Monthly Archives: September 2022

Future studies that utilize the IGT in young adults during fMRI are needed to explore this question

Places whose citizens grant legitimacy to cannabis might not be ready to publicly display cannabis within their territories. Potential tax revenues and employment opportunities are not worth the moral trade-off for middle- and upper-class communities. For example, Santa Monica and Laguna Beach residents were among the strongest supporters of cannabis legalization—75% and 62% of cannabis support, respectively—but their city governments banned any cannabis-related economic activities. Both Santa Monica and Laguna Beach are predominantly non-Hispanic and wealthy.88 In contrast, economically and socially disadvantaged cities have to rely on potential tax revenues and jobs generated by legal cannabis businesses and, thus, permit cannabis companies even without public support. Take, for example, Calexico and Firebaugh, whose citizens did not support cannabis legalization , but city governments permitted cannabis companies. Both cities are predominantly Hispanic and poor . Irvine and Santa Ana—cases that are familiar to most UCI residents—are yet another example of the disparity between supply and demand. Irvine residents supported cannabis legalization at higher rates than Santa Ana residents . However, Santa Ana permitted all kinds of cannabis-related economic activities and has more than 20 cannabis dispensaries, and Irvine allowed only cannabis testing labs. Remarkably, Irvine has 9.7% of the Hispanic population, and Santa Ana—77.3%. In Outsiders, Howard Becker defines three types of social control of cannabis use: limiting supply and access to the drug; keeping nonusers from discovering that one is a user; defining the act as immoral. Since Becker published his book, cannabis has been depenalized,heavy duty propagation trays decriminalized, and finally legalized in California. Although the situation has significantly improved in terms of supply and access to cannabis, the stigmatization of cannabis use is still a pressing issue in the legal cannabis market.

The war on drugs generated various misconceptions about cannabis, which detrimentally affected public perceptions. First, despite scientific research showing that cannabis is no more harmful than nicotine or alcohol, some people still believe that cannabis is a gateway drug to heavier substances that induces criminal activity and violence.89 Second, although most people recognize the medicinal benefits of cannabis , they continue to disfavor the recreational use of cannabis, perceiving it as a non-conforming and risky behavior and its users as weak and non-productive members of society. Finally, people who tolerate the recreational use of cannabis in private spaces do not always accept its public display and consumption. Agreeing with legalization as a concept, Californians are not ready to embrace it entirely and allow dispensaries in their own neighborhoods—this occasionally leads to their obtaining court rulings against cannabis-growing operations.The drug problem cannot be adequately understood without examining the underpinning issues of poverty and disadvantage.There is nothing inherently criminogenic about drugs, nor drugs necessarily relate to poverty. Stigmatization of drug use is a product of a culture in which the consumption of pleasurable intoxicants is deemed intolerable and punishable. Drug use is a heavily moralized territory, and the lower social strata suffer worse outcomes than more affluent people for the same drug-related behavior . The literature on the history of drugs portrays drug regulation as a moral tale, in which the “blurry lines between us and them, privileged and repressed, strong and weak, keep getting rewritten as the boundaries between good and evil” . Existing at all social levels, drug use is recognized as a problem in specific social contexts—namely, it is clustered in the communities suffering already from multiple socio-economic difficulties . Even if the number of cannabis arrests is declining every year,Hispanics and African Americans continue to be disproportionately arrested.

In California, in 2019, Hispanics accounted for 41.7% of cannabis felony arrests, African Americans for 22.3%, and whites for 21.3%.Despite the fact that cannabis consumption rates are higher among whites, they are less likely to be arrested for cannabis-related offenses .The idea behind socio-spatial control is that deviance should be contained within designated territories, i.e., if objects, practices, and behaviors do not fit the existing social order, they are to be spatially excluded. In this chapter, I tested the reverse hypothesis, i.e., if things are geographically put out of place, it means that they are viewed as socially undesirable and inappropriate. The statistical analysis shows that city governments act as moral entrepreneurs when deciding whether they want to forbid or allow legal cannabis businesses. The prohibition erastereotypes continue to influence the development of the legal cannabis market: most jurisdictions decide to keep aloof from spoiled identities and tainted places associated with cannabis use, even at the cost of not reaping financial rewards. On the contrary, economically disadvantaged communities with a larger Hispanic population are more likely to permit cannabis dispensaries because: they have higher financial incentives, and they have lower reputational risks. Since these communities are already marginalized and associated with crime, disadvantage, and social exclusion, having legal cannabis dispensaries will not exacerbate their stigmatization.A secondary aim was to conduct an exploratory analysis examining group-by-sex interactions on risky decision-making in young adult college students. Since we were interested in examining decision making within active MJ users who were not yet undergoing cannabis withdrawal, we asked participants to remain abstinent from all substance use for 12 h prior to the study visit to attempt to avoid any withdrawal symptoms that may contribute to impairments in decision making. We hypothesized that frequent MJ users would have poorer performance than healthy controls, indicated by lower net IGT scores; frequent MJ users would show faster reaction times in card selection compared with healthy controls, which would reflect greater impulsive tendencies during decision-making; and younger age at first MJ use, greater cumulative MJ use and greater recent MJ use would be related to lower net IGT scores in MJ users.Sixty-five participants, 18–22 years old, completed the study. All participants were native English speakers currently enrolled in college or university. Of these participants, 32 were healthy controls and 33 were frequent MJ users.

Exclusionary criteria included uncorrected visual impairments, pregnancy, lack of fluency in English, self-reported lifetime history of a diagnosed psychiatric disorder or learning disability, self-reported current use of psychotropic medications, major neurological/medical illness or significant head trauma, prenatal exposure to drugs or alcohol, premature birth and reported history of psychotic disorders in immediate family of biological relatives. Additional exclusion criteria for healthy controls included: significant substance use history , any history of heavy episodic alcohol use: >5 drinks/occasion for males and >4 drinks/ occasion for females, >90 lifetime days of cigarette use, MJ use more than once/month in the past year and any other lifetime illicit drug use. Inclusionary criteria for frequent MJ users was ≥5 occasions of MJ use/week in the past year. Given the comorbidity of MJ and alcohol use , alcohol use was assessed but not exclusionary for the MJ+ group. MJ+ reporting >15 lifetime occasions of other illicit substance use combined across substances were excluded from study participation. While no participants reported lifetime history of a psychiatric disorder, scores from the Cannabis Use Disorders Identification Test-Revised indicated 23 MJ+ met criteria for a possible cannabis use disorder.Participants were recruited through flyers posted around the community and at MJ dispensaries as well as through social media advertising. Written consent was obtained from participants who contacted the laboratory to complete an interview to determine eligibility for the study. Following an eligibility interview, eligible participants were invited to take part in a study visit that included measures of substance use and psychosocial functioning as well as neurocognitive tasks of executive functioning. All participants were asked to abstain from substance use for at least 12 h prior to the study visit to limit effects of acute intoxication on neurocognitive measures. No participants appeared intoxicated at the time of the study visit. After providing consent for participating in the study visit, participants provided a urine sample for a 12-panel urine toxicology test and completed a breathalyzer test to confirm absence of alcohol intoxication. All MJ+ had a positive urine toxicology screen for THC, while all HC had a negative urine toxicology screen for THC. Further, all participants had a blood alcohol concentration of 0.00 at the time of the study visit. A nicotine metabolite test for cotinine was not conducted for this study; thus, recent nicotine use was assessed through self-report. At the end of the study visit,participants were compensated with an Amazon e-gift card. All study procedures were approved by the Oregon State University Institutional Review Board and were in accordance with ethical guidelines of research with human participants.Participants completed a brief demographics questionnaire, vertical cannabis which included questions on race, and socioeconomic status . As many college students in this age range lack personal income, we asked participants to select their perceived socioeconomic status . Additionally, participants were asked to estimate lifetime alcohol, MJ and cigarette use, and to report all substance use in the past 30 days using the Timeline Follow back procedure. Participants also reported age at first use for alcohol, MJ and cigarettes. All participants completed a 2-subtest version of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence-II. Here, we report on the findings from the Iowa Gambling Task , one of the tasks from a larger neurocognitive assessment that was selected as a measure of risky decision-making.

Findings from other tasks included in the larger neurocognitive assessment have been previously reported .Data were analyzed using IBM Statistical Package for the Social Sciences . For parametric, normally distributed data, independent samples t-tests were used to examine group differences on demographic variables and reaction times in card selection on the IGT with a significance value set at p < 0.05. Mann-Whitney U-tests were used to examine group differences on substance use variables that violated normality , including past 30 day and lifetime substance use variables. Using a repeated measures ANCOVA with age and IQ as co-variates, we investigated group differences on net IGT scores across five bins, each consisting of 20 trials. Substance use variables not normally distributed were log-transformed to improve normality and were examined in relation to IGT performance using Pearson correlations. Finally, an exploratory analysis using a repeated measures ANCOVA examined the main effect of group, sex and their interaction on net IGT scores, controlling for age and IQ.This study examined the relationship between frequent MJ use and risky decision-making in young adult college students using the IGT. To our knowledge, only one other study has examined risky decision making using the IGT in a similar and narrow age range of young adults . In the current study, MJ+ were older and had significantly lower IQ scores relative to HC. As both age and IQ were related to IGT performance, they were included as co-variates in the analyses. There was a significant main effect of group on net IGT scores, suggesting that MJ+ had lower net IGT scores relative to HC . Although MJ+ made advantageous card selections as indicated by the positive net IGT scores, they made less advantageous choices compared to HC. This effect is consistent with prior research examining group differences between MJ users and healthy controls in young adults . Research suggests that MJ users are more likely to make risky judgments despite subsequent monetary punishment than healthy controls and exhibit increased impulsive decision-making by selecting more disadvantageous cards than healthy controls . Additionally, the current findings support prior research that found young adult MJ users made more selections from disadvantageous decks A and B compared to healthy controls . However, in the current study, MJ+ also made fewer card selections than HC from deck C, an advantageous deck, but one that is associated with frequent punishments relative to deck D . This could suggest MJ users may prefer decks that are associated with frequent rewards and infrequent losses, which could drive reward-driven behavior. This observed performance difference in reward-driven behavior may be attributed to differences in utilization of the prefrontal cortex during strategy and choice selection.Furthermore, we found that the effect of group on net IGT scores was significant when including sex as a factor in the model. Overall, MJ + had lower net IGT scores compared with HC .

Many college students began smoking cannabis to protest the war in Vietnam

Yet another limitation of the criminal justice perspective is its focus on the national trends, federal mass media, or the general public. It is important to remember that the early regulatory efforts happen at the local level. When scholars use the term “public” , they often refer to “national” in its scope, impact, or character . According to James Hunter, public debate should mean not national but local debate “among people who live and work in relative proximity to each other and who care about their common neighborhoods and communities, towns, cities, and regions; and within institutions that are prominent and integrated into the communities where these people live” . There is a vast territory of social life between national culture and individual meanings, which is often overlooked in the canonical socio-legal literature on drugs. The focus on local processes allow us to see that criminalization and legalization were happening at the same time; that the debate on the decriminalization of cannabis took place before the full-fledged war on drugs ; that African Americans supported cannabis legalization at the lower rates but eventually had higher rates of incarceration for cannabis arrests ; that the decriminalization efforts of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Ford administration were not temporary and incidental but had long lasting effects and eventually resulted in cannabis legalization; that many legislative proposals failed and did not become “events” but affected the future legislations; that 2/3 of California cities supported cannabis legalization, but only 1/3 of them allowed legal cannabis businesses . In this section, I focus on the history of cannabis legalization in California. In particular, I describe the role of social movements in legalizing medical and recreational cannabis, their failures and victories, tactical repertoires,vertical grow shelf political threats, and discursive opportunities.

As I discussed above, cannabis prohibition and cannabis legalization are not separate processes; these are two dialectically united phenomena that interact, contradict, negate, and reaffirm each other. Socio-legal scholars, who are interested in cannabis as a criminal justice issue, often overlook the fact that control does not exist without resistance and that criminalization and legalization are two sides of the same coin. It is impossible to understand lawmaking processes without considering the work of mobilized groups of citizens challenging the unfair laws and shifting agendas of resourceful players. As I show below, defining the “drug problem” is not a prerogative of mighty actors or institutions. Some less powerful actors can create and promote alternative narratives about drugs and drug users and ultimately succeed in changing the governing norms and public opinion. The ongoing cannabis legalization in California offers a clear illustration of how social movements can become a local source of power and foster ideational change. California has been a pioneer in both criminalizing and decriminalizing cannabis. It was the first state to prohibit recreational use of cannabis in 1913 and the first to allow its medical use in 1996. Pro-cannabis social movements emerged in response to the Controlled Substance Act that classified cannabis as a Schedule I drug . According to Andreas Glaeser , change becomes possible when the state fails to positively validate people’s understandings of the social world. Understandings contribute significantly to the stabilization of political institutions, but for this to happen, they need to be continuously validated. There are three modes of understanding based on: interpretations, emotions, and senses. In the case of cannabis, the de-fetishization of the prohibitionist policies started in the 1960s, when new scientific evidence, dissatisfaction with authorities, and people’s own experience challenged the domain of unquestioned background assumptions about cannabis and its users.

The first objection to the prohibitionist assumptions came from the scientific community, which provided a new interpretation of cannabis. Although Nixon disowned the Shafer Commission’s report , which called for the decriminalization of cannabis possession, its results were spreading in society, along with the La Guardia Report of 1944. From the 1970s, scientific evidence proving the medical benefits of cannabis and demystifying its deleterious effects was multiplying, but the government continued to ignore it. The scientific community was calling for thorough research of the chemical properties, pharmacological qualities, and therapeutic applications of cannabis . More and more studies had shown the possible benefits of cannabis use. However, the scientific evidence was constantly downplayed by the federal authorities and the National Institute of Drug Abuse, who continued to fixate on presumed adverse effects of cannabis . For instance, the Reagan administration ignored the National Academy of Science’s report published in 1982,40 which questioned the effectiveness of full prohibition and recommended removal of criminal sanctions. Under the democratic Clinton presidency, a study co-authored by Harvard Medical School and Yale University showed the efficacy of cannabis for a wide range of ailments.Yet, once again, scientific findings did not change the anti-cannabis course of the political establishment; on the contrary, the drug-war budget doubled, and the record number of Americans were arrested on cannabis charges in those years . The second challenge to the prohibitionist status quo was a growing dissatisfaction with the US drug policy and the defiance of state authority. Cannabis use became a form of protest, a central symbol of the counterculture, and a ritual that demonstrated the willingness of young Americans to run risks with their peers.The government responded with harsher enforcement of drug laws: cannabis-related arrests rose from 18,000 in 1965 to 220,000 in 1970. That inevitably amplified protest movements. According to Patrick Anderson, the legalization movement began on August 16, 1964, when a young man walked into a police station in San Francisco, lit a cannabis joint and asked to be arrested.

Later that year, his lawyer launched the Legalize Marijuana organization , which sponsored the first pro-cannabis demonstration in America. In sum, the legalization movement was developing in response to political threats, confronting the mythology of “reefer madness” and persuading Americans that the time had come to change political priorities and put an end to the incarceration of young people for using a mild intoxicant . The third challenge to the prohibitionist discourse arose at the level of individual senses. An increasing number of people who used cannabis realized that it was no more dangerous than alcohol. The fact that cannabis was classified as the most dangerous drug, causing more damage than cocaine, opium, or methadone, sounded preposterous to those who had experienced cannabis effects. Thus, less and less people believed in the myths propagated during the anti-cannabis campaign. In 1975, psychiatrist and social activist Tod Hiro Mikuriya wrote: “Marijuana use in America is reminiscent of the era of Prohibition, in that almost 30 million people have smoked pot and the police of the 180 million other Americans are trying to prevent them from doing so. Despite vigorous efforts of society to regulate by deterrent legal sanctions, they have obviously failed. The use continues to escalate. In fact, marijuana has become a permanent part of American society. Since those who try and continue to use pot find it enjoyable, and many more people are trying it all the time, marijuana use is clearly here to stay. The time has passed when prohibition against personal use and possession should have been repealed”.All three factors—scientific evidence, dissatisfaction with authorities, and personal experience—made Americans more susceptible to the proclaimed dangers of cannabis. And this, in turn, raised political dissidence. In the 1970s, many social activists felt that the decriminalization and legalization of cannabis were just “around the corner.” Not only scientists and activists but also some state actors favored the depenalization of cannabis. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws became the main voice of the pro-cannabis movement. Founded in 1970 by Georgetown law graduate Keith Stroup, the organization brought together a group of young lawyers, scientists, civic leaders, and even politicians to fight for cannabis reform .43 From the very beginning, NORML was a public-interest lobby that represented the interests of cannabis users, focusing on individual rights and the social harm caused by incarceration for minor drug offenses. Although its ultimate goal was the complete legalization of cannabis, in the 1970s, NORML focused mainly on the depenalization of cannabis and its removal from the list of Schedule I controlled substances. A catalyst of the national pro-cannabis movement, NORML scored its first victory in 1973 when Oregon has ended criminal penalties for smoking cannabis. Over the decade, several more states—including California—have followed suit. In 1976, California approved the Moscone Act,44 which made possession of small amounts of cannabis a civil instead of a criminal offense. That was the beginning of cannabis decriminalization in California: felony arrests for cannabis decreased fourfold—from 99,587 in 1974 to 19,284 in 1976 .

In subsequent years, both the number of organizations working on pro-cannabis issues and the pressure imposed on the federal government increased. In 1977, President Carter asked Congress to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of cannabis grow indoor at the federal level . But his plan never came to life due to the scandal discrediting his drug advisor Peter Bourne and the emergence of the grassroots parents’ organizations, which were building strong opposition to cannabis decriminalization. In 1986, the Drug Enforcement Administration finally agreed to review a petition filed by NORML and the American Public Health Association that asked to recognize the medical value of cannabis and remove it from Schedule I classification . After careful investigation, the DEA’s chief administrative law judge Francis L. Young stated that cannabis “has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people […] and it would be unreasonable […] for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance.”The judge permitted the transfer of cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule II so that cannabis could be legally available for patients. However, the DEA director ignored such recommendations . Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the federal government and the media launched the largest anti-drug and anti-cannabis campaign. In this cultural context, the pro-cannabis movements did not have any political or discursive opportunities to bring about legal change. To a great degree, the success of social movements depends on their ability to “offer frames that tap into a hegemonic discourse” . Cannabis activists had nothing to offer; their claims did not resonate with ideas widely accepted in the broader society. The situation has changed with the AIDS epidemic, which provided discursive opportunities for politically effective framing.Robert Randall, a young college professor from Washington, D.C., was the Rosa Parks of the medical cannabis movement . In 1976, he sued the federal government for the right to use cannabis to treat his glaucoma. His doctor testified that the use of cannabis significantly decreased eye pressure, one of the primary symptoms of glaucoma, which kept Randall from going blind . In 1978, D.C. Superior Court established an important legal precedent: Randall won his case and became the first legal cannabis smoker since cannabis prohibition in 1937. However, Randall’s victory did not solve the problem of obtaining cannabis legally. He was not allowed to grow cannabis for himself and filed a petition demanding that the government provides him enough cannabis from the federal experimental farm at the University of Mississippi . His victory forced the Food and Drug Administration to establish the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program, which provided government-grown cannabis for seriously ill patients. However, the program was limited to a small number of patients since many people who had received medical approval were rejected by the program . By 1991, only 15 patients were enrolled in the program. Randall’s legal precedent was a landmark victory, and social movements continued to exploit the medical discourse in the following years. Pro-cannabis activists crafted the image of cannabis as a compassionate palliative for seriously ill people and the image of cannabis users as patients, not criminals . However, such a medical frame was not very successful until the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, which made medical cannabis an urgent issue and provided first discursive and later political opportunities for the movement. Many AIDS patients experienced wasting syndrome, and cannabis helped them stimulate appetite, retain weight, and prolong lives. As Cyrus Dioun argues, “the death and devastation of the AIDS epidemic made it necessary to discuss previously unmentionable topics” . From 1980 to 1995, over 500,000 AIDS cases and over 300,000 AIDS deaths have been reported in the US. San Francisco was at the forefront of both the AIDS crisis and the medical cannabis movement.

The polysemy of the “drug problem” is itself a problem for researchers

The case of cannabis is very telling since it went through different stages of neutrality, hostility, and affirmation in the last hundred years. In the mid-19th century, cannabis was a legitimate medical substance , included in The Pharmacopeia of the United States and attributed to helping with rheumatism, tetanus, epidemic cholera, hysteria, depression, and other illnesses. In the course of the 1930’s anti-cannabis campaign, the plant was framed as an evil drug that leads to criminality and violence. The mass media and state officials popularized the term “marijuana,” a Spanish word used by farm workers, to transform the public perception of cannabis and tie it with “dangerous” Mexican migrants. In 1937, cannabis was prohibited at the federal level and, five years later, removed from The Pharmacopeia of the United States. The image of cannabis as a dangerous drug was promoted in the public discourse, which resulted in its classification as a Schedule I narcotic by the 1970’s Controlled Substances Act .11 In the 1980s, with the launch of the war on drugs, the prosecution of cannabis cultivators, distributors,hydroponic stands and consumers is escalated, which significantly contributed to the mass incarceration of minority groups. Meanwhile, cannabis supporters crafted an alternative image of cannabis as a safe and pleasurable alternative to alcohol. Social movements and their efforts to portray cannabis as an innocuous substance led to the decriminalization of cannabis in several states in the 1970s . However, neither the prohibitionists nor the proponents of cannabis viewed it as a medicine, but primarily as an intoxicant used for hedonistic pleasure.The medical conceptualization of cannabis came back with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

Cannabis use helped patients to increase appetite, retain weight, and hence prolonged their lives. Pro-legalization activists created a new concept of cannabis as a compassionate palliative for dying people. Thence began the process of cannabis legalization in the US.This brief historical overview suggests that cannabis is more than a plant in modern America. As Alan Bock argues, “It is something of a cultural signifier, a totem laden with assumptions and attitudes about what constitutes a good life” . Nowadays, cannabis has three equally powerful meanings. In different situations, cannabis is described as a dangerous drug, a medical treatment, or soft tonic. This polysemy creates a significant challenge for developing consistent legal and cultural infrastructure related to cannabis consumption and distribution. Although both medical and recreational cannabis were legalized in California, the idea of “legal cannabis” is still vague. The very distinction between medical and recreational meanings exacerbates this ambiguity, leaving cannabis is in a limbo: it is a pain-relief medicine that is not available in the pharmacy, and a recreational intoxicant , that cannot be bought at the supermarket. Cannabis was removed from the criminal justice context but was refused a place in the context of existing medical or market institutions. At present, cannabis is going through a moment of transition and institutional change. In order to become a “thing,” legal cannabis should settle in a new institutional environment. When we say that something is institutionalized, we mean that it is cognitively, behaviorally, and organizationally established.13 First, institutionalization rests on meaning making. There should be a consensus about what cannabis is and what it is not, a cognitive convention upon which individuals can jointly rely when they make decisions. An idea is institutionalized when it is built into the language, logic, values, social relations, or—as Mary Douglas put it—when it finds “its rightness in reason and in nature” . Second, institutionalization manifests itself through practices, actions, preformed roles, and shaped identities.

To understand the real meaning of cannabis, we need to look at what people do in their everyday lives—that is, how cannabis companies apply for licenses, how licensing agencies decide who gets a license, how landlords decide who gets a space, how consumers choose where to buy cannabis, how the police oversee the activity of illegal businesses, and so forth. Finally, the institutionalized phenomenon is represented through material reality, such as cannabis dispensaries, testing laboratories, greenhouses, licensing agencies, legal documents, licenses, permits, etc. Social phenomena can be institutionalized to a different degree . Complete institutionalization means that individuals experience an institution as an objective reality and take it for granted . In California, cannabis is not understood as a dangerous drug anymore. It is something else, but what exactly? Why distinguish between medical and recreational cannabis, given that it is the same herb, grown in the same conditions, and distributed by the same people? Does the persistence of the black market affect the institutionalization of legal cannabis? To understand the real status of cannabis nowadays, one should answer such and other questions. The idea of cannabis is not crystallized yet, and its vocabulary is still in a formative stage. For example, recently, activists and state officials began using the term “adult-use cannabis” instead of “recreational cannabis.” Such wording supposedly sounds more neutral and legitimate, deemphasizes the pleasure component, and denies the possibility of adolescent use. My research contributes to an understanding of institutional change. The legalization of cannabis is unfolding before our eyes at this very moment. It is a great opportunity to observe the process of institutional change in action, rather than post factum. Instead of examining what caused an institutional change in the past, I focus on what enables it right now, namely, what kind of background understandings, practices, and organizations make the legalization of cannabis possible . According to Rao et al. , institutional change is characterized by the transformations in institutional logics and governance structures . In the case of cannabis legalization, social movements were the most important motors of institutional and ideational change; their actions eventually led to the dissolution of old beliefs systems and governance structures and the necessity to create new ones. Since 2015, California has passed seven statutes and propositions regulating different aspects of cannabis-related activities and elaborating on the idea of cannabis. To be naturalized and reproduced in the future, these new understandings of cannabis come to be positively validated in the environment .

The real meaning of cannabis has to be defined by continuous interaction between regulators, local authorities, market actors, and society in general. When I say that cannabis legalization is the project under construction, I mean that institutional elements are not yet equilibria : power relations, roles, identities, potential benefits are still being validated and clarified. My research lies at the intersection of cultural criminology and lawmaking perspective. The primary focus of cultural criminology is the meaning, representation, and power in the contested construction of crime . Cultural criminology incorporates, on the one hand, traditional sociological perspectives and, on the other hand, postmodern theories . The concept of crime embodies a dynamic notion: it is defined as a project under construction, which is shaped by interaction, encoded with collective meaning, and attached to a particular social context. This view is essential for understanding several problems in my research, such as the criminalization of cannabis and stigmatization of its users through the 20th century, the role the mass media and power structures in the social control of illicit substances, the reasons and implications of the war of drugs, etc. Similarly, this approach helps to investigate the nature of the legalization process—the reverse mode of criminalization—and understand the construction of “legal cannabis”, i.e., how it is being depenalized, decriminalized, destigmatized, and deracialized. As for the lawmaking perspective, the following ideas are informative for the current study: Gusfield’s distinction between the instrumental and symbolic functions of law; and the ‘gap studies’ exploring the discrepancy between claims held out for law and its actual effects . According to Gusfield , lawmaking is not only a means of social control but also a symbol of cultural ideals and norms. Symbolic aspects of law are concerned with public morality and defining the line between right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, normal and pathological. In analyzing a legislative act as symbolic, we are oriented towards the meaning people attach to it rather than its instrumental functions. Legal rules are not automatically created and enforced; they result from a moral enterprise undertaken by individuals engaged in defense of their status position and the enforcement of their ethical standards . The temperance movement, for instance,grow table was the response of the old middle class to a changing status system and a perceived loss of moral authority . The government acted as a prestige-granting agency glorifying the values of one group and demeaning those of another. Similar to other culture wars, cannabis regulation in the 20th century reflects a general clash over cultural values between the progressive and conservative camps . In this project, I analyze cannabis legalization through the lens of symbolic politics, cultural dominance, and moral authority. The gap studies allow us to move beyond national-level explanations and empirically investigate the local factors—social, cultural, political, or economic—that affect policy implementation. As Mona Lynch has argued, law as practiced is significantly shaped by local norms and culture . Although the adoption of federal and state regulations predicts homogeneous outcomes across the jurisdiction, there are significant variations at the county and city levels.

The notion that legal change happens through ground-up—rather than top-down—processes has gained popularity in socio-legal scholarship recently . The case of cannabis legalization offers another illustration of how social and political culture affects local decision making. This study focuses on the law-before and the law-in-between processes exploring the adoption and enforcement of morality policies at the city level. Specifically, it explains the gap between public input on cannabis legalization and actual political decisions. This project covers several gaps in the existing literature. First, most studies focus on the legalization of cannabis for medical use. The legalization of cannabis for recreational purposes has a very different rationale behind it, but since it is a relatively new phenomenon, it has not been fully explored yet. Second, cannabis legalization is a subject that attracts the attention of economists, policy analysts, psychologists, biologists, but rarely socio-legal scholars. Criminologists are exclusively interested in how the legalization of cannabis affects crime rates—increases, decreases, or does not change them . Sociologists focus on public attitudes to cannabis, deviance and stigma, identities, or the market formation . However, there is no comprehensive socio-legal analysis of how cannabis shifts from an illicit drug to a legal intoxicant, how the idea of legal cannabis is constructed and institutionalized, or, in short, how cultural, social, and legal change happens. Third, the traditional gap studies focus on the discrepancy between the law-in-the-books and the law-in-action. In other words, scholars are interested in how the initial idea of legislators is implemented in practice. However, there is no single “gap” but multiple types of gaps at different levels of the decision-making process . The present study investigates a gap between people’s expectations and the adopted policies . This perspective is especially important when we analyze morality policies, such as the legalization of abortions, same-sex marriages, gambling, prostitution, or recreational drugs. Fourth, a large body of literature focuses on the symbolic qualities of law: the symbolic role of drug legislation ; the symbolic meaning of “crime control” in political campaigns ; the symbolic character of capital punishment ; the symbolic goals of anti-abortion campaign , and so forth. However, all these studies center on prohibitionist legislation while the permissive morality policies, like cannabis legalization, were not on the radar of the symbolic politics studies. The present study covers this gap in the literature.There is no single definition of the “drug problem.” The term may simultaneously refer to the mere use of illegal drugs, drug use by teenagers, the abuse of drugs, drug-induced behavior that harms others, or domestic and international drug trafficking .The two main traditions in the literature on drugs are the constructionist and the objectivist. The latter examines drugs as objective phenomena that can be measured, counted, and classified . This approach is popular among medical scholars, medical practitioners, psychologists, policy advocates, and legislators. The objectivists typically speak about “drug problems” in the plural and employ it as an umbrella term for drug use, drug abuse, drug addiction, drug trafficking, drug selling, etc. The constructionist approach is common among sociologists, socio-legal scholars, political scientists, journalists, and policymakers who see the drug problem as a product of political campaigns and social concerns.

The slippage from civil noncompliance to criminality was mirrored in enforcement practices

Residence in states with medically legal cannabis was associated with higher odds of cannabis use during the preconception period but not associated with use at any other time. The difference in odds of cannabis use between medically and recreationally legal states could be explained by several factors. Provider responses to women may vary based on legalization status and could impact a pregnant woman’s choice to discontinue use early in pregnancy. A recent study in Pennsylvania found healthcare providers were much more likely to focus on legal implications of use rather than health implications when women disclosed use in pregnancy . In medically legal states, cannabis use is often only allowed for a limited set of medical conditions . Therefore, if providers focus on the legality of use in states with more restrictions, pregnant women might be more convinced to quit using cannabis; whereas, in recreational states no “illegal use” exists and perhaps there is less pressure from providers for women to quit cannabis use. Similarly, another study found if providers did not discuss cannabis use during a visit most pregnant women assumed this meant cannabis use during pregnancy posed no health risk . Duration of legalization may also play a role in the differences observed between recreational and medical cannabis states. Medical cannabis legalization first took place in 1996 and in the subsequent two decades resulted in the development of cannabis prevention programs specific to pregnancy, whereas, context of more recent recreational legalization are in their infancy. Further research is warranted to examine how prevention practices differ between states with recreational and medical cannabis legalization and the resultant outcomes.As seen in other studies, the association with inadequate prenatal care and cannabis use in this study may be a result of selection bias insofar as women who use substances may not access prenatal care due to their substance use behaviors or fear of being reported. Alternatively, women using substances during pregnancy tend to be younger and with lower education attainment and may not access prenatal care due to some other external barriers irrespective of substance use and therefore continue use because they do not receive education about cessation of substances during pregnancy .

Inadequate prenatal care is associated with cannabis use across all time periods in this study suggesting a need for public health or clinical interventions prior to pregnancy. One possibility would be to consider delivering cannabis prevention education outside prenatal care through public service announcements and warning labels on legally sold cannabis products consistent with prevention strategies used for prenatal alcohol use . Furthermore, since the study found that parity was a protective factor against cannabis growing system use in all three time periods, offering prevention education for women of reproductive age at any medical appointment may be an effective strategy to reach women before future pregnancies and promote abstinence from any substance use prior to conception. Based on the review of the literature, this study is possibly the first to include e-cigarettes in the assessment of tobacco co-use with cannabis. E-cigarettes present an emerging public health crisis and are considered especially harmful during pregnancy given the increase in nicotine exposure to the pregnant woman and fetus . The odds of tobacco use in association with cannabis use were slightly higher than in other studies looking at traditional tobacco use alone . Possibly, as e-cigarette use increases during pregnancy, there is a concomitant increase in use of cannabis especially given new technology making it easy to “vape” nicotine and cannabis together .Whittington and et al., provided evidence that e-cigarette use is on the rise in pregnancy as is concurrently used with combustible tobacco which could account for the magnitude of the association found in this study. Notably, the indicator for tobacco use in this study was one or more cigarettes and did not differentiate between intensity of smoking possibly leading to an overestimation of use in our sample resulting in the higher reported odds. Interpretation of the study findings is subject to several limitations including the cross-sectional design which precludes causal inference. In addition, the stigma associated with substance use in pregnancy may have resulted in under reporting of use and underestimation of prevalence rates, although the PRAMS computer-assisted interviews could decrease this bias to some degree . The PRAMS also relies on women to recall their substance use from the past year, during the postpartum period, potentially leading to over- or under-reporting of past year use of cannabis.

Limitations due to the use of secondary data include the inability to measure cannabis use throughout the pregnancy and only at designated times as specified in the survey questions. Finally, due to the difficulty of analyzing policies in motion given that recreational cannabis legalization is a new policy, a possibility exists that not enough time has passed to estimate the full impact of the changing policy on use rates . Also, cannabis use rates may be higher in recreational or medical states prior to the passage of cannabis laws and therefore the higher rates of use were not associated with the policy change. Future studies should take advantage of additional years of post recreational legalization data as they become available and analyze the direct impact on policies on prenatal use.With the passage of Proposition 64 , state voters elected to integrate cannabis into civil regulation. The California Department of Food and Agriculture oversees state-licensed cannabis cultivation and defined it as agriculture.Prior to the possibility of state licensure for cultivators, however, counties can decide on other designations and implement strict limitations. In effect, local governments have become gatekeepers to whether and how cultivation of personal, medical or recreational cannabis can occur and the repercussions of noncompliance. When cannabis is denied a consistent status as agriculture, despite being a legal agricultural commodity according to the state, localities can determine who counts as a farmer and who is considered compliant, non-compliant and even criminal. In Siskiyou County’s unincorporated areas, the Sheriff’s Office now arbitrates between the effectively criminal and agricultural. Paradoxically for this libertarian county, the furor around cannabis has seen calls for government intervention, and has led to officials passing highly stringent cannabis cultivation regulations that have been enforced largely by law enforcement, muddying the line between noncompliance and criminality. These strict regulations produced a situation where “not one person” has been able to come into compliance, according to a knowledgeable government official. Nonetheless, at the sheriff’s urging, Siskiyou declared a “state of emergency” due to “nearly universal non-compliance” , branding cannabis cultivation an “out-of-control problem.” Such a strong reaction against cannabis can be understood in terms of cannabis’s potential to reorganize Siskiyou’s agricultural and economic landscape.

According to some estimates, there are now approximately twice as many cannabis cultivators as non-cannabis farmers and ranchers in Siskiyou , a significant change from just a few years ago. Although cannabis has been cultivated in this mostly white county for decades, since 2015 it has become associated with an in-migration of Hmong-American cultivators. Made highly visible through enforcement practices, policy forums and media discourses, Hmong-Americans have become symbolically representative of the “problem.” This high visibility, however, obscures a deeper issue, what Doremus et al. see as a nostalgic, static conception of rural culture that requires defensive action as a bulwark against change. Such locally-defined conceptions need to be understood , especially in how they are defined and defended and what effects they have on parity among farmers growing different types of crops. Our goals in this study were to consider the consequences of an enforcement-first regulatory approach — a common regulatory strategy across California — and its differential effects across local populations. Using Siskiyou County as a case study, we paid attention to the public agencies, actors and discourses that guided the formation and enforcement of restrictive cannabis cultivation regulations as well as attempts to ameliorate perceptions of racialized enforcement. This study attends to novel post legalization apparatuses, their grounding in traditional definitions of culture and the ways these dynamics reactivate prohibition. We used qualitative ethnographic methods of research, including participant observation and interviews. In situations of criminalization, which we define not only as the leveling of criminal sanctions but being discursively labeled or responded to as criminal-like , quantitative data can be unreliable and opaque, which necessitates the use of qualitative ethnographic methods . In 2018–2019, we talked to a wide range of people — including cannabis growers from a diversity of ethnic backgrounds, government officials, business people, subdivision residents, farm service providers, medical cannabis advocates, realtors, lawyers, farmers and ranchers, and,hydroponics rack system with the assistance of a Hmong-American interpreter, members of the Hmong-American community. We also analyzed public records and county ordinances, Board of Supervisors meeting minutes and audio , Sheriff’s Office press releases and documents, related media articles and videos, and websites of owners’ associations in the subdivisions where cannabis law enforcement efforts have focused. Some cannabis cultivators regarded us suspiciously and were hesitant to speak openly, an unsurprising phenomenon when researching hidden, illegal and stigmatized activities, like “drug” commerce . This circumspection was most intense among Hmong-American growers on subdivisions, who had been particularly highlighted through enforcement efforts and local, regional and national media accounts linking their relatively recent presence in Siskiyou to cannabis growing. Human subjects in this research are protected under the Committee for Protection of Human Subjects, protocol number 2018-04-1136 , of the Office for Protection of Human Subjects at UC Berkeley.Siskiyou is a large rural county located in the mid-Klamath River basin in Northern California . Since the mid-19th century, inmigrants have historically engaged in agriculture, predominantly livestock grazing and hay production, and natural resource extraction, primarily timber and mining.

Public records demonstrate that although the value of the county’s agricultural output and natural resource extraction is declining, these cultural livelihoods still shape the area’s dominant rural values of self-reliance, hard work and property rights . For instance, one county document stated that Siskiyou’s cultural-economic stability depends on nonintervention from “outside groups and governments” and residents should be “subject only to the rule of nature and free markets” . Another document, a “Primer for living in Siskiyou County” from the county administrator, outlined “the Code of the West” for “newcomers,” asserting that locals are “rugged individuals” who live “outside city limits,” and that the “right to be rural” protects and prioritizes working agricultural land for “economic purpose[s]” . We heard a common refrain that localities will eventually succumb to the allure of a taxable, profitable cannabis industry. Indeed, interviewees in Siskiyou universally reported economic contributions from cannabis cultivation, especially apparent in rising property values and tax rolls and booming business at horticultural, farm supply, soil, generator, food and hardware stores . However, a belief in an inevitable free market economic rationality may underestimate the deep cultural logics that have historically superseded economic gains in regional resource conflicts . As one local store owner told us, “I’d give up this new profit in a heartbeat for the benefit of our society.” Many long-time farming and ranching families remain committed to agricultural livelihoods for cultural reasons , even as the economic viability of family farms is threatened by increasing farmland financialization , corporate consolidation and biophysical decline . Many interviewees felt that the recent rapid expansion of county cannabis cultivation and corresponding demographic changes were a visible marker of broader tensions of cultural continuity and endangerment. As the sheriff expressed, cannabis cultivation would “jeopardize our way of life … [and] the future of our children” . This sense of cultural jeopardy , echoed by numerous interviewees, materialized in a range of negative quality-of-life comments about cannabis cultivation: noisy generators, increased traffic, litter and blighted properties, and unsafe conditions for residents. Non-cannabis farmers also reported farm equipment and water theft, livestock killed by abandoned dogs, wildfire danger, illicit chemical use and poisoned wildlife. Some non-cannabis farmers expressed a sense of regulatory unfairness — that their farms were subject to onerous water and chemical use regulations while cannabis growers “don’t need to follow the government’s regulations.” Enabling cannabis cultivators to pursue state licensure would facilitate just such civil regulation, but some feared that regulating this crop as agriculture would threaten “the loss of prime agriculturally productive lands for traditional pursuits” .

Surface water and springs were the next–most common sources

The environmental impacts of stream diversions are likely to be greatest during the dry summer months,which coincide with the peak of the growing season for cannabis. Further, because cannabis cultivation operations often exhibit spatial clustering , some areas with higher densities of cultivation sites may contain multiple, small diversions that collectively exert significant effects on streams . An important assumption underlying these concerns, however, is that cultivators rely primarily on surface water diversions for irrigation during the growing season. Assessments of water use impacts on the environment may be inaccurate if cultivators in fact use water from other sources. For instance, withdrawals from wells may affect surface flows immediately, after a lag or not at all, depending on the well’s location and its degree of hydrologic connectivity with surface water sources . Documenting the degree to which cannabis cultivators extract their water from above ground and below ground sources is therefore a high priority. In 2015, the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board , one of nine regional boards of the State Water Resources Control Board, developed a Cannabis Waste Discharge Regulatory Program to address cannabis cultivation’s impacts on water, including stream flow depletion and water quality degradation. A key feature of the cannabis program is an annual reporting system that requires enrollees to report the water source they use and the amount of water they use each month of the year. Enrollees are further required to document their compliance status with several standard conditions of operation established by the cannabis program. These include a Water Storage and Use Condition, which requires cultivators to develop off-stream storage facilities to minimize surface water diversions during low flow periods, among other water conservation measures. Reports that demonstrate noncompliance with the Water Storage and Use Standard Condition indicate that enrollees have not yet implemented operational changes necessary for achieving regulatory compliance. In this research, we analyzed data gathered from annual reports covering 2017 to gain a greater understanding of how water is extracted from the environment for cannabis cultivation. The data used in this study was collected from cannabis sites enrolled for regulatory coverage under the cannabis program.

The program was adopted in August 2015, with the majority of enrollees entering the program in late 2016 and early 2017. The data presented in this article was collected from annual reports submitted in 2018 ,flood and drain tray which reflected site conditions during the 2017 cultivation year. The data therefore represents, for the majority of enrollees in the cannabis program, the first full season of cultivation regulated by the water quality control board. Because the data was self-reported, we screened reports for quality and restricted the dataset to reports prepared by professional consultants. Most such reports were prepared by approved third-party programs that partnered with the board to provide efficient administration of, and verification of conformity with, the cannabis program. Additional criteria for excluding reports included claims of applying water from storage without any corresponding input to storage, substantial water input from rain during dry summer months and failure to list a proper water source. Reports containing outliers of monthly water extraction amounts were also identified and excluded due to the likelihood of erroneous reporting or the difficulty of estimating water use at very large operations. Extreme outliers were defined as those values outside 1.5 times the bounds of the interquartile range . Farms were not required to use water meters, and those without meters often estimated usage based on how frequently they filled and emptied small, temporary storage tanks otherwise used for gravity feed systems or nutrient mixing. The final dataset included 901 reports. Parcels of land where cannabis was cultivated — including multiple contiguous parcels under single ownership — constituted a site, and this is the scale on which reporting was conducted. The spatial extent of the cannabis program included all of California’s North Coast region ; however, only a subset of the counties in this region allow cannabis cultivation and therefore reports were only received from the following counties: Humboldt , Trinity , Mendocino and Sonoma . Because Sonoma County contributed relatively little data, we combined Sonoma County’s enrollments with those from Mendocino County when making county-level comparisons. The data used for this analysis included the source and amount of water that cultivators added to storage each month as well as the source and amount of water applied to plants each month. We did not analyze absolute water extraction rates. Rather, we used the amount of water extracted each month — whether water was added to storage or applied to plants directly from the source — to analyze seasonal variation in each water source’s share of total water extraction. Water sources included: surface , spring , rain , well , delivery and municipal.

The two external sources — delivery and municipal — were consolidated into a single category.Because staff from the water quality control board were not able to corroborate the accuracy of reported data, enrollees may have classified water sources erroneously. A well placed in proximity to a stream, for example, might properly qualify as a diversion of surface water; so might rainwater catchment ponds or spring diversions that are hydrologically connected to a watercourse. We attempted to minimize these potential errors by restricting the dataset to reports prepared by professional consultants. As mentioned, enrollees were required to assess several standard conditions in their site reports, including water storage and use requirements. To encourage cultivators to join the regulated industry, and because many cultivation sites existed prior to adoption of the cannabis program, existing sites were not required to comply with standard conditions as a prerequisite for enrollment. Rather, cultivators unable to comply with the standards when they enrolled were required to indicate their lack of compliance and develop a plan for achieving compliance. Such sites were not held in violation of regulations, thus removing a potential motivation to falsely report site conditions. More than one-quarter of enrollees in the dataset reported noncompliance with the Water Storage and Use Standard Condition. To address question 1 — from which sources cannabis cultivators most frequently extract water across the North Coast region, and if extraction patterns differ across the region — we calculated the percentage of sites that reported use of each water source . We also calculated, for sites using each source, the percentage of sites that also used at least one other source category. Directly applying water to plants and also placing water in storage did not constitute use of multiple extraction sources if the water was drawn from the same source category. Additionally, sites that used multiple inputs from the same category — for example, multiple wells — were not considered users of multiple sources, as this classification was reserved for extraction from multiple categories of sources. We performed all elements of our analysis for the entire dataset and for each county individually. To address question 2 — how reliance on each water source differed from one month to another — we divided each site’s monthly water extraction total by its annual extraction total to calculate the relative percentage of water extracted in each month, and performed similar calculations for each source category. The median amount of water extracted and interquartile range were calculated for each month — both for overall extractions and for each source category individually. To address question 3 — whether sites reporting compliance with the Water Storage and Use Standard Condition relied on different water sources than those reporting noncompliance — we compared water source extraction patterns for sites of both types. Specifically, we calculated for each compliance status the percentage of sites that extracted water from each source category and made comparisons accordingly; and did likewise for monthly extraction patterns, following procedures similar to those described in regard to question 2.

The purpose of this comparison was strictly qualitative, and no inferential statistics were performed to determine statistically significant differences. Instead, this element of our analysis was performed for exploratory purposes, with the intention of identifying broad trends that warrant future attention.The most commonly reported water source was wells . Over half the sites reported at least some reliance on wells for their irrigation water.Rainwater catchment and off-site water were the least commonly used water sources . Sites using wells and off-site sources were the least likely to use additional sources . In contrast, sites using rain catchment systems most frequently reported using an additional source category,hydroponic tables canada followed by sites reporting use of spring diversions and surface diversions . To determine if the observed high frequency of well use was due to bias associated with examining only reports prepared by consultants, we reincorporated sites without consultants and reran the analysis on this dataset . Reported well use was slightly more common among sites not using consultants than among sites using consultants . Counties displayed notable variation in the frequency with which cannabis cultivators used particular water sources . Compared to all sites in the dataset, sites in Humboldt County relied more on surface water and spring diversions , with fewer relying on wells . The pattern was reversed in Trinity County, with a high percentage of sites there reporting well use and relatively few using surface and spring diversions. A large number of sites in Trinity County were located in a single watershed known for a high concentration of similar cultivation practices, so we recalculated the percentages with these sites excluded. The resulting totals for Trinity County were closer to the overall results: wells , surface , spring , rain and off-site . Mendocino and Sonoma counties reported a similar pattern of extraction sources per site: wells , surface , spring , rain and off-site . Patterns of using multiple sources varied among counties. Sites in Humboldt County using well water extraction much more commonly used additional sources of water than did similar sites in Trinity and Mendocino/Sonoma counties. Use of additional sources was also more common among Humboldt County sites extracting surface water and spring water than among sites using surface and spring water in Trinity County and Mendocino/Sonoma counties . Wells were a prominent water source for cannabis cultivators during the summer months . Extraction from wells generally peaked in August and declined in off-season months. The pattern was reversed for rainwater use, with most extraction occurring in off-season months. Spring water use was generally even across the year, with slightly higher use during the growing season. Surface diversions occurred throughout the year, but declined late in the growing season, likely reflecting declining availability of surface water. The pattern exhibited in off-site water use closely matched that of well water; the former, however, was a less substantial source of water in general. There appeared to be differences in the extraction sources reported by compliant and non-compliant sites .

Although nearly one-third of non-compliant sites used well extraction, this source was more than twice as frequently reported among compliant sites . In contrast, non-compliant sites reported surface diversion and spring diversion more commonly than did compliant sites . Rain and off-site sources were the least commonly used for both compliant sites and non-compliant sites . Use of additional alternative sources was lower for compliant sites with wells than for non-compliant sites with wells . The seasonal extraction patterns of compliant and non-compliant sites were generally similar , following the overall pattern discussed above.We found that well water is the most commonly reported source of extracted water for cannabis cultivation in the North Coast region of California. Furthermore, among the source categories, wells are least frequently supplemented with alternative sources. Spring and surface water diversions together are also important water sources, with seasonal patterns of use that are distinct from well water extraction. Reported timing of well water extraction closely tracks the water demand patterns of plants, indicating that cultivators are applying well water directly to plants, rather than storing it. In contrast, the timing of extractions of spring water and surface water remains relatively consistent throughout the year, suggesting that water from these sources may be diverted to storage in the winter, reducing the need for extraction in the summer months. These seasonal extraction patterns and the relative predominance of each source may inform assessments of cannabis cultivation’s impacts on water availability.

Ingestion and inhalation were the most common routes of exposure

Surveys conducted in April 2020 found that Canadian adolescents aged 14 to 18 years increased their alcohol and cannabis use, and had increased feelings of depression and fear, which are associated with solitary substance use. To our knowledge, no study has examined changes in cannabis exposures in California since recreational legalization in November 2016, the institution of a recreational retail sales market in January 2018, or after the March 2020 statewide shelter-in-place orders intended to reduce the risk of exposure to COVID-19. Past research assessing unintended consequences of cannabis legalizations notes that existing studies are not generalizable to all populations and states; this is particularly relevant for California, which by itself constitutes the world’s largest cannabis market. Previous studies of cannabis exposures were completed before the COVID-19 pandemic and failed to capture exposure rates under pandemic conditions. Since Colorado first legalized recreational cannabis use in 2012, other states have followed and also implemented legalization of recreational cannabis. In this study we reviewed cannabis exposures in California, before and after legalization of recreational cannabis use, after the establishment of recreational retail sales, and during the first nine months of the COVID-19 global pandemic. We also classified product exposures by type to assess which might be associated with exposures among children, in light of popular media reports that have identified group overdoses among children involving cannabis gummies.CPCS serves California’s population of 40 million people, making it the largest poison control provider in the United States. We obtained reports of cannabis exposures from CPCS from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2020. Inclusion criteria were human exposures to cannabis and cannabis containing products reported within California. Cases were identified by searching the CPCS database for American Association of Poison Control Centers codes relating to cannabis. We excluded calls from outside California.Exposures were defined as an “actual or suspected contact with any substance which has been ingested, inhaled, absorbed, applied to, or injected into the body, regardless of toxicity or clinical manifestation.”Case records were individually reviewed by one of four raters to verify that exposures were actually related to cannabis, to separate human from animal exposure calls, to validate the call involved an exposure rather than a request for information, to check whether exposures involved a single substance or multiple substances, and to detail the nature of the product involved in each exposure given that poison control centers until recently did not classify cannabis exposures beyond “marijuana” and route of exposure .

Records with unclear classifications were reviewed with three other authors . CPCS records were collected and managed using RED Cap, a secure, web-based software platform designed to collect and manage study data.CPCS coded 12,108 exposures from January 2010 to December 2020 as cannabis; 1,351 of these exposures did not meet inclusion criteria, as they were miscoded,trim trays involved animals, were calls from outside California, or were requests for information. Of the remaining 10,757 exposures, 20 percent involved someone under the age of six, 6 percent someone between the ages of six and twelve, 24 percent someone between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, and 50 percent an adult . Forty-four percent of exposures were female, and 56 percent were male. Additionally, 79 percent of the exposures involved ingestion, 18 percent involved inhalation, and 3 percent other routes including topical, rectal, parenteral, subcutaneous, or ophthalmic, as shown in Table 1. Although the total population of California grew by an estimated 6.1% from 2010 to 2020, with an increase of 22.5% in those under the age of 18 and a 6% increase in those under 5 years of age; calls to CPCS related to cannabis more than tripled over the same period. The number of cannabis exposure calls in proportion of all incoming calls is described in Table 2. Among children under the age of six years, 2,130 calls were assigned a code indicating the reason for exposure, of these, 2,107 were coded as unintentional exposures, zero as intentional, and the remaining 23 were coded as other . Among children aged six to 12 years, 625 calls were assigned a reason code, and of these 504 were coded as unintentional, 84 as intentional, and the remaining 38 as other. Our interrupted time series analysis first considered overall changes in exposures after legalization of use, initiation of retail sales, and after the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order. As noted in methods, ITSA coefficients represent estimated monthly increases or decreases in reported exposures after an intervention. Following recreational legalization in 2016, estimated monthly cannabis exposures increased significantly . Following the implementation of retail sales in 2018, cannabis exposures increased significantly as well . However, no significant change in cannabis exposures was observed following the shelter-in-place order. A graph of exposures over time is provided in Figure 1; detailed estimates are provided in Table 3. We continued by comparing changes in exposures for two age groups: those under thirteen years old and those thirteen years and older. Age is provided in CPCS records and this categorization follows AAPCC convention; exposures without information on age were excluded. Cannabis exposures in those under thirteen increased significantly both after recreational legalization and after the opening of the retail sales market , but not following the shelter-in-place order .

For those thirteen and older, there was no significant change over time. As a result, although exposures in children under thirteen were the minority in January 2010, by December 2020 they represented nearly half of all exposures, as shown in Figure 2. To assess possible changes in exposures by product type, we organized ingestion exposures by product type and grouped these into categories. We identified significant increases over in the number of exposures for gummies , candies , chocolate , dabs , edibles in the form of drinks , hemp, joints , blunts , cannabis oils , vapes , other edible products , and all other products between 2010 and 2020. However, there was no change in the trend of exposures for cookies, brownies, other edible baked goods, hash, plant products, or synthetic products. We aggregated these categories into nine broad product types: chocolate and candy, other edibles and drinks, gummies, brownies, cookies, and other baked goods, new technology , traditional products , oils, hemp products, and synthetics, then graphed exposures . Chocolate and candy, other edibles and drinks, and gummies increased from levels near zero prior to recreational legalization to thousands of exposures per year by 2020. For example, there were only 16 total reported gummies exposures in the six years between 2010 and 2015; these increased to 409 exposures in 2020 alone.We analyzed trends in cannabis exposures reported to the CPCS before and after the legalization of recreational cannabis in November 2016, the establishment of recreational retail sales in January 2018, and the institution of a statewide shelter-in-place order due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and found that as expected, exposures increased following recreational legalization and the establishment of retail sales, consistent with previous studies. However despite expectations we did not find a significant change in cannabis consumption following the COVID-19 shelter-inplace order. This finding may reflect that only nine months of exposure cases following March 2020 were available at the time of this study. We also found that cannabis exposures in children under thirteen increased significantly following recreational legalization and initiation of retail sales but did not increase for teens and adults. As a result, although cannabis exposures were uncommon among young children in 2010, by 2020 they constituted nearly half of all exposures.Cannabis edibles such as gummies, candy, and other dessert-like products have been involved with increased use in younger users. Our detailed records review found that a common exposure after 2018 involved a child or group of children finding cannabis edibles that they perceived to be normal candy and consuming an entire package.

Particularly among the youngest children the primary reason for exposure was accidental ingestion, in which children or their caregivers mistakenly identified cannabis gummies as ordinary candy. Cases in which cannabis gummies and other edibles are mistaken for non-cannabis products may result from issues with packaging. Although California regulates the potency of cannabis edibles and requires opaque, resealable packaging, each edible can contain up to 10 mg of THC and each package up to 100 mg of THC; as a result, even a single gummy represents a high dosage for a naïve user,trimming trays particularly a child. By comparison, edible regulations in Canada, for example, place a limit of 10 mg of THC per package, even if it the package contains multiple edibles, as well as requiring plain packaging and larger warning labels. As a result, a child who accidently consumed an entire bag of cannabis gummies in Canada would likely be exposed to the same level of THC as one who consumed a single gummy in California. We note that Canadian regulations on packaging were instituted in 2020, so there is limited data to assess potential changes in pediatric exposures after this policy change. However, given reported confusion among both children and caregivers about whether candy products contain cannabis, instituting similar regulations such as plain packaging and lower doses per edible, or expanding on them by requiring individual packaging, offer potential for reducing the high levels of exposures among children. Our study has limitations. The data were drawn from a single state, limiting potential generalizability; however, California’s status as the most populous with the largest cannabis market allows us to assess trends that would not be possible in smaller areas. Moreover, the more granular data provided by CPCS made it possible to classify product types; these data are not available at the national level. Using poison control data only captures data volunteered by patients and providers and these may not capture general patterns of use. In addition, although CPCS seeks to create a case report linked to individuals rather than to group exposures, in some cases, multiple exposures were reported in a single record . As a result, these findings are likely to be underestimates of actual exposures.

Our classification of product types was limited by reporters, who may use a range of terms to describe cannabis products ; as a result, we were unable to categorize all exposures and may have failed to identify additional products associated with exposures. Finally, given that the study was observational in nature, we could only identify associations between cannabis exposures and policy interventions rather than establishing causality. Despite these limitations, the absence of other contemporaneous factors expected to increase exposures, as well as the consistency of these findings with prior research, suggest that recreational legalization and sales were associated with significant increases in exposures, particularly among children.Cannabis is the most commonly used illicit psychoactive substance in developed nations . While a majority of cannabis users do not report problems, 10–30% of those who ever use cannabis meet criteria for a lifetime history of cannabis abuse or dependence as defined by the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual . Recently, changes to the diagnostic criteria for substance use disorder have been made in DSM-5 , including several for the diagnosis of cannabis use disorders . Across the broad range of substance use disorders,the distinction between abuse and dependence has been replaced by a unidimensional symptom count, with endorsement of 2 or more symptoms resulting in a DSM-5 diagnosis of substance use disorder ; the DSM-IV criterion of legal problems has been eliminated from the diagnostic repertoire; and a new criterion for the DSM-5, craving has been added. More specifically for cannabis, withdrawal is now a criterion. A wealth of psychometric evaluations in epidemiological and clinical samples support these recommendations; however, the impact of these revisions on the prevalence of cannabis use disorders under the new DSM-5 classification remains largely unexplored. A recent study of Australian adults found a modest reduction in the rate of cannabis use disorder with the transition from DSM-IV to DSM-5 , while another study of individuals with substance use disorders note damodest increase of 4% . Twin studies indicate that 50–60% of the variation in cannabis use disorders can be attributed to heritable influences.Despite this robust heritability estimate, association studies for cannabis use disorders have largely failed to identify genetic variants of significant and replicable effect.

Living in the university dormitories or living with parents is strongly negatively correlated with marijuana use

Compared to the national data, the WSU sample pre-RML appears to be more white, more likely to be in a fraternity or sorority, more likely to live off campus or in a fraternity/sorority house, and less likely to live with parents. We will see based on the regressions that although these variables are associated with higher likelihood of marijuana use, they are also associated with a lower likelihood of increasing use after RML. To the extent that differences in composition between the WSU and national samples affect differences in the trend of marijuana use, we expect that such differences are likely to bias against an observed relative increase in use at WSU. We also compare pre-RML marijuana use between the WSU sample and the two national samples. Fig. 2 shows the percentage of respondents each year who have used marijuana in the past 30 days for all three samples. The NCHA national data is only through 2011.For the national NCHA data after 2011 and for the WSU data after 2012, we forecast each series based on the data through 2012. Forecasts are generated using best-fit double exponential smoothing to account both for levels and for changing trends.Both the national NCHA and NSDUH data show an increase over the period before 2012 and are consistently within 1 and 4 percentage points of each other. The WSU series starts out slightly lower than both national series but with a nearly parallel trend and remains in the range of both national series through 2012. Readers will note the relatively large increase in the WSU series between 2008 and 2010, which corresponds to changes in Washington’s MML laws. Though the magnitude is smaller, we observe an increase at this same time in both the national samples. It may be the case that national changes affected students both in and out of Washington. Any long-term effects of such national changes are reflected in the NSDUH data. The forecasts for both the WSU and the national NCHA samples are almost parallel to the actual trend in the NSDUH and the 95-percent confidence interval for each forecast contains the other forecast as well as the NSDUH actual values. It appears that the increase in marijuana use at WSU after 2008 may have been a one-time jump,grow tent indoor a proposition more fully examined in the conclusion of the paper.

It is also relevant to note that both national samples are “contaminated” with observations from WSU and from others in Washington and Colorado.9 If RML increases marijuana use for college students, as we expect, then including Washington and Colorado students in the national samples biases against finding an effect in the difference-in differences analysis.Estimates for the logit regressions on the probability of having used marijuana in the past 30 days are reported in Table 3. The far-left column shows the basic regression, controlling only for a linear trend. Column 2 shows the results of the regression with demographic controls added. Columns 3 and 4 show the results with more co-variates added, some potentially endogenous. Controlling for a predicted increase of about 1.2 percentage points each year, we find that marijuana use among WSU students increased between 2.0 and 3.5 percentage points after RML and remained higher through 2015. Each estimate across specifications is statistically different from zero with at least 95-percent confidence. We find no evidence that legal sales had an additional impact on the proportion of marijuana users. The additional change after legal sales is consistently positive but not statistically different from zero at conventional levels; t-scores for these differences range from 0.43 to 0.88 . This regression model also provides estimates of relative marijuana use among WSU students. Male students are between 2 and 7 percentage points more likely to have used marijuana than females. Black and white students are the most likely to use marijuana compared to other races with Asian students being the least likely. In results not shown , we also see a decreasing likelihood of marijuana use with age of about 3 percentage points per year after age 20. After controlling for GPA, Greek membership, residence, and international status, 1st-year undergraduates are the most likely to use marijuana by between 3 and 5 percentage points over students of other years. International students are between 4 and 7 percentage points less likely to use marijuana than domestic students. Students with a 4.0 GPA are between 3 and 10 percentage points less likely to use than other students. Students in fraternities or sororities are between 4 and 12 percentage points more likely than other students.

Finally, the likelihood of marijuana use is positively correlated with the use of tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs.different subgroups and present the results in To better understand the impact of RML, we repeat the analysis for Table 4. Results of these regressions are generally consistent across all four specifications for each group. For brevity, we report only the results that include controls for age, sex, race, and year in school . The proportion of each group that reported having used marijuana before 2014 is included at the bottom of each column. Though the estimates differ greatly in magnitude, and only a few of the estimates are statistically significant at conventional levels, all groups are associated with a positive increase above the trend in marijuana use after RML. The results suggest marijuana use by underage students increased at least as much as that by legal-age students after RML. The estimates for the increase in underage students’ likelihood of using marijuana are large and statistically significant with a p-value < .01, while the estimates for legal-age students are smaller and not statistically different from zero. Using a chi-squared test after estimation, the differences between the two groups’ estimates for 2014 and 2015 have p-values of 0.206 and 0.955, respectively. We also note that the difference between the estimates for 2015 and 2014 for legal-age students is marginally statistically significant with a p-value=0.081, indicating that legal-age students waited to use marijuana until after they could obtain it from authorized distributors. The subgroup analysis provides insight into which groups are driving the changes overall. There is a relatively large increase in likelihood of marijuana use for Black and Hispanic Students, although only Hispanic students showed changes that are statistically significant with a p-value < 0.05. The likelihood of marijuana use among Black and Hispanic students increased in 2014 by 15.8 and 14 percentage points, respectively. This change represents an 88-percent increase in recent users for Black students and a 93-percent increase for Hispanic students. This is 8–9 times the estimated effect for Asian and white students. This relatively large increase is made more significant by the fact that it occurs over a previously non-increasing trend for both groups. In fact, though not statistically different from zero, Black and Hispanic students are the only groups with estimated negative trends over this time.

In other words, both groups started out with a proportion of marijuana users that remained essentially constant since 2005 until RML, after which Black and Hispanic students were among the most likely students to have used marijuana. Females are the group with the next highest increase after RML that is statistically significant with a p-value < 0.05.Results from the logit regressions on the likelihood of using tobacco, alcohol, or illegal drugs are reported in Table 5. Again for brevity, we report only the results for the regressions that include controls only for age, sex, race, and year in school. For convenience, we report again the estimates for marijuana use from column 2 of Table 3. On average, the yearly trends in the likelihood of use for tobacco, alcohol, and illegal drugs are in the opposite direction and significantly smaller in magnitude than the yearly increase of 1.2 percentage points in marijuana use. No significant changes occur in 2014. In 2015, the only significant changes include a 2.4-percentage-point decrease in the likelihood of using tobacco and a 2.2-percentage-point increase in the likelihood of using other illegal drugs. These results imply a possible substitute/complement effect or a spillover effect on norms against other illegal drugs, though the changes did not occur until a full year after the major changes in marijuana use. Additionally, relative to the changes for marijuana, the changes for tobacco and illegal drugs are not as robust to alternative specifications and estimation methods . We see no evidence that RML or legal sales affected the use of alcohol. Overall, grow tent hydroponic our results do not support any systematic changes in other substances that occur parallel with changes in marijuana use. This supports a conjecture that RML was the cause of the changes we find for marijuana.Results of the OLS regressions with respect to regularity of marijuana use are presented in Table 6. In 2014, we find an increase of about 0.5 days in the past 30 days above a linear trend of between 0.13 and 0.16 days per year.This increase is statistically significant across specifications with at least 95-percent confidence. The estimates for after legal sales are smaller than for after RML and are not statistically significant at conventional levels. Though the magnitude of the estimates in 2015 are not significantly lower than in 2014, the lack of a significant increase in 2015 could indicate that the effect of RML on frequency is short-lived and the equilibrium trends in frequency are unaffected by legalization. Alternatively, this may indicate that a proportion of students who began using before legal sales of marijuana are more likely to use it more frequently than those who waited.

The calculation of the difference-in-differences estimations are reported in Table 7. Using the national NCHA forecast as a counterfactual, the estimated effect of RML is an increase of 8.6 percentage points. Using the NSDUH, the estimated effect is 9.6 percentage points. These estimates are both statistically significant with over 99-percent confidence and are 3–5 times larger than the estimated increase over a linear trend in the regressions. Although limited by not accounting for covariate changes over time, the difference-in-differences estimations suggest that the increase over a linear trend in the regressions may be a conservative estimate of the effect of RML on the likelihood of using marijuana.Substance use among young adults is a major public health concern and is associated with academic problems. The bulk of research in this area has focused on undergraduate students, as alcohol and marijuana use among this population are fairly common . In addition to academic difficulties, alcohol and marijuana use are associated with other negative consequences during the college years, including risky sexual behaviors, social and interpersonal problems, injury, and impaired driving . Longitudinal research has shown that alcohol and marijuana use during college might have long-term consequences after college graduation. Heavy drinking and marijuana use during college are associated with post-college substance abuse and dependence, unemployment, less prestigious employment, and lower income . Marijuana use during college and the immediate post-college years, particularly heavy use, is associated with several negative health outcomes at ages 24 and 27, including emotional problems, injury, illness, decreased quality of life, and less service utilization for physical and mental health problems . Degree non-completion as a consequence of substance use has been found in longitudinal studies of high school and college students. Adolescents who use alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana during ninth grade are less likely to complete high school than non-drug users . One study integrated data from three longitudinal studies and found that daily marijuana use during adolescence was significantly associated with decreased odds of both high school and college completion . In a study of college students, frequent marijuana use during the course of college was associated with increased likelihood of dropping out . Despite evidence of associations between alcohol and marijuana use and high school and undergraduate degree non-completion, the possible impact on graduate degree completion has not been explored. An increasing number of college graduates are enrolling in graduate school, with almost 40% of college graduates pursing a graduate degree within four years of graduation . However, only 50% to about 75% of those who enter graduate school ultimately complete their degree, with differences by degree type and academic discipline .

The density of the protein bands was quantified using ImageQuant TL software

Gilman et al. used a similar multi-modal approach and found that gray matter density , shape , and volume of the left nucleus accumbens was significantly different for recreational users and controls. More specifically, in users, the left and right accumbens showed a negative relationship between shape and marijuana use frequency, such that the accumbens showed more inward deflections with more frequent recent use, as well as greater volume. However, in an attempt to replicate these findings, Weiland et al. found that the results of Gilman et al. held only when participants were not matched in terms of alcohol use. When matched for alcohol use, marijuana users and controls showed no significant effects in terms of cortical or sub-cortical morphometry. Moreover, when Weiland et al. examined the effect sizes observed in 11 prior studies, they found a net zero effect for the effects of marijuana on brain morphometry . Notably the results of the current study take into consideration the potentially confounding factors of alcohol and tobacco use as well as gender, age, and years of education. A recent paper using some of the same sample from the HCP examined how genetic vs. environmental factors might contribute to brain volume as a function of marijuana use. They found that marijuana use was associated with smaller volume of the left amygdala and right ventral striatum. However, their analyses suggested that the results for the amygdala are likely driven by shared genetic factors as compared to environmental factors as both marijuana user twins and their non-user twin showed reduced volume compared to concordant non-user twins. While the current study did not directly examine the role of genetics and shared environment in mediating the effects of marijuana on the brain, our analyses accounted for family structure. When accounting for family structure, we found no effects of marijuana on the amygdala, and a trend for a more inward deflection of the right accumbens, but no accompanying difference in volume. However, the analysis of Pagliaccio et al. trim bin tray was limited in sample size for certain sibships, in particular, monozygotic twins discordant for marijuana use.

With the upcoming complete HCP dataset consisting of 1200 participants, it will be important to update the analyses of Pagliaccio and colleagues, as well as adding sub-cortical shape as a measure, to see if a causal relationship arises with a larger sample .As the current study is not longitudinal but rather cross-sectional, it cannot speak to whether the use of marijuana causes changes in neural structures. Such an analysis will require longitudinal data as is to-be collected by the new national ABCD study funded by NIH. Nonetheless, the current study can provide hints as to potential effects of marijuana use due to its large sample size and because family structure was controlled for in the analyses. In addition, despite the 100-fold increase in the number of marijuana users from most studies and the high-quality of imaging data, the data on marijuana use history from the HCP is relatively sparse. Whereas alcohol and tobacco were assessed in terms of recent and past use, questions of marijuana use were restricted to self-report measures of the age of first use and the number of times used in the lifetime. As such, it was not possible to accurately examine the effects of duration of use or more specifically, the effects of time since last use. As noted in the Materials and methods Section, the age of first use and number of times used data was coarsely coded using relatively arbitrary ranges. In particular, the number of times used score presented widely different categories for participants to select, ranging from 1–5 times used to “more than 1000.” Moreover, no data was available regarding the recency of this use. Additionally, while tobacco and alcohol were controlled for using scores selected to best represent the impact of chronic, co-morbid substance use, it is possible that alternative metrics would change the representation of variance due to these substances. As it stands, the alcohol and tobacco use scores used in this presented significant co-variance with age of first use and times used, highlighting both the need to control for these factors and the importance of a data-set large enough to separate the effects of each variable.

While participants were excluded from the HCP for major psychiatric or neurological illness participants underwent a psychiatric screening as part of the SSAGA, and psychiatric symptoms were assessed with the NIH Toolbox and the Achenbach Adult Self-Report questionnaire . Examining the interactions of psychiatric symptoms and marijuana use was beyond the scope of the current study, but future studies should examine these effects. Previous studies have shown that adolescent marijuana use is co-morbid with a number of psychopathologies including childhood trauma , depression , attention deficit hyperactivity disorder , and psychosis . Furthermore, the HCP contains information about parental psychopathology. While much of the psychiatric information available in the HCP has less information than a targeted study of psychopathology, there is enough information for future studies to assess multivariate effects of marijuana use variables and co-morbid psychopathology and other substance use. Lastly, while the advanced imaging analyses used in this study provide powerful ways to non-invasively understand the anatomical changes occurring with a brain, they are limited in that they cannot speak to the mechanisms whereby marijuana use might influence brain structure. specifically, they cannot elucidate the microscopic changes responsible for the more macroscopic GM and WM impacts . For example, while shape changes of the accumbens and hippocampus might reflect inflammation, marijuana has been found to have anti-inflammatory properties . Macroscopic morphological changes could be caused by neuronal loss or changes in cytoarchitecture such as neuronal size, dendritic spine density, dendritic length, or synaptic protein levels . As such, morphometry studies can strongly inform where such changes are occurring, but cannot pinpoint the microscopic causes of these structural changes. It is important to note that the two major components of marijuana, Δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol and cannabidiol , have opposite effects behaviorally, symptomatically, and in terms of functional activation of all of the regions-of-interest for the current study . With legalization of marijuana comes more accurate assays of THC and CBD concentrations, and thus, future research can and should focus on examining whether THC and CBD have dissociable effects on brain morphometry .Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder worldwide, affecting 1e2% of the population over the age of 65.

The condition is characterised by the progressive loss of dopaminergic neurons from the substantia nigra pars compacta.There are a number of studies that link the development of PD with the exposure of certain pesticides such as rotenone.As a result, rotenone is commonly used to create in vivo and in vitro models to study the disease.H2O2 is a compound commonly used to model oxidative stress in vitro and in vivo. As mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress are thought to contribute to cell death in PD, we aimed to assess the effects of both rotenone and H2O2 on SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells. The SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cell line has been previously used to create a cellular model of PD.The cells share many biochemical and functional characteristics with mature dopaminergic neurons and have the ability to differentiate into adopaminergic phenotype. As tyrosine hydroxylase and dopamine seem to be central to the pathogenesis of PD and dopaminergic neurons are specifically targeted in the condition, we opted to utilise a cell line that had been transfected with human TH isoform 1.There were two main aims to be addressed in this study, firstly we aimed to compare the effects of rotenone and H2O2 treatment on cell viability and TH expression and once we had established these changes we would then assess the ability of a number of potentially neuroprotective compounds to protect against this toxicity. Cinnamon is a spice commonly used in food throughout the world. The spice has been demonstrated to have anti-diabetic and anti-inflammatory effects as well as some neuroprotective properties.For instance a previous study demonstrated that treatment with cinnamon prevented the development of PD like symptoms and pathology in 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetra hydropyridine treated mice, however the effect of cinnamon on rotenone is yet to be investigated. Hemp seed and its oil have been used as both a food and medicine in China for at least 3000 years and hemp seed extracts have been found to demonstrate antioxidant and antiaging effects as well as improve cognitive impairment induced by chemicals in mice.In addition to all of this, epidemiological studies suggest societies that commonly use curcumin, cinnamon and hemp seed appear to demonstrate a lower incidence of PD and neurodegenerative disorders.We included the use of curcumin within our study as a positive control as this substance has been shown previously to provide protection against rotenone and H2O2 toxicity.Polygonum cuspidatum is widely distributed in the world and has been shown to possess antiviral, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory,pollen trim tray neuroprotective, and cardioprotective properties,however these properties are yet to be investigated using a cellular model of PD.

In this study we assessed the effect of rotenone and H2O2 on SHSY5Y cell survival and TH protein expression. We also evaluated the protective effects of curcumin, cinnamaldehyde, and constituents isolated from hemp seed and polygonum cuspidatum .Methylthiazolyldiphenyl-tetrazolium bromide powder was used as a means to assess cell viability as previously described.Briefly, at the conclusion of the 24 h treatment duration, MTT was added to culture medium at a final concentration of 0.5 mg/ml and the plate was mixed gently for 1 min before 2 h incubation in a 37 C, 5% CO2 incubator. After the incubation, media was removed and 100 mL of DMSO was added to each well for 10e15 min while shaking. The intensity of the purple colour produced in each well was measured colourimetrically using a plate reader at 595 nm. The values of absorbance are expressed as a proportion of the controls.The Trypan Blue assay was used as another means of visually assessing cell viability to support the MTT assay findings. Cells were seeded into 12 well plates and treated as described above. When the treatment protocol had ended the media was removed from the wells and 30 mL of Trypan Blue was added and left for 30 s. After 30 s an image of the plate was taken using ‘Cell Pad’. While not quantitative this protocol provided a means of visually assessing the viability of cell cultures.Whole cell lysates were used for western blotting experiments to analyse total TH and Poly-ADP ribose-polymerase protein levels. Cells were seeded in a 24 well plate and treated as described above. At the end of the treatment protocol media was removed and 110 mL of 2% SDS stop buffer with inhibitors , 2% SDS, 2 mM EDTA, 1 mM Na orthovanadate, 1 mM Na fluoride, 10 mM Na pyrophosphate was added. The lysed cells were collected and heated for 10 min at 100 C. Samples were then frozen and stored at -20 C for later analysis. Samples were prepared for electrophoresis by dilution with sample buffer . Samples were run on an 8 or 10% SDS-polyacylamide gel and transferred to nitrocellulose membrane . To minimise non-specific binding membranes were blocked with 5% skim milk in Tris-buffered saline containing 0.075% tween 20 for 1.5 h at room temperature. Membranes were then incubated with anti-PARP-1 or anti-total TH antibodies for 1 h at room temperature. Blots were washed and exposed to appropriate secondary antibody for 1 h at room temperature. Blots were then exposed to enhanced chemiluminescence detection reagent for 1 h and developed using a LAS 4000 imaging system . Later, membranes were washed and then immunoblotted with b-actin antibody as a marker of the total protein loaded per lane.Quantitation of tTH and PARP-1 were normalised relative to b-actin levels.This study demonstrates that rotenone and H2O2 have markedly different effects on SH-SY5Y cells. H2O2 treatment does not appear to have any significant effect on TH protein expression and the cell death induced by H2O2 can be prevented by a number of compounds tested. In contrast, rotenone treatment was associated with an increase in TH protein levels and its toxicity could not be prevented with any of the compounds.

The application of MRS to the study of chronic marijuana users is limited in the current literature

In the present study natural fiber composites,containing 10%,20% and 30% hemp fibers as reinforcement and mixture of virgin and recycled high density polyethylene as matrix,have been fabricated.The tensile and flexural properties of the composites are evaluated and compared with samples made of 100% virgin HDPE and 50-50 mixture of virgin and recycled HDPE.In the last years,considering the increasing environmental awareness and the introduction of new rules and regulations to reduce the environmental impact and reach sustainability,the new products must minimize the environmental impact,so the interest and the subsequent use of eco-friendly materials is grooving more and more in different application fields.This aspect is particularly relevant in the composite manufacturing field,where both synthetic fibers and petroleum polymers are still widely used.In this contest,the use of natural fibers as reinforcement is reaching an increasing attention,indeed a lot of researches have aimed on the study of a range of recyclable materials based on natural fibers such as flax,ramie,sisal,hemp and many more in order to study their possible use as interesting substitute over the conventional ones.Among various kinds of natural fibres,the hemp one is one of the most promising because of its interesting properties such as the low density,low cost and high specific mechanical properties.In addition,the hemp plant is characterized by the ability of extracting heavy metals from the soil makes and the environmental conditions required from its cultivation allow the easy growth of this plant around the world.Regarding the matrix used for the natural fibre composites manufacturing,commercial greenhouse supplies its selection is limited by the temperature at which natural fibres degrade.Both thermoset and thermoplastic polymers are coupled with natural fibres and each one highlights its peculiarity characteristics: thermoplastics are capable of being repeatedly softened by the application of heat and hardened by cooling and have the potential to be the most easily recycled,on the other hand a better emphasis of the fibres mechanical properties are generally achieved by using thermosets as matrix.

In fact,thermoset polymers are particularly attractive as matrix materials for natural fibre reinforced composite production as they generally have reactive functional groups that make them compatible with hydrophilic fibre surfaces.Among these,the epoxy is one of the most interesting polymer resins that used as matrix for the natural fibre composites shows very high mechanical properties of the final product.Several applications as interior and insulation components of hemp/epoxy composites was largely found in literature in particular in the automotive and building sectors,whilst there are few applications as structural components and few works aimed on the study of manufacturing processes to produce hemp composites characterized by low density and high specific mechanical properties.Based on this overview,this work is focused on the manufacturing of lightweight hemp/epoxy composites through a new process easily implemented in industrial production by using hemp fabrics characterized by a large mesh size.To assess their mechanical performances,tensile and bending tests were performed and coupled with FE simulations.Therefore,due to the no optimum control in the fabric superimposition,even though the fibre weight content is the same for each sample typology,the difference in the thickness vales is directly connected with the difference in the density and in the fibre volume fraction values.Ideally,considering for the B type a good alignment able to obtain the same thickness of the A type sample and also considering that the B type samples contained half number of tows then the A type,the ideal values of the density and of the fabric volume fraction should be half than the ones of the A type.Figs.8 and 9 shows the tensile and bending stress-strain curves for the specimens under investigation.The composites with density of around 0.74 g/cm3 are characterized by a tensile strength of 40 MPa and a tensile modulus of 3000 MPa,whilst the composites with a density of around 0.47 g/cm3 showed a tensile strength of 24 MPa and a tensile modulus of 1650 MPa; the tensile properties of the B type are approximately half of the ones of the A type.Looking at Fig.9,it is possible to note that all curves show the same behavior up to the failure,but when the maximum stress value was reached and then the specimens started to fail,the behavior changes.

This is observed by comparing the stress-strain curves and the type of failure of the specimens show in Fig.10.The curves of the A type show a significant drop in the stress and then a brittle failure of the specimens was observed,whilst the curves of the B type show a slighter decrease in the stress coupled with a sliding failure.This is due to the higher presence of resin on the bottom surface of the A type specimens.The composites with a density of 0.77 g/cm3 showed a bending strength of 40 MPa and a bending modulus of 3100 MPa,instead of the samples with a density of around 0.47 g/cm3 that was characterized by a bending strength of 22 MPa and a bending modulus of 1200 MPa.It is also possible to observe that the flexural mechanical response variability is in any case quite limited.However,a slightly greater value was reached for the B type specimens due to above said misalignment problems that mainly occurs for this specimen typology.This is also corroborated from the results of the FE simulations of the three-point bending tests where the eventual misalignment error was considered.Illicit marijuana use in the United States has been a longstanding public health concern for both adolescents and adults.As many as 44% of college-aged individuals endorse having used marijuana at some point in their life,and 21% of college-aged individuals report marijuana use in the past 30 days.Marijuana intoxication is associated with motor coordination deficits,euphoria,impaired temporal estimation,and a variety of other psychological phenomena.Marijuana use has also been associated with more specific cognitive deficits,even after acute intoxication has subsided,and with the development of severe psychopathology.Furthermore,chronic marijuana use has been related to adverse physiological consequences in the cardiovascular and respiratory systems.Adolescence and young adulthood represent periods of the lifespan when increased risk-taking occurs,including the use of illicit substances,such as marijuana.The combination of an innate propensity for risk-taking and use of a judgment-altering substance is a striking example of the immediate public health concern over marijuana use in young-adults.This concern is particularly pertinent in light of recent efforts in support of marijuana’s legalization in the United States.A challenge for the field is to identify which chemical systems and associated information processing networks are most affected by chronic marijuana use.

The main psychoactive component of marijuana,Δ9 -tetrahydrocannabinol,acts as an agonist in central nervous system cannabinoid receptors and in other peripheral cell types,primarily immune cells.In the CNS,CB1 receptor density is high in the basal ganglia,particularly in the dorsal striatum.Cannabinoid receptor signaling acts on multiple neurotransmitters through a variety of biochemical cascades,including inhibition of voltage-dependent calcium channels and by directly inhibiting vesicle release.Both excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters,including glutamate,γ-aminobutyric acid and dopamine,are either directly or indirectly affected by CB1 receptor activation.For marijuana and other drugs of abuse and dependence,the dorsal striatum has been hypothesized to play a key role in the transition from intermittent drug use to compulsive habit-based drug-taking via mechanisms that underlie long-term synaptic plasticity.Exogenous activation of CB1 receptors,as occurs with marijuana intoxication,inhibits the release of glutamate as well as GABA in both the dorsal and ventral striatum.This inhibition facilitates the development of long-term depression in the striatum,which is a critical component in the altered synaptic plasticity that accompanies drug addiction.Thus,the manner in which corticostriatal functional connectivity is altered in the context of marijuana use is of interest,as is metabolic activity within the chemical systems that contribute to those alterations.Magnetic resonance spectroscopy is a widely used tool,allowing for in vivo characterizations of various brain metabolites.MRS data is acquired either from single voxel or multiple voxels.The SVS method typically benefits from high spectral resolution and signal-to-noise ratio.MRSI has better spatial resolution compared to SVS,but typically has a much more limited spectral resolution.To the best of our knowledge,only four other studies utilizing some form of MRS to examine marijuana users have been published,and the methods of these studies are relatively heterogeneous.The existing studies are summarized in Table 1.

Individuals ages 16-to-42 years were studied with either SVS or MRSI.In two of the studies,only males were examined.In most cases,marijuana use was reported at 20 or more days per month.Lower levels of Glu,N-acetylaspartate,and myo-inositol were observed in marijuana users compared to controls in regions known to be associated with substance use,cannabis dry rack including the basal ganglia,thalamus,cingulate cortex,dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,and the striatum as well as posterior cortical regions.The methods,ages of subjects,and extent of current marijuana use in the samples tested vary considerably across studies as summarized in Table 1.As disruptions in glutamate activity have been implicated in the development of addiction,we hypothesized disruptions in glutamate concentrations in marijuana users compared to controls.Several lines of evidence suggest inhibition of glutamate excitotoxicity by marijuana.In addition,based on the MRS literature described above related to the basal ganglia of adult marijuana users and literature describing the inhibitory effects of CB1 receptors on glutamate release,we specifically hypothesized that young-adult MJU subjects would show lower levels of Glu + glutamine in the basal ganglia compared to their non-using counterparts.We did not have a specific hypothesis regarding concentrations of other metabolites given that other researchers have not concentrated their assessments on the striatum.However,the limited available literature suggested the possibility of altered mIns as well as NAA levels in users versus controls.Twenty-seven marijuana users were recruited into the study through local advertisements on the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus.Marijuana users’ ages ranged from 18-to-21 years,with a mean and standard deviation of 19.5 ± 0.6 years.Exclusion criteria are described below.Twenty-six healthy young adult non-users,who were participants in a large,longitudinal study of normal brain development,served as a control sample.Control participants’ ages ranged from 13-to-24 years,with a mean and standard deviation of 19.3 ± 3.1 years.The recruitment strategy for the control sample has been described elsewhere.Briefly,participants younger than 18 years of age were recruited through a database of research volunteers throughout the Metro community,through post-cards mailed to University of Minnesota civil service employees,and through local advertisements.Participants over the age of 18 years were recruited using on-campus advertisements.During the controls’ third longitudinal follow-up visit,MRS was added to the protocol as time allowed.Thus,the control sample described in this study has a broader age range than the MJU sample,a feature that was considered in the statistical approach described below.A description of the study was initially given to both the MJU and control participants over the phone.Interested participants were then invited to complete a brief phone screening to ascertain study eligibility.Exclusion criteria included major physical,neurological or psychiatric illness,substance use disorders,head injuries resulting in loss of consciousness >20 min,mental retardation,learning disabilities,current use of psychoactive medications,non-native English speaking,vision or hearing that was not normal or corrected to normal,complications at birth,current pregnancy,and MRI contraindications.Inclusion criteria for MJU participants included current use of marijuana at least five times per week for at least one year,and an age of onset of use prior to the age of 17 years.Marijuana users were also excluded if they were daily cigarette smokers,or if their alcohol use exceeded four drinks for females and five drinks for males on more than two occasions per week.Marijuana users were asked to refrain from drug use for at least 12 h prior to their visit to avoid acute intoxication during study procedures.Participants provided written informed consent and all study procedures were approved by the University of Minnesota’s Institutional Review Board.After the phone interview,eligible participants were invited to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Neurobehavioral Development for an in-person screening session to further ascertain eligibility and to verify information given over the phone.The Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia,Present and Lifetime version was used to assess for current or past Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,Fourth Edition axis I disorders,including childhood disorders given the relative youth of the sample.The presence or absence of DSM-IV disorders was confirmed by case consensus meetings with staff members including a license-eligible clinical psychologist.In addition,a two-subtest version of the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence was administered to yield estimated full scale IQ.Participants who met all inclusion criteria after the in-person interview were invited back for a comprehensive neuropsychological testing battery and an MRI scan.