Thailand Expects to Legalize Medical Marijuana After Failed Drug War

The Narcotics Control Board of Thailand is pushing forward with a rewritten draft of the country’s drug laws in order to legalize medical marijuana. 

The proposed revision, which is currently going through the parliamentary process, will allow medicinal cannabis to be sold over-the-counter for patients with a valid prescription from their doctor.

The move is expected to pass without opposition. Once adopted, the country will be one of the first in Asia to do so.

Thailand’s public health department and the country’s law enforcement agencies have stated no opposition to the move, which is in stark contrast to previous policy in the Asian nation.

In 2016, previous Justice Minister of Thailand Paiboon Koomchaya declared the war on drugs to be a failure, which opened the door to a conversation about what to do next.

Thailand is Poised to Legalize Medical Cannabis | Marijuana.com

Cannabis CBD For Pets, A Possible Solution to Treat Anxiety and Inflammation

At Colorado State University, the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences is conducting two clinical trials with Cannabis CBD – one involving treatment of arthritis, and the other epilepsy in dogs.

For now, CBD advocates for dogs are spreading the word at ground level. Cannabis at human strengths can be toxic for dogs, so firms are making dog chews, oils and topical creams using cannabis extract.

Alison is the CEO of TreatWell Health, a Californian firm making medical marijuana products for people and their dogs. TreatWell’s cannabis tincture can be dropped straight into an animal’s mouth or on to food

Similar companies include Treatibles, which sells a hemp oil “for animals of all kinds”, and Pet Releaf, whose hemp dog treats look like fancy vegan snack-food.

The compound Cannabidiol (CBD) was discovered by studies to reduce inflammation and combat seizures. Veterinary groups are cautious but a mounting number of dog owners say the Cannabis is easing their animals’ anxiety and chronic pain.

Cinnamon, a portly Beagle cross from Kansas City, Missouri, takes PetReleaf’s hemp oil daily for her bad hips. Her owner Joyce Lattimer claims that after one dose:

She hopped right down from her chair when I called her to go outside. usually I have to call several times and start pushing her off.

She came over just to say hi and lick me on the leg. I almost cried, it’s been so long since she’s done that.

Pot for pets: Could medical marijuana help your dog? | BBC News

Does Cannabis Legalization Decrease Violent Crime? (Study)

The increasing reform of cannabis policies is taking away power from Mexican cartels and reducing violent crime.

In a new research study, Is Legal Pot Crippling Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations? The Effect of Medical Marijuana Laws on US Crime, when a state on the Mexican border legalized medical use of the drug, violent crime fell by 13% on average.

These laws allow local farmers to grow marijuana that can then be sold to dispensaries where it is sold legally.

These growers are in direct competition with Mexican drug cartels that are smuggling the marijuana into the US. As a result, the cartels get much less business.

Whenever there is a medical marijuana law we observe that crime at the border decreases because suddenly there is a lot less smuggling and a lot less violence associated with that.

-Evelina Gavrilova, Author of the economic journal study

Taking Cannabis Away from Dirty Hands

While the Mexican cartels smuggle other drugs such as cocaine, heroine and meth across the border, the market for cannbis is the largest drug market in the US and the one from which the cartels can make the fattest profit. It costs around $75 to produce a pound of marijuana in Mexico, which can then be sold on for $6,000 depending on the quality.

Gavrilova, along with fellow researchers Takuma Kamada and Floris Zoutman, studied data from the FBI’s uniform crime reports and supplementary homicide records covering 1994 to 2012 to report these findings:

Among the border states the effect of the change in law was largest in California, where there was a reduction of 15% in violent crime, and weakest in Arizona, where there was a fall of 7%.

The crimes most strongly affected were robbery, which fell by 19%, and murder, which dropped by 10%. Homicides specifically related to the drug trade fell by an astonishing 41%.

Mislabeled Drug to Legal Medicine


The authors claim their study provides new insights into methods to reduce violent crime related to drug trafficking. But its publication comes as the US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is rescinding the Obama-era policy that ushered in the medical marijuana laws.

When the effect on crime is so significant, it’s obviously better to regulate marijuana and allow people to pay taxes on it rather than make it illegal.

For me it’s a no brainer that it should be legal and should be regulated, and the proceeds go to the Treasury.

-Evelina Gavrilova, Author of the economic journal study

As of January 2018, more than 20 states have implemented medical marijuana laws. In those cannabis friendly states, there is now one marijuana dispensary for every six regular pharmacies. The increasing amount of positive medical marijuana stories have convinced many people to use it for their health. Compassionate dispensaries even offer discount programs for low income patients who qualify.

The study suggests that the full recreational legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington will have an even stronger impact on the drug trade as their large-scale cannabis production facilities will push cartels out of the industry.

DISCLAIMER: All Information Displayed In This Post Is For Educational Purposes Only, And Is Not To Be Construed As Medical Advice Or Treatment For Any Specific Person Or Condition. Cannabis Has Not Been Analyzed Or Approved By The FDA. Individual Results May Vary.

Legal marijuana cuts violence says US study, as medical-use laws see crime fall | The Guardian

Coma – Waking Up to Find Legal Cannabis (Video)

Coma - Waking Up to Find Legal Cannabis (Video) | Third Monk

A man wakes up from a five-year coma surrounded by his wife and doctor. As he deals with the blight of his new reality, including the surprise of an amputated leg and five years of his life down the tube, his doctor offers to write him a prescription for Vicodin, morphine or … marijuana.

The man in the hospital bed looks at the doctor with disbelief when he says, “Marijuana is legal now.”

“Coma” was created by IFC’s comedy sketch troupe Women

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The Positive Cannabis Scene in Colorado is Mind Blowing (Video)

The Positive Cannabis Scene in Colorado is Mind Blowing (Video) | Third Monk

The 60 Minutes broadcast crew profiles cannabis tourism in Colorado, one of the first states to legalize pot for recreational use.

In all of our lives, in all of our experiences, marijuana, except in some instances for medical marijuana, marijuana has been illegal.

You go to Colorado now and everything you thought about it is turned upside-down.

It’s legal. It’s mind-blowing.

You go into a warehouse and it’s a huge warehouse full of marijuana plants. And one we visited for our story is right across the street from a police station. You can smell it when you’re driving by.

You can smell the marijuana in the air. And it’s all legal.

– CBS Correspondent Bill Whitaker

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Smarter People Stay Up Late, Do More Drugs, and Have More Sex (Study)

Smarter People Stay Up Late, Do More Drugs, and Have More Sex (Study) | Third Monk image 2

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Sex. Drugs. Late nights.

You may be reading the first four words of my memoir. Or you could be simply listing three things that show signs of being a genius, according to various studies. There’s evidence that shows that if you’re spending less of your nights hitting the books and more time smoking weed and getting laid until 3am, then you’re probably wiser than the rest of us.

Researchers in England have found that students studying at prestigious universities such as Oxford and Cambridge spend more on sex toys than their peers at other universities. Cambridge and Oxford’s sex toy sales on just one website (Lovehoney.co.uk, who funded the research) totaled a staggering $31, 461. No word on what products they ordered, nor whether they kept their glasses on while they used them.

“The correlation probably has something to do with the open-mindedness that comes with intelligence,” says Annalisa Rose, 23, who works at Honey, a high-end sex shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

I think that the ability to engage in an open sex life comes with the abilities of introspection and logical thought, and those require some level of intelligence. If we’re talking about an open sex life that comes from an emotionally healthy place, sexual mores are mostly made up anyway and intelligent people can rationalize past them. – Annalisa Rose

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The 2nd part of our “genius trifecta” is drugs.

Smarter people are more likely to smoke pot or do a line than the average simpleton. This is because, according to many studies, a smarter person isn’t more likely to choose the “smarter” choice of not doing drugs but is instead more likely to pursue the more evolutionary novel choice, one that would inherently expand their horizons. Smarter people don’t necessarily ‘think smarter’ – they simply rationalize where they’re supposed to “feel.” So while a less intelligent person is less likely to pick up a heroin habit in the first place, the more intelligent person will rationalize it. (This explains every good jazz album ever made and also every Christian rock album ever made in the same sentence.)

So while a less intelligent person is less likely to pick up a heroin habit in the first place, the more intelligent person will rationalize it. (This explains every good jazz album ever made and also every Christian rock album ever made in the same sentence.)

A 2010 study that ran in Psychology Today (what, you don’t subscribe?) also states that those with an IQ of 125 or higher are exponentially more likely to use drugs. Says the study:

Net of sex, religion, religiosity, marital status, number of children, education, earnings, depression, satisfaction with life, social class at birth, mother’s education, and father’s education, British children who are more intelligent before the age of 16 are more likely to consume psychoactive drugs at age 42 than less intelligent children.

…there is a clear monotonic association between childhood general intelligence and adult consumption of psychoactive drugs. “Very bright” individuals (with IQs above 125) are roughly three-tenths of a standard deviation more likely to consume psychoactive drugs than “very dull” individuals (with IQs below 75).

Late nights, too, play a leading role in that of the smart person: an academic paper entitled “Why The Night Owl Is More Intelligent,” published in the journal Psychology And Individual Differences, says that for several millennia humans have been largely conditioned to work during the day and sleep at night.

Those that buck the trend, the paper suggests “…that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences than less intelligent individuals.”

The paper goes on to say that those who are more liberal and more inclined towards atheism are more likely to be intelligent, too.

Essentially, if you’re more of a forward thinker, if you’re trying something new and pushing your boundaries, you’re most likely more intelligent. This doesn’t mean that Toronto mayor Rob Ford is some kind of lucid genius, however. It merely suggests that smarter people are more likely to have more sex, do drugs, and stay up late.

So if you’re getting laid at 3am on Sunday morning and have a full bowl packed beside the bed and you aren’t going to church the next day, you’re probably a genius.

Either that or you’re incredibly good at living your best life.

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> Smarter People and Their Habits | Esquire

Terence McKenna at His Best: Drugs, Legality, and Love (Interview)

Terence McKenna at His Best: Drugs, Legality, and Love (Interview) | Third Monk image 1

Terence McKenna is one our favorite psychedelic luminaries. Here is a short interview of his where he talks about many ideas concerning drugs, legality, and love that are increasingly becoming commonplace among a larger and larger portion of our global populace.

Ideally, we’ll look back at this time in history and laugh at our collective foolishness and hubris.

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My mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts. – Terence McKenna

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Brain on Weed – Less Gray Matter But Increased Connections? (Video)

Brain on Weed - Less Gray Matter But Increased Connections? (Video) | Third Monk

Using the above video as a quick reference to how cannabis may affect the brain let us move now to the present study at hand. Researchers state that they find a decrease in gray brain matter in the orbitofrontal cortex in chronic cannabis users, users who medicate at least 3 times a day, versus non cannabis users.

These same cannabis users also show more connections in the same region of the brain. What does this mean really? The results are basically (SPOILER ALERT) inconclusive in the way they describe it’s affect on the test subjects.

Although the above is true, neither the users or non users show a decreased quality of life or an inability to perform daily functions. Francesca Filbey, the author of this study, speculates that the increased connections may be the way cannabis users adapt to having less gray brain matter so that they may function with no issues in their daily lives.

I’m happy to find that we are diving deeper into how marijuana affects the human body. Some of the other findings, such as lower IQs for the marijuana users is also inconclusive because there is no correlation between IQ and the function of the orbitofrontal cortex.

This study was funded by Parternship for a Drug Free America. Even with their hopes to find a way to bury cannabis through science, no conclusive negatives were found through this study.

Regardless of the motive, I hope studies like this continue to pop up for cannabis and psychedelics so that we may learn more about how these substances affect us and how we may use them to our advantage.

Check out the source article below, the article contains plenty of sources to feed your need for scientifically generated cannabis info.

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Chronic Pot Smoking Associated With Reduced Gray Matter, But Increased Connections | I Fucking Love Science

Stoner Wisdom – Famous Quotes From High Times

Stoner Wisdom - Famous Quotes From High Times | Third Monk image 1

Since 1974, High Times magazine has served as a safe platform for public figures and celebrities to express their love for Mary Jane.

The movement to legalize cannabis is picking up momentum, these classic quotes from High Times shows that famous stoners always believed in a green future:

Bob Marley (Sept. ‘76)

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It’s time to let de people get good herbs and smoke. Government’s a joke. All dey wan’ is ya smoke cigarettes and cigar. Some cigar wickeder den herb.

Mick Jagger (June ‘80)

Cocaine is a very bad, habit-forming bore. I can’t understand the fashion for it. Sitting and smoking grass is different.

Stephen King (Jan. ‘81)

I think that marijuana should not only be legal, I think it should be a cottage industry. It would be wonderful for the state of Maine. There’s some pretty good homegrown dope.

Jack Herer (Feb. ‘89)

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I didn’t discover marijuana until 1969, when I was 30 years old. At the time, I was a successful businessman and a Nixon supporter.

Pot changed my life. I began to hear my own words back to me as judgments. I put on earphones and heard music in color for the first time.

Jello Biafra (Aug. ‘91)

You don’t have to smoke pot to realize that the real drug problem is not the drugs, and that we can help solve our drug problem and a hell of a lot of our crime problems, environmental problems and racial problems if we’d all do our patriotic duty as Earth Patriots and GROW MORE POT!

Redman (Mar. ‘93)

I treat my music as an individual, you know, as a person, a human life. You gotta puff weed to get really deep like that.

Tom Robbins (May ‘94)

Marijuana seems to possess all of the benevolence, grace, clarity, insightfulness and calm that the state-sanctioned drug — booze — so sadly lacks.

Hunter S. Thompson (May ‘94)

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I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a staple of basic life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits — and millions of Americans agree with me.

Ken Kesey (May ‘94)

That old 1960s consciousness coming out of the beatnik years is the only path I see that is going to get us out of the mess that we’re in. And our gospel is that joint –That joint won’t lie to you. One joint will give you a different high than another joint, but they’ll be straight with you. Marijuana works.

Woody Harrelson (Nov. ‘00)

Everybody has their drug. The real hypocrisy of the Drug War is that it’s not simply a War on Drugs.

You can go to a drugstore in any city in the nation and you’ll find any drug you want, and they’ll be more addictive and worse for you than grass.

And there will be a smiling man there sanctioned by the government who’s allowed to give them to you.

Bryan Cranston (Sept. ‘12)

Marijuana started out with a bad connotation, as you know — but to me, marijuana is no different than wine. It’s a drug of choice. It’s meant to alter your current state — and that’s not a bad thing.

It’s ridiculous that marijuana is still illegal. We’re still fighting for it… There are millions of people who smoke pot on a social basis and don’t become criminals. So stop with that argument — it doesn’t work.

Roseanne (July ‘13)

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The first time I smoked, I was 17. I was with my sister, and we were sleeping out on our porch. I remember sitting on the porch with my mouth hanging open, looking at a tree and going, Jesus Christ, is that a tree? I couldn’t stop staring at it — the complexity of it, the patterning.

It opened up my mind to whole other conscious rhythms.

35 Celebs Sound Off on Marijuana | High Times

Trail Blazing – Cannabis Footprints Around the World (Map)

Trail Blazing - Cannabis Footprints Around the World (Map) | Third Monk image 3

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A new report describes how cannabis use originated thousands of years ago in Asia, and has since found its way to many regions of the world, eventually spreading to the Americas.

Cannabis plants are believed to have evolved on the steppes of Central Asia, specifically in the regions that are now Mongolia and southern Siberia. The history of cannabis use goes back as far as 12,000 years, which places the plant among humanity’s oldest cultivated crops.

Burned cannabis seeds have also been found in kurgan burial mounds in Siberia dating back to 3,000 B.C., and some of the tombs of noble people buried in Xinjiang region of China and Siberia around 2500 B.C. have included large quantities of mummified psychoactive marijuana.

For the most part, it was widely used for medicine and spiritual purposes during pre-modern times. For example, the Vikings and medieval Germans used cannabis for relieving pain during childbirth and for toothaches.

The idea that this (cannabis) is an evil drug is a very recent construction and the fact that it is illegal is a “historical anomaly”.

Marijuana has been legal in many regions of the world for most of its history.

–  Barney Warf, Professor of Geography at the University of Kansas

Marijuana became widely used in India, where it was celebrated as one of “five kingdoms of herbs … which release us from anxiety” in one of the ancient Sanskrit Vedic poems whose name translate into “Science of Charms.”

Over the next centuries, cannabis migrated to various regions of the world, traveling through Africa, reaching South America in the 19th century and being carried north afterwards, eventually reaching North America.

Path of Cannabis Map – From Asia to America

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Marijuana’s History: How One Plant Spread Through the World | Live Science