The Rev. Canon Carol L. Wade, former canon precentor at the National Cathedral in Washington, will be the new dean and rector at Lexington's historic Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral. She is the first woman to hold either position at the downtown church.Wade will assume her new duties in September...
The Fayette County School Board has named Daviess County Superintendent Tom Shelton as superintendent to replace out-going superintendent Stu Silberman.
About $41,000 in funding for the Valley View Ferry was restored Thursday by a Lexington council budget committee.Mayor Jim Gray initially proposed cutting money for the ferry to help reduce a multimillion-dollar city deficit for the fiscal year that begins July 1. But the administration reversed ...
FRANKFORT — State lawmakers Thursday questioned whether the state has the resources and expertise to oversee moving the $6 billion Medicaid program to private, for-profit managed care companies. Sen. Jimmy Higdon, the chairman of the Interim Committee on Program Review and Investigations, told...
For the first time, a Lexington teen who shot and killed his best friend publicly apologized to the victim's family.Jamar Mays, 18, told Ali Shalash's family — his mother, Gwendolyn Perkins, in particular — he was sorry during a sentencing hearing Thursday."I want to apologize to Miss...
Building strong communitywide support is key to closing achievement gaps and moving Lexington schools forward, Clark County superintendent Elaine Farris said Thursday as she sought Fayette County's top education job."It's very important that we understand that the excellence we want cannot be achieved...
FRANKFORT — A judge has ordered that a receiver take over a troubled personal care home in Letcher County that has been the subject of numerous state citations and federal and state criminal charges. Letcher Circuit Court Judge Samuel Wright granted a temporary restraining order Thursday and...
Galbraith blamed partisan politics for Kentucky’s woes and said as an independent, he will work with both sides of the aisle.
“I foresee that after my stint as governor, I’m going to be one of the most disliked people in the state because I’m going to have to make decisions that neither party candidate can possibly make, because they’ve got to answer to the party,” Galbraith said. “I don’t answer to anybody except God and an occasional judge or two.”
Galbraith said the state should allow the growing of hemp as a source of bio-fuel.
“If you planted 7 percent of the U.S. Agricultural land in hemp, we wouldn’t have to import another drop of oil,” Galbraith said. “Gee, reckon if there’s anyone out there that doesn’t want that to happen? People I call the petrol-chemical-pharmaceutical-industrial-transnational-corporate-fascist-elitist SOBS.”
Galbraith said if people voted for gambling, it should be run by the state and should be placed at the racetracks.
“We better keep these racetracks here because that’s what’s keeping the breeders here,” Galbraith said. “We need to protect the horse breeding industry. My running mate and I want to brand Kentucky as the horse capital of the world…We’d like to build the world’s largest statue of a horse out at the horse park. We would get tourists in here to take a look at that thing and spend their money here. St. Louis has the golden arch. Cairo has the Sphinx. Let’s put a big ole horse in front of the Kentucky Horse Park.”
Twitter and the White House have announced a Twitter Town Hall webcast for July 6 in which participants are invited to ask President Obama "questions about the economy and jobs."
But if past experience is any indicator -- and trust me, it will be -- the most-asked questions will be about the president's willingness to push for the legalization of marijuana.
In March 2009, shortly after his inauguration, Obama held a webcast "town meeting" in which online viewers could submit questions to him.
At one point, the commander-in-chief interrupted the event M.C. to say, "There was one question that voted on that ranked fairly high and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation. And I don't know what this says about the online audience, but ... this was a popular question. We want to make sure it's answered. The answer is no, I don't think that's a good strategy to grow our economy. All right."
The American Independent has long reported on inconsistencies in federal acknowledgment of marijuana’s medical benefits. These came to a head in March, when an update to the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) treatment database went into detail about the treatment potential of marijuana as prescribed for cancer patients.
In a series of occasionally frantic NCI emails, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) emerged as the boogeyman of medical marijuana advocates like database contributor Dr. Donald Abrams. To Abrams’ chagrin, several of NIDA’s requests to remove aspects of the entry were granted, and the current version of the marijuana entry that appears on NCI’s site is missing several key elements from the original that NIDA had taken issue with. How, it must be asked, did one agency come to hold such sway over government conversations on medical marijuana?
The answer to that question stretches back to 1961, when the UN drafted the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, an international treaty meant to control the flow of illicit drugs across borders and within member countries. Speaking for the institute, NIDA’s deputy press officer Sheri Grabus explains that the convention “required each nation to designate a single official source of marijuana for medicinal research.” In the U.S., NIDA ended up with that responsibility, and it’s been the gatekeeper for legal government and private research on marijuana ever since.
Because marijuana is a Schedule I drug, any researcher looking to study marijuana has to get prior approval from the DEA. But it’s NIDA that ultimately decides who gets to do marijuana research and for what purposes.
NIDA is also the sole pipeline for researchers to the nation’s only legal marijuana grow farm. Since 1975, Dr. Mahmoud Elsohly has been a research professor at the University of Mississippi; for more than 30 years, he’s held the contract to supply marijuana for all research in the U.S.
Simplifying research by making one agency responsible for approval and one man responsible for growing the materials isn’t necessarily controversial. What worries both advocates and researchers is a perceived anti-medical marijuana agenda within NIDA.
“It’s an incredibly expensive and bureaucratic process, which deters science on so many levels,” says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). St. Pierre contends further that with few exceptions, NIDA only allows access to marijuana if a researcher is looking to show the drug’s adverse effects.
While Abrams declined to comment to The American Independent, his emails put him firmly on the side against NIDA. “I am not happy that NIDA has been able to impose their agenda on us,” he wrote in March. “I am considering resigning from the Board if we allow politics to trump science!” Abrams’ testy history with NIDA goes back to 1996, when the agency only allowed him access to Elsohly’s marijuana after he agreed to change the focus of a marijuana study [PDF] from examining the drug’s benefits to AIDS patients to looking instead at its adverse effects.
For its part, NIDA admits that most research on the adverse effects of marijuana gets the agency’s support but claims it’s not by design. “In fact, for the past several years very few proposals have been submitted to the NIH for testing the medicinal effects of smoked marijuana,” NIDA tells TAI. “Rather, the more promising approach for research has been on cannabinoids.”
This diplomatic answer happens to confirm the notion that the government may give the pharmaceutical industry a legal pass to develop marijuana-based drugs, quashing state-legal dispensaries that sell whole-plant cannabis. But it’s also in line with the contention among abuse specialists that their biggest problem with medical marijuana presently is that people smoke it. As more entities in the federal government make it clear that they recognize the medicinal benefits of the drug, the last big hurdle to fall before medical marijuana has a chance at federal recognition is its delivery system. The question that remains is whether Big Pharma’s going to get there first. And with the first non-synthetic cannabinoid derived from whole-plant marijuana winding down testing, all signs point to that being a matter of when, not if.
On Tuesday, State Auditor Crit Luallen found no evidence of wrongdoing in the retirement agency, but did raise concerns about the use of placement agents, who act as middlemen to secure investments from entities like the KRS. The report found New York placement agent Glen Sergeon had “an unusually close working relationship” with former KRS chief investment officer Adam Tosh, who resigned last summer.
Galbraith campaign manager Ralph Long says the audit didn’t go far enough in probing Tosh’s activities within the agency or his relationship with Sergeon.
The audit primarily blames former Chief Investment Officer CIO Adam Tosh who left town one month before the placement agent scandal was revealed, and one placement agent, Glen Sergeon but does not recommend any prosecution, just blame these two guys and sweep the whole thing under the rug.
(SNIP)
Why did the staff wait until Tosh was gone to inform the board about placement agents? Are there any plans to prosecute Tosh? Why did the Auditor decide not to look into the land deal? Why does the audit not address HB 480 relating to term limits and placement agents?
“The special audit of KRS was conducted by professional audit staff with years of training and experience,” she says. “We stand by their work.”
Long has not returned our request for comment.
UPDATE:
Continuing his criticism of the audit, Long told WFPL News he wasn’t speaking on behalf of the campaign and believes Luallen’s office are professionals but should have allowed a third party to investigate the retirement agency instead.
“I think it might have been done better by an outside firm with a greater degree of expertise in the investment field. I would like to see the legislature come back and construct a better oversight of the Kentucky Retirement Systems,” he says.
The lack of transparency in quasi-government agencies could become an issue in the governor’s race, Long says.
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