Road Trip: Las Vegas, Nevada

“Las Vegas” translated is “The Meadows,” once the last watering hole after the ice age’s glaciers melted, leaving the valley lush and green – forming pools of water that ultimately became Hoover Damn, and a point of interest in the now barren valley.

In the late 1930s Thomas Hull, owner of the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, had his eye on the desert, and built the first casino in downtown Las Vegas, opening the fancy western-themed “El Cortez Hotel” in 1941. At that time Vegas was a weekend getaway from Los Angles for rebel rousers – a place to drink, gamble and get a quickie divorce.

Sky Black overcomes his heroin addiction with cannabis, read his story!

A stick that is often used by policy makers to beat back calls to relax attitudes towards cannabis is that it is a ‘gateway’ drug. The argument goes that weed is just one step down a long and slippery slope that leads to a smorgasbord of harder drugs and puts the user at risk of falling victim to addiction. But, what if cannabis could be part of the solution as opposed to the perception that it is part of the problem? What if cannabis had a role, not as a gateway, but as an exit gate for harder drugs such as heroin?