New UK PM Liz Truss U-Turned on Marijuana

UPDATE 10/20: Truss has announced she will resign her post. Boris Johnson is expected to stand in the Tory leadership contest to replace his successor Truss. Others are calling for a general election.

You knew she was in trouble when, entering the Queen's funeral, she was misidentified as a minor Royal. 

Former UK Environment and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has been appointed as the UK's new prime minister after winning the Conservative Party leadership election that followed Boris Johnson's ouster. 

Truss was criticized during her campaign for flip-flopping politically, since while at Oxford University, she was president of the university branch of the Liberal Democratic Party. According to ABC News, "The economically centrist Lib Dems back constitutional reform and civil liberties, and Truss was an enthusiastic member, putting up 'Free the Weed' posters that called for decriminalization of marijuana and arguing in a speech for the abolition of the monarchy."  

After graduating college, Truss went to work for Shell Oil and became a conservative. Of late, she's been modeling herself after Britain's first female prime minister Margaret Thatcher, down to imitating her hairstyle and dress. 

In a 2001 interview with NME magazine Truss was asked for her opinion on marijuana legalization and replied, "I don't agree with it. Where do you stop?" (In the same interview, Truss confirmed Macy Gray to be a favorite musician. Perhaps she hasn't heard Gray's song, "Stoned.")

Truss balked when UK territory Bermuda voted to legalize cannabis in May 2022. After Governor Rena Lalgie blocked the law and asked for approval from the foreign secretary, talks were held but no decision was announced. (See update.)

The "Bebop Baroness" Who Took a Pot Rap for Thelonious Monk

Baroness Pannonica "Nica" Rothschild was born in 1913 into one of the wealthiest families in the world. In 1935 she married a French diplomat/Baron Jules de Koenigswarter with whom she had five children. An aviation enthusiast and an accomplished pilot, Nica worked for Charles de Gaulle's Free French Army during WWII, serving in various functions such as ambulance driver and ending the war as a decorated lieutenant. Her husband’s extended family, as well as her Hungarian-born mother’s, were nearly all killed in the Holocaust.

Nica and her husband separated in 1951, and she left him to move to New York City, causing her to be disinherited by her family. In the 2009 BBC documentary "The Jazz Baroness," produced by her grandniece Hannah Rothschild and narrated by Helen Mirren, Nica is quoted saying, "My husband liked military drum music; he hated jazz. He used to break my records when I was late for dinner. I was frequently late for dinner." 

In New York, Nica became a serious jazz aficionado, befriending and patronizing leading musicians like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, to whom she was introduced by Tokin' Woman Mary Lou Williams in 1954. "I never sorted out the role of 'freedom fighter,'" she said. "But once I got here, I did see that an awful lot of help was needed. I couldn't just stand by and watch."

When Parker died in Nica's hotel room after a heroin-related illness that she and her daughter nursed him through, the salacious headlines screamed, "The Bird and the Baronesses's Boudoir" and one paper wrote, "Blinded and bedazzled by this luscious, slinky, black-haired, jet-eyed Circe of high society, the Yardbird was a fallen sparrow." Walter Winchell, the powerful columnist who inspired Burt Lancaster's character in Sweet Smell of Success, pursued and persecuted her in his column as a dealer of drugs.

Nica and Thelonious

She and Monk became inseparable, despite the fact that he was a married man. She enthused, "If there were seven wonders of the world, then I think Thelonious was the eighth. He helped you see the music inside the music. And his music itself made me see possibilities in life and ways of living that I never dreamed of." In 1957, she bought a new piano for the famous Five Spot club because she thought the existing one was not good enough for Monk's performances there. He wrote songs like "Pannonica" for her.

In October 1958, Monk was experiencing "periods of mania and psychological withdrawal" when Nica drove him and fellow musician Charlie Rouse to a Delaware gig in her Bentley. According to Nica's Dream: The Life and Legend of the Jazz Baroness by David Kastin, accounts vary as to what happened after Monk entered the segregated Park Plaza Motel in New Castle along the way looking for a bar, but the police were called and he was escorted to Nica's car in the parking lot. The threesome was permitted to drive away, but soon afterwards the Bentley was pulled over and Monk, who refused to leave the car, was forcibly removed and thrown to the ground, with one cop beating on his hands with a billy club while Nica screamed for them to stop. When he was handcuffed and driven away in a patrol car, "I feared they would take him off and kill him," she said. 

Poll: Americans (Especially Women) Think Marijuana Is Less Harmful Than Alcohol

Jeany smokes a joint at the Berner’s on Haight dispensary in San Francisco in 2020.
 Jessica Christian/The Chronicle 

A new Gallup poll finds that Americans, especially women, find alcohol much more of a danger to individuals and society than marijuana, even though fewer of them say they use it than do men. 

The pollsters write: 

The poll found that Americans are evenly split in their views about marijuana's effect on society, with 49% considering it positive and 50% negative. They are slightly more positive about the drug's effect on people who use it, with 53% [including 55% of women] saying it's positive and 45% negative.

The same poll found that three in four adults [including 80% of women] believe that alcohol negatively affects society, and 71% [including 76% of women] think it is harmful to drinkers.  Yet, these perceived negative effects of alcohol are not enough to discourage Americans from imbibing, as two in three say they personally have the occasion to drink alcoholic beverages.

Amy Heckerling's "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" Turns 40

Amy Heckerling, a filmmaker fresh out of college, was given the chance to direct a film based on Cameron Crowe’s 1981 book, Fast Times at Ridgemont High: A True Story, which he wrote after spending a year undercover as a high school student. The resulting film is a funny, tender and true account of high school life at the time, focused on Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a sophomore just beginning to date.

Most known to marijuana fans for Sean Penn's portrayal of surfer/stoner Jeff Spicoli, the film also helped launch the careers of Leigh as well as Forest Whitaker,  Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Nicolas Cage (credited as Nicolas Coppola in a small role for his first film), and others. Heckerling's gift for casting included choosing Penn after being "overwhelmed by his intensity, even though all he had done was look up at her." 

The film was selected for re-release in May by The Criterion Collection,  featuring a restored 4K digital transfer, deleted and alternate scenes, a conversation with Heckerling and Crowe moderated by Olivia Wilde, and more. An essay by film critic Dana Stevens to introduce the release says, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High was the beneficiary of an improvisational, DIY freedom its director would never quite enjoy again, and that was fast disappearing from the studio system itself. Each new viewing makes you notice a different well-thought-through detail (the Peanuts-style near absence of visible parents! the dandyish New Wave touch of Damone’s piano-keyboard scarf!)."  

Finnish Prime Minister Voluntarily Drug Tests After Party Video Released

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin has voluntarily taken a drug test after a video surfaced of the 36-year-old dancing at a party.

"For my own legal protection -- although I consider the demand for a drug test unreasonable -- in order to erase such doubts, I have today taken a drug test," Marin told reporters. The call that she be tested came via a tweet from Mikko Karna, an opposition MP. 

“I wish we lived in a society where my word could be trusted. But when suspicions like this are raised here, that’s why I took these tests,” Marin said. She says she never took illegal drugs, and does admit to drinking alcohol at the party, saying, “I trust that people understand that leisure time and work time can be separated.” 

Marin, the world's youngest sitting Prime Minister, was Finland's transport minister and supports making the country carbon neutral by 2035. With her election, all five of Finland's major political parties are run by women, four of them in their 30s.  

Olivia Newton-John Opens Up About Cannabis

UPDATE 8/8/2022: Newton-John died at her ranch home in California on August 8, 2022 at the age of 73, after battling metastatic cancer for over 30 years. An angel on Earth, she earned her wings just three days after her fellow Australian songbird Judith Durham of The Seekers.

ONJ goes bad in Grease

September 4, 2017 - In news that went 'round the world in places as far-flung as the Kansas City Star, singer Olivia Newton-John told Australia's The Sunday Telegraph that she is using "legal and easily obtained" medical marijuana in her home state of California to treat cancer.

“I use medicinal cannabis, which is really important for pain and healing,” she says. “It’s a plant that has been maligned for so long, and has so many abilities to heal."

“I will do what I can to encourage it,” she added. “It’s an important part of treatment, and it should be available. I use it for the pain and it’s also a medicinal thing to do — the research shows it’s really helpful.”

Survey Looks at Cannabis Use in Perimenopausal and Menopausal Women, Calls More Research "Critically Needed"

A new survey conducted by researchers at Boston's Mass General Brigham (MGB) healthcare system found that perimenopausal and postmenopausal women had similar patterns of use for cannabis to treat their menopausal symptoms.

The paper, published in published in Menopause, the journal of the The North American Menopause Society (NAMS), had this to say (with full citations) about the potential for cannabinoid treatments for menopause symptoms: 

The endocannabinoid system is involved in a variety of physiological and psychological processes (e.g., regulating body temperature, mood, anxiety, sleep), and evidence suggests that this system significantly impacts fertility and reproduction. Specifically, the human ovary produces the endogenous cannabinoid anandamide with peak plasma levels occurring at ovulation and correlating with estrogen levels, suggesting that anandamide production may be controlled by this hormone.

In addition, cannabinoid treatments, including administration of anandamide, as well as antagonists of cannabinoid degradative enzymes, improve postovariectomy complications and reduce anxiety. Further, administration of cannabinoids typically results in vasorelaxation [reduction in tension of the blood vessel walls], suggesting that cannabinoid-based therapies may be particularly salient for treating vasomotor symptoms of menopause [hot flashes and night sweats].

In particular, estrogen deficiency results in downregulation of systems involved in hemodynamic regulation and is associated with vasomotor symptoms; 2 weeks of treatment with anandamide has been shown to reverse this downregulation in ovariectomized rats. Taken together, research indicates that medical cannabis (MC) may be a nonhormone treatment option with the potential to alleviate menopause-related symptoms with greater efficacy and possibly fewer side effects relative to existing treatments.