Cannabis Around the World: 8 Countries That Embrace Marijuana (List)

Unlike the United States’ arcane Cannabis policies, these 8 countries actually take facts into account when classifying and regulating Marijuana.

8 Countries That Embrace Marijuana

Spain

In Spain personal marijuana has been legal for decades. Today Barcelona is en route to challenge Amsterdam as the world center of pot tourism. In Spain, anyone is allowed to grow the herb for personal use, and – echoing California’s rules for medical marijuana use – growers can form collective, nonprofit, members-only cannabis clubs.

Barcelona officials have given their blessing to this new phenomenon. … The number of cannabis clubs that have opened in Barcelona recently has some experts saying this city will soon challenge Amsterdam as the go-to destination for vacationers who want to get high in peace. – Suzanne Daley New York Times

Daley reported that the pot clubs provide an economic boost.

Though they are nonprofits, advocates say the clubs are generating thousands of jobs and tax revenues for the state. In addition to selling a wide array of cannabis products and hashish, many of the clubs also sell food and drinks and offer extras to their members, like live music nights and Pilates classes.

Portugal

Portugal has enjoyed the benefits of all-out drug decriminalization for over a decade. Portugal became the first nation in Europe to decriminalize personal possession of drugs – including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine – in 2001.

Decriminalization means those drugs remain illegal, but instead of throwing people in jail for their use, the country imposes a fine similar to a traffic ticket and provides addiction treatment options. By removing criminal penalties for drug use, the nation was able to fund the resources necessary to treat drug addiction as the health crisis that it is.

Today in Portugal if you’re convicted of possessing small amounts of drugs, you visit a psychologist, social worker and legal advisor who determine what kind of treatment you need. Prior to decriminalization, Portugal had a serious drug problem, but over the last decade the nation has seen a decline in drug use.

While critics of the law warned that drug use would swell, it has not risen. We have seen significant reductions in H.I.V. infections and in overdoses, as well as a substantial increase in new patients seeking drug treatment. – João Castel-Branco Goulão, Portugal’s national Drug Coordinator & Chairman of the European Monitoring Center on Drugs and Drug Addiction

Canada

While the Great White North does not allow marijuana for recreational purposes anywhere, it has a nationwide government-sanctioned medical marijuana program. About 20 companies are licenced to mass-produce cannabis in Canada for medical purposes.

In addition to the substantial economic boost that comes from the new market, the Canadian government probably took the stacks of convincing research on cannabis’s potential health benefits into account in its decision to allow large scale medical marijuana production and distribution.

Israel

In Israel a $40-million-per-year medical-marijuana industry is thriving.

The Israeli government is funding and supporting breakthrough research on the many healing potentials of the cannabis plant – from cancer, to addiction, to psychological traumas. Israel’s federal government sanctions their national medical marijuana program.

Iceland

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Iceland smokes the most weed in the world, on average. The report, which included a breakdown of illegal drug use per country, found that 18.3% of the Icelandic population smokes weed. The United States ranked fourth in the report, with 14.8 percent of the population using pot.

Whatever the reason for their infatuation with cannabis, Icelanders were also found to be one of the happiest populations on the planet.

Netherlands

Surprisingly, cannabis remains illegal in the Netherlands.

The Dutch government and law enforcement are extremely tolerant of the herb and possession of small amounts is decriminalized nationwide. Two million tourists per year visit the city of Amsterdam for its legendary “coffee shops,” which are licensed to sell weed. You’re not allowed, however, to buy your bud on the streets, and coffee shops do card.

Uruguay

In response to increasing drug trafficking activity and violence, Uruguay became the first nation to legalize marijuana across the board, in December 2013. It did so in an effort to undermine the powerful cartels that have ravished much of the rest of Latin America. The plan in Uruguay is to set government weed prices extremely low so that cartels will be forced out of business.

While many had hoped to see Uruguay’s pot sales start already, President Jose Mujica announced that complications have delayed sales until 2015.

North Korea

While not officially confirmed, according to Open Radio North Korea, as well as other news outlets and visitor reports, marijuana has never been controlled in the country and is not considered to be a drug. While the North Korean penalty for hard drugs like meth is severe, people are allowed to smoke pot without regulation – it even grows freely on the side of the street.

NK NEWS receives regular reports from visitors returning from North Korea, who tell us of marijuana plants growing freely along the roadsides, from the northern port town of Chongjin, right down to the streets of Pyongyang, where it is smoked freely and its sweet scent often catches your nostrils unannounced. Our sources are people we know who work inside North Korea and make regular trips in and out of the country.

There is no taboo around pot smoking in the country—many residents know the drug exists and have smoked it. In North Korea, the drug goes by the name of ip tambae, or ‘leaf tobacco.’ It is reported to be especially popular amongst young soldiers in the North Korean military. Rather than getting hooked on tar and nicotine like servicemen in the West, they are able to unwind by lighting up a king-sized bone during down time on the military beat. – VICE

> 9 Marijuana Policies From Around the World That Are Way Ahead of the U.S | Waking Times

Jul 30, 2014Jun 17, 2016

Romans Used Nanotechnology – 1600 Year Old Lycurgus Cup Proves It

The Lycurgus Cup, as it is known due to its depiction of a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, is a 1,600-year-old jade green Roman chalice that changes colour depending on the direction of the light upon it.

It baffled scientists ever since the glass chalice was acquired by the British Museum in the 1950s. They could not work out why the cup appeared jade green when lit from the front, but blood red when lit from behind.

The mystery was solved in 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers:

They had impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometres in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt.

The Lycurgus Cup

The work was so precise that there is no way that the resulting effect was an accident. In fact, the exact mixture of the previous metals suggests that the Romans had perfected the use of nanoparticles. When hit with light, electrons belonging to the metal flecks vibrate in ways that alter the colour depending on the observer’s position.

The super-sensitive technology used by the Romans might help diagnose human disease or pinpoint biohazards at security checkpoints. Gang Logan Liu, engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his colleagues, conducted a study last year in which they created a plastic plate filled with gold or silver nanoparticles, essentially creating an array that was equivalent to the Lycurgus Cup.

When they applied different solutions to the plate, such as water, oil, sugar and salt, the colours changed. The prototype was 100 times more sensitive to altered levels of salt in solution than current commercial sensors using similar techniques.

It’s not the first time Roman technology has been studied. Scientists studying the composition of Roman concrete, submerged under the Mediterranean Sea for the last 2,000 years, discovered that it was superior to the modern-day concrete in terms of durability and being less environmentally damaging.

The knowledge gained is now being used to improve the concrete we use today.

> 1600 Year Old Roman Goblet | Rise Earth

Jul 24, 2014Jan 24, 2018

Your Brain on Porn: How Porn Consumption Changes Your Brain Structure and Functional Connectivity (Study)

This is the first brain-scan study published on porn users, and it was published in one of the most prestigious medical journals, JAMA Psychiatry. Researchers found several brain changes, and those changes correlated with how much porn was consumed. The subjects were moderate porn users, not classified as addicted.

Your Brain on Porn

The more porn the subjects used, the less gray matter in the striatum. The striatum is a complex set of structures. It includes the reward center (ventral striatum) and the dorsal striatum, which also goes by several names. Less gray matter means fewer nerve connections (dendrites and axon terminals) in reward-related areas. Put simply, less gray matter in the striatum mean less reward activity, and a decline in dopamine signaling (desensitization).

That could mean that regular consumption of pornography more or less wears out your reward system. – Simone Kühn, Lead Author

A second finding…

The connection between the striatum and prefrontal cortex worsened with increased porn watching. This may indicate hypofrontality (a weakening of the impulse control circuits).

A third finding…

The more porn used the less reward activation when viewing sexual images. A possible explanation is that heavy users need more stimulation, confirming desensitization.

We assume that subjects with a high porn consumption need increasing stimulation to receive the same amount of reward. Existing psychological, scientific literature suggests consumers of porn will seek material with novel and more extreme sex games. That would fit perfectly the hypothesis that their reward systems need growing stimulation. – Simone Kühn

The above findings dismantle the two primary arguments put forth by porn addiction naysayers:

That porn addiction is a sign of high sexual desire. Reality: The heaviest porn users had less response to sexual images, exhibiting less “sexual desire.

That compulsive porn use is driven by habituation, or becoming easily bored. Reality: Habituation is a temporary effect that doesn’t involve measurable shrinkage of actual brain structures.

Keep in mind that the results of this study are consistent with over 60 recent brain studies done on internet and video game addicts by addiction neuroscience experts. In these studies, the results demonstrate profound brain changes from over consumption of internet stimuli.

Porn On The Brain – Channel 4 Documentary

Jul 20, 2014Jun 17, 2016

5 Reasons Monsanto Roundup Needs to be Banned Forever

The science is irrefutable on this simple fact: Roundup weedkiller, manufactured by Monsanto, is a deadly chemical poison that persists on – and in – food crops consumed by millions of people.

The many consequences of Roundup’s continued use in commercial agriculture are reason enough to ban the toxic chemical cocktail for the sake of the environment and humanity.

These are strong words, but they are fully substantiated.

Roundup Ready Crops Absorb Glyhposate

Despite industry claims, Roundup does not simply wash off crops after it has been sprayed. A study out of Norway recently found that glyphosate accumulates inside crops at “excessive” levels.

Published in the 2013 June issue of the journal Food Chemistry, the study revealed that, while Roundup Ready crops are capable of resisting glyphosate in order to survive, they also absorb and incorporate it into food.

This means that people who eat GM soy or products derived from it, including soy lecithin and soy protein, are also eating a chemical solution linked to all sorts of health problems.

Exposure to Roundup Doubles Exposure to Lymphoma

The government maintains the same position as Monsanto — that glyphosate is essentially inert and not something to worry about. But a recent review of more than 44 published scientific studies found otherwise, having determined that exposure to glyphosate doubles farmers’ risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The study authors theorize that glyphosate disrupts the normal functioning of white blood cells, throwing your immune system into a sickened, dysfunctional state. – Leah Zerbe, Maria’s Farm Country Kitchen

Roundup so Heavily Used That It’s Being Found in Air & Rainwater

It would be one thing if Roundup were isolated just to crop fields. But scientists are finding that the chemical is now spreading to the air, and even raining down along with precipitation.

This means that glyphosate is now traveling with the wind patterns and raining down on people’s homes and on city parks where children play.

Roundup is Killing Butterflies and Other Pollinators

Even if Roundup really was helping to boost yields and produce more food – as demonstrated here and elsewhere, this is not actually the case — the harm inflicted on butterflies and other pollinators by the GM crop pesticides is simply inexcusable.

Researchers from Iowa State University found that glyphosate use has resulted in an 81 percent reduction in the monarch butterfly population, which relies on milkweed for reproduction and survival.

Like bees, monarch butterflies serve as crop pollinators. Without them, many seed- and fruit-bearing plants would be unable to survive.

Roundup Doesn’t Even Work as Claimed

Perhaps the biggest reason why Roundup deserves to be banned forever is that the weedkiller does not even work. Overuse of Roundup has led to the emergence of highly resistant “superweeds” that no longer respond to chemical treatments and now plague millions of acres of U.S. cropland. Roundup does not even biodegrade as claimed.

Because of this, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is gearing up to approve an even more deadly herbicide made from a component of Agent Orange, the Monsanto biowarfare chemical used during the Vietnam War.

> Five Reasons Round-up Should be Banned | Higher Perspective

Jul 16, 2014Jun 17, 2016

Weaving a Home: Collapsible Woven Refugee Shelters

Human life throughout history has developed in alternating waves of migration and settlement. Navigating this duality between exploration and settlement, movement and stillness is a fundamental essence of what it means to be human.

In the aftermath of global wars and natural disasters, the world has witnessed the displacement of millions of people across continents. Refugees seeking shelter from disasters carry from their homes what they can and resettle in unknown lands, often starting with nothing but a tent to call home.

Designed by Abeer Seikaly, “Weaving a home” reexamines the traditional architectural concept of refugee shelters by creating a technical, structural fabric that expands to enclose and contracts for mobility while providing the comforts of contemporary life (heat, running water, electricity, storage, etc.)

Design is supposed to give form to a gap in people’s needs.

This lightweight, mobile, structural fabric could potentially close the gap between need and desire as people metaphorically weave their lives back together, physically weaving their built environment into a place both new and familiar, transient and rooted, private and connected.

Structural Fabric Weaves Refugee Shelters into Communities

In this space, the refugees find a place to pause from their turbulent worlds, a place to weave the tapestry of their new lives.

They weave their shelter into a home.

> Structural Fabric Weaves Tent Shelters into Communities | Abeer Seikaly

Jul 15, 2014Jun 17, 2016

Taking The Piss With Banksy by Zenpencils (Comic Strip)

This comic brings life to the voice of street art and pays tribute to the inspirational work of Banksy.

Taking The Piss with Banksy

Banksy is an anoynomous English street artist and activist who has become a cult hero for his anti-establishment and rebellious artwork.

Unlike someone I know, who stays in his house all day drawing comics and watching Simpsons reruns, Banksy is a REAL artist who challenges the status quo, forces people to think and puts himself in danger, all while remaining a complete mystery to the world.

I mean think about it, he’s one of the most famous artists on the planet, his work has been popping up in major cities for the past 10 years and sell for millions of dollars and no one knows who the hell this guy is! I take my hat off to the dude. – Gavin Aung Than, Zen Pencils

Jul 14, 2014

How to Create a Society of Obedience and Consumption

Drug addiction is not a moral failing or mental malfunction, but an adaptive response to circumstances. It would be cruel to put rats in cages and then, when they start using drugs, punish them for it. That would be like suppressing the symptoms of a disease while maintaining the necessary conditions for the disease itself.

Are we like rats in cages? Are we putting human beings into intolerable conditions and then punishing them for their efforts to alleviate the anguish? If so, then the War on Drugs is based on false premises and can never succeed.

Here are some ways to waste human potential and create a society of mass consumption:

1.Make children stay indoors in age-segregated classrooms in a competitive environment where they are conditioned to perform tasks that they don’t really care about or want to do, for the sake of external rewards.

2.Destroy community bonds by casting people into a society of strangers, in which you don’t rely on and needn’t even know by name the people living around you.

3.Create constant survival anxiety by making survival depend on money, and then making money artificially scarce. Administer a money system in which there is always more debt than there is money.

4.Divide the world up into property, and confine people to spaces that they own or pay to occupy.

5.Move life, especially children’s lives indoors. Let as many sounds as possible be manufactured sounds, and as many sights be virtual sights.

6.Remove as much as possible all opportunities for meaningful self-expression and service. Instead, coerce people into dead end labor just to pay the bills and service the debts. Seduce others into living off such labor of others.

7.Cut people off from nature. At most let nature be a spectacle or venue for recreation, but remove any real intimacy with the land. Source food and medicine from thousands of miles away.

8.Destroy the local stories and relationships that build identity, and replace them with celebrity news, sports team identification, brand identification, and world views imposed by authority.

9.Replace the infinite variety of the natural and artisanal world, where every object is unique, with the sameness of commodity goods.

10.Delegitimize or illegalize folk knowledge of how to heal and care for one another, and replace it with the paradigm of the “patient” dependent on medical authorities for health.

11.Reduce the intimate realm of social interaction to the nuclear family and put that family in a box. Destroy the tribe, the village, the clan, and the extended family as a functioning social unit.

Cannabis and psychedelics can directly induce nonconformity, weaken consumer values, and make the prescribed normal life seem less tolerable, not more. The growing movement to end the drug war might reflect a paradigm shift away from judgment, blame, war, and control towards compassion and healing.

> 11 Ways Our Society Treats Us Like Caged Rats: Do Our Addictions Stem from that Trapped Feeling? | AlterNet

Jul 1, 2014Jun 17, 2016

Mr. Olympia Comes Out of the Psychedelic Closet, Talks DMT, Ayahuasca & Unity Consciousness(Video)

Dorian Yates, a six time Mr. Olympia just came out of the psychedelic closet and what he has to say about his psychedelic experiences is worth sharing.

What we need is a massive coming out of people who have done psychedelics and accomplished a lot. – Rick Doblin, Founder of MAPS

Dorian Yates Comes Out of the Psychedelic Closet, Talks Ayahuasca and Smoking DMT

One of the most important issues we strive for is our collective freedom of consciousness, we dearly need a psychedelic renaissance.

This is only to come about if we reach a level of social acceptance where reason thwarts taboo. Therefore, it is imperative that more and more people like Dorian step up — we may find our consciousness revolution materialize faster than expected.

The educational value of entheogens and psychedelics may be their capacity to reliably evoke experiences of wonder and awe, to stimulate transcendental or mystical experiences, and to catalyze a sense of life meaning or purpose. – Kenneth W. Tupper, Ph.D.

Jun 30, 2014Jun 17, 2016

The Effects Of Negative Emotions On Our Health

Humans experience an array of emotions, from joy and severe depression and everything in between. Each one of these emotions create a distinct feeling in the body.

That’s why Power Poses can be such a great way to influence your brain’s release of chemicals.

That raises the question, what happens when we have negative thoughts consistently?

Positive or Negative Emotions, it’s All Perspective

Imagine yourself driving down the street when suddenly you are cut off, what happens next? Do you react in anger? Or do you simply apply the brake slightly and move on with your day.

The same experience can yield two very different results based on how we define our experience.

Tune Your Perception

With that in mind, we realize that positive or negative emotions are only defined as such by us.

This reminds me of a wonderful Zen Parable:

The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbors as one living a pure life.

A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him. Suddenly, without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child.

This made her parents very angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment at last named Hakuin.

In great anger the parents went to the master. “Is that so?” was all he would say.

After the child was born it was brought to Hakuin. By this time he had lost his reputation, which did not trouble him, but he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else the little one needed.

A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth – that the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fishmarket.

The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask his forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back again.

Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he said was: “Is that so?”

The Mind Body Connection

The unseen connection between your mind and body is very powerful and the effects your mind can have on your physical body are profound.

Our emotions and experiences are essentially energy and they can be stored in the cellular memory of our bodies. Have you ever experienced something in your life that left an emotional mark or pain in a certain area of your body? It is likely you have residual energy stuck in that area of your body that you have yet to acknowledge.

It’s all a learning and growing process that we don’t have to judge nor fear. Positive or negative thoughts, the choice is yours!

> Emotion Effects on our Health | Collective Evolution

Jun 29, 2014Jun 17, 2016

Imagine You’re a Baby Again – Alan Watts Animation (Video)

An enlightening discussion accompanied by a beautiful musical score (Ravi Shankar) and superb animation.

This Alan Watts animation challenges us to imagine the world through our nascent consciousness again.

What is it like to be a baby again, to be completely new to this world? Just how different would the world appear compared to our adult eyes?

Jun 25, 2014Jun 17, 2016

Do We Unconsciously Feel the Future Before it Happens? (Study)

Can your brain detect events before they occur?

That was the stunning conclusion of a 2012 meta-analysis of experiments from seven independent laboratories over the last 35 years, which found that the human body can apparently detect randomly delivered stimuli occurring 1-10 seconds in the future.

In the studies, physiological readings were taken as participants were subjected to unpredictable events designed to activate the sympathetic nervous system (for example, showing provocative imagery) as well as ‘neutral events’ that did not activate the nervous system. These readings showed that the nervous system aligned with the nature of the event (activated/not activated) – and what’s more, the magnitude of the pre-event response corresponded with the magnitude of the post-event response.

Rebuttal? Not so fast…

In a recent paper, researchers have critically analysed these findings, considering possible mundane explanations for the results and also the implications of the results if they truly do point to a paradigm-shaking discovery.

The key observation in these studies is that human physiology appears to be able to distinguish between unpredictable dichotomous future stimuli, such as emotional vs. neutral images or sound vs. silence. This phenomenon has been called presentiment (feel the future).

In this paper we call it predictive anticipatory activity or PAA. The phenomenon is “predictive” because it can distinguish between upcoming stimuli; it is “anticipatory” because the physiological changes occur before a future event; and it is an “activity” because it involves changes in the cardiopulmonary, skin, and/or nervous systems.

Neither questionable research practices (bias) nor physiological artifacts seem to be able to explain PAA, the evidence indicates that there is a temporal mirroring between pre- and post-event physiological events, so that the nature of the post-event physiological response is correlated with the characteristics of the PAA for that event. – Study

The authors of the paper also point out fascinating aspects of the research, such as the fact that “PAA is an unconscious phenomenon” that “appears to resemble precognition (consciously knowing something is going to happen before it does), but PAA specifically refers to unconscious physiological reactions as opposed to conscious premonitions”.

There must be a necessity for PAA to remain non-conscious most of the time, if some part of our nervous system can obtain information about events seconds in the future, wouldn’t we have evolved to make this information conscious? – Study

How is this possible…

A metaphor may help to provide an intuitive feel for this effect – watching a river move past a stick.

Imagine that the direction of the water’s current is the conscious experience of the flow of time (temporal flow), and imagine that an intrusion in the flow (the stick) is an emotional, arousing, or otherwise important event. The largest disturbance in the water made by the intrusion is downstream (in the “forward” time direction), which is analogous to our conscious reaction to experiencing the important event.

But if one examines the flow of water near the stick, one will also see a small perturbation upstream, anticipating the intrusion in the water downstream due to the back pressure. Similar to PAA, this upstream perturbation is a hint of things to come. It is not normally part of our conscious awareness and, as with disturbances in a flow of water, the majority of the effect of an intrusion is downstream of the intrusion.

Nevertheless, the authors of the recent paper urge caution until more extensive research is undertaken:

Until there is a gold standard experiment that is replicated across laboratories using exactly the same experimental procedure, physiological measures, and statistical analyses, there remains the possibility that multiple analyses could influence the body of evidence supporting PAA.

I look forward to seeing the results of these future investigations. Or do I already know what they are going to be?

> We Unconsciously React to Events Up to 10 Seconds Before They Happen | Earth We Are One