Shocking news from the DEA as they very sneakily established a new drug code yesterday for all cannabis extracts to be treated as a Schedule I controlled substances. That means products containing CBD and CBG with no THC are now clearly defined as Schedule 1. Before this ruling came out many thought products below the legal threshold for THC 0.3% or less was technically legal.

The DEA clarified this by saying quote: “For practical purposes, all extracts that contain CBD will also contain at least small amounts of other cannabinoids. However, if it were possible to produce from the cannabis plant an extract that contained only CBD and no other cannabinoids, such an extract would fall within the new drug code and therefore remain federally illegal. In other words: The DEA is confident that it can find enough traces of other cannabinoids in your CBD oil to arrest and prosecute. And if they can’t, they still have the option of arresting and prosecuting based on the CBD oil itself now.

What’s worse is that the new extracts classification applies to all “extracts that have been derived from any plant of the genus Cannabis and since Hemp is not a separate genus the DEA views hemp as simply cannabis with very low THC.

The good news is there are temporary safeguards in place that protect patients in many states from federal prosecution over possession of the oil. The Rohrabacher-Farr amendment is the most important of those protections. Originally passed in 2014, the amendment to a Congressional appropriations bill prohibits the Justice Department from spending funds to interfere with the implementation of state medical cannabis laws.

In other news there was a mass casualty event in Brooklyn last summer that you may have heard about where emergency workers reported multiple people all of whom had a degree of altered mental status that was described as zombielike.

Well now the report, based on blood and urine samples drawn from eight of the 18 men taken to area hospitals that day, offers the first detailed look at a powerful drug that has caused dozens of people to overdose. It identifies the drug as a synthetic cannabinoid called AMB-FUBINACA that was originally developed by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Congrats Pfizer, first you got our dicks stiff now you’re working on making our brains melt. What a great company.

AMB-FUBINACA which has the street name AK-47 24 Karat Gold is 85 times more potent than the THC levels of a single joint. These types of synthetic drugs are growing both increasingly powerful and popular as the makers of the illicit substances continue to create new chemical compounds to evade detection and since these synthetics have a completely different chemical structure from plant-based THC they don’t show up in a regular drug test.

Also in the news as many of you know Arizona was the only state to reject their marijuana proposition during this year’s election. Well it turns out the CEO of the pharmaceutical company that funded Arizona's anti-pot campaign has now been charged with bribing doctors in that state.

Prop 205 was an initiative similar to Colorado’s decriminalization law. Until a few weeks before the election it appeared 205 would pass by about 10 points.

Then a well-funded anti-205 campaign kicked into gear, with 24/7 TV commercials that included the governor and attorney general. The television ads lied to the Arizona public saying that Colorado’s experience with legal pot was terrible. That the schools never got the money they were promised and many more students were getting high.

The fear-mongering ads were so dishonest that Colorado legislators sent a letter to Arizona’s anti-205 officials telling them to quit lying about Colorado. The anti-205 campaign spent over $5 million dollars in ads and events.

Insys Therapeutics, a company that makes fentanyl, a painkiller that’s much stronger than heroin donated $500,000 to the anti-205 campaign, saying they opposed legal