Sheigla Murphy, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Studies at the Institute for Scientific Analysis in San Francisco, will share preliminary findings of interviews with 50 of the city’s marijuana consumers. Murphy’s data are part of a broader National Institutes of Health research project.
A medical sociologist, Murphy has been conducting research for more than 30 years of various types of illicit drug use, drug treatment and violence. She will share her analysis, “The Times are Changing: Preliminary Findings from a San Francisco Study of Baby Boomers and Marijuana Use,” on Tuesday, Feb. 4, at 5:30 p.m. in the Native American Forum (room 162) adjoining the university’s Behavioral and Social Sciences Building.
The speaker series will shift focus from the Bay Area to southern California with a presentation of “The Future of Medical Marijuana Regulation in Los Angeles County” by Nathan Donahoe, board member of the West Los Angeles Neighborhood Council and chair of its Medical Cannabis Committee. He will speak on Tuesday, Mar. 11 at 5:30 p.m. in the same location.
The HIIMR forums will conclude on Monday, Apr. 21, again the same time and location, with “Cannabinoid Medical Science and Political Ecology: Psychoactive Substances and Mental Distress,” to be hosted by Sunil Kumar Aggarwal, M.D., executive science director at the Seattle-based Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy. He will discuss the chronic pain management practiced by medical cannabis-using patients and the mental distress levels they experience as targets of drug law enforcement.
Aggarwal will shortly begin a clinical fellowship in Hospice and Palliative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. His research has been published in a wide range of medical and law-related scholarly journals.