Jason White has created dazzling advertising and marketing campaigns for Nike and Disney, the World Cup and Olympic Games, to name a few. But when the Georgetown alumnus told his parents he was exiting Apple-owned Beats by Dre for the cannabis industry, the announcement landed with a thud. "What they heard was, 'You're going to sell weed,' " the 44-year-old said, laughing.

White is now chief marketing officer at Curaleaf Holdings Inc., which says it is the world's largest provider (by revenue) of legal medical and recreational cannabis. While some liken legal pot to a gold rush, White - who is African American and Cuban - talks of repairing communities harmed by the war on drugs. "Some are very wary of cannabis, having seen people arrested and their voting rights taken away," he says. "But as cannabis has become more mainstream, others don't see harm, but opportunity. I want to use this platform to help improve society."

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Sue Taylor never would have let one of her students slide 20 years ago if she had caught one with marijuana.

But the former Catholic school principal has found a new mission with senior citizens: providing them with information and access to cannabis through her California dispensary, Farmacy Berkeley. It opened in the Bay Area in February.

Like many of her former colleagues at the top of religious institutions, she once saw marijuana as a plague on her African-American community. "I was just like them until I saw the healing, and I could not turn my back on that, spiritually," Ms. Taylor, 72, says.

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Baba Ram Dass, who epitomized the 1960s of legend by popularizing psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary, a fellow Harvard academic, before finding spiritual inspiration in India, died on Sunday at his home on Maui, Hawaii. He was 88.

His death was announced on his official Instagram account.

Having returned from India as a bushy-bearded, barefoot, white-robed guru, Ram Dass, who was born Richard Alpert, became a peripatetic lecturer on New Age possibilities and a popular author of more than a dozen inspirational books.

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LOS ANGELES - Every Sunday, about two dozen people gather at a green cabin along the main drag of Big Bear, Calif., a small mountain town known for its namesake lake. They go there for Jah Healing Church services, where joints are passed around.

April Mancini, a founder of the church, said she was drawn to the idea of cannabis as a religious sacrament back in 2013, after she met a Rastafarian who was running the place as an unlicensed medicinal dispensary.

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The announcement on Wednesday that Johns Hopkins Medicine was starting a new center to study psychedelic drugs for mental disorders was the latest chapter in a decades-long push by health nonprofits and wealthy donors to shake up psychiatry from the outside, bypassing the usual channels.

"Psychiatry is one of the most conservative specialties in medicine," said David Nichols, a medicinal chemist who founded the Heffter Research Institute in 1993 to fund psychedelic research. "We haven't really had new drugs for years, and the drug industry has quit the field because they don't have new targets" in the brain. "The field was basically stagnant, and we needed to try something different."

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It can seem as though everyone in Silicon Valley is either heading to or coming back from a psychedelic trip, and it is probably Michael Pollan's fault.

He did after all write a best seller, "How to Change Your Mind," about how healthful psychedelics can be. His neighbor Ayelet Waldman, whose memoir "A Really Good Day" recounts how taking acid helped her mood and marriage, has something to do with it, too. And now, inspired by Pollan, the writer T.C. Boyle has a new novel, "Outside Looking In," about Timothy Leary, the charismatic Harvard professor turned psychedelics pied piper of the 1960s.

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The Oakland City Council passed a resolution Tuesday night that decriminalizes certain natural psychedelics, including mushrooms, a move that makes Oakland the second city in the nation to do so.

The resolution instructs law enforcement to stop investigating and prosecuting people using the drugs. It applies to psychedelics that come from plants or fungi, not synthetic drugs like LSD or MDMA, also known as ecstasy.

After the vote, nearly 100 supporters rose from their chairs, clapped and cheered loudly.

"I don't have words, I could cry," said Nicolle Greenheart, the co-founder of Decriminalize Nature Oakland. "I'm thrilled. I'm glad that our communities will now have access to the healing medicines and we can start working on healing our communities."

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Only a few days ago, millions of American probably had never heard of psilocybin, the active agent in psychedelic mushrooms, but thanks to Denver, it is about to get its moment in the political sun. On Tuesday, the city's voters surprised everyone by narrowly approving a ballot initiative that effectively decriminalizes psilocybin, making its possession, use or personal cultivation a low-priority crime.

The move is largely symbolic - only 11 psilocybin cases have been prosecuted in Denver in the last three years, and state and federal police may still make arrests - but it is not without significance. Psilocybin decriminalization will be on the ballot in Oregon in 2020 and a petition drive is underway in California to put it on the ballot there. For the first time since psychedelics were broadly banned under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, we're about to have a national debate about the place of psilocybin in our society. Debate is always a good thing, but I worry that we're not quite ready for this one.

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An Inland church that uses marijuana to worship is embroiled in a bitter dispute with Jurupa Valley, which alleges the Vault Church of Open Faith is primarily a pot store and has been trying to shut it down for more than a year.

An association representing the church and about 15 others like it fired back Friday, April 13, filing a claim against the city seeking $1.2 million in damages and alleging harassment and discrimination. Church leaders say they smoke marijuana or eat edibles as part of spiritual meditation as a religious sacrament, but city officials say they're using religion as a front for selling pot.

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Decades after Canada abandoned the field, the B.C. Centre on Substance Use is investigating the benefits of drugs like MDMA and psilocybin

In 2011, Gerald Thomas was invited to an Indigenous community in a remote area of British Columbia. Working for the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C., he was one of a small team of scientists who observed 12 people take ayahuasca, an Amazonian mixture that induces vivid visual and auditory hallucinations as well as deep emotional and intellectual reflection.

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Researchers gear up for last stage of testing before legalization

Ed Thompson remembers the helplessness he felt each of the thousands of times his twin daughters would turn blue and go lifeless in his arms. The young girls suffered from acute breath-holding spells, an involuntary condition that causes children to pass out, in their case up to 40 times a day.

"Having your kids die in your arms 7,500 times kind of sucks," he said.

The girls' conditions eventually improved, but the experience compounded earlier trauma Thompson had witnessed as a firefighter in South Carolina, sending him into a spiral of post traumatic stress, substance abuse and thoughts of suicide.

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Vancouver is one of 16 locations where clinicians hope to use the drug to transform trauma treatment

Ed Thompson remembers the helplessness he felt each of the thousands of times his twin daughters would turn blue and go lifeless in his arms.

The young girls suffered from acute breath-holding spells, an involuntary condition that causes children to pass out, in their case up to 40 times a day.

"Having your kids die in your arms 7,500 times kind of sucks," he said.

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They won't happen, though, until after July 1 legalization

LONDON, Ont. - Canadians convicted of simple marijuana possession will have to wait until recreational pot is legalized on July 1 before learning whether they'll be pardoned for something that will no longer be a crime.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ruled out Friday declaring an amnesty before the new law goes into effect.

"We recognize that anyone who is currently purchasing marijuana is participating in illegal activity that is funding criminal organizations and street gangs," he told a news conference wrapping up a twoday cabinet retreat.

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Tracy Sanderson understood opioid addiction. Her daughter Kelsie began struggling with opioid addiction after she had a traumatic experience being tasered by RCMP officers.

After drinking with some friends, Kelsie, who was 16 at the time, stole her parents' truck. When Sanderson received a call from RCMP officers, she said, "Keep my daughter overnight. She needs to learn a lesson."

She did not expect to pick up a different girl the next day. "Something inside my daughter died that night," she said. That's when Kelsie's descent into fentanyl addiction began.

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Niagara is not immune to opioid use.

Opiods are being used all over the region, not just in areas with lowincome housing and high crime rates.

According to Positive Living executive director Glen Walker, hard drugs such as fentanyl aren't only a problem in larger municipalities such as St. Catharines and Niagara Falls, places such as Fort Erie and Welland also have many users, part of an epidemic across Niagara.

"We have a lot of work to do," Walker says.

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Last month, you could hear the collective global gasp when news broke that eminent Zen Buddhist Michael Stone had passed away in Victoria, B.C. The shock was a natural reaction to the unexpected death of a beloved force of nature, a powerful communicator who, through his ability to make ancient spiritual ideas fresh and relevant, helped improve the lives of countless people around the world.

Stone left behind a wife and two children - with another on the way - and would have celebrated his 43rd birthday this past Saturday. But what also caused thousands of jaws to drop from the news was the Stone's cause of death: the charismatic, world-renowned and respected yoga/meditation/mindfulness expert, author, and speaker - who founded the Centre of Gravity in Toronto-died after OD-ing on street drugs.

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Johnsie Gooslin spent Jan. 16, 2015, tending his babies -- that's what he called his marijuana plants.

More than 70 of them were growing in a hydroponic system of his own design.

Sometimes, he'd stay in his barn for 16 hours straight, perfecting his technique.

That night, he left around 8 o'clock to head home. The moon was waning, down to a sliver, which left the sky as dark as the ridges that lined it. As he pulled away, the lights from his late-model Kia swept across his childhood hollow and his parents' trailer, which stood just up the road from the barn. He turned onto West Virginia Route 65. Crossing Mingo County, he passed the Delbarton Mine, where he had worked on and off for 14 years before his back gave out. Though Johnsie was built like a linebacker, falling once from a coal truck and twice from end loaders had taken a toll. At 36, his disks were a mess, and sciatica sometimes shot pain to his knees.

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Shirley Jones said she was devastated to learn that three young men in her family from the Tseshaht First Nation in Port Alberni died in recent weeks from suspected fentanyl overdoses.

"It's heart-wrenching living this [crisis] at work and then hearing about these young people in my mother's family," said Jones, who is a custodian at Our Place Society on Pandora Avenue. An overdose-prevention site has operated at the site since 2016.

"Even here, I've seen young natives who were chronic alcoholics die from overdoses, and I had no idea they even used," she said. "It was hidden."

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Deb Sheamer and other friends of Charmaine Bassett protest her arrest and detention outside of the Lucas County Courthouse on June 21.

Friends of Charmaine Bassett protest her arrest and detention outside of the Lucas County Courthouse on June 21.

Lucas County Common Pleas Judge Michael Goulding on Friday found a Toledo woman charged with selling marijuana and illegal mushrooms for "spiritual purposes" competent to stand trial on felony drug charges.

Charmaine Rose Bassett, 56, of the 3400 block of Secor Road entered not guilty pleas to aggravated possession of drugs, aggravated trafficking in drugs, and trafficking in marijuana. She is the founder and "medicine woman" at Anyana-Kai, a member of the Oklevueha Native American Church.

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Dear Editor: This letter is in response to two recent letters to the editor with regards to the subject of marijuana and whether or not it should be legal.

The first letter from D. Simpson of Kelowna ("Marijuana not part of God's law, Herald, May 17), I am a little confused. If pot was not part of God's law, then why did He put it on earth to begin with? Marijuana has been around for tens of thousands of years (probably much longer.) Tell me, was alcohol part of God's plan? Did He plan to ruin families, finances, and lives? I thought He was a loving God. I will cite the quote used in the letter. In 2 Peter 1:3, "that we have been given all things that pertain to life and Godliness." This includes marijuana.

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