Business
Science Explains How Marijuana Inspires Awe
Marijuana regulates two subtle, but important gateways through which we experience life.
Regular cannabis users often report an important side effect of smoking marijuana — everything in your life seems amazing. Pizza becomes heavenly. Nature walks seem like you’re exploring the Garden of Eden. Mediocre Netflix shows elevate to masterful works of art. Now, science explains how marijuana inspires awe.
This is by design — your brain’s design, more specifically. We don’t usually talk about awe as an emotion in public. Negative feelings like anger, sadness, and fear crowd the discourse space instead. But awe is an essential ingredient to the experience of being alive. The emotion derives from a novel sensation or moment in your life. A feeling that you can’t believe you’re lucky enough to witness something you might describe as magical.
Awe occurs because of an almond-shaped ball collection of cell bodies called the amygdala. Previously you may have heard of the amygdala described as the brain’s “fear center.” That vastly oversimplifies it. The amygdala regulates many of your emotions and behaviors, including pleasurable feelings like awe. As explained by Timmen L. Cermak, a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction medicine, one way the amygdala facilitates awe is by organizing incoming stimuli.
“When an unfamiliar stimulus arrives, for example wearing a new ring, the amygdala adds a special ‘zing’ of alertness to the feel of the ring,” Cermak writes. “This draws our attention to the new sensations on our finger. After a while, when the feel of the ring becomes the unchanging norm, the amygdala stops adding the zing. We accommodate, or habituate, to the ring’s feel and it falls into the background of our awareness.”
Guess what disrupts that familiar feeling of the same-old, same-old? Your body’s natural endocannabinoid system, which is triggered by an uptake of cannabinoids — or, put simply, by puffing a joint. It lowers the barrier to what your amygdala, which has a dense collection of cannabinoid receptors, considers novel or new. It then instructs your brain to release neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and serotonin, causing pizza to taste like the best thing you’ve ever tasted.
“We dishabituate to the world and many stimuli rise up out of the background and back into awareness,” Cermak writes of this effect.
But cannabis also produces awe in a more subtle way. A 2015 study published in Emotion analyzed the relationship between inflammation and negative emotions. Researchers noted that poor mental health often leads to poor physical health. One example was that high inflammation correlated with clinical depression. However, researchers discovered the strongest relationship was between inflammation levels and awe.
“Why would awe be such a potent predictor of reduced proinflammatory cytokines?” researchers wrote. “One reason is that proinflammatory cytokines encourage social withdrawal and reduce exploration, which would serve the adaptive purpose of helping an individual recover from injury or sickness.”
“On the other hand, awe is associated with curiosity and a desire to explore, suggesting antithetical behavioral responses to those found during inflammation,” they added. “In this sense, experiences of awe may be part of an integrated response that includes emotional and biological responses that facilitate approach and social exploration.”
Multiple studies have noted marijuana anti-inflammatory abilities. It is within reason that by reducing inflammation, cannabis also opens up users to experiencing awe. Sometimes, you hear marijuana causing users to feel like a kid again. This can be meant jokingly, as in you can’t function well enough to perform adult activities, like laundry or cooking. But it can also highlight those big-eyed wonders we associate with childhood — how new and abundant life seems. Put another way, marijuana helps remind users how full and possible life can be.
Source: https://thefreshtoast.com/cannabis/science-explains-how-marijuana-inspires-awe/
New Mexico regulators fined a cannabis operator nearly $300,000 and revoked its license after the company allegedly created fake reports in the state’s traceability software.
The New Mexico Cannabis Control Division (CCD) accused marijuana manufacturer and retailer Golden Roots of 11 violations, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Golden Roots operates the The Cannabis Revolution Dispensary.
The majority of the violations are related to the Albuquerque company’s improper use of BioTrack, which has been New Mexico’s track-and-trace vendor since 2015.
The CCD alleges Golden Roots reported marijuana production only two months after it had received its vertically integrated license, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Because cannabis takes longer than two months to be cultivated, the CCD was suspicious of the report.
After inspecting the company’s premises, the CCD alleged Golden Roots reported cultivation, transportation and sales in BioTrack but wasn’t able to provide officers who inspected the site evidence that the operator was cultivating cannabis.
In April, the CCD revoked Golden Roots’ license and issued a $10,000 fine, according to the news outlet.
The company requested a hearing, which the regulator scheduled for Sept. 1.
At the hearing, the CCD testified that the company’s dried-cannabis weights in BioTrack were suspicious because they didn’t seem to accurately reflect how much weight marijuana loses as it dries.
Company employees also poorly accounted for why they were making adjustments in the system of up to 24 pounds of cannabis, making comments such as “bad” or “mistake” in the software, Albuquerque Business First reported.
Golden Roots was fined $298,972.05 – the amount regulators allege the company made selling products that weren’t properly accounted for in BioTrack.
The CCD has been cracking down on cannabis operators accused of selling products procured from out-of-state or not grown legally:
- Regulators alleged in August that Albuquerque dispensary Sawmill Sweet Leaf sold out-of-state products and didn’t have a license for extraction.
- Paradise Exotics Distro lost its license in July after regulators alleged the company sold products made in California.
Golden Roots was the first alleged rulebreaker in New Mexico to be asked to pay a large fine.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/new-mexico-cannabis-operator-fined-loses-license-for-alleged-biotrack-fraud/
Four marijuana companies, including a multistate operator, have filed a lawsuit against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in which they allege the federal MJ prohibition under the Controlled Substances Act is no longer constitutional.
According to the complaint, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, retailer Canna Provisions, Treevit delivery service CEO Gyasi Sellers, cultivator Wiseacre Farm and MSO Verano Holdings Corp. are all harmed by “the federal government’s unconstitutional ban on cultivating, manufacturing, distributing, or possessing intrastate marijuana.”
Verano is headquartered in Chicago but has operations in Massachusetts; the other three operators are based in Massachusetts.
The lawsuit seeks a ruling that the “Controlled Substances Act is unconstitutional as applied to the intrastate cultivation, manufacture, possession, and distribution of marijuana pursuant to state law.”
The companies want the case to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.
They hired prominent law firm Boies Schiller Flexner to represent them.
The New York-based firm’s principal is David Boies, whose former clients include Microsoft, former presidential candidate Al Gore and Elizabeth Holmes’ disgraced startup Theranos.
Similar challenges to the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) have failed.
One such challenge led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2005.
In Gonzalez vs. Raich, the highest court in the United States ruled in a 6-3 decision that the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution gave Congress the power to outlaw marijuana federally, even though state laws allow the cultivation and sale of cannabis.
In the 18 years since that ruling, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized adult-use marijuana and the federal government has allowed a multibillion-dollar cannabis industry to thrive.
Since both Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice, currently headed by Garland, have declined to intervene in state-licensed marijuana markets, the key facts that led to the Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling “no longer apply,” Boies said in a statement Thursday.
“The Supreme Court has since made clear that the federal government lacks the authority to regulate purely intrastate commerce,” Boies said.
“Moreover, the facts on which those precedents are based are no longer true.”
Verano President Darren Weiss said in a statement the company is “prepared to bring this case all the way to the Supreme Court in order to align federal law with how Congress has acted for years.”
While the Biden administration’s push to reschedule marijuana would help solve marijuana operators’ federal tax woes, neither rescheduling nor modest Congressional reforms such as the SAFER Banking Act “solve the fundamental issue,” Weiss added.
“The application of the CSA to lawful state-run cannabis business is an unconstitutional overreach on state sovereignty that has led to decades of harm, failed businesses, lost jobs, and unsafe working conditions.”
Alabama regulators are targeting Dec. 1 to award the first batch of medical cannabis business licenses after the agency’s first two attempts were scrapped because of scoring errors and litigation.
The first licenses will be awarded to individual cultivators, delivery providers, processors, dispensaries and state testing labs, according to the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission (AMCC).
Then, on Dec. 12, the AMCC will award licenses for vertically integrated operations, a designation set primarily for multistate operators.
Licenses are expected to be handed out 28 days after they have been awarded, so MMJ production could begin in early January, according to the Alabama Daily News.
That means MMJ products could be available for patients around early March, an AMCC spokesperson told the media outlet.
Regulators initially awarded 21 business licenses in June, only to void them after applicants alleged inconsistencies with how the applications were scored.
Then, in August, the state awarded 24 different licenses – 19 went to June recipients – only to reverse themselves again and scratch those licenses after spurned applicants filed lawsuits.
A state judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Chicago-based MSO Verano Holdings Corp., but another lawsuit is pending.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/alabama-plans-to-award-medical-cannabis-licenses-dec-1/
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