Uncategorized – Page 4 – Alice's WanderLand

I’ve been waiting for this guy. He’s a Junco, a Slate-colored Junco. For some reason I am very fond of these little birds and shortly after I moved to Fawn Hill I asked my neighbor if there were Juncos. “Sometimes,” she said, “In the winter.” And that squared with my memory of Juncos. I first became acquainted with them in Washington, D.C. For a period of time we had an apartment with a lovely deck just off the living room and in winter the Juncos would come and hop around searching for food. We traveled a lot in those days and somehow never got into the bird feeder thing even though there were many varieties of birds there in downtown Washington, DC, including numerous raptors. The Juncos were only around in the winter and they charmed me with their white breast and pinkish beak. It didn’t take long to figure out that when the Juncos arrived it was going to be cold and it came as no surprise to me that they summer in the Arctic Circle. Forecast for Franklin this weekend? An “arctic blast” arrives on Sunday. ❧

That’s my friend Mary Lynn Mathre with my buddy Tango. We visited MaryLynn, or ML, and her husband Al in North Florida last March. This picture was taken on their property near Carrabelle, Florida. I’ve posted her picture today because tomorrow, September 13, ML and I will be co-presenters at a seminar in Lansing, Michigan. The seminar is entitled, “Cannabis & The Endocannabinoid System: What Nurses & Medical Marijuana Professionals Need to Know.”

Collectively ML and I have more than a half century of experience in the medical marijuana issue. We hope that this might be the first of many presentations we give together. Nurses are the frontline personnel in healthcare environment and marijuana’s medical use is a hot topic these days, with 20 states authorizing the legal use of the drug. Michigan is one of those states and has more than 100,000 certified patients who can use marijuana legally! Yet nurses and other healthcare professionals have no training programs or classes.

ML and Al began an organization in the 1990s called Patients Out of Time, a non-profit group dedicated to education. Every two years they have organized an international conference on cannabis research and have brought together the world’s finest researchers who present fascinating papers on the emergining science of the endocannabinoid system. Mainstream America is finally awakening to science that is being conducted in places other than the U.S.A. Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently reversed his position on medical marijuana. In throwing his support behind this issue he issued an apology, explaining that he ” didn’t look far enough. I didn’t review papers from smaller labs in other countries doing some remarkable research, and I was too dismissive of the loud chorus of legitimate patients whose symptoms improved on cannabis.”

Just a few weeks ago marked the 38th anniversary of an arrest in Washington, D.C. that started the medical marijuana movement in America. It was 1975 and not very many people knew about marijuana’s beneficial properties. But a young college professor with glaucoma had realized that marijuana was saving his sight and he began growing marijuana to help keep his supplies steady. When he and his mate were arrested they realized they had two options: 1) pay the fine and be more careful in the future, hoping not to get caught again, or 2) fight the charges and at least create a record that marijuana was helping. They chose the latter and went on to make history.

That glaucoma patient was my late husband, Robert Randall, the acknowledged founder of the medical marijuana movement in America.☙