reform issue is easier to accept as accurate.

And we are winning.

And when I say “we”, I mean those of us who work in the department of common sense.

The poll suggests 52 per cent of New Zealanders intend to vote against the legalisation of cannabis, while 39 per cent want it legalised.

What is significant about this is that we are closer to voting time. My sense of it is that when the theory becomes reality — by which I mean we really are going to vote and it really is going to count — we wake up a bit and take it more seriously.

This latest result reinforces my belief in the simple truth that you should trust middle New Zealand.

And middle New Zealand doesn’t want a bar of this Government’s barking madness over drug liberalisation.

This debate of course, given the myriad social ills we face, shouldn’t even be on the table.

And, irony of ironies, no one bangs on more than this government about poverty and deprivation and kids without shoes and food and clothes and families in cars and caravans and parks and yet is more than happy to have them all stoned.

It’s driven by the naive concept that if the Government ran the dope market, it will all be tidied up and above board.
READ MORE: https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/mike-hosking-breakfast/video/mikes-minute-cannabis-reform-goes-up-in-smoke/

NewsHub 10 June 2019
A Newshub-Reid Research Poll has revealed the majority of New Zealanders do not think recreational cannabis should be legalised.

It found that 48 percent of New Zealanders do not agree with legalising it, while 41.7 percent of people think it should be legalised, and 10.4 percent don’t know.

The poll of 1000 people found that Green supporters were more in favour of legalising cannabis, while National supporters were less in favour.

The poll found that 76.9 percent of Green supporters were in favour, while just 14.5 percent opposed.

It’s a stark contrast to just 25.3 percent of National supporters who want it legalised, while 67.6 percent were opposed.

The majority of Labour supporters want recreational cannabis legalised, with 50.4 percent in favour and 37.9 percent opposed.

That compares to 44.5 percent of New Zealand First supporters in favour, while 45.3 percent were opposed.

Green supporters and National supporters were more certain about their position, with just 8.6 percent and 7.1 percent, respectively, saying they didn’t know.

That compares to 11.7 percent of Labour supporters and 10.2 percent of New Zealand First supporters who said they didn’t know.

The Government announced last month that New Zealanders will vote on legislation to legalise recreational cannabis at the 2020 election.
READ MORE: https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2019/06/poll-most-new-zealanders-don-t-want-recreational-cannabis-legalised.html

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