The latest on Pennsylvania’s adult use push.
Sens. Dan Laughlin and Sharif Street are at it again. The pair, which previously joined forces to push adult use legislation, as Cannabis Wire has reported, announced late Friday that they will do so in the coming days.
The other adult use legislation introduced so far this session envisions state-run sales, while the Senators’ plan does not.
“With neighboring states New Jersey and New York implementing adult use, we have a duty to Pennsylvania taxpayers to legalize adult use marijuana to avoid losing out on hundreds of millions of dollars of new tax revenue and thousands of new jobs,” said Laughlin in the announcement.
“We have a unique and singular opportunity to correct decades of mass incarceration, disproportionate enforcement against marginalized communities, the criminalization of personal choice and the perpetuation of violence, which all materialized from the failed war on drugs,” Street said.
A step toward a cannabis breathalyzer: more research.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder conducted a study on cannabis breathalyzer technology that aimed to “begin developing a protocol that yields reproducible results — a necessary step toward a reliable, validated field-based method.”
For context, there’s no reliably effective breathalyzer used to test for presence of cannabinoids, like with alcohol.
Researchers used breath samples from people before and after they smoked cannabis. The samples, collected through the use of a mobile lab, or a “comfortably appointed white van that would park conveniently outside participants’ homes,” were both breath and blood. Researchers compared both samples before and after participants smoked the high-THC cannabis.
“One key question that we cannot yet answer is whether breath measurements can be used to distinguish between a person who uses cannabis regularly but hasn’t done so lately, and someone who consumed an hour ago,” said study author Tara Lovestead. “Having a reproducible protocol for breath measurements will help us and other researchers answer that question.”
This research was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Breath Research.
NIDA-backed clinical trial will explore age-dependent effects of smoked and oral THC.
A new clinical trial spearheaded by University of California, Los Angeles researchers, of which the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is a collaborator, will examine the effects of THC.
More specifically, the placebo-controlled study, which will kick off in August and is expected to be completed in 2028, will “compare the dose-dependent effects of smoked and oral THC on analgesia and endpoints directly related to adverse consequences of use including abuse liability, intoxication, and impairment as a function of age and sex,” according to the trial notice.
+ More: The lead author is Ziva Cooper, who you might remember is an author of the 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s comprehensive review on cannabis research.
Cannabis Wire had a conversation with Cooper in 2019 after she ended up in thrust in the public eye after Alex Berenson, author of Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence, misinterpreted the NASEM review.
