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4 books match the query 'Cannabis'

cover of Cannabis Consulting: Helping Patients, Parents, and Practitioners Understand Medical Marijuana

Cannabis Consulting

Helping Patients, Parents, and Practitioners Understand Medical Marijuana

Ezra Parzybok

University Press of New England, 2018

As the movement for legalization of marijuana spreads across the country, it is important to weigh the possible benefits and pitfalls of cannabis use. Cannabis Consulting is both a handbook and a report from the front lines of medical marijuana use. Writing from the perspective of a parent and veteran schoolteacher turned professional cannabis consultant, Ezra Parzybok tells the often-inspiring stories of his practice, where he assists victims of chronic pain, terminal disease, and even conditions such as ADHD. This timely volume was written for patients and families, law enforcement and health professionals, who are trying to make decisions about cannabis during this critical era of transition. It is an honest, clear-eyed exploration of the marijuana debate that looks beyond the hype and disinformation on both sides to chart a new path toward rational and safe use of cannabis.
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cover of Grass Roots: A History of Cannabis in the American West

Grass Roots

A History of Cannabis in the American West

Nick Johnson

Oregon State University Press, 2017

Marijuana legalization is unfolding across the American West, but cultivation of the cannabis plant is anything but green. Unregulated outdoor grows are polluting ecosystems, high-powered indoor grows are churning out an excessive carbon footprint, and the controversial crop is becoming an agricultural boon just as the region faces an unprecedented water crisis.

To understand how we got here and how the legal cannabis industry might become more environmentally sustainable, Grass Roots looks at the history of marijuana growing in the American West, from early Mexican American growers on sugar beet farms to today’s sophisticated greenhouse gardens. Over the past eighty years, federal marijuana prohibition has had a multitude of consequences, but one of the most important is also one of the most overlooked—environmental degradation. Grass Roots argues that the most environmentally negligent farming practices—such as indoor growing—were borne out of prohibition. Now those same practices are continuing under legalization.

Grass Roots uses the history of cannabis as a crop to make sense of its regulation in the present, highlighting current efforts to make the marijuana industry more sustainable. In exploring the agricultural history of cannabis, There are many social and political histories of cannabis, but in considering cannabis as a plant rather than as a drug, Grass Roots offers the only agriculturally focused history to date.
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cover of Minnesota Green: The Highs and Lows of Cannabis in the North Country

Minnesota Green

The Highs and Lows of Cannabis in the North Country

Tanner Berris

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

The socially fraught and surprisingly colorful history of cannabis in Minnesota

In a sweeping narrative, Minnesota Green presents the previously untold story of cannabis and its long and complex history of criminalization, activism, and legislative contention. Seamlessly blending historical research, political analysis, and lived experience, activist and industry insider Tanner Berris traces the highs and lows of the plant’s presence in a state often held up as a beacon of progressive policymaking. Trekking across this fraught history, Berris documents how nineteenth-century hemp cultivation coincided with the federal dispossession of Indigenous lands, how, by the 1930s, moral panic turned cannabis from a common crop into a criminal threat, and how the “Hemp for Victory” campaign during World War II temporarily lifted a federal ban before the postwar decades gave way to renewed policing and punishment.

Paying close attention to school-based antidrug curricula, racialized rhetoric, patient testimonies, eradication campaigns, and widespread propaganda, Berris uncovers the prohibitionist roots of the “marijuana menace” and how reformers worked to reclaim the plant’s maligned reputation throughout the twentieth century. The fight for medical cannabis during the AIDS crisis, the revival of industrial hemp, and Minnesota’s embrace of low-dose hemp-derived products—all are pivotal points in the state’s reshaping of both public opinion and regulatory imagination.

At its core, this story is about Minnesotans: farmers experimenting with commercial hemp, activists staging legalization protests, policymakers wrestling with public caution, entrepreneurs and tribal leaders navigating a complex regulatory landscape, and local communities confronting the unjust racial and social consequences of punitive—and often violently policed—prohibition. At once a regional history and civic memoir, Minnesota Green vividly documents how a once-criminalized plant reemerged as a symbol of renewal and self-determination in Minnesota.

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cover of The African Roots of Marijuana

The African Roots of Marijuana

Chris S. Duvall

Duke University Press, 2019

After arriving from South Asia approximately a thousand years ago, cannabis quickly spread throughout the African continent. European accounts of cannabis in Africa—often fictionalized and reliant upon racial stereotypes—shaped widespread myths about the plant and were used to depict the continent as a cultural backwater and Africans as predisposed to drug use. These myths continue to influence contemporary thinking about cannabis. In The African Roots of Marijuana, Chris S. Duvall corrects common misconceptions while providing an authoritative history of cannabis as it flowed into, throughout, and out of Africa. Duvall shows how preexisting smoking cultures in Africa transformed the plant into a fast-acting and easily dosed drug and how it later became linked with global capitalism and the slave trade. People often used cannabis to cope with oppressive working conditions under colonialism, as a recreational drug, and in religious and political movements. This expansive look at Africa's importance to the development of human knowledge about marijuana will challenge everything readers thought they knew about one of the world's most ubiquitous plants.
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