Sunshine rolling back the overcast this early-Thursday afternoon on California’s north coast — expectations abound for another day-gorgeous.

As you most-likely know, last Thursday the DEA announced a forked-tongue, contradictory arrangement — despite supposedly a relaxation on cannabis research, the agency also continued marijuana in the same gene pool as like heroin and LSD.
(Forbes):

‘According to the DEA’s official explanation of its decision, the only factor that mattered was whether marijuana has a “currently accepted medical use.”’

(Illustration found here).

Asshole-wrong, and idiotic. Marijuana’s still-illegal status makes it way-hard for decent studies to be conducted, the biggest obstacle, researchers are limited to the handful of strains grown on a University of Mississippi farm — doesn’t ease research because the regulation required for research doesn’t change.

Indeed-idiotic.
Ryan Vandrey, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University, and who has studied cannabis awhile, had these comments found at Think Progress yesterday:

The Schedule I license approval process can take up to a year.
Then, the DEA analyzes the study itself, along with the “scientific merits” of the researcher.
“My last study took a year and a half to be approved,” Vandrey said.
“And now I’m waiting again.”
Any small change in the study requires another lengthy reevaluation from the DEA, a process that has forced Vandrey to put his current project on hold.
And the feds don’t make this process easy, either.
“Not only do we have to jump through regulatory hoops to do our science, but there’s also no time limit on the DEA to review our work,” Vandrey said.
“I’ve been on the phone with the DEA every day, checking on the status. They’d never call us.”

The whole Controlled Substance Act is a sham.

Yet good shit continues — from the Independent on Monday:

A cannabidiol (CBD) vaporiser that has helped thousands of people suffering from a variety of conditions is being tested by an NHS unit, an unprecedented step that could increase scrutiny on cannabis’ medical benefits and have a huge impact on the UK’s legislation on it.
…
“As the first consumer cannabis product to be tested by the NHS, we are confident that this will go a long way towards creating a properly regulated cannabis market in the UK and are extremely excited to see what the future holds.”

And yesterday, from Scientific American:

As early as 15 years ago physicians began hearing that patients were using cannabis instead of prescription opioids for pain.
These anecdotes inspired a research team led by Marcus Bachhuber, assistant professor of medicine at the Montefiore Medical Center in New York City, to examine whether some states’ legalization of medical cannabis had affected the number of opioid overdose deaths.
Published in 2014, the study revealed an intriguing trend: between 1999 and 2010, states that permitted medical marijuana had an average of almost 25 percent fewer opioid overdose deaths each year than states where cannabis remained illegal.
…
Various wide-ranging new studies back him up.
As reported in the June issue of the Journal of Pain, researchers at the University of Michigan conducted a retrospective survey of 185 patients who frequented a medical marijuana dispensary in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Those patients reported cutting their opioid use by more than half in treating their chronic pain.
Meanwhile animal studies have shown that cannabinoid chemical compounds found in marijuana can work synergistically with opioids to mitigate pain.
…
“We have all these states that have legalized medical cannabis,” says Kevin Boehnke, a Ph.D. candidate in environmental health sciences and public health at the University of Michigan and co-author on the Ann Arbor study.
“At this point, we really need a policy on the ways that cannabis can be researched and accessed by the scientific community to catch up with that reality.”

Plus, the freakin’ DEA is so-far behind the time, right now, and long, long time ago.
I missed this — from New Scientist in July

It must have been something in the air.
During a short time window at the end of the last ice age, Stone Age humans in Europe and Asia independently began using a new plant: cannabis.
That’s the conclusion of a review of cannabis archaeology, which also links an intensification of cannabis use in East Asia with the rise of transcontinental trade at the dawn of the Bronze Age, some 5000 years ago.
Central Eurasia’s Yamnaya people — thought to be one of the three key tribes that founded European civilisation — dispersed eastwards at this time and are thought to have spread cannabis, and possibly its psychoactive use, throughout Eurasia.
The pollen, fruit and fibres of cannabis have been turning up in Eurasian archaeological digs for decades.

Tengwen Long and Pavel Tarasov at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, and their colleagues have now compiled a database of this archaeological literature to identify trends and patterns in prehistoric cannabis use.
It is often assumed that cannabis was first used, and possibly domesticated, somewhere in China or Central Asia, the researchers say — but their database points to an alternative.
Some of the most recent studies included in the database suggest that the herb entered the archaeological record of Japan and Eastern Europe at almost exactly the same time, between about 11,500 and 10,200 years ago.
“The cannabis plant seems to have been distributed widely from as early as 10,000 years ago, or even earlier,” says Long.
…
What’s more, Barney Warf at the University of Kansas in Lawrence says that we know from early Greek historians that post-Bronze Age nomadic pastoralists of the steppe who came after the Yamnaya — the Scythians — regularly used cannabis as a drug.
“People talk about Herodotus’s accounts of hanging out in the Crimean peninsula smoking weed with the Scythians,” he says.
Warf says the new work is fascinating, and should encourage more researchers to explore the history and prehistory of cannabis.
“I think there’s a largely untold story of cannabis in Europe from the Bronze Age up until the Renaissance,” he says.

Idiotic on a huge, historical scale…