As hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries have opened this year in a startling rollout across California, unnerved local officials have started to push back aggressively.

Many cities and a few counties have banned them. Others have imposed emergency moratoriums. And some have started to sue dispensaries to force them to close. So far, the state's courts have sided with local officials.

For marijuana advocates, who have seen over-the-counter sales become commonplace and watched the steady drift of California's vibrant weed counterculture into the mainstream, these setbacks are a discordant development.

The American Medical Association on Tuesday issued a cautious but historically significant call to change America's marijuana prohibition laws, urging a "review" of the drug's status as a Schedule I drug.

At a meeting in Houston, the AMA's House of Delegates adopted a new policy that calls for "marijuana's status as a federal Schedule I controlled substance be reviewed with the goal of facilitating the conduct of clinical research and development of cannabinoid-based medicines, and alternate delivery methods."

That does not mean the AMA supports the legalization or decriminalization of marijuana.

The possibility of federal funds is particularly enticing for needle exchanges right now, as many face budget cuts in state funding which may force them to close down.

BACKGROUND: Cannabis use is associated with altered neurocognitive functioning in severe mental disorders, but data are still inconclusive and there are no studies of bipolar disorder. The aim of this study was to investigate the association between cannabis use and neurocognition in bipolar disorder compared with schizophrenia in a naturalistic setting. METHOD: A total of 133 patients with bipolar disorder and 140 patients with schizophrenia underwent neuropsychological assessments and clinical characterization including measures of substance use. Relationships between cannabis users and neurocognitive function were explored in the two diagnostic groups. Possible interactions between diagnosis and cannabis use were investigated, and findings were controlled for possible confounders. RESULTS: In bipolar disorder subjects, cannabis use was associated with better neurocognitive function, but the opposite was the case for the schizophrenia subjects. There was a statistically significant interaction effect of diagnosis and cannabis use on focused attention (p=0.019), executive functioning (verbal fluency - set shifting) (p=0.009), logical memory-learning (p=0.007) and on logical memory-recall (p=0.004). These differences in neurocognitive function could not be explained by putative confounders. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that cannabis use may be related to improved neurocognition in bipolar disorder and compromised neurocognition in schizophrenia. The results need to be replicated in independent samples, and may suggest different underlying disease mechanisms in the two disorders.

Thanks to Sandoz Tabman for sending this our way!

With the support of a $2.7 million Recovery Act grant from the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), an interdisciplinary team headed by Vanderbilt chemist John McLean and physicist John Wikswo will attempt to determine whether an individual’s white blood cells retain chemical memories of exposure to drugs like cocaine and alcohol that can be read reliably and unambiguously.

The capability to characterize an individual’s history of drug abuse should allow physicians to tailor treatment strategies on a case-by-case basis, and the technology could provide new insights into the biological pathways that control addictive behavior, which is a first step toward identifying effective new treatments.

If successful, it might also provide the basis for a new technology for drug testing that could be more difficult to beat or evade than current tests that detect the presence of specific drugs or their metabolites in the body. McLean, Wikswo and their collaborators at Vanderbilt, Cornell, Duke and NIDA will be using an experimental platform specifically designed to characterize millions of biomolecules and search them for various signatures. In this case, they will be analyzing a large suite of biological signaling and metabolic molecules in search of signatures that correspond to past exposures to cocaine, alcohol and other drugs of abuse.

The new platform has a number of other potential applications. The researchers have also received a $1.5 million grant from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to search for signatures of biological warfare agents that could be built into field detectors. In addition, the researchers propose using it to analyze biopsy material from cancer patients to identify the most effective chemotherapy agent for each individual.

Some dude outside my supermarket just asked me to sign a petition to legalize marijuana. Apparently he was so high that he forgot he's in California, where pot is already more legal than budget-balancing. Last year I was granted a medical-marijuana license, even though I'm healthy and I don't smoke weed. I went to a doctor's office that consisted of a desk, a TV, two cans of air freshener and a man wearing a Hawaiian T-shirt. I told Dr. Magnum P.I. about my constant anxiety, insomnia and headaches — two more conditions than any previous patient had bothered to mention. He freaked out and gave me a pot license for only six months until I saw a psychologist. My lovely wife Cassandra, however, got a full year's prescription by claiming she was afflicted with a condition called "menstruation." Looking back, I'm pretty sure I could have used that too.

There are more medical-marijuana dispensaries in L.A. than Starbucks. Most are like nice tea shops, where salespeople behind a counter open glass jars so you can smell the Sugar Kush, look at the Purple Urkel under a magnifying lens and ask about the effects of Hindu Skunk. At the Farmacy, I spun a wheel to determine my first-time-buyer gift and was handed a pot lollipop. If the pot-dispensary people ran General Motors, the recession would be over. Although GM cars would be engineered to just stare idly at the road for hours. Which is more than they're good for now.

The vast majority of that Sugar Kush is still in our house, mostly because Cassandra found an even more effective solution to menstruation called pregnancy. But also because shopping for pot in California is more fun than using it. So when Attorney General Eric Holder declared that the Federal Government would quit busting dispensaries, removing even the hint of consequences for medical-marijuana use, my heart ached for small-time American pot dealers. They can't compete on price, selection, customer service, quality control or not-getting-arrestedness, and they have no skills that translate into another industry. They're almost as bad off as journalists.

Thanks cigga!

The Teafaerie does not believe in discarnate entities. This is my official stance. It’s the stance that I absolutely have to take at this point in order to maintain what I’m still pleased to call my sanity. The last thing I need, insofar as my tenuous and tempestuous romance with consensus reality is concerned, is to think I’m some kind of god damned Faerie Ambassador. I get the irony of my name (Teafaerie is actually a title, like Doctor or Professor, rather than a proper name) but in fact I don’t believe in faeries, demons, lizard people, or self-transforming machine elves. Clap all you want, it won’t do a lick of good. Or rather, I should say I don’t Believe in them, with an emphasis on the capital “B”. I’ve taken enough ayahuasca that I can’t deny the compelling intensity of some of these experiences, nor dismiss their relevance, but I don’t think I know what they are anymore than I think that I know what I am, myself. To label such a phenomenon as “entity contact” is to attempt to box it into a metaphor that is perhaps not large enough to contain it...

People are of many minds about the entity thing. It’s difficult to gauge what the general consensus is, if there even is any. Religions seem to prefer having an immunity to ontological analysis. Some of this stuff is maybe a little bit embarrassing for them, but it’s too central to their basic mythologies to just sweep it under the rug, so they kind of have to go with it. It’s perfectly normal to believe that (pick your favorite religious superhero) had all kinds of weird-ass entity contacts. You know, they cast out devils, and they talked to the Creative Principle as a personified entity, and they were harassed and helped by angels or devas or whatever. Not only that, but the followers of most of the popular religions are asked to believe, nay, commanded to believe, that they are players or pawns in some sort of a spiritual war or game between a number of disincarnate entities, and that they must guard themselves scrupulously against supernatural attack, and that they must perform rituals to please or appease certain deities and demigods who might come to their aid or intervene for their salvation. Really stop and think about this: it has been absolutely impossible to get elected president of the United States without at least professing to believe that intelligent demons are out to corrupt your soul. Variations on this theme hold true all over. Millions of people believe in ghosts, too, and most believe that their consciousness continues on in some manner after death. Don’t tell folks that you hear voices in your head, though, or they’ll lock you up!

Survey fail. From Failblog.org.