According to the report, patient enrollment saw a 15% increase in the fiscal year 2022–2023 compared to 2021–2022. The concluded fiscal year witnessed a decrease in daily doses, primarily influenced by Florida’s emergency rule, which imposed limits on daily dosing. Additionally, the report highlighted a consistent pattern where few certified doctors accounted for a significant portion of medical marijuana certifications.
In FY 2022–2023, 859,026 individual patients were enrolled, an increase from 757,600 in the previous year. In fiscal 2020–2021, the patient count was 607,220, indicating a noticeable upward trend. However, monthly enrollment has gradually declined from year to year.
According to the report, new patient enrollment increased by 27% between January 2020 and January 2021 and then fell by 6% between January 2021 and January 2022. In 2023, month-to-month enrollments fell by 3%, with 20,977 new patients being enrolled in June 2023.
When it came to qualifying conditions, the report highlighted post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as the most prevalent condition, constituting 40.2% of reported cases. Other common conditions included extreme nonmalignant pain at 13.4%, multiple sclerosis at 8.8% and cancer at 3.6%. Moreover, 25% of patients met the eligibility requirements for conditions that were either similar to or of the same kind as those that were listed, with chronic pain, anxiety and various conditions related to the digestive system being prominent.
Physician certifications, crucial for patient participation in the program, exhibited a steady increase. Between the fiscal years 2022 and 2023, the overall yearly number of certifications climbed by 15%, from 1,142,172 to 1,315,123. This growth rate was marginally less than the 24% increase from 2021 to 2022.
Monthly certificates increased by 48% between January 2020 and January 2021 and by 24% between January 2021 and January 2022. In FY 2022–2023, certifications rose by 21%, but at a slower rate from January 2022 to January 2023. June 2023 had 117,313 certificates, a rise from January 2023’s 113,992 total.
The majority of certifications were granted by a small percentage of doctors, which was consistent with previous years’ findings. Only 1% of certificates were issued by the lower 40% of qualified physicians in FY 2022–2023, compared to 84% of certifications issued by 19% of qualified physicians over the same period.
The report delved into detailed lists of the top doctors recommending medical cannabis and low-THC products, revealing that some, who were anonymously identified by a special two-letter code, issued certifications for thousands of patients over the years.
This growing number of patients registering for medical cannabis access suggests that companies such as Trulieve Cannabis Corp. (CSE: TRUL) (OTCQX: TCNNF) have a steady demand for the medical marijuana products that they sell in dispensaries within the state.
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For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
– Kipling, Prophet Laureate of Tonic Masculinity
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Being no one’s idea of angelic, I will now hold forth on the masculinity question.
Say what you will about the pronounists, they’ve nailed the zeitgeist in one important respect, that being the widespread confusion about what men and women even are. Somehow, we’ve found ourselves in a place where a plurality of us, maybe a majority, have no idea what it is to be a man or a woman, an issue that was considered not so much settled as simply obvious to essentially every previous generation. The apparently clear definition of ‘an adult human male or female’, beloved of big brains in the post-liberal set, doesn’t seem at all sufficient. We’ve got plenty of physically mature humans wandering about who have no real idea of what it is to be a man or a woman. Evidence: just look at them.
It isn’t just the gender confused who are gender confused. They’re merely the most acute symptom of this societal breakdown, their dangerhair1 a screaming siren that something has gone seriously wrong not only in their own broken psyches, but in the social disorder that broke them.
No, gender confusion is pervasive. We talk about it all the time because we have no idea what we’re talking about. We’re groping after something we know is missing, trying to repair something that’s been shattered, trying to learn something we were never taught without even knowing who we should approach to teach us.
Matt Walsh’s hilarious and poignant documentary What Is A Woman skewered leftist gender theory by posing the titular question to a procession of ‘doctors’, ‘academics’, and activists2 to wonderful effect. The best they could do as they avoided eye contact and attempted to shield their incoherent ideology from the detonation wave triggered by jamming that simple query into the rat’s nest of logical contradictions at its demonic core was ‘a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman’, a tautological non-definition that’s up there with Ibram Kendi’s ‘a racist is anyone who supports racist policies’. These people are frauds and simpletons with the small and terrified souls of vicious rodents, so we’ll pass by without further content.
In the end , the best definition was the one provided by Walsh’s wife: ‘you’re looking at one.’ The finger pointing at the Moon is not the Moon. Precisely defining any entity in the cosmos turns out to be extraordinarily difficult, because some jerk can always roll up with a corner case and akshually the definition into submission. Definitions are always partial and incomplete, which is really just a basic property of symbolic language, since the signifier is useful precisely to the degree that it is much more informationally compact than the signified3.
This is all something of a red herring, since the problem isn’t one of definitions. Trying to turn it into that is a cope. It’s an attempt to reduce a pervasive, deep, and knotty problem – which is that most of us have no idea how to be what we know we’re supposed to be – into something simple and concrete. “Here’s the definition. This is what a woman is. Do this, and you’re a woman.” Or for that matter, a man.
The always fascinating and ever-so-slightly terrifying
recently posted an essay on The Artificial Woman that’s been on my mind since I read it. Her central thesis, which I think is correct, is that the right-wing image of the tradwife staying home to cook the meals, raise the babies, clean the sheets, and do the rest of the Stepford Wife act, is every bit as much the hollow caricature of feminity as the autogynophile stomping around in drag and pitching his voice an octave too high. Both reduce a woman to a role defined by external imagery; both are hollow costumes, no deeper than cardboard, no more tangible than a hologram. The images are different, but on final analysis that’s all they are – signifiers standing in for signified. I don’t think Megha included them in her analysis, but the carefully curated plasticized instagram influencer or the OnlyFans e-whore seem equally faek and ghey, images of the feminine that have been so thoroughly abstracted from the feminine that they no longer have anything to do with the genuine article.
The performative femininity in the cyborg era is a low-rez screenshot of a photoshopped photocopy of a photocopy of a fax from a number that’s no longer in service.
Magdalena Radziej
Exactly the same thing has happened to masculinity.
The phrase toxic masculinity has been getting shoved down everyone’s throats as a bro-shaming tactic for years now. Open your mouth in a woman’s presence and you’re mansplaining. Sit so your balls don’t get crushed and you’re manspreading. Say something nice to a girl without asking her permission first and it’s literally rape. Since feminists apparently want men to be quiet castrata kneeling with downcast eyes in the corner like good little subs, it’s easy to infer that the attack on masculinity that gets so much attention is driven by the vindictive ressentiment of femoids demented by their lifelong penis envy; or post-wall bitter-bitches lashing out against the lack of male attention; or that it’s all just a shit test by women impatient for the men to stop just taking it like pussies and stand up for themselves, which is the most hopeful option. And maybe it’s all of those harnessed together into a janissary army by globalist social engineers who know full well that conquering a people is much easier if you cut off the men’s balls first.
Cognitive conquest isn’t just about getting nagged to death by social media’s self-appointed HR ladies, although that undoubtedly has a depressive effect on testosterone. The war on men is full-spectrum 5GW. Sedentary living drops your t levels, both because the body needs physical hardship to stimulate testosterone production, and because adipose tissue is esterogenic. The food supply has been flooded with endocrine disrupting and hormone-mimicking chemicals as well, to say nothing of the obesity-inducing effects of high fructose corn syrup and seed oils. Cortisol kills testosterone, meaning the high-stress lifestyle, and the social prohibition on stress-relievers such as a single combat with that asshole from accounting who ballsed up the last quarterly report, serve as a systemic limiter on testosterone production. Then of course there’s porn. When the body is busting a nut on the regular, it concludes that sex is plentiful and therefore it can down-regulate testosterone production. The lizard brain doesn’t distinguish much between the supple flesh of a willing art ho gf and pixels displayed on a black mirror. Hormones are necessary to score whore moans, but whore moans deplete hormones: this is the whoremoanal cycle, and coomers are caught at its low point.
The lacuna in Megha’s Artificial Woman4 is why, precisely, we are so prone to being snookered by the image, to the point that we forget the real even existed. The obvious reason is that most of us have had almost no experience of a real woman, meaning a woman who embodies the multivalent archetype of femininity in all of its gorgeous and infuriating self-contradiction. So many of the women we run into in our everyday lives are just LARPing as women, based on what they’ve seen women presented as on Netflix and Instagram.
Women do have a certain advantage in this social breakdown, which is that femininity draws more on biology, and less on social conditioning, than masculinity does. At the most basic level of sexual attractiveness, men are drawn to the young and fit, a conditon most females will pass through at some point in their lives even if only by accident, at least as long as they don’t eat their feelings. Being tricked into thinking that acting like a grrlboss is acting like a woman might make a woman insufferable, but it won’t necessarily make her unattractive. At least from a distance, on the outside. That only goes so far, however. Enough bad advice, enough bad life decisions, and a woman’s soul can become so scarred that she becomes every bit the plastic parody of feminity that a tranny or a weeb’s conception of a wheat-field tradwife is. Still, there’s a certain limit to how much damage bad advice can do. Plenty of lib women are actually quite pleasant.
There’s an exact symmetry with the collapse in masculinity, but it’s much worse. As the old saying has it, women are born, men are made. The distinction isn’t as pure as that, but there’s an essential truth to it. Even in the absence of good guidance, and saturated with terrible advice, a lot of females will sort of muddle through and figure out more or less how to become a woman through sheer instinct if nothing else. Males need to be shown the way towards becoming men. They need to be molded and tested by other men. They need to be torn down and built up, terrorized and encouraged, bullied and bantzed. All of that requires pre-existing social infrastructure. All those male bonding instincts that enable men to operate within male competence and dominance hierarchies are like the built-in ability of a baby to learn language. If the language isn’t there, Broca’s area shrivels and the ability to learn any language is permanently lost; if the social technology to turn boys into men is absent, the boy cannot mature into a man, but remains a boy forever. Deprived of the hunting party, he walks naked in the jungle, not sure how to hunt, or what to hunt, perhaps unaware that he’s hunting at all, but with only the vague idea that he should be doing … something … whatever that is.
Over the last generation or so all those social technologies for turning boys into men were systematically corrupted and destroyed. This was done primarily by demanding the entry of females into male spaces, since the presence of even a single girl immediately changes male social dynamics. The normalization of homosexuality played a role, too, via the hermeneutics of gay suspicion. While legal force can’t be used to prise open informal male groups for female entryists, the implication that hanging out exclusively with other guys in environments with zero females is kinda gay, isn’t it? – a camping trip with your bros, for example, instead of meeting at the bar – serves as an effective deterrent to any exclusively male socialization. While it’s considered poor manners to admit it, straight men are instinctively revolted by homosexuality, and will push back desperately at any implication that they might be engaging in homoerotic behaviour5. A society that leers suggestively at any male-exclusive group inhibits the formation of such groups.
No-fault divorce, the destruction of marriage, and the legal preference to award custody to the female has also led to a large number of boys being raised exclusively by their mothers. They then attend schools in which the teachers are largely female – almost exclusively so, in elementary school. The tendency is to treat them like defective girls. “Can’t pay attention? Take your meth pills6! Rough-housing in the hallway? Suspension7!” What men they do run into, maybe with the exception of the coach if they’re lucky enough to be athletically gifted and inclined, are apologetic and henpecked, and certainly don’t stick up for them. University is no different. By the time they reach physical maturity, many young males have had no actual men in their lives to show them how to be men, they’ve been relentlessly punished by women whenever their male instincts broke through the social conditioning, and they’ve never experienced deep male bonding in the context of an all-male social environment. This isn’t new – as Tyler Durden8 pointed out over two decades ago, they’re ‘a generation of men raised by women.’ Now that’s two generations and counting.
The leftist response to the miserable crisis created by sexual depolarization, and yes, it is making everyone miserable, is to claim that there’s no such thing as masculinity or femininity in any case, that gender stereotypes are limiting straightjackets, and that we’re better off now that we’ve evolved beyond them. Everyone just needs to be their own authentic selves and not worry about living up to some false ideal … better yet, they should subvert those ‘ideals’, challenge them, reject them, because after all those old patriarchal ways are suffused with misogyny. It’s toxic masculinity, by which they mean anything that would have been recognized as masculine by any healthy human culture in history before the present moment.
The rightist response is to say fuck you to the culture that let them down like this, and to start trying to cobble together the lost man-making social engines from scratch out of the wreckage of the dead civilization in whose ruins most haven’t yet even realized we all inhabit. This is the only possible correct response, but it’s not without its difficulties, chief among which is that when you don’t know what being a man even is, it isn’t obvious where to start or who to turn to.
Being the cyborg era, we turn to the Internet – the hall of shadows where simulacra thrive, where discerning the image from the real becomes more challenging than it ever has before. And there are plenty of grifters out there willing to take your money in order to teach you how to be a man.
The grifter everyone’s talking about right now is Andrew Taint, the flashy e-pimp who claims to have become a billionaire thanks to crypto scams and his stable of emotionally damaged cam-whores.
I was going to ignore the guy, until it got personal. Recently I was relaxing in my favoured local watering hole when a three-sheets-to-the-wind and probably stoned Brazilian dude and his equally intoxicated lady friend sat down beside me and told me I looked like Taint (because we’re both bald dudes with facial hair? I dunno I don’t see it), whom he apparently greatly admired. Later they tried to recruit me for a threesome. So that’s the kind of guy the Taints of this world appeal to, it seems, and having been compared to him for some fucking reason pissed me off.
I’m not gonna claim to know a lot about Taint because I’ve never been interested. I find his kind tedious. He’s a high profile example of a certain type, the male equivalent of the Instagram ho, projecting an image of success and danger intended to appeal to the male caricature of the female concept of what makes men sexually appealing. Women find powerful, wealthy, confident guys sexy, men instinctively know this, so Taint’s grift is to project this image, pretend he is this, and then sell his real product to his real audience: boys who want to be just like that, because they have no idea what being a man even is and the image Taint projects looks great to them, and will therefore give Taint money to teach them how to be something Taint t’aint. To use the lost boy hunter analogy, Taint is the guy who shows up in the forest promising to teach the kid how to hunt, not telling him that the prey he intends to hunt is that lost kid.
Taint’s arrest on sex trafficking charges has been an absolute bonanza for the left, spawning awful takes like this by midwit male feminists who got their understanding of the ‘red pill’ (a term that hasn’t been used exclusively by the manosphere for years now, but anyhow) entirely through the insightless misunderstandings of leftist YouTubers who themselves are probably lacking any direct experience of what the manosphere actually is and what its participants’ discourse actually concerns. I feel a bit icky kicking Taint while he’s down and out in a Romanian holding cell but this is compensated for by the abundant ick provided by the greaseball himself. In any case, the emotionally incontinent freshman paper linked at the beginning of this paragraph seemed to operate under the assumption that every single PUA guru could be thrown into the same garbage bin as Taint. The author seemed completely unaware that Roosh, for example, pulled all of his books and blog posts from the Internet after converting to Orthodox Christianity and proselytizing celibacy to his followers.
As an aside, a close friend of mine woke up a few years ago and got it into his single-minded head that it was time to solve the Family Question. He picked up Roosh’s final (and no longer available, you rat bastard, Roosh) book Game, and applied the seduction tools therein. After a couple of false starts and less than a year he got hitched to a very high quality woman, and he is now happily married and the stressed-out father of two strong and beautiful children. I mention this to emphasize that Game 1) works and, 2) like any tool, contains exactly zero moral weight. You can use it to be a fuckboi the way most PUAs did back in the naughty oughties when they were developing their psychoemotional arsenal, and find yourself emotionally unfulfilled and unable to bond when the music stops and the party’s over; or you can use it to get married and start a family. Time was you learned everything you needed to do that from your Dad, but these are not those times. Our fathers failed us, and we do the best we can do.
Anyhow, back to Taint.
Some on the right have tried to defend his dubious honour, which has resulted in some funny moments, such as Darren Beatie trying to claim Taint is the embodiment of the bronze age mindset, only to get slapped down by BAP not just once but twice because a skeezy cam-pimp just ain’t it. A former beauty queen enlisting the Taliban9 to come to Taint’s aid and save America from the rainbow people got a chuckle out of me, too.
By and large, though, it seems to me that Taint elicits just as much distaste on the right as he does on the left.
Smarter takes on the Taint debacle are, as one might reasonably expect, to be found in relative abundance on our side of the ideological fence. Substack’s resident ponerologist
tried to figure out what in the heck Taint means by the Matrix, which as Syrian Girl explained on Twitter is apparently traffic laws. Koehli points out, correctly, that Taint shows all the hallmarks of a dark triad demon who, precisely because of his narcissistic lack of concern for others and psychopathic disdain for social mores, is able to say and do whatever he wants, flouting the rules that tie the rest of us down like Gulliver in Lilliput. To quote Tyler Durden again, he’s free in all the ways that you are not, and for young guys who are acutely conscious of the cramped cage of punitive norms and hostile laws into which they were born, it’s like they’re budgies with clipped wings watching a vulture soaring free on the thermals10.
Dancemaster
also wrote a solid piece on Taint Modern. I refer to Rollins as a dancemaster because the Dance is his characteristically brilliant reframing of Game. Frame can make all the difference, and understanding the socioemotional dynamics of seduction as a dance reconceptualizes it in a way that has real consequences. ‘Game’ implies a sort of Machiavellian, manipulative sociopathy in intersexual relations that always made me a bit uncomfortable with actually applying it. ‘The Dance’, on the other hand, implies a cooperative, playful interaction. Thinking of the toolset one way or the other almost certainly affects how one is likely to apply it, and that matters if you don’t want to break people and hate yourself.
The important thing in Rollins’ piece isn’t ripping on Taint, though. It’s his introduction to the titular concept of this essay: Tonic Masculinity:
Leadership is Tonic Masculinity. Caring about men in your community, making sure they don’t spiral into depression, or addiction, or just loneliness, is also Tonic Masculinity. … Tonic Masculinity is using the right tool for the job, and the tools that I’ve found work best for the job of being a man, the real tools in the toolbox of masculinity (which is surprisingly heavy), are a combination of doing your duty and treating others with the respect they’re due. Those are the tools good men reach for most frequently, and they require a certain amount of practice and elbow grease to ingrain the habit of applying them.
I think this is a very useful term. Right now the culture has masculinity and toxic masculinity in its lexicon, and because it doesn’t really know what the first is, the second swallows it in the popular imagination, leaving males adrift in a Sargasso sea of impotent faggotry where they’re at the mercy of emotional parasites like Andrew Taint.
Adding Tonic Masculinity to our conceptual universe helps to draw out the distinction between good, bad, and evil. It provides something positive to associate with, rather than simply a negative with which to disassociate.
There’s an important theme uniting Rollins’ introductory remarks. Tonic Masculinity isn’t primarily concerned with women. It isn’t preoccupied with poon like PUAs, it isn’t defining itself against feminism like MRAs, and it isn’t some sort of Stockholm syndrome beta male white knight male feminist learned helplessness ally nonsense like the Good Men Project. Women are simply … absent from the discussion. They’re not in the room. They’re not allowed in the room.
To quote Durden a final time, if we are a generation raised by women, another woman is the last thing we need.
Luye Liangshan Zhonggong
The focus of Tonic Masculinity is on lifting men up, on making them strong, powerful, and virtuous, in the old renaissance era meaning of virtu – possessing in abundance those qualities which are worthy of admiration and praise. As Weapon-X Program escapee
I’m not going to pretend that Tonic Masculinity is some sort of a brilliant new discovery. Like everything else of value, it is something very old, something perennial, primal and instinctive. It isn’t a new rediscovery, either. If there’s one thread running through the disparate elements of the Dissident Right or the New Right or whatever we’re calling our thing this year, it’s bromotion. It’s spreading tips and tricks for getting jacked. It’s cajoling and bullying and encouraging one another to hit the gym. It’s offering a sympathetic ear and a kick in the ass as needed when your boy is feeling down. It’s cracking jokes over whiskey. It’s bromoting the shit out of every amazing meme, song, poast, or book our frens create. It’s mobbing comments sections and Twitter threads to mog enemies that insult the honour and intelligence of our buddies11.
It’s the open-ended silicon koryos that’s been self-organizing in the cultural voids left by the collapse of the Shriners into obscurity, the Boy Scouts into pedarst grrlpower bankrupcty, and the military into lesbian supremacist autogynophile idolatry.
I’m not going to try and give a comprehensive treatise on Tonic Masculinity, here. I hope we’ll be talking about it for some time, and more than talking, building out fraternal systems of mutual aid.
The one thing I want to emphasize, not because it’s an original thought but because I don’t see it said nearly often enough, is that Tonic Masculinity is goal oriented. Forming associations is important, but just getting together to fill out your beer guts while spectating sportsball is every bit as fake as sportsball and fully as gay as beer guts. Just getting together for its own sake isn’t enough, there needs to be a point, otherwise the male brain instinctively knows that it’s pointless and that seed of ennui is the devouring mother of despair. Furthermore, that goal has to matter. Getting together to build a teepee in the woods so you can pass a talking stick around and ‘be men together’ changes nothing in the world, it does nothing to advance your or your friends’ interests.
Male groups function best when they serve as vehicles for the direction of their members’ collective will to power. They need to be directed at making real, consequential changes in the world, in such a fashion as to directly improve both the members’ lives and the lives of those they care about. The nature of the goal is entirely irrelevant. Killing, skinning, and butchering a deer; defending the village from a cattle raid; capturing cattle and brides from the neighbouring village; developing an Urbit app; manufacturing a quadrotor sky-bike; making a movie; all these and more can do nicely. The key element is that the group is organized around a project, and the project is something that will raise the status of members by improving the lives of people in their community, ideally by bringing something new into those lives that they didn’t previously have access to. The whole self-improvement angle of Tonic Masculinity is a subset of goal-directed activities: you want your bros to be fit, strong, and sharp because that makes all of you fitter, stronger, and sharper, and thereby makes the goal, any goal, easier to achieve.
The strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
I started this piece off discussing the sexual depolarization arising from the loss of contact with the primal sexual archetypes, so I’ll finish on the same subject. The simple fact is, men can’t teach women how to be women. Women have to get their own shit together. The reverse is even more true. The only way we’re going to become men again is to teach ourselves how to do it, to lift one another up, to form into mannerbund mafias and reconquer the Earth. In the process of becoming real men, we become worthy of real women; that then inspires women to become their best selves; and those priceless jewels in turn inspire the men to cultivate virtue. All we can do is our part. The ladies have to do theirs. For both parties it’s an act of faith. Neither alone can rebuild the shattered archway of sexual polarity, but if we’re successful we can redeem the vicious spiral into a virtuous one.
Legacy media is being supported through the Federal government’s Department of Canadian Heritage and through tax breaks worth billions per year. New media outlets need to even the odds.
For an entire generation of Canadians, the future of media is already here. The content of old “legacy” media is dead or dying while the “new” media is thriving, even as the legacy attempts to muzzle and dismiss it.
Of course, the legacy has a bit of help to enable its continued existence.
The legacy is being supported through the Federal government’s Department of Canadian Heritage, a huge government bureaucracy officially tasked with initiatives that promote and support “Canadian identity and values, cultural development, and heritage,” but which also provides legacy media outlets with direct cash loans, grants and tax breaks worth billions of dollars annually.
But all this financial support limits the content the legacy media can provide. They need to retain the support of their major financier and are often encouraged to ignore all but officially sanctioned government talking points.
As noted in the November 30th, 2023 the Hub post, “Half of private Canadian journalism could now be government supported,” it’s estimated that roughly half the salary of a Canadian legacy media journalist earning $85,000 per year is now being defrayed by the federal government or through Google, which entered into an agreement with the Canadian government late last year to distribute Canadian legacy media content on its search engine.
That’s over $40,000 per year for each individual legacy media journalist. If anyone in the new media had access to that sort of money, they’d destroy most legacy outlets within the week.
Even the CBC.
But we don’t currently possess those resources and competing against legacy media without the supports provided by the Canadian government is challenging.
But it’s not impossible. Here’s a suggestion on how to proceed.
In exchange for your support, Freedom Forum’s paywalled offerings will focus on the “business” of the new media; how small, independent, cash strapped organizations can compete effectively against large, cash rich, but corrupt, bureaucratic and centrally controlled propaganda outlets.
We’ll focus on financing, distribution, social media and the legal issues faced by new media outlets. We’ll discuss stories and sources, plus compare techniques used by colleagues and competitors.
Sometimes we’ll discuss technology and how technology has always defined and influence information flow or compare the differences between journalism and advocacy.
New beginnings are fragile times and here we are again. A new year, a new cycle, has begun. The newly emerging seedling, newborn baby, relationship, new enterprise, all need care and nurturance to survive early days. Without tenderness, love and care, fragile things fail to thrive. Whether it is harsh environmental conditions, natural hazards, human neglect – the physical world is not a kind place to the newborn thing. The wise know this and take caution with fledglings.
We have just passed the first New Moon of 2024 – an apt signal to pause and consider the fragility of this time. The new year signals a new energy. It is at once full of promise and hope and at the same time, the feeling of potential chaos colours the picture. There is so much happening in our world, moment to moment, as the acceleration of our perception of time brings novelty and change thick and fast. We are in thrall as we contemplate the possibilities at this start of a 2024. Although the zodiacal new year doesn’t officially begin until March 21 (when the Sun moves to zero degrees Aries) the calendar as we know it has turned the page and the number 2024 ushers in a new frequency. What will you do with this frequency? We can not know if it will serve humankind well, or not. But what we can do is firm our intentions at this time to nurture ourselves and our loved ones; to handle with care the fragile shoots of this newness by taking time to slow down and act with full consciousness and deliberation. As the dismantling of our civilisation appears to be picking up pace, it is vital that we act to nourish our humanness, our human spirit. The forces intent on taking us down are not human (though their proxies may be), which gives them an advantage, but is also a great disadvantage. Their disadvantage is their empathy deletion and the spiritual void in which they exist means they have no cohesion. Love is the glue that holds us, as humanity, together. This is our strength and ultimately it is why and how we will prevail – even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
My offerings, by way of the Kosmic Medicine pages this year, will be broader than the astrologically focused ones of the past. The cosmic cycles and patterns are deeply meaningful and can be helpful in navigating the current emotional climate but the wisdom of the ages is vast and it is into this ocean I will dive. We have access to probably a tiny portion of the perennial wisdom, the ancient knowledge of the spiritual sages who have gone before us. Whilst our age is unique, the wise ones told us long ago that there is nothing new under the sun. History repeats. This paradox is intriguing and open to be mined for insight. I will endeavour to bow to, or perhaps acknowledge is a better word, the astrological energy signature of the time in which I prepare the Kosmic Medicine – in the hope that the Oracle speaks through the writing, as I scroll through the records of the wisdom keepers of the past.
Let us begin then, in the spirit of opening our hearts and minds to the bigger picture through the thoughts and words of those wiser than ourselves, who have gone before. As we prepare, let us pause to reflect on who we are, how far we have come and where we intuit our hearts want to take us in this year of 2024. You might write down your intentions for the year. You might simply feel the energy of change and, like the imaginal cells of mush inside the chrysalis, awaiting birth as a butterfly, stay still and quiet – not yet ready to launch yourself into the world and your new life. Not ready to move far. You will know when the time is right. This time is preparation. It is fragile. It is therefore important and has the potential to ground you more firmly into the soil of earthly life, in order to emerge when you are ready, all the stronger.
The Moon in Aquarius today, the first Aquarius Moon of the year, looks to Uranus (its ruler) for inspiration. Uranus, the awakener, the liberator, the channel to the higher divine mind, in earthy Taurus is moving retrograde (until the 27th) confirming the time of inward reflection is still with us. Do not therefore, push yourself to ‘get moving’. Heed this call to pause and nurture yourself. This is a beautiful time to attend to your body, perhaps a fast or detox after the indulgences of the holiday season. We would all benefit, at this time, by firming intentions around our physical well-being for the coming year. Immerse yourself in nature, walk barefoot on the earth, drink herb teas and eat vital plants, root vegetables (particularly if you are in the northern hemisphere). Listen to your body, listen to the wisdom and intelligence of this miraculous vehicle you walk around in. Be in your body. Be in your sensory experience of this world. This is the perfect time to engage your perceptual experience of being in your body, by observing its sensations, its fluctuations. Your body is a moving energetic sea of chemical actions and reactions that enable your perceptual apparatus to convert the external world into your internal one. Be in awe of this play of Shiva and Shakti, Consciousness and Power.
“Our sensory organs are meant to perceive the world. The sensory capacities of human ears were shaped by sounds of the world, our smell formed through long association with the delicate chemistries of plants, our touch by the nonlinear, multidimensional surfaces of the Earth, our sight by the images that constantly flow into our eyes. Human senses emerged from immersion within the world. They are part of Earth, an expression of communicative contact subtly refined and shaped through long association. They have their identity IN the world, and are meant to perceive the every-minute-of-every-day influx of sensory communications that flow into and through them.
Focusing on the continuous flow of sensory data coming from the world around us activates our sensing bodies as organs of perception, leaves the computer behind, and embeds us once again within the world in which our species was born.
So, allow yourself to sense once again. Allow your sensory perceptions to BE your thinking. SENSE instead of think. This is what the senses are meant to do.
It’s time to come to your senses.”
Stephen Harrod Buhner, ‘The Secret Teachings of Plants.’
Until next we meet…..
L.
Lover of words, writer, astrologer, philosopher, yogini, mother of 4, grandmother of 7, I have been on the Quest since the 70s – to know Truth. Grateful – with full consciousness to be here in this pivotal transition to a new way of being.
Compostable packaging company TIPA announced it will be providing packaging for edibles brand Wyldfor its products in the US and Canada beginning this year. Wyld introduced “Canada’s first compostable cannabis packaging” in 2021, with further compostable expansion in 2022.
Winnipeg Free Press did a write-up on Manitoba’s“controlled access” retail cannabis licence that allows cannabis to be sold in convenience stores. The author spoke with Kerri Michell of Farmer Jane, Omar Khan of High Tide, and a representative of the Liquor, Gaming, Cannabis Authority of Manitoba about industry concerns that such licences should be restricted to rural areas only.
Radio Canada took a look at some of the unique cannabis edibles in Quebec, speaking with François-Olivier Hébert, research associate at the neuroscience axis of the University of Montreal Hospital Center (CHUM); Alexandre Poulin, co-founder of Gayonica; Geneviève Giroux, vice-president of supply and marketing at the Société québécoise de cannabis (SWDC); and Serge Brochu, professor emeritus at the School of Criminology at the University of Montreal.
The Ontario Land Tribunal has provided a deadline of May 30, 2024, for cannabis producer Redecan to provide odour mitigation documents to the town of Pelham, where it operates a production facility, says the municipality’s former Cannabis Control Committee. The issue has been brewing for years in the community, with some outspoken residents frustrated by the smell of cannabis. Phoena (formerly CannTrust) was previously located in the community before closing its doors in 2023.
After five years with Canopy Growth, Les Serres and Steve Bertrand, originally Canadian greenhouse tomato growers, say they have pivoted away from cannabis and back into produce—this time radishes. They also converted their former cannabis drying room to grow mushrooms (oyster and lion’s mane).
Canopy Growth Corporation announced that it has entered into subscription agreements with certain institutional investors in a private placement offering of 8,158,510 units at a price per unit of US$4.29 for aggregate gross proceeds of approximately US$35 million.
Organigram announced the appointment of Karina Gehring to its Board of Directors. She is one of two directors (including Simon Ashton) designated by BT DE Investments Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of British American Tobacco (“BAT”), as nominees to Organigram’s board. The global tobacco giant has invested heavily in the New Brunswick cannabis producer.
The Supreme Court of Canadadismissed a BC man’s drug trafficking appeal relating to 101.5 pounds of cannabis found during a traffic stop, along with edibles, cannabis oil, and cash, despite the initial judge in the case ruling the search was unlawful.
A civil forfeiture case in British Columbia involving a couple that Vancouver Police say are connected to a large cannabis oil extraction lab and a cannabis grow operation is raising questions about the province’s civil forfeiture process and police procedures. The case can be read here.
We are asking for help for Michael Gibbons, whose spiritual shamanic name is Quiet Bear. Quiet Bear has been in service to humanity and Mother Earth all of his life. By the time he was eighteen, he had saved four lives, served as a volunteer Fireman, worked in Law Enforcement, and served his country in the United States Air Force. Spiritually, he continued such work until 1989, when he became a shaman after seven intense years of formal study, and is proud to live under the teachings of the Twisted Hair Elders (https://newagora.ca/the-bear-truth/). In the course of all this work, he has experienced four near-death experiences, and each time was sent back by God, to complete work he has been asked to do.
On 12/16/23 he experienced his fourth near-death experience. He was rushed to the hospital with fluid around his heart and in his lungs, his kidneys and liver failing. Against all odds, Quiet Bear has made a miraculous recovery, leaving his team of doctors and nurses stunned. He is now known around the hospital as “The Bear” due to his amazingly fast healing and the sheer strength he has shown in the face of death, as well as a reference to his shamanic name. During this fourth time Jesus Christ communicated with him, and asked him to return, to continue his important work. While in the hospital for his 20-day stay, he also underwent a 12-hour surgery to save his leg and underwent the amputation of his great and second toes.
During his time in the hospital, he and his wife, Marcela were evicted from their present rental due to inconveniences claimed by the landlady, that she claimed to be caused by all of these extenuating circumstances. QuietBear is now in great need of financial assistance to help cover his medical bills, as well as the unexpected moving costs. Any assistance you can find it in your heart to give, will be both deeply appreciated as well as blessed, as it will support the important work he has been sent back to do for us all.
GrowerIQ, a cannabis technology company, announced this week that it had completed its successful acquisition of Ample Organics, a pioneering force in Canadian cannabis technology.
The acquisition was finalized in December 2023 and signifies a major expansion in GrowerIQ’s footprint within Canada and on the international stage, introducing exciting technological options to the portfolio available to licensed cannabis producers worldwide.
This significant all-cash acquisition positions GrowerIQ as the market leader in Canada and Europe, boasting the largest market share in the sector, says GrowerIQ in a press release. The company is pleased to confirm that all members of Ample Organics’ team have joined GrowerIQ, further enhancing the combined entity’s capabilities.
John Prentice, the former Founder of Ample Organics, expressed his enthusiasm about the acquisition, stating, “This marks another significant milestone for Ample Organics. Joining forces with GrowerIQ opens up new opportunities for innovation and growth for the company within the cannabis technology landscape. The combined expertise and resources of both teams will undoubtedly create brilliant solutions for licensed cannabis producers globally.”
Andrew Wilson, Founder of GrowerIQ, shared his vision for the combined entity, stating, “The acquisition of Ample Organics is a strategic move that aligns with our mission to provide the most effective management solutions for our incredible producers around the world. We are excited to welcome the talented team from Ample Organics and look forward to our journey together.”
About Ample Organics:
Founded in 2014, Ample Organics is a pioneer in the cannabis technology ecosystem. The technology platform makes compliance easy by tracking individual plants from seed to consumer and reporting every detail of the growth, production, and sales processes. The software continues to be a trusted solution for cannabis producers, manufacturers, distributors, physicians, clinics, laboratories, retailers, and educators. For more information, visit www.AmpleOrganics.com.
About GrowerIQ:
GrowerIQ is the operational backbone ERP that unites the fragmented systems required by cannabis production facilities around the world. The company now powers facilities in more than a dozen countries and four languages, enabling true seed-to-sale traceability. For more information, visit www.GrowerIQ.com.
Thailand’s recent political shift has set the stage for the introduction of fresh marijuana legislation, marking a major turnaround only 18 months after the nation took steps toward decriminalizing the substance.
The initial lenient regulations sparked a flourishing marijuana industry, serving both locals and tourists across southeast Asia. However, the conservative coalition government, which assumed power late last year, has pledged to enforce stricter rules, restricting marijuana usage solely to medical purposes.
Last week, the nation’s health ministry unveiled a draft measure outlining severe penalties, including high fines and potential one-year prison sentences for violators. The proposed legislation expressly limits marijuana and related products to medical applications. This aligns with Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin’s commitment in September to change marijuana regulations within the first six months in office, reinforcing the government’s focus on medical use exclusively.
Although public cannabis consumption has always been illegal, the impending laws go further by prohibiting marketing and advertising campaigns for all marijuana products. An earlier version of the bill faced parliamentary rejection in November, but the current government remains steadfast in its determination to regulate recreational marijuana.
Thavisin has consistently emphasized the severity of the drug-abuse issue in Thailand through various media platforms. The proposed legislation represents a stark departure from the June 2022 milestone when Thailand became the first Asian country to fully decriminalize marijuana, a historic move in a region where severe penalties, including death sentences, are common for marijuana-related offenses.
While medical cannabis gained legal status in Thailand in 2018, full decriminalization allowed for the cultivation, trade and use of hemp and cannabis products without criminal repercussions. The subsequent proliferation of marijuana-related businesses, including cafes, dispensaries and hemp spas, attracted considerable attention, turning cities such as Bangkok and Chiang Mai into hot spots for weed festivals and tourist attractions.
Former health minister Anutin Charnvirakul stated in a CNN interview that the intent of original legislation was never to endorse public recreational marijuana use, emphasizing the promotion of marijuana for medical purposes.
Despite protests from prolegislation advocates, including the Future Marijuana Network, the government appears resolute in its decision to pivot away from the previously permissive stance on marijuana. Kitty Chopaka, a marijuana entrepreneur and advocate based in Bangkok, labeled the government’s move an unexpected response, expressing disappointment while highlighting that the momentum for marijuana as a narcotic has irreversibly shifted.
The ongoing debate underscores the complexities surrounding marijuana regulation in Thailand, impacting various stakeholders from farmers and small business owners to advocates emphasizing the importance of public involvement.
This policy reversal in Thailand could come as a disappointment to entities such as Tilray Brands Inc. (NASDAQ: TLRY) (TSX: TLRY) that had hoped for more international markets opening up on the Asian continent and elsewhere.
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Integrity: “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness: the state of being whole and undivided.” When we read this definition, the opening quote rings true. We can feign it all we want. However, when we contemplate our authenticity, it is as foreign to us as our soul. We have an excess of bias, concepts, filters, interpretations, judgements, perspectives and programming. So many perceptual preoccupations that manufacture our personal delusion. We cannot see reality, nor truth for that matter. Instead, we stumble around in the darkness of our individual oblivion. We are enslaved by the stimuli of society; trapped in infinite, vicious cycles until our inevitable demise.
The Tail of the Coyote
The coyote is a trickster who revels at pulling pranks on others. Occasionally, he will chase his own tail and bite it. Momentarily, it shocks him, then he attempts to solve the enigma of this abuse. Eventually he realizes that it was indeed him that bit his own tail. In time, the coyote chases his tail until he bites it again. This happens over and over. Until nature intervenes and interrupts his hysteria. This is us! We are the tail, and our ego is the coyote. Although this by no means is a flattering fable, it is a true portrayal of humanity. There is only one difference between the coyote and us: we have severed our connection with the natural world. We neglect to exercise oversight and free ourselves from the patterns of our egocentricity.
Cheaters and Lest
Instead of learning lessons from our setbacks and revealing insights to shift into a new way of being, we often strategize for an angle, looking up the answers instead of establishing our own. We are socially conditioned for instant gratification. We call this “success,” then move onto the next achievement. Recently, a college football team in my area won a championship. However, a few weeks into the season, they were caught in an elaborate cheating scandal. The league levied multiple violations on the program. When I mentioned this fact to some of my friends who are fans, they dismissed it as “fake news.” I observed how strong their delusion was in defense of their team. This is the equivalent of Trump supporters insisting the 2020 Presidential Election was stolen.
The Power of Narrative
Alternative and mainstream media reports biased, agenda-driven opinions about current events. Our information sources are no longer factual, they are editorial. Narrative has been distorted by agendas to influence the ideologies and perceptions of society. To whichever side we may gravitate: Democrat/Republican, Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Palestine, religious/spiritual, vaccinated/unvaccinated or this team/that team, we are pawns upon a global chessboard of control, power and profit. Believing our vote, faith, politics, vaccination status or sports fandom bears any social authority is our personal delusion, within the illusion we misinterpret as “reality.” The power of narrative deceives the world.
“Disingenuity is our social disease.”
The Cult of Society
Every day, we engage in social addictions via entertainment, media, politics, religion, sports and otherwise. When we sacrifice our conscience, empathy, intelligence, morality, relativity and understanding for superficial fellowship, we subscribe to the cult of society. Corporations, entities and organizations broadcast ideology, indoctrination, rhetoric and propaganda. They proliferate synthetic information, intelligence, faith, health, spirituality, success and wealth, all within the social conformity of a congregational environment. Those who pander a “one truth for all” program are simply pyramid schemes exploiting popular belief as a cover for their cult.
Badge of Honor
Through our personal and social institutionalization, we are conditioned to sacrifice our dignity upon society’s altar of ego. We desensitize ourselves from the horrific realism in which we are enslaved. It is a human standard to sever our relativity with our heart, soul and the universe, as we engage in and endure social reality. Our individual oblivion sustains the customized bubble in which we defend our ignorance, pride and prejudice. We justify ourselves with our repressed malevolence in the toxic environment of a violent, hierarchical society. Then we lionize and patriotize our inhumane behavior as our badge of honor, with our arrogance, entitlement and self-righteousness.
The Real World
In The Matrix, Morpheus reveals to Neo the illusion in which he was enslaved. He shows him the “real world,” a wasteland of destruction, where machines harvest energy from millions of humans encased in pods. We do not want to be introduced to the real world. We see, hear, feel and sense only what indulges our dependencies. What we most desire is the illusion. Quite literally, we are “living the dream.” Our denial is so paramount, we defend sinister corporations, entities, governments and organizations who control, enslave and manipulate us. The real world is consumption, disease, delusion, failure, pain, violence and war. For all the truth we could express, illusion is what we enable.
Wake Up!
Since adolescence, I had always felt as though there was something severely wrong with society. When I became aware of the smoke and mirror show that is “reality,” I was enraged. Over the last few decades, I have become more present to its deception. I learned how to transform my anger into creativity, and ultimately consciousness. I awakened from my daydream, clarified the nature of reality and became an expression of my truth. This transformation has taken longer than my institutional, personal and social programming. We have lived our whole lives in our delusion, within the illusion of society. Before we free ourselves from the simulation, we must wake up to the reality of our truth.
The Reality of Truth
There are over seven billion truths in the world. Our personal truth is meant for us alone to embody and express. We will never discover it in the congregational domains of amusement, education, media, politics, religion or science. These are all just social vortices that divert us from our destiny. The greatest truth we will ever experience is our soul. It is our relativity with the universe. Our prosaic personality is the blasphemy of our universal being. When we delude ourselves into seeking our truth in reality, we exile ourselves from universality. It is a unique path we must pioneer with consciousness, creativity, purpose, transformation, will and understanding. The reality of our truth transcends our triviality.
The Blind Spot of Oblivion
Oblivion to our soul abolishes our energetic flow with the universe. Social manipulation is the watermark of our progression. Evolution does not exist in society. Only the simulated procession of time that passes as maturity beneath the gravity of age. The artificiality of our social reality is the bane of our existence. It consumes our consciousness with the singular purpose of soul extinction. We are overwhelmed with social stimuli, which enslaves us with our own anxiety, disease, fear, insecurity, pain and trauma. We adopt our victimization by investing in an illusion, and engaging in a society that distorts, exploits and extracts our energy. Our personal delusion is the blind spot of our oblivion.
“Transcending our oblivion is the origin of our awakening.”
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