Featured guests: Jennessa Lea, founder of Break The Stigma Fitness.
[podcast]LOTS TO TALK ABOUT
• Pot as PED? Making marijuana be a performance enhancing drug.
• From a wheelchair to a 5K, a medical marijuana patient crediting cannabis for helping her change her life.
• A quick workout for hosts Jake and Janae.
TOP MARIJUANA NEWS
Jeff Sessions has asked Congress to allow him to prosecute medical marijuana providers: Attorney General Jeff Sessions is asking congressional leaders to undo federal medical marijuana protections that have been in place since 2014, according to a May letter that became public Monday. The protections, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, prohibit the Justice Department from using federal funds to prevent certain states “from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana.”
In his letter, first obtained by Tom Angell of Massroots.com and verified independently by The Washington Post, Sessions argued that the amendment would “inhibit [the Justice Department’s] authority to enforce the Controlled Substances Act.” He continues: “I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime. The Department must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives.” –Report by The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham
Weed company PotCoin sponsors Dennis Rodman visit to North Korea: North Korea is awaiting another visit by former NBA bad boy Dennis Rodman on Tuesday in what would be his first to the country since President Donald Trump took office. Wearing sunglasses and a black T-shirt advertising a marijuana cybercurrency, Rodman passed through immigration at Beijing airport, from where he is expected to fly to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Rodman has received the red-carpet treatment on each of his past visits but has been roundly criticized for doing so during a time of high tensions between the U.S. and North Korea over its weapons programs. His entourage included Joseph Terwilliger, a professor who has accompanied Rodman on previous trips to North Korea. –Report by The Associated Press’s Eric Talmadge
Battling the racial roadblocks to joining the legalized cannabis industry: Darryl Hill, hailed for integrating college football in his youth half a century ago, was a successful entrepreneur with no criminal record and plenty of capital when he applied for a license to grow marijuana in Maryland — a perfect candidate, or so he thought, to enter a wide-open industry that was supposed to take racial diversity into account. To his dismay, Hill was shut out on his first attempt. So were at least a dozen other African American applicants for Maryland licenses. They were not told why. Now, Hill, who has a long history of helping minority firms get financing and federal contracts, has a new game plan for breaking into the industry — just as a number of jurisdictions are turning to address the yawning racial disparities in the legal marijuana business. –Report by The Washington Post’s Tracy Jan and Fenit Nirappil
Researchers find the right dose of THC if your goal is to relax:Nearly 40 percent of people who use marijuana say they do so primarily to help them relax. New research from the University of Illinois at Chicago suggests that many of those folks may be overdoing it. As it turns out, there hasn’t actually been a whole lot of research done on the stress-mitigating effects of pot, according to Emma Childs, Joseph Lutz and Harriet de Wit of UIC. So they conducted a randomized, double-blind lab experiment involving 42 test subjects to see how different doses of THC – pot’s main chemical ingredient – affected the subjects’ responses to stressful situations. The test subjects were divided into three groups. The first group received an oral dose of 12.5 milligrams of THC. The second group got only 7.5 mg, while the remaining students unknowingly received a placebo. –Report by The Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham
QUICK HIT
Former marijuana enforcement officer, entrepreneur indicted in massive Colorado trafficking ring: A former Colorado marijuana enforcement officer and a Denver-based marijuana entrepreneur already the target of fraud allegations were indicted in connection with a suspected massive illegal marijuana trafficking ring that operated throughout the state. A grand jury cast a wider net after the March indictments of 16 people in an allegedly illegal marijuana trafficking ring led by Michael Stonehouse, and on June 7 indicted former Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division (MED) officer Renee Rayton and three others. According to court records and the indictment obtained by The Cannabist, warrants were filed for the arrest of Rayton; entrepreneur Scott Pack, whose businesses Harmony Green LLC and HGCO LLC also were charged; and Travis Bridle and John Edward Loos, both growers and suspected middlemen in the operation. –Report by The Cannabist’s Alicia Wallace
POT QUIZ
This week instead of the Pot Quiz we are playing “Pot or Not,” a list of 10 items, 5 are marijuana strains. Can you guess if they are pot, or not?
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