WeedLife News Network

Devin Crispin began growing hemp in 2019 in hopes of producing CBD oil.

He said the new plan provided by the government allows farmers to have clearer picture of what to expect before they begin the process like when to harvest and how to test their plants’ THC levels.

“We have a pretty good handle on what the new regulations will be. I think the benefit will be having a firm rule in place so that people can make investments and decide what they’re willing to risk without changes coming down that could affect their businesses.”

USDA approves Indiana’s plan for commercial hemp growing 

Prior to 2020 hemp farmers had to have a research license through a university to grow hemp.

Under Indiana’s new plan, farmers can now apply for a license independently to produce commercial hemp.

Cannabis tourism is thriving today on account of more countries legalizing the herb. It has opened paths for enthusiasts to travel far and wide worldwide to enjoy marijuana while embracing the picturesque views. While most countries allow tourists to use the herb, not all can offer the best marijuana.

Does your dream vacation include a good amount of high-grade marijuana? Read on to know the countries that produce the best marijuana you can visit to have a magical time.

Which are the Best Countries for Marijuana Travel?

Like every other marijuana lover, you must be searching for the countries that offer the best marijuana in the world. If you are looking for your next marijuana adventure destination, you’ve reached the right place.

Here are five countries that should be on your bucket list:

The first thing that pops in mind when someone says Jamaica is Bob Marley and ‘Ganja.’ The Caribbean island offers a vibrant mix of reggae music, Rastafarians, and marijuana that adds up to a heavenly experience. The natives consider marijuana as sacred, and it is deeply rooted in their culture.

Starting a cannabis business in the US takes a lot of planning, effort, and patience.

However, it’s doable if you choose the best US state for such a business.

According to some of the most recent statistics, the cannabis industry is among the fastest-growing industries globally.

Therefore, it’s a perfect time to start this type of business.

A recent study taking place in Israel looked at how effective medical cannabis can be at treating chronic pain, with an emphasis on long-term pain management use. 

The study, originally published in The European Journal of Pain and conducted by researchers with University of Haifa, looked at patients over the course of one year and examined and measured how cannabis worked with their chronic pain conditions and how much relief they received. It checked in with users at one three, six, nine, and twelve months after the treatment started to see how patients were doing with their cannabis treatment.

“At one-year, average pain intensity declined from baseline by 20 percent. All other parameters improved by 10 to 30 percent,” the study reported. “A significant decrease of 42 percent from baseline in morphine equivalent daily dosage of opioids was also observed. Reported adverse effects were common but mostly non-serious.” Reports of adverse effects declined over the course of the study period.”

Another Study, A Consistent Finding

Of course, this is not entirely new information. It backs up what other studies have found, which is that cannabis can help with long term pain relief and reduction of opiate use, as patients rely on cannabis instead of more dangerous treatment options. However, there are some things about the study that are unique. 

“This study is novel in identifying possible predictors for treatment success, including normal to long sleep duration, lower BMI and lower depression scores,” the study explains in detail. “In contrast to current beliefs the diagnosis of neuropathic pain predicts a less favorable outcome. These findings provide physicians with new data to support decision making on recommendations for MC treatment.” 

The election has been brutal, affecting everything from our our motivation to our appetite and sleep. Here’s how marijuana can help you win the battle.

November just started but it feels like it’s been going on forever. The super slow results and razor thin margins have likely inspired a thousand panic attacks. For many of us, it’s been very difficult to concentrate and to not succumb to our worst impulses — mainly the constant refreshing of interactive maps and eating all the junk food in sight. Even if it feels like the country is falling apart, it’s important to take care of yourself and your relationships. Marijuana can help.

While the herb can be a great escape mechanism, it can also be a constructive way of grounding yourself in the present and curbing other coping mechanisms that are more harmful. Here are 5 ways marijuana can help cure your election hangover:

It can curb your drinking

Photo by Jetta Productions/Getty Images

2020 has had no mercy. The gloves have been off since March, pummeling us with a barrage of COVID-19 cases and uncertainties. The elections are much of the same, giving us a free pass to drink earlier every day. While drinking does help to make us feel better in the short term, marijuana might play a more effective role in the long term, eliminating hangovers, treating your body more kindly and preventing sad drunken episodes. Next time you feel yourself itching to reach for that bottle of wine or that whisky you’ve been saving for a special occasion (the end of the world counts), reach for a joint instead. Your body will thank you.

It was no surprise to Michael Di Croce when New Jersey voters approved a referendum Tuesday allowing anyone 21 and older to smoke marijuana recreationally.

For two years, Di Croce, the mayor of Shamong Township, Burlington County, has been pitching his Pinelands community as a potential marijuana epicenter in anticipation of legalization. His goal was to use the resulting revenue to lower local property taxes and maybe even build a community center with an Olympic size pool.

“I think it’s fantastic,” Di Croce said of the vote. “Farmers … have been struggling for a long time.”

Someone has to grow all that weed, Di Croce knows, and he’d like a lot of it grown in Shamong. Because marijuana is illegal at the federal level, it can’t be transported across state lines. So Di Croce sees the potential.

Yet who will be able to grow cannabis, how and where, is still anyone’s guess since laws need to be crafted to tackle a host of issues surrounding legalization. Added to that are broader questions like whether a community that prides itself on being family friendly will want to offer apple picking next to a pot farm.

With voters in New Jersey overwhelmingly passing a bill to legalize recreational marijuana is it a sign for other states, including Pennsylvania?

 “It’s money, it’s jobs, it’s justice, it’s freedom,
 Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman said. 

Fetterman has long been an advocate for legal marijuana, but nowadays after New Jersey voters approved adult-use cannabis he says Pennslvynia could be poised to lose out on millions in revenue. 

“Legal weed in New Jersey is huge for Pennsylvania too because 40 percent of our population will no more than a drive to the grocery store to buy as much legal marijuana as they want," he explained.

Not everyone wants to go green there are still many groups who fear legalizations leads to drugged driving and an increase in teen use.

State Senator-elect Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio has pre-filed a bill that would legalize cannabis.

The Democrat who ousted Republican Pete Flores in the State Senate District 19 race last week made the legalization of marijuana for medical and adult recreation use one of his campaign platforms.  Gutierrez says  it would result in an estimated $3.2 billion in state revenue and create 30,000 jobs.

“There is going to be a budget shortfall to affect all Texans next legislative session, however, I look forward to working with my colleagues to offer a real solution,” Gutierrez said. “Our state’s economic future is uncertain and in order to best serve our state, we have to look at cannabis legalization as a solution and not keep going back to the taxpayers and raise their taxes.”

He notes that marijuana is legalized, either for medicinal or adult recreational use, in 3 dozen states.

“We’ve interview Texas mothers who are living with their autistic children in Colorado because cannabis helps control seizures,” Gutierrez told KTSA News.

Every serious grower has a set of tools that are used every day to monitor and tend to their crops. If you’re thinking about taking the step from curious cultivator to master grower, there are a handful of tools that will be essential to the plant’s success and using them on a daily basis will ensure that the next (or first) crop will be healthy and bountiful. Check out this list of suggestions below for resources to get you growing with the best of them.

pH Meter

There are a few ways to measure the pH of the nutrient solution with effective pH meters that are inexpensive yet simple to use. You may purchase a vial of litmus fluid to test the pH. Simply take a sample of the nutrient solution and put a few drops in the vial. After shaking it to mix it thoroughly, the color of the nutrient solution changes. Compare this color with the gauge that’s included and that’s the pH.

A more effective but costlier method is to purchase a pH meter, which is recommended if there’s more than one crop being grown. It’s a simple meter to use and can be found at any hydroponic supply store. Fast-growing leafy plants generally like a lower PH in the range of 5.2 to 5.9.

PPM Meter

The concentration of the nutrient solution is measured in parts per million (PPM). This indispensable tool is used every day to monitor and mix the nutrient solution to make sure there aren’t any nutrient deficiencies. Young, established seedlings or rooted clones are generally started at 500 to 600 PPM. This value is increased to 800 to 900 PPM during the peak foliage growth period. During the flowering period, the PPM is raised even higher to 1000 to 1200 PPM. That’s a lot of nutrient. And it’s needed – every drop. It’s at the flowering time that the plant will need the most resources.

24 Hour Timer

In order to have a healthy crop, a lighting cycle must be religiously adhered to. The norm is to have a cycle that has 18 hours with light and six hours without it. This is accomplished with an automatic timer. It’s important to have a setup that allows the night cycle to be absolutely black. It’s recommended to not even enter the room they’re being grown in to check on them during their night cycle.

Using cannabis-related products has become increasingly popular in North America. Scientific research has discovered a wide variety of ailments that these products could be useful for. Accordingly, the CBD market has surged. 

People are now integrating CBD products into their everyday lives. When shopping for  CBD near you, visit sites like cbdoilnearby.com to find which stores are worth visiting. For the best deals, always buy online unless it’s not an option in your town or city.

What Does CBD do?

The normalization of CBD products is still a relatively new concept. Therefore, not everyone is exposed to information regarding the benefits that this compound can have. In this article, we are going to learn how CBD products can have a positive impact on men’s health.

Cannabidiol known to most as CBD is an active compound that can be derived from cannabis and hemp. It is the second most prevalent, after THC. Many people know THC due to its psychoactive properties. Essentially, THC is what makes users feel “high.”

The presidential election is over. While the central concern of the election was to reclaim America from the clutches of Donald Trump, addressing the pandemic that killed more than 230,000 Americans, passing some version of the COVID-19 relief bill that Senate Republicans have been holding hostage, protecting abortion and LGBTQ rights from the now-stacked Republican Supreme Court, as well as a host of other urgent issues, the legal status of marijuana is also at stake. While the Democratic platform calls for the federal descheduling and decriminalization of marijuana, the Republican platform called for more of the same—which means more mass incarcerations and a “tough on crime” stance for petty drug possession charges.

What Joe Biden Promises

During the primary race, the Shepherd Express repeatedly pointed out that Joe Biden was the only Democratic candidate who refused to consider the full legalization of marijuana, a stance that has now been adopted by the entire party since Biden became the nominee. However, despite being one of the more conservative candidates on the roster, Joe Biden made one key promise: “Nobody should be in jail simply for smoking or possessing marijuana.”

During the last presidential debate, President Donald Trump didn’t hesitate to point out Joe Biden’s record as a Senator, accusing him of partially causing America’s mass incarceration problem. Surprisingly, given that it came from the mouth of the president who told a record-breaking 20,000 recorded lies before the end of his first term, this is actually true—somewhat. While Trump simply repeated the words “your Crime Bill” in-between some drivel about being better than any president since Abraham Lincoln, there is a nugget of truth here. Joe Biden is credited with writing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, commonly known as the 1994 Crime Bill, a core component of the War on Drugs to this day, which led to the incarceration of countless innocent people for possession of recreational drugs.

What matters now, a quarter-century later, is that Joe Biden publicly denounced his own record. “It was a mistake,” he said of his Crime Bill during the debate, on live television in front of 63 million Americans. “We passed 100%. All 100 senators voted for it. It was a mistake. I have been trying to change it since then, particularly the portion on cocaine,” he added. “I’ve been arguing that, in fact, we should not send anyone to jail for a pure drug offense, they should be going into treatment. [...] It was a mistake to pass those laws relating to drugs.”

Beyond recognizing the error of his past actions, which made him the only man to do such a thing on the debate stage, Joe Biden also put forth ideas for a solution: “There should be no minimum mandatory [sentences] in the law. I am offering $20 billion to states to change their state laws to eliminate minimum mandatories and set up drug courts. No one should be going to jail because they have a drug problem. They should be going to rehabilitation, not to jail. We should fundamentally change the system, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

In the short term, marijuana hinders your learning ability, but doesn’t seem to cause long-term impairment.

Marijuana makes you dumb. At least according to the tired trope surrounding its use. Back in the day, stoners were considered slackers and anyone who smoked weed was on a one-way ticket to Loserville.

Today, many of those stigmas have fallen away. But some still linger in the popular consciousness, like the perception that every hit on a joint results in a lower IQ. But does smoking marijuana actually make you stupid?

Not really, according to a review published in the journal Neuropsychology. Canadian researchers Scot Purdon and Daniel Krzyzanowski aimed to better understand what long-term cognitive effects cannabis could have on users. They analyzed 23 previous studies to determine if marijuana abstinence had any impact on verbal learning and memory abilities.

Based on available literature, they wrote, whatever impairment marijuana use inflicted upon memory and verbal learning “appear to resolve between 7 and 28 days of sustained abstinence.” However, they added, “years of regular use were inversely related to longer periods of abstinence and verbal learning performance, undermining a confident inference that abstinence alone has direct benefits to verbal learning and memory.”

Detroit-based production company ASK-Y LLC is currently filming “Smokin’ Good,” a drama series set in the ‘world of cannabis.’

The series will follow August Good, portrayed by Shiek Mahmud-Bey, as he navigates his transition from the illicit cannabis market into the legal framework, notes a press release.

“The average person has no idea what this industry is really about,” says Andrew Watson, co-executive producer. “They primarily feed into the stigmas attached to cannabis, and that, in turn, affects their perception. This show will give them a taste of what the industry is, and from a very unique perspective. You rarely see a Black man’s point of view with cannabis, outside of being arrested and locked up from it.”

Watson called the show semi-autobiographical. “It details my successes, my failures and everything in between as a cannabis entrepreneur,” he says.

Mahmud-Bey called the series “a classic, from-the-streets-to-the-boardroom tale,” adding “those types of stories never get old, and the writing for this one is incredible.”

While we were watching other elections, voters in South Dakota legalized marijuana.

What will that mean for Minnesota?

In Rock County, Minn., close to the South Dakota border, bemused officials took in the news.

“It was a shocker,” said Rock County Sheriff Evan Verbrugge. “I think everybody in this area was really surprised that South Dakota voted this way before Minnesota.”

That’s pot politics. Lots of issues split along partisan lines — blue against red, liberal against conservative, us against them — but not marijuana. Never marijuana.

Down a rural farm road on the outskirts of Bergheim, 40 minutes north of San Antonio, lies the green pasture nurturing Texas' first legal hemp farm. At Texas First Hemp, visitors can take a look inside the farming operation, demystifying some of the stigma and buying samples on their way out.

Owners Jennifer and Austin Ruple were some of the first to receive hemp-growing permits after the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 1325 in June 2019, legalizing hemp farming in Texas. Hemp is a variety of cannabis that contains less than .3% THC, a compound known to produce psychoactive effects. The Ruples primarily focus on cannabidiol, or CBD, a naturally occurring extractable compound found in hemp plants. Hemp has been used in everything from soaps, clothing, and diapers to paper, foods, and building materials.

The Ruples became licensed in spring 2020 just after COVID-19 hit, and they were the first in the state to have seeds planted that would grow into the first legal hemp plants in Texas.

“People think of this industry, and they think long hair and beanies, but it’s all about integrity,” Austin says. “It’s all above-board. It is becoming more popular and so much more mainstream.”

Now that those seeds have blossomed into 8-foot plants with leaves and buds, they’re ready for harvest, and the Ruples have opened the farm to tours. While nearby Fredericksburg attracts wine lovers, people with an appreciation for hemp can go behind the scenes of the process.