David H. Seber: President of Hemp Shield LLC

Research Shows Access to Medical Cannabis Lowers Prescription Drug Overdose Rate

Women could create millions of jobs if the companies they founded grew at the same pace as men's.

Tapping into this huge economic resource was the subject of a conference in Berlin, where attendees discussed what barriers women face around the world and what could be done to overcome them.

If women’s businesses flourished at the same rate as men’s, they would spark 15 million jobs in the United States, 74 million jobs in China, and 1.9 million jobs in France, according to the Global Women Entrepreneur Leaders Scorecard, which is research sponsored by Dell that crunches data from groups such as the World Bank and the United Nations.

THE Peckham women are your typical attractive, well-educated New Yorkers from a wealthy construction dynasty.

But the family has had its share of sadness, most recently when Frances Keeffe, mother of Amy Peckham and grandmother to Hillary and Keeley, died two years ago after a painful battle with Motor Neurone Disease.

It was soon after that tragedy that Amy made a bold suggestion to her daughters — they should go into the marijuana business.

The women had the money, thanks to family business Peckham Industries, a titan of road construction and maintenance with a 92-year history. They also had determination and an eagerness to help people living with chronic illnesses.

With widespread anticipation that California voters could legalize recreational marijuana use for adults next year, a generation of women growers are poised to shed the term “activist” for “CEO.”

About two dozen women working in the North Coast’s flourishing medical cannabis industry will be rubbing elbows after business hours Thursday in downtown Santa Rosa during a launch party for a local chapter of Women Grow, a for-profit networking company.

The women say they aim to break through what some call the “green ceiling” of an industry traditionally run by men, with marketing heavily skewed toward able-bodied heterosexual males.

Forget the Funyuns and drop the Doritos. New research out of Arctic Canada suggests that marijuana users, for some yet-to-be-understood reason, are slimmer and less at risk for diabetes than non-users.

A study by Quebec researchers found that among Inuit residents of Nunavik, the province’s northernmost region, use of cannabis was correlated with lower body-mass-index measurements, lower body-fat percentages and less insulin resistance.

With medical marijuana continuing to be a hot topic on Capitol Hill, it came as no surprise that the topic was the only one discussed during Wednesday’s hearing in the Health and Human Services Interim Committee.

In general, it appeared that the HHS committee was at least warming to the idea of considering a law that would allow the legal purchase of the Schedule I drug. This statement was bolstered by the first hour of the discussion when members of the public shared their personal stories of marijuana use in light of various severe illnesses.

The committee was further intrigued after hearing from Dr. Edward Clark, Chair of the University of Utah Health Care’s Department of Pediatrics and Chief Medical Officer of Intermountain Healthcare’s Primary Children’s Hospital.

The Westside neighborhoods of Los Angeles, known as Silicon Beach, have become the tech center of Southern California. According to CCTV America, there are about 500 startups there, as well as branches for big tech companies like Google, Snapchat, and Yahoo.

One of the communities in Silicon Beach, Santa Monica, is home to not only a booming tech scene, but also the amenities that come along with it. There are tech-focused festivals, hackathons, and frequent networking events, along withdark fiber leasing for businesses with high bandwidth needs.

The march to bring marijuana legalization before California voters in 2016 ramped up Thursday with the announcement by a group of longtime Bay Area cannabis advocates that they have hired heavy-hitting Democratic political strategists and plan to release a draft of the proposed initiative in the coming weeks.

Santa Rosa-based attorney Joe Rogoway is part of a team with the Coalition for Cannabis Policy Reform that is crafting an initiative under a project dubbed ReformCA, backed by California NORML — the state branch of the national marijuana reform group — that would create a framework for a “robust set of regulations” to legalize cannabis for use by adults while maintaining regulations already in place for medical use.

The upcoming Cannabis Creative Conference, slated for July 29 and 30 at the Oregon Expo Center in Portland, has added an Investment Forum on July 28 to help investors and entrepreneurs profit in the newly legalized marijuana industry. The forum is presented by the Marijuana Investor Summit.