2013 October

American middle and high school students seem increasingly taken with electronic cigarettes — and that alarms health officials who worry the devices will turn teenagers to regular cigarettes, according to a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report.

 

The battery-powered electronic devices are marketed as safer and more socially acceptable than regular cigarettes and come with “flavor cartridges” — cherry, chocolate and lime and coconut, to name a few — that could appeal to youngsters.

 

Teenagers’ use of the electronic devices — sometimes call e-cigs — in 2012 was about double what they reported in 2011.

 

About 10 percent of high school students reported they’d used the e-cigarettes in 2012 along with 3 percent of middle-schoolers.

 

The devices do not contain tobacco, so they are not regulated like traditional cigarettes and can be purchased by minors.

 

But health officials said they still deliver nicotine and other chemicals and can serve as the proverbial gateway to regular cigarettes and all of their known health hazards. They also say the devices have not been well studied, so there may be other health risks that are yet unknown.

 

“The increased use of e-cigarettes by teens is deeply troubling,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, in a statement. “Nicotine is a highly addictive drug. Many teens who start with e-cigarettes may be condemned to struggling with a lifelong addiction to nicotine and conventional cigarettes.”

 

Source: Erie Times-News, October 3,2013

As a nation, we are drinking much more than we used to, which is partly attributable to alcohol being cheaper and more available than ever. Many British teenagers get into the habit early, although recent trends suggest this situation is improving (alcohol consumption among teenagers is slightly lower than it was ten years ago).

Nonetheless, drinking alcohol during adolescence is not a good idea, because the younger you are when you have your first alcoholic drink, the more likely you are to develop problems later on in life. The same is true for cigarette smoking and the use of illicit drugs such as cannabis and cocaine.

Starting early carries greater risk. NatCen

 

Arrested development

Why are adolescents particularly vulnerable to addiction? A large part of the answer comes from our understanding of the neurobiology of brain development during adolescence. The brain does not reach maturity until fairly late in life, with new connections between brain cells being formed right up until people are in their mid-20s.

Importantly, the brain does not mature at a uniform rate. The more primitive regions of the brain, including the reward system and other areas of the subcortex such as those parts that process emotions, reach maturity relatively early (when people are in their early teens).

The prefrontal cortex is a late bloomer. National Institute of Health

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The more “advanced” parts of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, are not fully developed until much later. In behavioural terms this means adolescents are particularly sensitive to their emotions and to things that are novel and motivationally appealing, but they are relatively unable to control their behaviour and plan for the future.

Taking risks

My research suggests this can explain why some adolescents drink more than others: teenagers who were relatively poor at exerting self-control, or who took more risks on a computer test of risk-taking, were more likely to drink heavily in the future.

This creates perfect conditions for vulnerability to addiction during adolescence, because the motivational “pull” of alcohol and other drugs is very strong, whereas the ability to control behaviour is relatively weak. Many scientists think if adolescents do drink a lot, and if they do it frequently, then this might cause long-lasting changes in the way that the brain is organised, which can make it very difficult to stop drinking.

We certainly see changes in the brains of people with alcohol problems (compared to people without problems), but it can be difficult to work out if alcohol caused those brain changes, or if those people had slightly different brains before they started drinking, and these subtle differences may have led them to start drinking in the first place.

Starting early carries greater risk. NatCen

 

Addiction and behaviour

In principle, adolescent brains could be vulnerable to “behavioural” addictions as well as alcohol and drug addiction, for exactly the same reason. Very few behavioural addictions are officially recognised by psychiatrists and psychologists at the moment (gambling addiction is the only exception).

The Channel 4 documentary Porn on the Brain shown this week asked whether pornography is addictive, and if adolescents could be getting hooked. As shown in the programme, it certainly seems to be the case that a minority of adolescents who use pornography exhibit some of the characteristic features of addiction, such as feeling unable to control their use of porn, and loss of interest in other activities.

Their patterns of brain activity when viewing porn seem to be similar to those seen in people with alcohol and drug addictions when they look at pictures of alcohol and other drugs. It remains to be seen whether addiction to porn will eventually be recognised as a psychological disorder, but it is clear that it can create problems for some adolescents and young adults who use it.

What can be done? Although it’s obvious, parents should do what they can to prevent their children from experimenting with alcohol, smoking and other drugs for as long as possible. The same applies to other things that might eventually be considered “addictive”. School-based prevention programmes can also be successful, including a recent program that is tailored to different personality types and has shown some promise at reducing alcohol consumption in teenagers.

Source: www.theconversation.com  2nd Oct.2013

The article below was written in 2007 but has relevance to the issues in the USA now in 2013.

In Defense of the Drug War

Libertarians often attack the war on drugs as a waste of tax dollars and an infringement on personal liberties. That is misguided thinking that comes from trying to apply unworkable theoretical concepts in the real world.

For example, you often hear advocates of drug legalization say that we’re never going to win the war on drugs and that it would free up space in our prisons if we simply legalized drugs. While it’s true that we may not ever win the war against drugs — i.e. never entirely eradicate the use of illegal drugs — we’re not ever going to win the war against murder, robbery and rape either. But our moral code rejects each of them, so none — including drugs — can be legalized if we still adhere to that code.

If we legalized drugs, we’d be able to tax them and bring in more revenue for the state. But, how is that working out with alcohol and cigarettes? In 2004 and 2005, 39% of all traffic-related deaths was related to alcohol consumption and 36% of convicted offenders “had been drinking alcohol when they committed their conviction offense.” When it comes to cigarettes, adult smokers “die 14 years earlier than nonsmokers.” But, will we ever get rid of tobacco or alcohol? No, both products are too societally accepted for that and perhaps more importantly, the government makes enormous amounts of revenue from their sale. Do we really want to be sitting around 10 or 15 years from now saying, “Gee, we’d like to get rid of heroin, but how could we replace the revenue we make from taxing it at an exorbitant rate?”

Of course, the number of people using what are currently illegal drugs would skyrocket if they were legalized, so we’d see a new wave of drug-addled burglars if we “legalized it.” Now, maybe you think that’s not the case. Some people certainly argue that if illicit drugs were legalized, their usage would drop. However, the fact that drugs are illegal is certainly holding down their usage. Just look at what happened during prohibition. Per Ann Coulter in her book, “How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)“:

“Prohibition resulted in startling reductions in alcohol consumption (over 50 percent), cirrhosis of the liver (63 percent), admissions to mental health clinics for alcohol psychosis (60 percent), and arrests for drunk and disorderly conduct (50 percent).” — p.311

That’s what happened when alcohol was made illegal. However, on the other hand, if we make drugs legal, safer, easier to obtain, more societally accepted, and some people say even cheaper as well, there would almost have to be an enormous spike in usage.

Certainly that’s what happened in the Netherlands where “consumption of marijuana…nearly tripled from 15 to 44% among 18-20 year olds” after the drug was legalized.

But, some people may say, “so what if drug usage does explode? They’re not hurting anyone but themselves.” That might be true in a purely capitalistic society, but in the sort of welfare state that we have in this country, the rest of us would end up paying a significant share of the bills of people who don’t hold jobs or end up strung out in the

hospital without jobs — and that’s even if you forget about the thugs who’d end up robbing our houses to get things to pawn to buy more drugs. Even setting that aside, we make laws that prevent people from harming themselves all the time in our society. In many states there are helmet laws, laws that require us to wear seatbelts, laws against prostitution, and it’s even illegal to commit suicide. So banning harmful drugs is just par for the course.

And make no mistake about it, drugs do wreck a lot of lives. Of course, drugs aren’t the only things that wreck lives and not every person who does drugs ends up as a crackhead burglar or a dirty bum living in an alley. Heck, Barack Obama, a man some people would like to see as our next President has used cocaine — and doesn’t it seem like every few weeks we read about another celebrity who comes out of rehab and goes on to have a successful career?

Sure, that’s true. But, every person who plays Russian Roulette doesn’t end up with a bullet in his head either. Look at the flip side of the equation. How many homeless people are drug addicts? How many women have had crack babies? How many people are in jail today because they got high and committed a crime? How many lives have been wrecked in some form or fashion by drug use? There’s probably not a person reading this column who doesn’t know someone who has faced terrible consequences in his life because of drug use.

That’s why once, way back when William Bennett was the drug czar, he responded like so to a caller on the Larry King show who told him that he should “behead the damn drug dealers.”

“I mean what the caller suggests is morally plausible,” he said. “Legally, it’s difficult. But somebody selling drugs to a kid? Morally, I don’t have any problem with that at all.”

Bennett was right then, he’s right now, and my guess is that most parents, upon finding out that someone was peddling drugs to their kid, would agree with him. Since that’s the case, do we really want the federal government to take over the role of a pusher and get our kids hooked on drugs to make a profit? No, we don’t

Source:   www.eaglepub.com  Human Events 25.1.07

Filed under: Legal Sector,USA :

Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder that affects approximately 1% of the general population.1 The 12-month prevalence of substance use disorders (SUDs) among the general US population is approximately 12% for alcohol and 2% to 3% for illicit drugs.  It is interesting to note that nearly 50% of people with schizophrenia also suffer from a comorbid substance-related illness during their lifetime.  There are complex interactions between substance use and psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia.

Patients who receive a dual diagnosis—a psychiatric disorder and an SUD—are faced with serious challenges related to treatment and prognosis. Many clinicians focus solely on treating either the psychiatric illness or the SUD. This lack of integration of psychiatric and addiction treatment is a significant issue for dual-diagnosis patients; growing evidence suggests a poorer prognosis with nonintegrated treatment.

Psychiatric illness appears to be a vulnerability factor for substance abuse, and because substance abuse can lead to an exacerbation of psychiatric symptoms, there is a critical need to understand the factors that influence both the onset and duration of substance abuse and psychiatric illness, particularly how they interact to influence prognosis.

Conclusions 

Identifying reasons for comorbid drug addiction in schizophrenia has been difficult. Many theories have been proposed to try to explain the root cause of drug addiction in patients with schizophrenia, but no one theory has been put forth that encompasses all aspects of drug addiction in these patients. The SMH falls short by assuming that drug addiction in schizophrenia operates on a negative reinforcement model.   Nonetheless, it is clear that the prognosis for schizophrenia is much better when patients achieve drug abstinence, including in the domains of depression, quality of life, and community integration.

Clearly, more research on the interrelationships between substance use disorders and schizophrenia is needed to support or refute the SMH or the AVH—and to establish the sequence of onset of the comorbid disorders. In other words, which came first, the chicken or egg? The answer to this question may have important implications for how we assess and treat people with drug addiction and schizophrenia.

Source:  http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/schizophrenia/understanding-neurobiological-basis-drug-abuse-comorbidity-schizophrenia/page/0/3?GUID=8CCBBF2C-6541-4A09-A30A-3E72BFE8C975&rememberme=1&ts=01102013#sthash.VXFBioNs.dpuf   February 12, 2013

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (AP) — Three men making hash oil were critically injured in an explosion and fire, Santa Cruz police said Monday.

Fire crews responded to the blast at an apartment building in the city around 1:30 p.m. Sunday. The men — all Santa Cruz residents in their 20s — sustained life-threatening burns, police said.  They were taken to a San Francisco Bay Area trauma center, where they were in critical condition.  Efforts to extinguish the fire were hampered by additional explosions from butane canisters, police said. But crews were able to contain the blaze and minimize damage to surrounding structures.

Hash oil is a potent marijuana byproduct that is extracted with butane from parts of the plant that are often discarded. Without proper ventilation, butane vapors can build up and be easily ignited by an open flame or static electricity. Explosions involving hash oil production are not uncommon.

The primary blast area in Sunday’s explosion points to the water heater pilot light, police said. Sophia Tolson, who lives next door to the men, said she ran outside to see what was happening after hearing a “huge boom.” “I heard the boom and guys came out screaming,” she told “I saw one had his eyebrows missing, his shirt was melting. He looked at me and said, ‘Please call 911.’ ”

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Police-Santa-Cruz-blast-victims-making-hash-oil-4857743.php    30.09.2013

Filed under: Social Affairs,USA :

Drug tourism has always been a big issue, and a big business, in the Netherlands

That land of  “laissez-faire,” with its reputation as a haven of drug tolerance, is not only mired in internal political discord over a nationwide extension of the prohibition against “soft” drug sales to tourists but also facing serious border disputes around the development of “weed ghettos” in areas near its neighbors.

Currently, only the country’s southern provinces have implemented last year’s ban outlawing the sale of drugs to tourists by the infamous coffee shops and limited sales to government-issued “weed pass”-carrying locals.

But the law created conflict mainly with an active lobby of coffee shop owners who decided to openly defy the law, triggering month-long suspended jail sentences and fines during the summer.

The battle between coffee shop owners and Onno Hoes, mayor of Maastricht (the regional capital of the south) and a stalwart supporter of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, ended at the Supreme Court in The Hague, which last week invoked a Solomon-like compromise: Move the coffee shops from the city center to so-called “coffee corners” on the edge of town.

Three coffee shop owners agreed to relocate immediately to an industrial park near the Belgian border.

However, five nearby Belgian towns weren’t amused – and the mayor of one even threatened to close roads crossing the border due to “international risk.”

“I can make all the cars returning from Maastricht undergo checks,” he told local journalists.

The national law banning foreigners from buying weed at the legal coffee shops has been widely ignored in most of the country, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the two largest cities whose mayors refuse to comply with the central government’s decision.

The battle’s been most intense in Maastricht, where Hoes claims that the 1.6 million foreign “drugs tourists” visiting the city’s 13 licensed coffee shops every year created “an unacceptable nuisance” and brought filth, noise and crime to the city.

The coffee shop owners argue that the ban has devastated their business, damaged the local economy and led to an increase in illegal street dealing.

A Dutch News article comparing “police and city council figures“ reports that “the decision to ban foreigners not resident in the Netherlands from the country’s cannabis cafes has led to an ‘explosion’ in drug-related crime in the south of the country. The government’s decision to turn the cafes into “members’ only clubs” in the southern provinces last May led to a sharp rise in street dealing.

In Maastricht, at the forefront of efforts to reduce drug tourism, the number of drug crimes has doubled over the past year while in Roermond they are up three-fold with at least 60 active street dealers.”

According to other surveys recently published in the local Dutch press, two-thirds of the country’s 478 cannabis cafes continue to sell marijuana to tourists, creating a new and sharp north-south divide.

The ban appears to leave a loophole for a local, ‘tailor-made’ approach, permitting licensed coffee shops to continue selling small amounts of cannabis to any adult for personal use. And while possession is not legal, the police turn a blind eye to people with less than five grams.

Amsterdam’s mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, for example, has made clear that his city will not ban tourists from its 220 coffee shops because “the legislation makes it possible to take local circumstances into account.” The mayors of many other towns support and follow his position.

Although Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten declared his ministry is not yet planning to impose a deadline on city councils to implement the ban, he also warned that he will not tolerate mayors refusing to ban tourists from buying marijuana.

At least 10 of Netherlands’ local councils, among them some of the biggest cities like Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht and The Hague have called for regulated growing, arguing that legalized production would remove organized crime from the equation.

Minister Opstelten has already said he will not approve that plan either.

Source: 24th Sept.2013 http://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2013/09/24/weed-ghettos-for-tourists-anger-netherlands-neighbors/

Filed under: Economic,Europe :

Legalising heroin would cost the NHS and damage the UK

The siren call for drug legalisation sounds again.  This time it issues from Mike Barton, the Chief Constable of Durham.  The NHS should be used to supply addicts, Class A drugs should be legalised and drugs “prohibition” must be ended, he advises.  It is a solution loved by top police officers and is no doubt borne out of a sense of frustration at the apparent intractability of drug-infected gangland crime.

It seems so seductively simple.   Except it is not.   Mr Barton is at the coalface of a drugs policy regime that is paying a high price for its liberality.  It is a confusing place to be: officers are expected to give clean needles to the addicts they should be arresting.  Prohibitive it is not.  The UK citizen is more likely to be convicted for defaulting on his TV licence than for possessing and using illegal drugs.

Muddled thinking follows muddled practice.   Much as the Chief Constable would like it otherwise, an addict is no more likely to be transformed by being sent to the doctor for his daily fix than than a legal market would put his supplier out of business.

The system Mr Barton suggests is already in place.  The NHS spends £1 billion a year supplying the Class A synthetic opiate methadone to 150,000 addicts. Replacing methadone with heroin would put it up by several more billion.  Mr Barton might stomach this cost, but I doubt a British public waiting for hip, heart and cancer operations would.

Improved health and reduced crime outcomes are overestimated.    The “safe” (heroin is anything but safe) injecting sites integral to this policy — at least one for every market town and city centre — would not even sanitise the problem, let alone solve it.  That is the experience of countries that have tried it.

Vancouver’s InSite programme is far from living up to its promises to reduce the spread of HIV, get clients into treatment and off drugs, or cut deaths from overdosing.  It’s a policing problem in itself.  Here in this country addicts on expensive NHS-funded opiate-prescribing trials were given daily injections and intensive nurse supervision, but still stayed street-drug dependent and continued to commit crime.  That is the nature of addiction: addicts always want more.

The legal supply of heroin would no more undercut illicit demand than sate addicts’ desire.  It would encourage drug tourism, black-market dealing (by adding to the supply) and the gangland crime that Mr Barton want to escape .

Supply without sanction feeds demand, which in turn feeds rates of use and, inevitably, harm.

 

Kathy Gyngell is a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies

Source:  The Times  28th September 2013

Filed under: Legal Sector :

We all agree that teenage drinking is a problem that never seems to go away. Most of the concerns about teens and alcohol are centered around their safety, whether behind the wheel or out at a party. But what about the long-term problem of alcoholism?

Can teenage drinking lead to a lifetime of addiction?

Sure, we worry about our teens and underage drinking. But what impact can early drinking have on your teen’s future? Alcoholism can have a devastating effect on the lives of everyone it touches — and rob your child of dreams for the future. We wondered if teens who drink were more likely to struggle with alcoholism down the road.

Who’s drinking?

Nearly 26 percent of Americans aged 12 to 20 reported that they currently consume alcohol, according to a 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The rate of underage drinking increases with age within this range. In a study out of George Mason University, teens reported that it has become the norm for teens to get together for the sole purpose of drinking alcohol. Teens also said that drinking alcohol can be a way of dealing with stress. Obtaining alcohol is easy for teens, and they reported that they usually drink whatever alcohol is available.

Alcoholism, or alcohol abuse?

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), young people who start drinking before the age of 15 years are five times more likely to develop alcohol dependence or abuse later in life than those who do not begin drinking until they have reached legal drinking age (21 years old). What begins as alcohol abuse — binge drinking, for example — can turn into a dependency on alcohol (alcoholism) down the road. What constitutes alcohol abuse? The CDC describes alcohol abuse as an unhealthy pattern of drinking that results in harm to one’s health, interpersonal relationships or ability to work, including: * Failure to fulfill major responsibilities at work, school or home * Drinking in dangerous situations, such as drinking while driving * Legal problems related to alcohol, like physical altercations or drunk driving * Ongoing relationship problems that are caused or worsened by drinking Patterns of alcohol abuse can lead to a dependency on alcohol — also known as alcohol addiction or alcoholism — which is marked by strong cravings for alcohol, the inability to limit drinking and continuing to drink despite warnings and interpersonal problems. Teens who have abused alcohol for several years are potentially on the path of alcoholism.

What’s the problem?

Dr. Suzana Flores is a clinical psychologist in private practice who treats both adults and teens. “Alcohol and drug use is a common issue with teens, but in therapy I focus more on why they are choosing to drink to excess,” she says.  “People who start drinking heavily as teenagers will likely show signs of irresponsibility in relationships, finances and career.”

There is the usual peer pressure and following the crowd, or problems at home or with friends — and teens will often self-medicate with alcohol. Even if teens are drinking purely for recreational purposes, there will still be long-term emotional effects. “For example, when someone starts drinking heavily — let’s say around the age of 15 or so — and maintains this pattern of drinking over time, psychologically, they can remain ‘stuck’ at that maturity level for their entire lives,” she shares. “Their decision-making will likely be impulsive and without forethought. They can get into destructive relationships and live their life based on short-term wants without being able to think in terms of long-term consequences,” Dr. Flores says. “For this reason, people who start drinking heavily as teenagers will likely show signs of irresponsibility in relationships, finances and career,” she adds. The damage done by abusing alcohol at an early age is tough to reverse, and teens may be left with a bleak future unless they can break free from their addiction.

Talk — then talk some more

Some parents have difficulty with talking to their kids about the dangers of alcohol. Whether you are afraid your teenage past will come back to bite you, or you just don’t know what to say, it’s important that you keep a conversation going about alcohol — all through their teen years. A full 83 percent of youth surveyed reported that their parents are the leading influence in their decision not to drink alcohol. The good news is that parents are talking to their kids more than ever about underage drinking and the dangers it poses. Almost half of parents report they have spoken with their 10- to 18-year-old at least four times in the past year about the dangers of underage drinking. Teens and alcohol can be a dangerous combination — now, and over the long term. Keep talking to your teens, know their friends, monitor their activities and stay involved. Your involvement and support may be the most important influence in your teen’s life.

Source:  www.sheknows.com  27th September 2013

Filed under: Parents :

Ten years ago this week, Insite, North America’s first supervised drug injection site, opened at 139 East Hastings in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, thanks mainly to two men, Dr. Julio Montaner and Thomas Kerr of the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

It’s an amazing story. Since 2003, folks in Canada’s most drug-infested neighbourhood have been buying heroin, cocaine and crystal meth on the street, strolling into InSite and shooting-up under the watchful eye of government nurses. All in the name of harm reduction, a philosophy of addiction treatment through enablement. How’d they do it? Early last decade, Montaner and Kerr lobbied for an injection site. In 2003, the Chretien Liberals acquiesced, gave the greenlight to B.C.’s Ministry of Health, which, through Vancouver Coastal Health, gave nearly $1.5 million to the BC Centre (that’s Montaner and Kerr, you remember them) to evaluate a three-year injection site trial in Vancouver. Voila! InSite was born. If the three-year trial was successful, or in other words, if InSite’s chief lobbyists, who received $1.5 million from taxpayers to study its pros and cons, concluded that InSite was a good fit for Vancouver, the provincial government would consider funding it in perpetuity. Amazing. Through Freedom of Information legislation, I obtained a copy of the $1.5 million contract, which tasked the BC Centre to “evaluate the process, impacts and economic elements” of InSite and note “any adverse events that may occur.” Yet every study produced by the BC Centre since 2003 has cast InSite in a positive light. Every study. And the BC Centre is very protective of its conclusions. For example. In 2009, the BC Centre released a report summarizing 33 InSite studies, all co-authored by Thomas Kerr, all singing InSite’s praises. At that time, I interviewed Kerr who bristled at my questions, claiming that his researchers “passed the test of independent scientific peer review and got our work published in the best medical journals in the world, so we don’t feel like we need to be tried in the popular media.” I asked him about the potential conflict of interest (lobbyists conducting research) and he ended the interview with a warning. “If you took that one step further you’d be accusing me of scientific misconduct, which I would take great offense to. And any allegation of that has been generally met with a letter from my lawyer.” Was I being unfair? InSite is a radical experiment, new to North America and paid for by taxpayers. Kerr and company are obligated to explain their methods and defend their philosophy without issuing veiled threats of legal action.

In the media, Kerr frequently mentions the “peer review” status of his studies, implying that studies published in medical journals are unassailable. Rubbish. Journals often publish controversial studies to attract readers — publication does not necessarily equal endorsement. The InSite study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a favourite reference of InSite champions, appeared as a “letter to the editor” sandwiched between a letter about “crush injuries” in earthquakes and another on celiac disease. Yet Kerr thunders away like Moses. Where did he obtain this astonishing sense of entitlement? Two words: the media. The reportage on InSite by Vancouver’s print and broadcast media does not meet, by any definition, basic standards of professional journalism. It’s been shameful. When the BC Centre stages a press conference, it’s always the same formula. A handful of Kerr-authored studies and an obligatory recovering addict who owes his life to InSite. The reporters in attendance nod along and write or broadcast the same story with the same quotes and BC Centre statistics.  If a story involves an InSite skeptic such as Dr. Don Hedges, an addictions expert from New Westminster or David Berner, a drug treatment counsellor with more than 40 years of experience, it almost always includes a familiar narrative propagated by the BC Centre. InSite opponents are blinded by ideology; conservative moralists who care little about the poor and addicted. InSite proponents, on the other hand, are pure and unburdened, following the facts and relying on science. Really? What kind of “science” produces dozens of studies, within the realm of public health, a notoriously volatile research field, with positive outcomes 100 per cent of the time? Those results should raise the eyebrows of any first-year stats student. And who’s more likely to be swayed by personal bias? InSite opponents, questioning government-sanctioned hard drug abuse?  Or Montaner, Kerr and their handful of acolytes who’ve staked their careers on InSite’s survival?  From 2003 to 2011, the BC Centre received $2,610,000 from B.C. taxpayers to “study” InSite.  How much money have InSite critics received? There has never been an independent analysis of InSite, yet, if you base your knowledge on Vancouver media reports, the case is closed. InSite is a success and should be copied nationwide for the benefit of humanity. Tangential links to declining overdose rates are swallowed whole. Kerr’s claims of reduced “public disorder” in the neighbourhood go unchallenged, despite other mitigating factors such as police activity and community initiative. Journalists note Onsite, the so-called “treatment program” above the injection site, ignoring Onsite’s reputation among neighbourhood residents as a spit-shined flophouse of momentary sobriety. Where’s the curiosity? Where did these reporters learn their craft? The BC Centre won’t answer your questions? Then ask the politicians who, unlike Montaner and Kerr, operate inside the bounds of democratic accountability. If InSite works in the Downtown Eastside, Mayor Robertson, why not Dunbar, Mount Pleasant or West Point Grey? If, God forbid, you had a child who became addicted to drugs, Minister Lake, would you refer him to InSite? Premier Clark, your government funds InSite yet shuns many abstinence-based treatment programs. Why? And so on. For the record, my opposition to InSite is based on the countless conversations I’ve had

with Downtown Eastside residents over the past decade, as a journalist, volunteer and friend. In my judgement, public money is better spent on treatment and recovery facilities outside the neighbourhood, which is where the vast majority of addicts settle when they finally decide to quit using drugs. Ten years later, despite any lofty claims, for most addicts, InSite’s just another place to get high.

Source: www.drugpreventionnetworkofcanada.ca    19th Sept 2013

Filed under: Canada,Drug Specifics :

US students already burdened by these emotions reacted to shame or guilt-inducing anti-drink ads by intending to and actually drinking more, the opposite of what was intended. This intriguing series of studies may reinforce the feeling that the ways anti-substance use ads can backfire are so various, the safest option is not to try them.

Summary This series of US studies using university students as subjects explored how people already experiencing or prone to shame or guilt respond to anti-alcohol adverts which induce the same unpleasant emotion. Unlike other aversive emotions, shame and guilt involve a conscious and negative perception of oneself as being seen to violate social norms and one’s ideal self (shame), or having unacceptably caused harm to others (guilt). Especially if already feeling bad about oneself in these ways, people may guard against and resist information (eg. ‘That won’t happen to me’) which would otherwise aggravate these uncomfortable feelings. The result could be to negate and even reverse the intended impacts of adverts which arouse these emotions. A case in point might be ads warning that the consequences of one’s over-drinking may be witnessed by friends and family (shame-inducing) or cause them serious inconvenience or harm (guilt-inducing).

 

To investigate this theory, in a pilot study an ad from a public service responsible-drinking campaign was modified to convey either shame or guilt due to the impact on “those you love” of a drink-laced “Best night of my life” illustrations.

By random allocation, one or other ad or none were shown to 75 students, who then rated the degree to which they were feeling guilt or shame. As expected, the shame-inducing ad did lead to the greatest feelings of shame, while the guilt-inducing ad led to the greatest feelings of guilt.

Having established that the ads aroused the intended emotions, the researchers then investigated this effect’s impact on how students responded to the ads, in particular their intended or actual drinking.

Study 1 randomly allocated 478 students to describe in writing an episode during which they had experienced either extreme shame or extreme guilt, or to simply describe their typical day. Again ratings indicated that the intended emotions had been aroused. Then the students were asked to evaluate either the shame-inducing anti-drinking ad or the guilt-inducing version. After a break they then completed a survey of the “habits of college students” which included the question, “Compared to last year, how often do you plan to binge drink this year?” A similar question asked their views about the intentions of the average student.

Students primed by the first task to feel shame, and then shown an advert inducing the same emotion, planned to binge significantly more often than the other students, including shame-primed students shown a guilt-inducing ad. The pattern was the same for the guilt variants of the preceding task and the ad. In contrast when, the individual was no longer themselves ‘threatened’ by the question, the combination of shame-inducing task and ad led them to make the lowest estimate of how often other students would binge-drink.

In other words, it was not the ads’ induction of negative emotions as such which generated a counterproductive impact on drinking intentions, but the ‘piling on’ of the same unpleasant emotion previously aroused, and then only when the viewer’s own drinking was at issue. The process of defending themselves from yet further shame (or further guilt) seemed to lead the students to reject the ad’s message, so that compared to seeing another ad, they planned to drink more. The opposing impacts on their ratings of their own versus other students’ intentions proves they had not simply ‘switched off’ in response to the ads – they were switched on and processing the messages, but not as the ads’ developers might have wished.

Study 2 extended the findings of study 1 from intentions to actual drinking. It recruited 71 students and followed a similar procedure to study 1 – a shame- or guilt-arousing recall task followed by viewing the shame- or guilt-arousing ad. Then the students were asked to evaluate the ad, and after a break, told they would be sampling and rating a new alcoholic drink mixer, of which they could drink as much they wanted. Among other questions, they were then asked to rate how likely they would be to shame themselves (or for students assigned to the guilt-arousing task, do something they felt guilty about) after having had a couple of drinks at a party, an attempt to assess whether they really had been provoked by the ads in to being defensive about their drinking.

When a shame- or guilt-inducing ad followed a task intended to arouse the same emotion, students drank more than when task and ad had been intended to arouse different emotions. They also saw themselves as less likely to get in to a situation causing the same feelings after drinking at a party. It seemed that piling on the same negative emotion led them to deny the link between their drinking and possibly behaving in ways which cause shame or guilt, a defensive posture which led them to actually drink more than if these emotions had not been serially provoked.

Unlike the previous studies, study 3 used ads to prime shame or guilt, more like what might happen in real life. The first ads shown to 182 students were unrelated to alcohol, but explicitly sought to generate shame about cheating, or guilt about the environmental consequences of buying bottled water. A test confirmed the intended effects. Then they were shown one of the two anti-drinking ads, and after a break asked to rate the likelihood that during the next two weeks they would patronise a bar, or consume three or more drinks in one evening. Combining these answers created a single measure of drinking intentions.

As expected, when a shame-inducing anti-drink ad followed another shame-inducing ad, students expressed firmer intentions to go out and drink heavily, but not because they had ignored the anti-drink ad – in fact, they recalled the ad better than the other students. Moreover, even though they had serially been exposed to shame-inducing ads, these students felt less shame at the end than other students in the study (but not less guilt). Similarly for the guilt-inducing ads. This pattern was consistent with the students successfully resisting the alcohol ads’ attempts to generate yet more of the same uncomfortable emotion already generated by the preceding ad, and as a result also resisting its anti-drink message.

The assumption was that students exposed to the shame-inducing adverts ended up feeling less shame than before, and similarly with guilt – but with no pre-ad measures of shame and guilt, this was just an assumption which fit the evidence. Study 4 rectified this by replicating study 1 with another 64 students, but this time taking before-and-after measures of guilt and shame.

As before, first the students described a shame or guilt-inducing incident from their lives. This time they were then asked to rate their feelings of shame and guilt, measures repeated after they later watched one of the two anti-alcohol adverts. When the advert was intended to arouse the same emotion as the preceding task, the opposite happened – feelings of that emotion actually fell from before to after watching the ad, relative to watching one intended to arouse a different emotion. In contrast, students primed to feel shame did feel more guilt after seeing the guilt-inducing ad. When processed defensively by people already burdened by these emotions, it seemed that a message designed to induce shame or guilt actually reduced the intended emotion.

The preceding studies had ‘artificially’ induced feelings of guilt or shame before exposing students to the anti-alcohol ads. Study 5 instead investigated the effects of the ads on people naturally prone to feel either guilt or shame. A questionnaire was used to assess these propensities among 233 students, who after a break were then shown one of the two anti-alcohol adverts. As in study 1, they were then asked, “Compared to last year, how often do you plan to binge drink this year?” The results were similar to the other studies. Shame-prone students were more likely to plan to drink heavily more often if they had been shown the shame-inducing advert, but not the other. For guilt-prone students there was a corresponding finding.

The authors’ conclusions

In relation to ‘irresponsible’ drinking, these studies show that when emotions which entail an uncomfortable perception of oneself are further stimulated in ways which threaten to heighten this discomfort, viewers tend to convince themselves that the message does not apply to them (‘defensive’ processing), leaving them freer to do what the message warned against than if it had never been received. In particular, shame-laden consumers exposed to messages which asserted that drinking might lead to additional shame-inducing situations, believed that their own drinking would not lead to those consequences, and similarly for guilt. In contrast, when there was no threat to the self and the viewer was asked to think about the behaviour of others, the warnings had the intended impacts.

The findings also suggests that people ‘repair’ negative mood states not in general but in relation to the specific mood they are experiencing; shame-laden consumers resist messages that might lead to greater shame, but are open to messages that lead to guilt, and vice versa.

In some of the studies effects were not large, but much larger in study 2 which assessed actual drinking, suggesting that guarding against the ‘piling up’ of negative emotions might strongly influence health-related behaviour.

Public service health promotion messages often highlight how friends or others might see you if you behave in the way the ad is seeking to deter. In relation to binge drinking, commonly ads arouse concern over ‘making a fool of oneself’ or ‘losing control and doing something bad’. Commonly these ads also highlight emotions which play on these concerns (eg, ‘Avoid the shame and embarrassment of a drunk-driving arrest’) and the consequences of one’s actions on others (eg, ‘Think about those you may harm if you cause an accident while driving drunk’).

The featured research suggests that emotional appeals such as these playing on guilt or shame should be used cautiously, and that attention should be paid to the broader milieu within which the ad will be embedded. For instance, a guilt-inducing message may not be optimal if inserted in a guilt-ridden television drama. However, such appeals may work as intended if the viewer is directed to the behaviour of others rather than themselves, as for example in the popular public service message, ‘Friends don’t let friends drive drunk’.

This intriguing series of studies might well reinforce a feeling that the ways anti-substance use campaigns can backfire are so various, the safest option is not to mount them. Describing the implications of the findings, one of the featured article’s authors warned that “public health and marketing communities expend considerable effort and capital on [anti- or ‘responsible’ drinking] campaigns but have long suspected they were less effective than hoped. But the situation is worse than wasted money or effort. These ads ultimately may do more harm than good because they have the potential to spur more of the behaviour they’re trying to prevent.”

It can happen, he said, because “Advertisements are capable of bringing forth feelings so unpleasant that we’re compelled to eliminate them by whatever means possible. This motivation is sufficiently strong to convince us we’re immune to certain risks.” The implication for health promoters was that “If you’re going to communicate a frightening scenario, temper it with the idea that it’s avoidable. It’s best to use the carrot along with the stick.”

The mechanism the authors propose for this effect is distinct from the ‘reactance’ thought partly to underlie counterproductive reactions to the anti-drug messages of the US National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. Seeing these ads, some young viewers may have resented being (as they saw it) ‘told what to do’, and reacted by moving in the opposite direction. Another way these ads may have backfired is by implying that drug use was so common and so hard to resist that the government had to warn young people about it. Ads which contradict personal experience may also be counter-productively discounted by viewers. Yet another mechanism is that ads can generate discussion between young people, which may be dominated by the more voluble risk-takers among them who tend to favour substance use. Another proposed mechanism is that ads which generate too much emotion lead recipients to ‘shut down’ and simply not process the message. One way to avoid these reactions is to end on a more positive note after presenting a warning, relieving the negative emotion and defusing defensiveness – found in a Spanish study to lead students to say they were less likely to drink excessively than a totally negative anti-drinking message or no message at all.

For the authors of the featured article, none of these explanation account for their findings. Instead they deduce that the students did pay attention to and process the messages of the two anti-alcohol ads, but in such a way as to defensively divorce themselves (if not others) from the risks portrayed. If this, as they persuasively argue, was the case, it may however have been due to the situation. The students had ‘signed up’ (sometimes in return for course credits) to participate in a study which involved assessing the ads; they may not have considered themselves at liberty not to ‘process’ them – that the situation and their obligations demanded they do not simply ignore them. To avoid further unpleasant emotions, perhaps they were left with little option but the ‘defensive processing’ hypothesised by the researchers. In real-life situations, viewers normally can simply turn over the page, look the other way, or stop paying attention to the TV, reactions which might neutralise the ad’s messages but not lead to counter-productive reactions.

All the studies involved young people in the USA, who below the age of 21 are not permitted to legally buy alcohol and usually also forbidden to drink. All too were students, a group newly liberated from parental control and known to in some quarters value excessive drinking. Rather bluntly, in some of the studies they were asked “Compared to last year, how often do you plan to binge drink this year?” Their reactions to the ads and to this loaded question may not transfer to other sub-populations in the USA or to students in the UK.

Another limitation is that only the pilot study compared the ads to no ad at all; in all the others, students were allocated to see one or other of the two anti-alcohol ads. None of the studies tell us whether, compared to no ad at all, the ads led students to intend to drink excessively or actually do so. All we know is that in certain circumstances, seeing one ad was counterproductive vis-à-vis seeing the other; it may nevertheless have been better (or at least, no worse) than no health promotion at all.

Also, both adverts look amateur and seem to give not very persuasively framed messages, the content of which may easily be discounted. Better expressed and produced ads may have lent themselves less easily to ‘defensive processing’, and produced a different reaction.

However, the general ineffectiveness of anti-drinking advertising campaigns suggest that the featured studies’ results are not merely due to context or ad quality. When experts assessed the full panoply of strategies to prevent or minimise alcohol-related harm, they could find no media campaign strategies to recommend: “Media campaigns prepared by government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that address responsible drinking, the hazards of drink-driving and related topics are an ineffective antidote to the high-quality pro-drinking messages that appear much more frequently as paid advertisements in the mass media”. In respect of illegal drugs too, in controlled studies anti-drug adverts have if anything bolstered intentions to use these substances.

Source:  Agrawal N., Duhachek A.  Journal of Marketing Research: 2010, 47(2), p. 263–273. Last revised 26 September 2013. 

Abstract

As cannabis use is more frequent in patients with psychosis than in the general population and is known to be a risk factor for psychosis, the question arises whether cannabis contributes to recently detected brain volume reductions in schizophrenic psychoses. This study is the first to investigate how cannabis use is related to the cingulum volume, a brain region involved in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia, in a sample of both at-risk mental state (ARMS) and first episode psychosis (FEP) subjects. A cross-sectional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study of manually traced cingulum in 23 FEP and 37 ARMS subjects was performed. Cannabis use was assessed with the Basel Interview for Psychosis. By using repeated measures analyses of covariance, we investigated whether current cannabis use is associated with the cingulum volume, correcting for age, gender, alcohol consumption, whole brain volume and antipsychotic medication. There was a significant three-way interaction between region (anterior/posterior cingulum), hemisphere (left/right cingulum) and cannabis use (yes/no). Post-hoc analyses revealed that this was due to a significant negative effect of cannabis use on the volume of the posterior cingulum which was independent of the hemisphere and diagnostic group and all other covariates we controlled for. In the anterior cingulum, we found a significant negative effect only for the left hemisphere, which was again independent of the diagnostic group. Overall, we found negative associations of current cannabis use with grey matter volume of the cingulate cortex, a region rich in cannabinoid CB1 receptors. As this finding has not been consistently found in healthy controls, it might suggest that both ARMS and FEP subjects are particularly sensitive to exogenous activation of these receptors.

University of Basel Psychiatric Clinics, Center for Gender Research and Early Detection, c/o University Hospital Basel, Petersgraben 4, CH-4031 Basel, Switzerland.

Source:  Psychiatry Res. 2013 Sep 17. pii: S0925-4927(13)00178-9. doi: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2013.06.006.   ncbi.nlm.gov/pubmed/24054

Whether it is used for medical reasons or recreational “highs,” marijuana has become more than a controversial topic.  Arguments for medical use and legalization press forward like an unstoppable force.  Each day, proponents of marijuana reform seem to win another battle.

But as a parent and youth drug abuse prevention specialist, I wonder how these social changes in the acceptance of marijuana will affect our children’s future.

Our generation likes to take credit for drug use because we grew up in the tumultuous 1960’s and 1970’s, though drugs have been used for thousands of years.  The children of the 60’s are now adults pushing for a revolution of the legal status of cannabis.

But there is a very big difference between the marijuana of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, and the marijuana of our children’s generation.  Technological advances allow cannabis plants to be cultivated with much higher concentrations of psychotropic components.  In other words, the street pot of today has an average of 8-13% THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol which causes the “high”) as compared to 0.5-2% THC in the 1970’s.  Some of today’s more expensive strains are created with THC levels in excess of 30%.

No one really knows how this super-pot will affect our children as they grow into adulthood.  We can+not fairly compare the effect of old 1960’s pot on our generation to today’s super-pot on this new generation. Scientists and medical professionals need time to study the long term effects of exposure to high THC levels on the developing adolescent brain.

Longitudinal studies have indicated that teen exposure to low-THC marijuana increases risk of dependency, depression, anxiety, attention deficit, impaired learning, and defective memory. One such 30-year study published this spring showed that I.Q. drops an average of 8 points if a person begins using marijuana before the age of 18 and continues using marijuana to age 38.  There was less I.Q. loss in the group of people who stopped using marijuana in adulthood.  But the least I.Q. loss was in the group of people who did not start using marijuana until after the age of 18.  This data indicates that adolescence is a vulnerable time for marijuana use.

So now we need data on the adolescent brain with today’s high potency marijuana. Well, there is a social experiment going on right now to study the effect of marijuana on today’s adolescent brains.  It is the medical marijuana and legalization reform movement that is going on across this country.  More teenagers will be using marijuana due to loosening laws.  The Colorado Department of Education reported that high school student use of marijuana has increased by 39% from 2008 to 2012.  Middle school student use increased statewide by 50% from 2008 to 2012.

Our children have become the unwitting guinea pigs to a national experiment.  No waivers or consent forms for parents to sign.  No disclosure of potential risks to our children’s future.   We should have the results in about 20 years.

Source: www.burlington.patch.com  12th August 2013

Filed under: Parents,Social Affairs :

The nature of the teenage brain makes users of cannabis amongst this population particularly at risk of developing addictive behaviors and suffering other long-term negative effects, according to researchers at the University of Montreal and New York’s Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

“Of the illicit drugs, cannabis is most used by teenagers since it is perceived by many to be of little harm. This perception has led to a growing number of states approving its legalization and increased accessibility. Most of the debates and ensuing policies regarding cannabis were done without consideration of its impact on one of the most vulnerable population, namely teens, or without consideration of scientific data,” wrote Professor Didier Jutras-Aswad of the University of Montreal and Yasmin Hurd, MD, PhD, of Mount Sinai. “While it is clear that more systematic scientific studies are needed to understand the long-term impact of adolescent cannabis exposure on brain and behavior, the current evidence suggests that it has a far-reaching influence on adult addictive behaviors particularly for certain subsets of vulnerable individuals.”

 

The researchers reviewed over 120 studies that looked at different aspects of the relationship between cannabis and the adolescent brain, including the biology of the brain, chemical reaction that occurs in the brain when the drug is used, the influence of genetics and environmental factors, in addition to studies into the “gateway drug” phenomenon. “Data from epidemiological studies have repeatedly shown an association between cannabis use and subsequent addiction to heavy drugs and psychosis (i.e. schizophrenia).

 

Interestingly, the risk to develop such disorders after cannabis exposure is not the same for all individuals and is correlated with genetic factors, the intensity of cannabis use and the age at which it occurs. When the first exposure occurs in younger versus older adolescents, the impact of cannabis seems to be worse in regard to many outcomes such as mental health, education attainment, delinquency and ability to conform to adult role,” Dr Jutras-Aswad said.

 

Cannabis interacts with our brain through chemical receptors (namely cannabinoid receptors such as CB1 and CB2.) These receptors are situated in the areas of our brain that govern our learning and management of rewards, motivated behavior, decision-making, habit formation and motor function. As the structure of the brain changes rapidly during adolescence (before settling in adulthood), scientists believe that the cannabis consumption at this time greatly influences the way these parts of the user’s personality develop. In adolescent rat models, scientists have been able to observe differences in the chemical pathways that govern addiction and vulnerability – a receptor in the brain known as the dopamine D2 receptor is well known to be less present in cases of substance abuse.

 

The researchers stress that while a lot remains unknown about the mechanics of cannabis abuse, the body of existing research has clear implications for society.

 

“It is now clear from the scientific data that cannabis is not harmless to the adolescent brain, specifically those who are most vulnerable from a genetic or psychological standpoint. Identifying these vulnerable adolescents, including through genetic or psychological screening, may be critical for prevention and early intervention of addiction and psychiatric disorders related to cannabis use. The objective is not to fuel the debate about whether cannabis is good or bad, but instead to identify those individuals who might most suffer from its deleterious effects and provide adequate measures to prevent this risk” Jutras-Aswad said.

 

The study “Trajectory of adolescent cannabis use on addiction vulnerability” will be published in Neuropharmacology and was funded from the National Institute on Drug Abus

 

Source:  CADCA.org  13 Aug 2013

The number of people suspected of being sickened by synthetic marijuana in Colorado has risen to 150, NPR reports. Last week, the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said they were investigating three deaths and 75 hospitalizations potentially caused by the drug.

Synthetic marijuana, commonly known as K2 or Spice, is a mixture of herbs, spices or shredded plant material that is typically sprayed with a synthetic compound chemically similar to THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. K2 is typically sold in small, silvery plastic bags of dried leaves and marketed as incense that can be smoked.

Short-term effects of using synthetic marijuana include loss of control, lack of pain response, increased agitation, pale skin, seizures, vomiting, profuse sweating, uncontrolled/spastic body movements, elevated blood pressure, heart rate and palpitations.

According to Colorado’s Acting Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Tista Ghosh, hospital emergency rooms across the state are reporting people coming in with agitation, delirium and confusion, as well as unresponsiveness, extreme sleepiness and seizures. About one-fifth of the hospitalized patients appear to be teenagers, the article notes. “We’re not exactly sure what molecule or chemical we’re looking for,” Dr. Ghosh said. “It’s pretty rare to be able to do this kind of testing. There’s not that many labs in the country that can do this.” Last year, the CDC found Spice caused kidney failure in three young people, and vomiting and back pain in a dozen others in Wyoming. “In [the Wyoming] investigation, they did find a novel compound that was being put into the synthetic marijuana,” Dr. Ghosh said. “That makes this kind of investigation more challenging, because they are constantly changing the chemical compositions that are in synthetic marijuana.”

Source:  http://www.drugfree.org/join-together/prescription-drugs   Sept 20th 2013

Teens who regularly use marijuana may be at risk for developing serious psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, a new study suggests.

This is because regular marijuana use in adolescence, but not adulthood, may permanently damage brain function and cognition, according to new research.

Scientists from the University of Maryland School of Medicine hope that the latest findings will help warn policy makers contemplating legalizing marijuana about the potential long-term dangers of the drug.

 

“Over the past 20 years, there has been a major controversy about the long-term effects of marijuana, with some evidence that use in adolescence could be damaging,” senior author Asaf Keller, Ph.D., Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine said in a news release.

Previous studies have suggested that children who start using marijuana before the age of 16 are significantly more likely to develop permanent cognitive deficits and psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia.

“There likely is a genetic susceptibility, and then you add marijuana during adolescence and it becomes the trigger,” Keller explained.

The current study wanted to identify the biological evidence and determine whether marijuana use during adolescence really comes with permanent health risks.

In the study, researchers examined the cortical oscillations in mice. Cortical oscillations, or patterns of neuronal activity, are believed to underlie the brain’s various functions.  Researchers say that these oscillations are very abnormal in people with schizophrenia and in other psychiatric disorders.

The study revealed that mice exposed to very low doses of the active ingredient in marijuana for 20 days had “grossly altered” cortical oscillations in adulthood.  Researchers said these mice also exhibited impaired cognitive abilities.

“We also found impaired cognitive behavioral performance in those mice. The striking finding is that, even though the mice were exposed to very low drug doses, and only for a brief period during adolescence, their brain abnormalities persisted into adulthood,” lead researcher Sylvina Mullins Raver, a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Neuroscience in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in a statement.

After repeating the experiment in adult mice, researchers found that the cortical oscillations and ability to perform cognitive behavioral tasks remained normal in mice exposed to the drug only after they’ve fully matured. Researchers said this suggests that it was only marijuana exposure during the critical period of adolescence that impaired cognition through this mechanism.

Further analysis revealed that the frontal cortex, the brain area that controls executive functions such as planning and impulse control, is significantly more affected by the drugs during adolescence. Researchers noted that the frontal cortex is also the area most affected in schizophrenia.

While the latest study was on mice, researchers believe that the findings have implications for humans as well. They say the next step is to continue researching the underlying mechanisms that cause these changes in cortical oscillations.

“The purpose of studying these mechanisms is to see whether we can reverse these effects,” explained Keller. “We are hoping we will learn more about schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders, which are complicated conditions. These cognitive symptoms are not affected by medication, but they might be affected by controlling these cortical oscillations.

 

Source: Counsel & Heal Mental Health  July 2013

Orchestrated by WHO, across all four countries this rare attempt at screening and brief intervention for problems arising from illegal drug use identified at front-line health care centres found modest reductions in use/risks, but there was a puzzling opposition between particularly positive results from Australia and seemingly negative ones from the USA.

Summary Results of the featured study are also available in a research report previously analysed by Findings. Both this and the featured journal article are drawn on in the following account.

There is good evidence that brief interventions (usually one or two face-to-face counselling sessions) can reduce tobacco and alcohol use identified by screening tests in primary health care settings, particularly when they capitalise on the results of the test. However, there is only suggestive evidence of similar effects in respect of illicit drug use, only recently has a culturally neutral screening questionnaire for all psychoactive substances, including illicit drugs, been available for use in primary care, and most studies were conducted in the USA, UK or Australia, limiting the international generalisability of the findings. To address these gaps the World Health Organization (WHO) developed the Alcohol, Smoking and Substance Involvement Screening Test (ASSIST). Through a series of interview questions it screens for problem or risky use of tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, amphetamine-type stimulants, sedatives, hallucinogens, inhalants, opioids like heroin, and “other drugs”. It first asks whether the patient has ever used these substances, then for those they have, how often in the past three months. Further questions in relation to each used substance ask about adverse consequences, urges to use, whether the individual has tried but failed to cut down, and whether others have shown concern over their substance use. Finally the patient is asked if they have injected drugs, if so when, and if recently, how often.

A risk score is calculated for each substance and categorised as low, moderate (harmful but not dependent use) or high (actually or probably dependent), in turn indicating whether no intervention is needed, a brief intervention to encourage the patient to cut back, or a brief intervention encouraging them to seek further and/or specialised treatment. ASSIST was primarily intended to identify patients at moderate risk who may otherwise go undetected and deteriorate.

To test this strategy, in 2003 to 2006, 845 potentially suitable patients were assessed by researchers and/or clinicians at health centres and other front-line medical care settings in Australia, India, the United States and Brazil. After completing the ASSIST interview, 731 adults were found to meet the study’s criteria and agreed to join the study; another 51 refused. To join they had to have scored as at moderate risk due to their use of either cannabis, cocaine, amphetamine-type stimulants, or opioids, but not at high risk from any substance except tobacco. Two thirds of study participants were men and 72% were employed. They averaged about 31 years of age.

Following assessment patients were randomly allocated to wait for three months before intervention (the control group), or to participate (they all did) in a single brief advice session offered by the same clinician/researcher who had conducted the assessment, focused on the drug which posed the greatest risk to the patient and/or over which they were most concerned. In a motivational interviewing style, during this session patients were offered written feedback on their ASSIST scores and the implications (eg, health risks) were explored. They left with a self-help guide on reducing substance use. On average ASSIST screening took eight minutes and the brief intervention 14 minutes.

86% of the patients were followed up about three months later when the ASSIST test was re-applied. At issue was whether the risk scores of those who participated in the brief intervention three months before had decreased relative to the control group. How they might have scored at the follow-up was estimated for the patients who could not be re-assessed.

Main findings

In general across all countries and in each separately, the brief intervention resulted in greater risk reduction, particularly in respect of the substance on which the intervention had focused.

Total ASSIST risk scores for substances other than alcohol and tobacco fell for both sets of patients, but significantly more so for patients who had been allocated to the brief intervention. Their scores fell from an average 36 to just under 30, while those of the control group fell from 36 to 32. This global picture was replicated in each of the countries (most sharply in Australia) except the USA, where control patients actually reduced their risk more than brief intervention patients, though not to a statistically significant degree. Patients who scored in the upper half of the moderate risk range reacted about as well to the intervention as those who scored lower; when the sample was divided in this way, neither intervention effect was statistically significant, though both neared this criterion.

For just over half the patients their main problem substance was cannabis, and this was the focus of the brief intervention for those allocated to this procedure. Among these patients, risk reduction in relation to the targeted drug (cannabis) was significantly greater among patients allocated to the brief intervention. In each country too risk reduction was greater among intervention patients, except again for the USA, where the order was reversed. Only the results for Brazil and India were statistically significant. For cannabis, only patients at the higher end of the moderate risk spectrum further reduced their ASSIST scores following intervention.

Across all countries, patients whose primary problem substance was a stimulant (cocaine or amphetamine-type drugs) also reduced their risk related to these substances more if they had been through the brief intervention. None were recruited in India and the country-specific statistically significant results were from Brazil and Australia. In respect of these drugs, only patients at the lower end of the moderate risk spectrum further reduced their ASSIST scores following intervention.

Only in India were there appreciable patients whose main problem substances were opioids. Opioid-related risk reduction was significantly greater among brief intervention patients than among control patients.

Finally the analysts explored whether there was any evidence that while on average patients reduced their cannabis use in response to the cannabis-specific brief intervention, they ‘compensated’ by increasing use of other substances. No statistically significant effects on other substances were found, and there was actually some reduction in risk related to drinking. Similarly, when the intervention targeted substances other than cannabis, cannabis use was unaffected.

The authors’ conclusions

This study has shown that a brief intervention lasting on average a quarter of an hour and linked to the results of the ASSIST screening test reduced illicit substance use and associated risk significantly among non-dependent patients identified across a range countries in different types of front-line health care settings. Risk related to the target drug was reduced without patients ‘compensating’ by increasing their risky use of other substances. Except for the USA, the pattern of extra risk reduction after brief intervention was maintained in each of the four countries. It was also apparent in patients with both a moderately high and a moderately low risk.

In both developing and developed countries, there is a compelling need for a comprehensive approach capable of addressing use of a range of illicit drugs and of tobacco and alcohol in primary care settings. The findings from this project indicate that the ASSIST screening test and linked brief intervention can at least partly meet this need, promising to help reduce the burden of disease associated with substance use and substance use disorders.

Why results differed in the USA is unclear. Possibly the relatively lengthy (10–15 minutes) interview required to establish the patient’s consent to join the study ‘overwhelmed’ the intervention. Possibly too the patients, around 30% of whom had been treated for drug or alcohol problems, were less responsive to a brief intervention. The authors also point out that screening and intervention was generally conducted by specially trained clinical research staff rather than the centres’ usual staff, and that these same staff also generally conducted initial and follow-up assessments, raising the possibility of bias. The puzzling divide between the prominence of research on brief interventions for drinkers, and the lack of similar investigations among users of other drugs, makes this rare large-scale study particularly welcome. Especially in the Australian (so perhaps too in the UK) context, it holds out the prospect that this divide is not due to differing efficacy, but a prospect clouded by questions over real-world applicability and impacts on health.

Though the study recorded statistically significant reductions in drug use severity after research procedures and screening, and significant extra reductions from the intervention, questions have been raised about the clinical significance of the findings. After the entire package overall illicit drug use risk fell by 6.6 points on a scale whose maximum was 336, only 2.6 points greater than the decline in the control group. Similarly for cannabis, on a scale reaching 39 the overall reduction was 3.1, just 1.4 greater than in the control group. Among patients whose drug use may or may not have put them at risk of health problems, the impact of such small reductions on their future health is unclear. The study excluded the highest risk patients most likely to be identified by doctors and of greatest concern, so could say nothing about how well the recommended brief intervention plus referral procedure works among these priority patients. As in some alcohol studies (1 2), a very minimal intervention, such as handing over the booklets used in the current study, may have led to as great a reduction in drug use/problems as the motivational-style interview.

The fact that patients usually saw the same person for intervention and follow-up assessment means not only could the assessors know whether the patient had been in the brief intervention group (ie, they were not ‘blinded’ as recommended in such trials), but also that often they were assessing the results of their own work. No biochemical tests were conducted to objectively test for substance use. This raises the serious possibility that both parties had the opportunity and the motivation to amplify the impacts of their interaction. Given the overall small impact of the intervention, this could account for an appreciable part of its apparent effectiveness. In the USA about half the participants were instead re-interviewed by a different person, perhaps one reason why their responses did not indicate extra risk reductions from the intervention.

Some of the biggest effects were seen among opioid users in India, where nearly 10 points were sliced from opioid use severity scores (maximum 39) by the whole package, over twice the decline in the control group. Half the patients targeted for their opioid use were daily or near daily users and all but a few were recruited in India. Where, as in parts of that country, regular opioid use is normalised among socially included populations with family and work responsibilities, it seems that in certain cultures it is susceptible to even quite brief intervention. It seems possible however that participants were motivated to deny continuing drug use (especially in the case of brief intervention patients, to their counsellors), which compared to other countries they tended to see as contravening personal and family responsibilities.

As the authors hint, screening of this kind will probably be reserved for medical and other settings likely to attract unusually many illegal drug users. How willing they will be to own up to their use is unclear. In the validation studies for the ASSIST screening questionnaire, patients were interviewed by researchers and assured of confidentiality, even in respect of their doctors – important to at least some of the patients. In routine practice these doctors or their colleagues would be the ones asking the screening questions. Another departure from routine practice was that the study largely relied on specially trained clinical research staff rather than the centres’ usual staff, meaning the results may not apply where clinical research staff are not available.

Assuming the results do translate to everyday practice, there remains the issue of which type of practice. Among the settings were sexually transmitted disease clinics, a health centre associated with a drug treatment programme, a dental clinic primarily seeing poor patients in an emergency, as well as primary health and community health clinics. At best pooling these results reveals the impact of the intervention at settings with the characteristic they shared – being front-line medical services. At worst it jumbles apples with pears, perhaps one reason why there was a highly significant variation in results from different countries.

Puzzling opposition in results from Australia and USA

British readers may be most interested in the somewhat opposing results from the two westernised developed nations in the study, Australia and the USA. It should be stressed however that results from individual countries are subject to the idiosyncrasies of the study site, population and procedures in that country, variations partly ironed out in the amalgamated results. Results from Australia were particularly promising, but derived from STD clinics rather than generic primary care, and the unexplained variation between these two countries closest to UK conditions makes it impossible to predict what the consequences might be of a similar study in the UK, especially in GP surgeries and emergency departments, where brief intervention work is concentrated. Details below.

In Australia, three quarters of the largely young single population recruited at clinics for sexually transmitted diseases were identified as primarily having problems with what seems to have been mainly recreational stimulant use. Despite of all the nations averaging the highest risk score in relation to illegal drug use and the shortest intervention (typically just eight minutes), this country also recorded the strongest intervention effects. Possibly this was a particularly health-conscious population not representative of usual primary care patients in Britain.

The USA was the other westernised developed nation, and here results were at the opposite end of the scale – in the ‘wrong’ direction for illicit drugs in general and for cannabis and stimulants, in each case nearly to a statistically significant degree. This could simply be chance variation but the consistency of the findings suggests otherwise. If it did reflect a real and counterproductive effect, this pattern does not square with the intervention being overwhelmed by the consent procedure or by the patients’ previous experiences of treatment, influences which would have merely nullified the intervention. Adding to the puzzle is that according to their own accounts at the follow-up interviews, the US patients’ feelings about the brief intervention do not seem to explain why they failed to react to by reducing their substance use risks. For example, almost 80% who received the brief intervention reported attempting to cut down as a result, similar to other countries. For more see the WHO ASSIST web site where you can download the research report on the featured evaluation, manuals for the screening tool and the brief intervention, and the written self-help guide given to patients in the study.  Humeniuk R., Ali R., Babor T. et al.  Addiction: 2012, 107(5), p. 957–966.

 

Source:www.findings.org.uk 

TUESDAY, Sept. 17 (HealthDay News) — Street drugs called “bath salts” were linked to nearly 23,000 emergency department visits in the United States in 2011, a new report says.

Bath salts are amphetamine-like stimulants that have become increasingly popular among recreational drug users in recent years. Despite the name, these synthetic drugs have nothing to do with the crystals you might sprinkle in a bathtub.

The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) report, released Tuesday, is the first national study to look at bath salts-related emergency department visits since the drugs appeared a few years ago.

“Although bath salts drugs are sometimes claimed to be ‘legal highs’ or are promoted with labels to mask their real purpose, they can be extremely dangerous when used,” Dr. Elinore McCance-Katz, SAMHSA’s chief medical officer, said in an agency news release.

“Bath salts drugs can cause heart problems, high blood pressure, seizures, addiction, suicidal thoughts, psychosis and, in some cases, death — especially when combined with the use of other drugs,” she noted.

The report said that 67 percent of emergency department visits linked to bath salts also involved the use of another drug. Fifteen percent of the visits involved the use of bath salts with marijuana or synthetic forms of marijuana.

In 2011, there were nearly 2.5 million U.S. emergency department visits involving drug misuse or abuse, according to the report.

The bath salts report is based on data from the 2011 Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) report. DAWN is a public health surveillance system that monitors drug-related hospital emergency department visits and drug-related deaths in the United States.

More information The U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse has more about bath salts.

 

SOURCE: U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, news release, Sept. 17, 2013  Reported in www.healthday.com  

An excellent and cogent article written by a doctor in 1997 – and still pertinent today in 2013..

 

Don’t Legalize Drugs  (Some thoughts on Prohibition)

by Theodore Dalrymple

 

Here is a progression in the minds of men: first the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then it becomes an orthodoxy whose truth seems so obvious that no one remembers that anyone ever thought differently. This is just what is happening with the idea of legalizing drugs: it has reached the stage when with the idea of legalizing drugs: it has reached the stage when millions of thinking men are agreed that allowing people to take whatever they like is the obvious, indeed only, solution to the social problems that arise from the consumption of drugs.

Man’s desire to take mind-altering substances is as old as society itself: as are attempts to regulate their consumption. If intoxication in one form or another is inevitable, then so is customary or legal restraint upon that intoxication. But no society until our own has had to contend with the ready availability of so many different mind-altering drugs, combined with a citizenry jealous of its right to pursue its own pleasures in its own way.

The arguments in favour of legalizing the use of all narcotic and stimulant drugs are twofold: philosophical and pragmatic. Neither argument is negligible, but both are mistaken, I believe, and both miss the point.

The philosophic argument is that, in a free society, adults should be permitted to do whatever they please, always provided that they are prepared to take the consequences of their own choices and that they cause no direct harm to others. The locus classicus for this point of view is John Stuart Mill’s famous essay On Liberty: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of the community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others, (Mill wrote. “His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.) This radical individualism allows society no part whatever in shaping, determining, or enforcing a moral code: in short, we have nothing in common but our contractual agreement not to interfere with one another as we go about seeking our private pleasures.

In practice, of course, it is exceedingly difficult to make people take all the consequences of their own actions (as they must, if Mill’s great principle is to serve as a philosophical guide to policy. Addiction to, or regular use of, most currently prohibited drugs cannot affect only the person who takes them) and not his spouse, children, neighbours, or employers. No man, except possibly a hermit, is an island; and so it is virtually impossible for Mill’s principle to apply to any human action whatever, let alone shooting up heroin or smoking crack. Such a principle is virtually useless in determining what should or should not be permitted.

Perhaps we ought not be too harsh on Mill’s principle: it’s not clear that anyone has ever thought of a better one. But that is precisely the point. Human affairs cannot be decided by an appeal to an infallible rule, expressible in a few words, whose simple application can decide all cases, including whether drugs should be freely available to the entire adult population. Philosophical fundamentalism is not preferable to the religious variety; and because the desiderata of human life are many, and often in conflict with one another, mere philosophical inconsistency in policy (such as permitting the consumption of alcohol while outlawing cocaine) is not a sufficient argument against that policy. We all value freedom, and we all value order; sometimes we sacrifice freedom for order, and sometimes order for freedom. But once a prohibition has been removed, it is hard to restore, even when the new found freedom proves to have been ill-conceived and socially disastrous.

Even Mill came to see the limitations of his own principle as a guide for policy and to deny that all pleasures were of equal significance for human existence. It was better, he said, to be Socrates discontented than a fool satisfied. Mill acknowledged that some goals were intrinsically worthier of pursuit than others.

This being the case, not all freedoms are equal, and neither are all limitations of freedom: some are serious and some trivial. The freedom we cherish – or should cherish – is not merely that of satisfying our appetites, whatever they happen to be. We are not Dickensian Harold Skimpoles, exclaiming in protest that “Even the butterflies are free!” We are not children who chafe at restrictions because they are restrictions. And we even recognize the apparent paradox that some limitations to our freedoms have the consequence of making us freer overall. The freest man is not the one who slavishly follows his appetites and desires throughout his life – as all too many of my patients have discovered to their cost.

We are prepared to accept limitations to our freedoms for many reasons, not just that of public order. Take an extreme hypothetical case: public exhibitions of necrophilia are quite rightly not permitted, though on Mill’s principle they should be. A corpse has no interests and cannot be harmed, because it is no longer a person; and no member of the public is harmed if he has agreed to attend such an exhibition.

Our resolve to prohibit such exhibitions would not be altered if we discovered that millions of people wished to attend them or even if we discovered that millions already were attending them illicitly. Our objection is not based upon pragmatic considerations or upon a head count: it is based upon the wrongness of the would-be exhibitions themselves. The fact that the prohibition represents a genuine restriction of our freedom is of no account. It might be argued that the freedom to choose among a variety of intoxicating substances is a much more important freedom and that millions of people have derived innocent fun from taking stimulants and narcotics. But the consumption of drugs has the effect of reducing men’s freedom by circum-scribing the range of their interests. It impairs their ability to pursue more important human aims, such as raising a family and fulfilling civic obligations. Very often it impairs their ability to pursue gainful employment and promotes parasitism. Moreover, far from being expanders of consciousness, most drugs severely limit it. One of the most striking characteristics of drug takers is their intense and tedious self-absorption; and their journeys into inner space are generally forays into inner vacuums. Drug taking is a lazy man’s way of pursuing happiness and wisdom, and the shortcut turns out to be the deadest of dead ends. We lose remarkably little by not being permitted to take drugs.

The idea that freedom is merely the ability to act upon one’s whims is surely very thin and hardly begins to capture the complexities of human existence; a man whose appetite is his law strikes us not as liberated but enslaved. And when such a narrowly conceived freedom is made the touchstone of public policy, a dissolution of society is bound to follow. No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good can long survive: a radical egotism is bound to ensue, in which any limitations upon personal behaviour are experienced as infringements of basic rights. Distinctions between the important and the trivial, between the freedom to criticize received ideas and the freedom to take LSD, are precisely the standards that keep societies from barbarism.

So the legalization of drugs cannot be supported by philosophical principle. But if the pragmatic argument in favour of legalization were strong enough, it might overwhelm other objections. It is upon this argument that proponents of legalization rest the larger part of their case.

The argument is that the overwhelming majority of the harm done to society by the consumption of currently illicit drugs is caused not by their pharmacological properties but by their prohibition and the resultant criminal activity that prohibition always calls into being. Simple reflection tells us that a supply invariably grows up to meet a demand; and when the demand is widespread, suppression is useless. Indeed, it is harmful, since (by raising the price of the commodity in question) it raises the profits of middlemen, which gives them an even more powerful incentive to stimulate demand further. The vast profits to be made from cocaine and heroin (which, were it not for their illegality, would be cheap and easily affordable even by the poorest in affluent societies) exert a deeply corrupting effect on producers, distributors, consumers, and law enforcers alike. Besides, it is well known that illegality in itself has attractions for youth already inclined to disaffection. Even many of the harmful physical effects of illicit drugs stem from their illegal status: for example, fluctuations in the purity of heroin bought on the street are responsible for many of the deaths by overdose. If the sale and consumption of such drugs were legalized, consumers would know how much they were taking and thus avoid overdoses.

Moreover, since society already permits the use of some mind-altering substances known to be both addictive and harmful, such as alcohol and nicotine, in prohibiting others it appears hypocritical, arbitrary, and dictatorial. Its hypocrisy, as well as its patent failure to enforce its prohibitions successfully, leads inevitably to a decline in respect for the law as a whole. Thus things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold.

It stands to reason, therefore, that all these problems would be resolved at a stroke if everyone were permitted to smoke, swallow, or inject anything he chose. The corruption of the police, the luring of children of 11 and 12 into illegal activities, the making of such vast sums of money by drug dealing that legitimate work seems pointless and silly by comparison, and the turf wars that make poor neighbourhoods so exceedingly violent and dangerous, would all cease at once were drug taking to be decriminalized and the supply regulated in the same way as alcohol.

But a certain modesty in the face of an inherently unknowable future is surely advisable. That is why prudence is a political virtue: what stands to reason should happen does not necessarily happen in practice. As Goethe said, all theory (even of the monetarist or free-market variety) is grey, but green springs the golden tree of life. If drugs were legalized, I suspect that the golden tree of life might spring some unpleasant surprises.

It is of course true, but only trivially so, that the present illegality of drugs is the cause of the criminality surrounding their distribution. Likewise, it is the illegality of stealing cars that creates car thieves. In fact, the ultimate cause of all criminality is law. As far as I am aware, no one has ever suggested that law should therefore be abandoned. Moreover, the impossibility of winning the “war” against theft, burglary, robbery, and fraud has never been used as an argument that these categories of crime should be abandoned. And so long as the demand for material goods outstrips supply, people will be tempted to commit criminal acts against the owners of property. This is not an argument, in my view, against private property or in favour of the common ownership of all goods. It does suggest, however, that we shall need a police force for a long time to come.

In any case, there are reasons to doubt whether the crime rate would fall quite as dramatically as advocates of legalization have suggested. Amsterdam, where access to drugs is relatively unproblematic, is among the most violent and squalid cities in Europe. The idea behind crime – of getting rich, or at least richer, quickly and without much effort – is unlikely to disappear once drugs are freely available to all who want them. And it may be that officially sanctioned antisocial behaviour – the official lifting of taboos – breeds yet more antisocial behaviour, as the “broken windows” theory would suggest.

Having met large numbers of drug dealers in prison, I doubt that they would return to respectable life if the principal article of their commerce were to be legalized. Far from evincing a desire to be reincorporated into the world of regular work, they express a deep contempt for it and regard those who accept the bargain of a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay as cowards and fools. A life of crime has its attractions for many who would otherwise lead a mundane existence. So long as there is the possibility of a lucrative racket or illegal traffic, such people find it and extend its scope. Therefore, since even lega1izers would hesitate to allow children to take drugs, decriminalization might easily result in dealers turning their attentions to younger and younger children, who – in the permissive atmosphere that even now prevails – have already been inducted into the drug subculture in alarmingly high numbers.

Those who do not deal in drugs but commit crimes to fund their consumption of them are, of course, more numerous than large-scale dealers. And it is true that once opiate addicts, for example, enter a treatment program, which often includes maintenance doses of methadone, the rate at which they commit crimes falls markedly. The drug clinic in my hospital claims an 80 percent reduction in criminal convictions among heroin addicts once they have been stabilized on methadone.

This is impressive, but it is not certain that the results should be generalized. First, the patients are self-selected: they have some motivation to change, otherwise they would not have attended the clinic in the first place. Only a minority of addicts attend, and therefore it is not safe to conclude that, if other addicts were to receive methadone, their criminal activity would similarly diminish.

Second, a decline in convictions is not necessarily the same as a decline in criminal acts. If methadone stabilizes an addict’s life, he may become a more efficient, harder-to-catch criminal. Moreover, when the police in our city do catch an addict, they are less likely to prosecute him if he can prove that he is undergoing anything remotely resembling psychiatric treatment. They return him directly to his doctor. Having once had a psychiatric consultation is an all-purpose alibi for a robber or a burglar; the police, who do not want to fill in the 40-plus forms it now takes to charge anyone with anything in England, consider a single contact with a psychiatrist sufficient to deprive anyone of legal responsibility for crime forever.

Third, the rate of criminal activity among those drug addicts who receive methadone from the clinic, though reduced, remains very high. The deputy director of the clinic estimates that the number of criminal acts committed by his average patient (as judged by self-report) was 250 per year before entering treatment and 50 afterward. It may well be that the real difference is considerably less than this, because the patients have an incentive to exaggerate it to secure the continuation of their methadone. But clearly, opiate addicts who receive their drugs legally and free of charge continue to commit large numbers of crimes. In my clinics in prison, I see numerous prisoners who were on methadone when they committed the crime for which they are incarcerated. Why do addicts given their drug free of charge continue to commit crimes? Some addicts, of course, continue to take drugs other than those prescribed and have to fund their consumption of them. So long as any restriction whatever regulates the consumption of drugs, many addicts will seek them illicitly, regardless of what they receive legally. In addition, the drugs themselves exert a long-term effect on a person’s ability to earn a living and severely limit rather than expand his horizons and mental repertoire. They sap the will or the ability of an addict to make long-term plans. While drugs are the focus of an addict’s life, they are not all he needs to live, and many addicts thus continue to procure the rest of what they need by criminal means.

For the proposed legalization of drugs to have its much vaunted beneficial effect on the rate of criminality, such drugs would have to be both cheap and readily available. The legalizers assume that there is a natural limit to the demand for these drugs, and that if their consumption were legalized, the demand would not increase substantially. Those psychologically unstable persons currently taking drugs would continue to do so, with the necessity to commit crimes removed, while psychologically stabler people (such as you and I and our children) would not be enticed to take drugs by their new legal status and cheapness. But price and availability, I need hardly say, exert a profound effect on consumption: the cheaper alcohol becomes, for example, the more of it is consumed, at least within quite wide limits.

I have personal experience of this effect. I once worked as a doctor on a British government aid project to Africa. We were building a road through remote African bush. The contract stipulated that the construction company could import, free of all taxes, alcoholic drinks from the United Kingdom. These drinks the company then sold to its British workers at cost, in the local currency at the official exchange rate, which was approximately one-sixth the black-market rate. A litre bottle of gin thus cost less than a dollar and could be sold on the open market for almost ten dollars. So it was theoretically possible to remain dead drunk for several years for an initial outlay of less than a dollar.

Of course, the necessity to go to work somewhat limited the workers’ consumption of alcohol. Nevertheless, drunkenness among them far outstripped anything I have ever seen, before or since. I discovered that, when alcohol is effectively free of charge, a fifth of British construction workers will regularly go to bed so drunk that they are incontinent both of urine and faeces. I remember one man who very rarely got as far as his bed at night: he fell asleep in the lavatory, where he was usually found the next morning. Half the men shook in the mornings and resorted to the hair of the dog to steady their hands before they drove their bulldozers and other heavy machines (which they frequently wrecked, at enormous expense to the British taxpayer); hangovers were universal. The men were either drunk or hung over for months on end.

Sure, construction workers are notoriously liable to drink heavily, but in these circumstances even formerly moderate drinkers turned alcoholic and eventually suffered from delirium tremens. The heavy drinking occurred not because of the isolation of the African bush: not only did the company provide sports facilities for its workers, but there were many other ways to occupy oneself there. Other groups of workers in the bush whom I visited, who did not have the same rights of importation of alcoholic drink but had to purchase it at normal prices, were not nearly as drunk. And when the company asked its workers what it could do to improve their conditions, they unanimously asked for a further reduction in the price of alcohol, because they could think of nothing else to ask for.

The conclusion was inescapable: that a susceptible population had responded to the low price of alcohol, and the lack of other effective restraints upon its consumption, by drinking destructively large quantities of it. The health of many men suffered as a consequence, as did their capacity for work; and they gained a well- deserved local reputation for reprehensible, violent, antisocial behaviour.

It is therefore perfectly possible that the demand for drugs, including opiates, would rise dramatically were their price to fall and their availability to increase. And if it is true that the consumption of these drugs in itself predisposes to criminal behaviour (as data from our clinic suggest), it is also possible that the effect on the rate of criminality of this rise in consumption would swamp the decrease that resulted from decriminalization. We would have just as much crime in aggregate as before, but many more addicts.

The intermediate position on drug legalization, such as that espoused by Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy research institute sponsored by financier George Soros, is emphatically not the answer to drug-related crime. This view holds that it should be easy for addicts to receive opiate drugs from doctors, either free or at cost, and that they should receive them in municipal injecting rooms, such as now exist in Zurich. But just look at Liverpool, where 2,000 people of a population of 600,000 receive official prescriptions for methadone: this once proud and prosperous city is still the world capital of drug-motivated burglary, according to the police and independent researchers.

Of course, many addicts in Liverpool are not yet on methadone, because the clinics are insufficient in number to deal with the demand. If the city expended more money on clinics, perhaps the number of addicts in treatment could be increased five- or tenfold. But would that solve the problem of burglary in Liverpool? No, because the profits to be made from selling illicit opiates would still be large: dealers would therefore make efforts to expand into parts of the population hitherto relatively untouched, in order to protect their profits. The new addicts would still burgle to feed their habits. Yet more clinics dispensing yet more methadone would then be needed. In fact Britain, which has had a relatively liberal approach to the prescribing of opiate drugs to addicts since 1928 (1 myself have prescribed heroin to addicts), has seen an explosive increase in addiction to opiates and all the evils associated with it since the 1960s, despite that liberal policy. A few hundred have become more than a hundred thousand. At the heart of Nadelmann’s position, then, is an evasion. The legal and liberal provision of drugs for people who are already addicted to them will not reduce the economic benefits to dealers of pushing these drugs, at least until the entire susceptible population is addicted and in a treatment program. So long as there are addicts who have to resort to the black market for their drugs, there will be drug-associated crime. Nadelmann assumes that the number of potential addicts wouldn’t soar under considerably more liberal drug laws. 1 can’t muster such Panglossian optimism.

The problem of reducing the amount of crime committed by individual addicts is emphatically not the same as the problem of reducing the amount of crime committed by addicts as a whole. 1 can illustrate what 1 mean by an analogy: it is often claimed that prison does not work because many prisoners are recidivists who, by definition, failed to be deterred from further wrongdoing by their last prison sentence. But does any sensible person believe that the abolition of prisons in their entirety would not reduce the numbers of the law-abiding? The murder rate in New York and the rate of drunken driving in Britain have not been reduced by a sudden upsurge in the love of humanity, but by the effective threat of punishment. An institution such as prison can work for society even if it does not work for an individual.

The situation could be very much worse than I have suggested hitherto, however, if we legalized the consumption of drugs other than opiates. So far, I have considered only opiates, which exert a generally tranquilizing effect. If opiate addicts commit crimes even when they receive their drugs free of charge, it is because they are unable to meet their other needs any other way; but there are, unfortunately, drugs whose consumption directly leads to violence because of their psychopharmacological properties and not merely because of the criminality associated with their distribution. Stimulant drugs such as crack cocaine provoke paranoia, increase aggression, and promote violence. Much of this violence takes place in the home, as the relatives of crack takers will testify.  It is something 1 know from personal acquaintance by working in the emergency room and in the wards of our hospital. Only someone who has not been assaulted by drug takers rendered psychotic by their drug could view with equanimity the prospect of the further spread of the abuse of stimulants.

And no one should underestimate the possibility that the use of stimulant drugs could spread very much wider, and become far more general, than it is now, if restraints on their use were relaxed. The importation of the mildly stimulant khat is legal in Britain, and a large proportion of the community of Somali refugees there devotes its entire life to chewing the leaves that contain the stimulant, miring these refugees in far worse poverty than they would otherwise experience. The reason that the khat habit has not spread to the rest of the population is that it takes an entire day’s chewing of disgustingly bitter leaves to gain the comparatively mild pharmacological effect. The point is, however, that once the use of a stimulant becomes culturally acceptable and normal, it can easily become so general as to exert devastating social effects. And the kinds of stimulants on offer in Western cities – cocaine, crack, amphetamines -are vastly more attractive than khat.

In claiming that prohibition, not the drugs themselves, is the problem, Nadelmann and many others – even policemen – have said that “the war on drugs is lost.” But to demand a yes or no answer to the question “Is the war against drugs being won?” is like demanding a yes or no answer to the question “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” Never can an unimaginative and fundamentally stupid metaphor have exerted a more baleful effect upon proper thought.

Let us ask whether medicine is winning the war against death. The answer is obviously no, it isn’t winning: the one fundamental rule of human existence remains, unfortunately, one man one death. And this is despite the fact that 14 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States (to say nothing of the efforts of other countries) goes into the fight against death. Was ever a war more expensively lost? Let us then abolish medical schools, hospitals, and departments of public health. If every man has to die, it doesn’t matter very much when he does so. If the war against drugs is lost, then so are the wars against theft, speeding, incest, fraud, rape, murder, arson, and illegal parking. Few, if any, such wars are winnable. So let us all do anything we choose.

Even the legalizers’ argument that permitting the purchase and use of drugs as freely as Milton Friedman suggests will necessarily result in less governmental and other official interference in our lives doesn’t stand up. To the contrary, if the use of narcotics and stimulants were to become virtually universal, as is by no means impossible, the number of situations in which compulsory checks upon people would have to be carried out, for reasons of public safety, would increase enormously. Pharmacies, banks, schools, hospitals – indeed, all organizations dealing with the public – might feel obliged to check regularly and randomly on the drug consumption of their employees. The general use of such drugs would increase the locus standi of innumerable agencies, public and private, to interfere in our lives; and freedom from interference, far from having increased, would have drastically shrunk.

The present situation is bad, undoubtedly; but few are the situations so bad that they cannot be made worse by a wrong policy decision. The extreme intellectual elegance of the proposal to legalize the distribution and consumption of drugs, touted as the solution to so many problems at once (AIDS, crime, overcrowding in the prisons, and even the attractiveness of drugs to foolish young people) should give rise to skepticism. Social problems are not usually like that. Analogies with the Prohibition era, often drawn by those who would legalize drugs, are false and inexact: it is one thing to attempt to ban a substance that has been in customary use for centuries by at least nine-tenths of the adult population, and quite another to retain a ban on substances that are still not in customary use, in an attempt to ensure that they never do become customary. Surely we have already slid down enough slippery slopes in the last 30 years with-out looking for more such slopes to slide down.

 

Source:  City Journal, Vol 7, No.2, Spring 1997, Manhattan Institute, England

Filed under: Law (Papers) :

By Join Together Staff | September 5, 2013 | Leave a comment | Filed in Drugs

Laboratories in China are becoming a significant source of synthetic drug production, according to Time.com. Drugs produced in China can easily be shipped to North America or Europe, using international courier services.

Chinese chemists are staying one step ahead of law enforcement, creating new variations of substances in anticipation of current versions being declared illegal. Wynbo Shi, Senior Regulatory Affairs Manager for a chemical inspection and regulation service, says dozens of labs in China produce synthetic drugs without meaningful government regulation. In June, The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released a report that concluded the increasing popularity of designer drugs is an alarming public health problem. The number of new synthetic drugs rose by more than 50 percent in less than three years, the report states.

The drugs are a particular cause for concern because in many places they are legal, and are sold openly on the Internet. They have not been tested for safety, and can be much more dangerous than traditional drugs, according to the UNODC. The harmless names of the drugs, such as “spice” and “bath salts,” encourage young people to think they are low-risk fun. “The adverse effects and addictive potential of most of these uncontrolled substances are at best poorly understood,” the agency wrote in its 2013 World Drug Report.

Source:  www.drugfree.org/join-together  Sept. 2013

University of Otago, Christchurch researchers have for the first time quantified exactly what damage alcohol abuse is inflicting on 20-somethings, and in turn society.

The Christchurch Health and Development Study researchshows up to a quarter of New Zealanders aged 21 to 30 have a problem with alcohol (classified as a subclinical alcohol problem) which affects their daily life to some extent.

More than 5 per cent of this age group met the clinical criteria for alcohol addiction.

Researchers were able to account for factors such as family background or previous substance abuse issues to shine the spotlight on the exact role alcohol plays in creating multiple serious social and personal issues. The study shows those with clinical alcohol addictions are:

* Almost nine times more likely than those with no alcohol problems to inflict physical violence on others.

* Three times more likely to commit property crimes such as burglary, car theft or vandalism.

* Almost 11 times more likely to have ten or more sexual partners and twice as likely to have a sexually transmittedinfection (STI).

* Almost seven times more likely to contemplate suicide.

* Almost three times more likely to be the victims of violence.

Those who have some problem with alcohol, or a subclinicalcondition (typically those whose drinking has some negative effect on their job, family, friends or criminal behaviour but who have not been diagnosed as an addict) are:

* Three times more likely to commit a violent crime and twice as likely to commit property crime.

* Twice as likely to commit family violence.

* Almost twice as likely as those with no problem to have an STI.

* Most three times more likely to contemplate suicide.

* Almost twice as likely to have been the victim of a violent crime.

Researcher Dr Joe Boden says much attention has been paid to the effects of the effects of problematic youth drinking but little on those aged in their 20s.

This study shows this group is still very much at risk, despite perceptions their drinking may be tapering off.

Dr Boden says the study showed the wide-ranging effect of alcohol misuse in 20-somethings on themselves and society.

“It seems that young people don’t need to misuse alcohol for a long time before they experience some serious negative outcomes, and often multiple serious outcomes.’’

“There could be great benefits to society in addressing alcohol misuse in those aged in their 20s.”

For example, the study showed that people aged in their 20s did not abuse alcohol violent crime committed by that age group would drop by almost half.

Dr Boden says becoming a parent has the biggest effect on minimising drinking. Many adults today however were having children later and experiencing an ‘extended adolescence’. This may have some impact on the reasonably high number of people in their 20s with drinking problems.

The research was recently published in the prestigious Drug and Alcohol Dependence journal.

This study was funded by the Health Research Council of New Zealand.

 

Source:  healthcanal.com  3rd Sept.2013

Filed under: Alcohol,Australia :

The first study of the global dependence upon illicit drugs has revealed dependence on opiods, such as heroin, causes the greatest health burden of all the illict drugs.

The results come from new analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010.

A team of Australian and US researchers, led by Professor Louisa Degenhardt from UNSW’s National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, performed a comprehensive search of available data on the prevalence and effects of amphetamines, cannabis, cocaine, and opioids. Other drugs, including MDMA (ecstasy) and hallucinogens such as LSD, were not included in the analysis due to a lack of high quality data on their prevalence and health effects.

The results, published today in The Lancet, show that the burden in the worst affected countries, including Australia, was 20 times greater than in the least affected countries. Other largely high-income nations such as the US and UK had similar poor outcomes.

The researchers also found that disability and illness caused by the four drugs studied has increased by over half in the 20 years between 1990 and 2010. Although some of this increase is due to increasing population size, over a fifth (22%) of the increase is thought to be due to increasing prevalence of drug use disorders, particularly for opioid dependence. Of the around 78,000 deaths in 2010 attributed to drug disorders, more than half (55%) were thought to be due to opioid dependence.

Regional breakdown of the results shows that the highest prevalence of cocaine dependence was in North America and Latin America, and among the highest levels of opioid dependence were in Australasia and Western Europe. The UK, US, South Africa, and Australia all had notably high overall burdens of death and illness due to illicit drugs.

“Our results clearly show that illicit drug use is an important contributor to the global disease burden, and we now have the first global picture of this cause of health loss,” says Professor Degenhardt.

“Young men aged 20-29 are disproportionately affected at a crucial time in their lives.

“Although we have fewer means of responding to some causes of burden, such as cocaine and amphetamine dependence, well-evaluated and effective interventions can substantially reduce two major causes of burden – opioid dependence and injecting drug use. The challenge will be to deliver these efficiently and on a scale needed to have an effect on a population level,” she says.

Effective strategies to reduce the burden of opioid dependence and injecting drug use include opioid substitution treatment.

Source:  www.healthcanal.com  30.08.2023

Not as bad as alcohol is hardly a selling point, nor is it much consolation

The research on stoned driving and the reports from states with medical marijuana laws make it clear, when it comes to driving, marijuana poses all the same problems that alcohol does. A research study by the University of Auckland compared a random sample of drivers with people who had either been killed or hospitalized by car accidents. Regular and heavy pot-smokers were 9.5 times more likely to get into a serious accident as non-users. Another study looked at patients in a hospital trauma unit who had been in car or motorcycle accidents. Fifteen percent had been using marijuana alone and an additional 17 percent had both THC and alcohol in their blood streams.  A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine looked only at impaired drivers who were not using alcohol. They found that 45 percent of people stopped for reckless driving tested positive for marijuana.  A significant percent of impaired drivers and serious accidents, including fatal accidents, are caused by marijuana. Part of the problem is that so many people drive stoned. One study found that 16 percent of adolescents drove within one hour after smoking pot. Also, while there’s been a huge education campaign against drunk driving, the pro-marijuana groups often insist thatmarijuana makes people safer drivers.

Marijuana advocates often insist that marijuana never killed anyone. One look at the stoned driving statistics should make it clear that’s not true. They also frequently argue that marijuana is safer than alcohol. But judging by these statistics, it’s possible that the main reason alcohol kills more people on the highway is because it is more widely available. Laws that make marijuana more widely available could even the gap between the two drugs.

In fact, that has happened. When Montana first passed its law, very few people were prescribed, or recommended, medical marijuana. Then marijuana caravans began criss-crossing the state, bringing with them pot doctors who made all their money handing out marijuana cards. In less than a year, the number of “medical marijuana” users increased 5-fold. And shortly after that, according to Montana narcotics chief Mark Long, marijuana DUIs skyrocketed as did the number of fatal car accidents where one of the drivers had marijuana in his blood stream. In two years, the number of fatal car accidents caused by marijuana increased 25 percent. In Montana, marijuana now causes half as many traffic fatalities as alcohol, and the gap is narrowing. In California, the number of fatal car crashes caused by marijuana doubled in the five years after they passed their medical marijuana law. Marijuana is just as deadly behind the wheel as alcohol, and if marijuana use increases it could overtake alcohol as the deadliest drug on the road.

Source: www.thecaseagainstmarijuana.com   August 31, 2013

This article from Sue Rusche of What About The Children campaign was published to show just how inane are comments from the drug user community on the internet. The sad part is that many young people use Facebook and Twitter and can be easily influenced by the comments they read on these and similar sites.  Parents need to educate their youngsters so that they know how biased and full of untruths such comment from drug users can be. NDPA

Don’t Expect to Learn Anything True about Marijuana From Internet Commenters

Six days after The Huffington Post published my latest article, browsers had logged in 156 comments. The post was titled Marijuana Legalization Proponents Deny Health Harms Just Like the Tobacco Industry Did; 153 of the 156 comments proved the point.

Just 30 people made 80 percent (125) of the comments. Contributing the most were truthaboutmmj (19); kevin hunt2012 (12); Andrew swanteni (9); Blows Against the Empire and ConnieInCleveland (6 each); RMForbes, SchumannFu, and Volteric (5 each); JohnThomas, Tomaniac, and WowFolksAreDumb (4 each); average dude, FlyingTooLow, JD Salinger, Matthew Fairbrother, McMike55, moldy, Paul Paul, and susierr (3 each). Eleven people contributed 2 comments each; 28 contributed 1 each. Only one person, Jan Beauregard, PhD, a Virginia psychotherapist whose specialties include addictive disorders, agreed that marijuana has health harms. She contributed three comments.  Clicking a link in a commenter’s name will take you to Huff Post’s Social News and a collection of all the comments that person has made about Huff Post stories. Commenters apply for a spot on Social News by linking it to their Facebook accounts, which magnifies Huff Post’s reach. Call it Huff Post squared. Huff Post cubed occurs if commenters also link Social News to their Twitter accounts. Huff Post awards badges to commenters based on the number of comments they make on Huff Post’s stories and the number of Facebook Friends and Twitter Followers they have. The more comments, friends, and followers, the higher level badges they earn. WowFolksAreDumb, for example, who must hold some kind of record, has written more than 10,000 comments since joining Social News in May 2012 and has earned four badges–Level 2 Networker, Level 2 Superuser, Level 1 Crime Solver, and Moderator.

Huff Post has brilliantly tapped into social media to expand its audience exponentially. But this brave new world comes at a cost. Few editors live in this world. Opinions triumph over facts. Quantity trumps quality. Truth loses.

Juxtapose this with two major problems of current science: 1) the public cannot access most published studies and 2) scientific disciplines are so specialized that public access would hardly matter. A PhD is needed to understand the complexity of new knowledge scientists are developing today, and a PhD in one discipline does not guarantee understanding of knowledge developed in another. Scientists can’t speak each other’s languages anymore, so specialized have various disciplines become. An astronomer couldn’t explain the genome to you any better than a geneticist could explain the cosmos.

Without access to comprehensible science, science illiteracy rules, particularly in the area of the science that underlies addictive drugs. Perhaps the most puzzling argument that runs through many of the comments about my post is one that rejects later work which contradicts earlier studies. WowFolksAreDumb, for example, writes, “According to Dreher 1994, there are no prenatal or neonatal differences between babies from mothers who did use cannabis during pregnancy and babies from mothers who did not.” In addition to the 2012 study I wrote about, more than 50 other studies about the harmful effects of marijuana on the developing fetus have been published since 1994, but WowFolksAreDumb claims the 1994 study negates them all. Maxpost, Midnight Toker, goes a step further. He interprets Dreher’s study to mean: “Pregnant women SHOULD smoke DOPE!!!”

Commenters attacked all the studies I wrote about, particularly the study indicating a link between marijuana use and testicular cancer. Steve Hager dismissed it this way: “I believe the testicular cancer study involved 6 people, maybe it was only 3. Worthless, really.” That study actually involved 163 young men diagnosed with testicular cancer and a control group of 292 healthy men of the same age and ethnicity and asked them about their drug use. The investigators found that compared to those who had never used marijuana, men who had used the drug were twice as likely to have testicular cancer. It’s difficult to understand why Mr. Hager couldn’t trouble himself to check how many people were involved in the study since I provided links to both the account of it published by Science Daily and the abstract of the study itself. Both clearly state the number of research subjects.

The collision of social media with current, complex science produces a chasm where scientific truth can be manipulated easily – and aggressively. I emailed Dr. Beauregard to thank her for supporting the marijuana science I had written about. She emailed back, “I have found many of the same facts, but the comments are more than I can stand and the backlash is horrific. I only posted a few things and have had literally over 50 people email me with hostile, emotional comments based on personal experience as a user.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the heart of the problem. When it comes to marijuana, users dominate not just Huff Post, but the Internet as well. They relentlessly assault anyone who reports that a marijuana study might show a detrimental effect. Few have time to put up with this, not therapists like Dr. Beauregard who treats marijuana addiction, not scientists who conduct the studies, not writers who report the science. With marijuana, what takes place on the Internet is a shouting match; those who shout loudest win.

After this experience, I’ve learned something else about the drug: marijuana not only makes you lie, it makes you rude.

Source: www.nationalfamilies.org  National Families in Action March 29, 2013 

Filed under: Parents,Social Affairs :

A 2012 survey pegged marijuana use in Jessamine County above the averages for the region and the state for eighth-graders and high-school sophomores and seniors. The Kentucky Incentives for Prevention (KIP) survey was completed by more than 1,600 Jessamine County students in grades six, eight, 10 and 12. Survey highlights were presented to the board of education at its August work session.

Nearly one in five sophomores surveyed reported using marijuana in the past 30 days, with that figure even higher at 23.9 percent for seniors. Both of those statistics are at least 5 percent higher than the state average. Among eighth-graders, 7.3 percent reported using marijuana in the past 30 days, and 12.7 percent — about one in eight — said they had used the drug in the past year.

The KIP survey addresses several other drugs including those legal for adults such as cigarettes and alcohol, which have both seen steady declines in use at each grade level statewide in the biennial survey since 2004. Marijuana use had been trending down among Kentucky teens from 2004 to 2008, but the numbers jumped back up again in 2010 and held steady last year, with 30.3 percent of seniors reporting marijuana use in the past year.   While presenting highlights of the KIP survey to the Jessamine County Board of Education on Aug. 12, director of pupil personnel Virginia Simpson said she has seen a “cultural acceptance” of marijuana through her years in the school system.

Simpson was part of a series of drug-testing forums with parents of student-athletes 10 years ago. A parent at one of those forums had questioned why a school should suspend a player for marijuana use and take away his or her “hook” for coming to school. Simpson said that parent’s words had stuck with her since: “You know in your heart as a Jessamine County resident, that kid’s going to be recreationally using marijuana every weekend for the rest of his life.”

Sgt. Scott Harvey of the Nicholasville Police Department is in schools regularly teaching fifth- and seventh-grade students about the dangers of drugs as part of the D.A.R.E. program on substance-abuse prevention. He said adults in Jessamine County don’t necessarily accept marijuana use but may see it as “not their problem” — an assessment he said is badly off-base.

“I think society-wise, we see people not wanting to meddle in other people’s business, and they see it as another person’s business. ‘It wouldn’t be right for me,’ they say, ‘but I don’t care if somebody else does it,’” Harvey said. “My problem with that is that it does affect me if somebody is driving up the road and crashes their car because they’re under the influence — it can directly affect me.”

While only 1.3 percent of Jessamine County sixth-graders said they had used marijuana in the past year — a figure right in line with the region and just above the state average — education about marijuana is reaching a younger and younger audience. D.A.R.E.’s national elementary-school curriculum recently added policy and procedure on addressing marijuana if the topic is age-appropriate for the specific classroom.

Harvey said he was surprised at how many eighth-graders reported using marijuana in the KIP survey but that children were undoubtedly affected by national debates over legalizing marijuana and using the drug as a medication. He noted talk-show host Montel Williams and CNN medical expert Sanjay Gupta as two major voices who have come out in support of medical marijuana and were making an impression on students.  “They’re seeing marijuana as not as big a deal any more,” Harvey said. “I think that’s one of the things that’s possibly being reflected in this data.”

The debate over medical marijuana has heightened in Kentucky in recent years, in part spurred on by the January 2012 death of perennial gubernatorial candidate and marijuana advocate Gatewood Galbraith. A bill in the Kentucky Senate to legalize medical marijuana was named in honor of Galbraith and introduced in January 2013 but never made it out of committee.

Marijuana is made from components of varieties of the cannabis plant and is usually smoked to produce physiological effects from its main active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). The cannabis plant contains ingredients with the potential for “relieving pain, controlling nausea, stimulating appetite and decreasing ocular pressure,” according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

Some varieties of the cannabis plant bred for industrial applications are referred to as hemp.  Harvey acknowledged the benefits of chemicals in marijuana to those dealing with anorexia and cancer treatments but said manufacturing and smoking the drug “in somebody’s basement” is not a reliable way to medicate.

“When you smoke marijuana, depending on the temperature it’s burned, depending on how far away the bud on the plant is, it varies the THC content,” he said. “There’s no way to get a measured dose of the medicine that you’re needing out of the plant unless it’s done scientifically under a controlled environment.” Marinol is an FDA-approved drug that contains THC and is marketed as an alternative to marijuana. NORML, a national marijuana-advocacy group, says Marinol can produce benefits similar to marijuana, but the group contends the drug lacks several other compounds in natural cannabis known to have further benefits.   “I think there are compounds in (marijuana) that help people — no doubt — but our days of smoking medications are several hundred years behind us,” Harvey said. “Those same compounds can be pulled out and put in a pill.”

The risks

Despite marijuana’s illegal status, high-school students in the KIP survey perceived less risk from smoking the illicit drug than from drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes.   Faced with four options on questions about risk — no risk, slight risk, moderate risk or great risk — only 40.7 percent of Jessamine County high-school seniors said people who smoke marijuana regularly face a moderate or great risk of harming themselves. More than 58 percent of seniors perceived a similar risk from drinking one or two alcoholic beverages a day, and 78.6 percent of them saw a significant risk from smoking one or more packs of cigarettes a day.

But NIDA reports that marijuana contains up to 70 percent more irritants and cancer-causing substances than cigarette smoke. The institute notes that there is no conclusive evidence that marijuana use leads to lung cancer.

The THC in marijuana acts on the brain’s reward system to give the user a sense of euphoria while impairing the ability to form new memories and disrupting coordination and balance, according to NIDA. The institute lists memory, learning-skill and sleep impairments as persistent consequences and increased risk of chronic cough and bronchitis as long-term effects of marijuana abuse.

Kevin Wilson, a community education and prevention specialist with the Bluegrass Prevention Center, said the perception of risk from marijuana use is “lower than ever” but that the actual drug has become more dangerous with higher levels of THC and lower levels of the  compound that counteracts THC’s psychoactive effects. Wilson sits on the Jessamine County Agency for Substance Abuse Policy (ASAP) board as well as ASAP

boards in Boyle, Garrard and Lincoln counties.  “In effect, we’re getting a much more dangerous product on the streets than ever before, and people aren’t really seeing it as any big deal,” he said.

Wilson said the effects of marijuana can be “all over the map” depending on the individual but that its potential to inhibit normal brain function was especially important when examining the risks to teenagers.  “The big thing is what it does to the potential in a young person, and it does affect the way that the brain develops,” Wilson said.

NIDA says long-term marijuana use can lead to addiction and cites a 1994 article that estimated 9 percent of marijuana users would become dependent on it. Though labeling marijuana as addictive is controversial, Harvey said he has seen direct evidence of dependence on the drug in his police work.

“When people are willing to steal from their families and pawn their sister’s most important possessions to get marijuana, then there’s obviously an addiction there,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that to get a scoop of ice cream; it’s a different situation.”

Addressing the issue

Marijuana use could be addressed by a recently created Jessamine County task force on substance abuse, though that group has focused initially on another illicit drug prominent in the county.

The task force, headed by Jessamine County Health Department director Randy Gooch, was created after a community health survey identified substance abuse as a “main health issue” in the county, Gooch said. The group has met once and plans to partner with the Kentucky Agency for Substance Abuse Policy to address substance abuse in Jessamine County.

Gooch said heroin has been the primary concern of the substance-abuse task force in its early stages. Jessamine County Attorney Brian Goettl and Jessamine County EMS director Jerry Domidion have reported a significant rise in heroin abuse this year, which authorities attributed to the passage of a 2012 bill that made it more difficult to abuse prescription pain pills.

“Marijuana hasn’t even really come up yet because heroin has been at the top of the agenda, and that’s the thing that we see our drug courts dealing with and our police and our emergency-response units dealing with is relative to heroin and heroin overdose,” Gooch said.

Though the consequences of marijuana use may not be as alarming as those from heroin or other addictive drugs, Gooch said marijuana needs to be addressed because it can serve as a gateway drug.

“Unfortunately, I think what ends up happening is when they experience or experiment with marijuana, it’s kind of like alcohol in a way — maybe marijuana is not the drug addiction that’s going to lead them to overdose and suicide and things of that nature, but I think it leads them on to other drugs that provide that potential,” he said.

Harvey said he was pleased with sixth- and eight-graders’ attitudes toward many drugs in the KIP survey, noting that those students are fresh out of D.A.R.E. programs the previous year. He said the police can only address marijuana abuse by enforcing existing laws and educating the public.

“We will continue to educate; we will continue to set a better example and show people positive alternatives to drug use in general,” he said.

Source:   www.jessaminejournal.com   Aug. 2013

Abstract

Objective: To promote wider recognition and further understanding of cannabinoid hyperemesis (CH).

Patients and Methods:

We constructed a case series, the largest to date, of patients diagnosed with CH at our

institution. Inclusion criteria were determined by reviewing all PubMed indexed journals with case reports and case series on CH. The institution’s electronic medical record was searched from January 1, 2005, through June 15, 2010.

Patients were included if there was a history of recurrent vomiting with no other explanation for symptoms and if cannabis use preceded symptom onset. Of 1571 patients identified, 98 patients (6%) met inclusion criteria.

Results:

All 98 patients were younger than 50 years of age. Among the 37 patients in whom duration of cannabis use was available, most (25 [68%]) reported using cannabis for more than 2 years before symptom onset, and 71 of 75 patients (95%) in whom frequency of use was available used cannabis more than once weekly. Eighty-four patients (86%) reported abdominal pain.

The effect of hot water bathing was documented in 57 patients (58%), and 52 (91%)

of these patients reported relief of symptoms with hot showers or baths. Follow-up was available in only 10 patients (10%). Of those 10, 7 (70%) stopped using cannabis and 6 of these 7 (86%) noted complete resolution of theirsymptoms.

Conclusion:

Cannabinoid hyperemesis should be considered in younger patients with long-term cannabis use and recurrent nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. On the basis of our findings in this large series of patients, we propose major and supportive criteria for the diagnosis of CH.

 

Source:  www.mayoclinicproceedings.org   Feb 2012: 87(2)

A west Cumbrian drugs charity has issued a warning over a deadly ecstasy-type drug. People taking PMA are risking their lives, the Rising Sun Trust says, as it can be stronger than ecstasy.  The warning comes as the government agency responsible for drug prevention said it was concerned with an apparent rise in the number of ecstasy-related deaths.

It is feared some tablets being sold as ecstasy actually contain PMA which can be stronger than MDMA (ecstasy).  Mark Dixon, 16, of Penrith, died last year after taking a cocktail of substances that included PMA pills.  The charity claims effects of PMA also take longer than MDMA to begin to be felt – so some users have overdosed by mistakenly taking pill after pill thinking nothing is happening.

Emma Pooley, of the Trust, said: “This seems to be right up there with the more dangerous drugs. This is not a case of scare mongering. It’s not a case of a bad batch. It’s the drug itself that is causing the problems. People take it thinking it’s ecstasy but it takes longer to get into your system. It could take up to an hour. People think the pills aren’t working and will take another lot and overdose.

“There are some really nasty side effects and the main one is over-heating which causes seizures.”

 

Source: www.newsandstar.co.uk  20th Aug.2013

Filed under: Effects of Drugs :

Campaigners have urged the Government to rethink drug laws in light of a widely respected independent body likening cannabis use to “moderately risky” gambling or junk food.

The publication of a six-year study from the UK Drug Policy Commission (UKDPC) today reveals that the £3bn spent annually tackling drugs is not evidence-based and calls for a “wholesale review” of existing laws.   The body, part-funded by the Home Office, was launched in April 2007 to provide objective analysis of drug policy, independent of government interference and special interest groups.

Its report, “A Fresh Approach to Drugs”, examined the effects of drug policy and makes recommendations ahead of the UKDPC being wound up this autumn. The report recommended re-categorising the possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use as a civil and not criminal offence.

It said there was an argument for amending the laws relating to growing cannabis for personal use which might “go some way to undermining the commercialisation of production”.   In England and Wales 160,000 people are given cannabis warnings each year. The National Treatment Agency for Substance Abuse says 2.8 million people in England use drugs, but only 300,000 use heroin and crack cocaine which “cause the most problems”.

The UKDPC report said there are “some moderately selfish or risky behaviours that free societies accept will occur” and seek to limit but not prevent entirely, such as “gambling or eating junk food”.   Politicians must heed its findings and begin this review as a matter of urgency” said Danny Kushlick, of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation.

Source: www.independent.co.uk   15. Oct.2012

Filed under: Drug Specifics :

The Dutch government said Friday it would move to classify high-potency marijuana alongside hard drugs such as cocaine and ecstasy, the latest step in the country’s ongoing reversal of its famed tolerance policies.

The decision means most of the cannabis now sold in the Netherlands’ weed cafes would have to be replaced by milder variants. But skeptics said the move would be difficult to enforce, and that it could simply lead many users to smoke more of the less potent weed.  Possession of marijuana is technically illegal in the Netherlands, but police do not prosecute people for possession of small amounts, and it is sold openly in designated cafes. Growers are routinely prosecuted if caught.

Economic Affairs Minister Maxime Verhagen said weed containing more than 15 percent of its main active chemical, THC, is so much stronger than what was common a generation ago that it should be considered a different drug entirely.

The high potency weed has “played a role in increasing public health damage,” he said at a press conference in The Hague .  The Cabinet has not said when it will begin enforcing the rule. Jeffrey Parsons, a psychologist at Hunter College in New York who studies addiction, said the policy may not have the benefits the government is hoping for.  “If it encourages smoking an increased amount of low-concentration THC weed, it is likely to actually cause more harm than good,” he said, citing the potential lung damage and cancer-causing effects of extra inhalation.

The Dutch Justice Ministry said Friday it was up to cafes to regulate their own products and police will seize random samples for testing.   But Gerrit-Jan ten Bloomendal, spokesman for the Platform of Cannabis Businesses in the Netherlands, said implementing the plan would be difficult “if not impossible.”   “How are we going to know whether a given batch exceeds 15 percent THC? For that matter, how would health inspectors know?” he said. He predicted a black market will develop for highly potent weed.

The ongoing Dutch crackdown on marijuana is part of a decade-long rethink of liberalism in general that has seen a third of the windows in Amsterdam’s famed prostitution district shuttered and led the Netherlands to adopt some of the toughest immigration rules in Europe.

The number of licensed marijuana cafes has been reduced, and earlier this year the government announced plans to ban tourists from buying weed. That has been resisted by the city of Amsterdam, where the marijuana cafes known euphemistically as “coffee shops” are a major tourist draw. Marjan Heuving of the Netherlands’ Trimbos Institute, which studies mental health and addiction, said there is a growing body of evidence that THC causes mental illnesses.   She said it stands to reason “the more THC the body takes in, the more the impact.” But it has not been demonstrated scientifically that high THC weed is worse for mental health, she said.

Parsons of Hunter College said it remains difficult to be sure whether marijuana causes mental problems or whether people predisposed to, say, depression seek it out as a form of self-medication.

The Trimbos Institute says the average amount of THC in Dutch marijuana is currently around 17.8 percent. It has been declining since 2004 after increasing steadily from 4 percent or so in the 1970s.By comparison, in the United States the average level of THC in marijuana is around 10 percent and rising, according to the last measure released by the Office of National Drug Control Policy in 2009.

Heuving agreed with Ten Bloomendal that determining THC levels outside of a laboratory setting would prove difficult, as exact content varies widely from batch to batch and even within a single plant.   “I don’t know of any home test,” she said. “How this is going to work in practical terms, I have no idea.”

Source:   www.independent .co.uk    Oct. 2011

A new study by Canadian social scientists finds boys who display anti-social behavior in kindergarten will likely abuse drugs later in life — unless they receive intensive intervention in their “tween” years.

The study began in 1984, in Montreal. Some kindergarten teachers selected boys in their class who came from low-income households and showed anti-social behavior for a longitudinal study by the University of Montreal.

Of the 172 disruptive 5-year-olds chosen, 46 were channeled into an intensive intervention program over two years, starting when they were 7.

The boys were given social skills training to learn how to control emotions and build healthy friendships. They were also taught to use problem solving and communication instead of anti-social behaviors. Their families were involved in parts of the program, with parents learning skills to help their sons through difficulties.

Researchers studied two control groups: 42 boys got no intervention at all, and the remaining 84 received only a home visit. All the boys were followed until they were 17, with specific attention paid to their use of drugs or alcohol. Results published recently in the British Journal of Psychiatry indicate that the boys who received this intensive therapy were less likely than the rest to use drugs as teens.   Researcher Natalie Castellanos-Ryan, of the psychiatry department of the University of Montreal, said the boys who received the intensive interventions had much lower levels of anti-social behavior. They never caught up with the level of drug or alcohol use of the other boys in the study, who began substance use from early adolescence. Even the boys who received periodic in-home visits, but not intensive intervention, had a high rate of substance misuse during teenage years.

The study authors concluded that “adolescent substance use may be indirectly prevented by selectively targeting childhood risk factors that disrupt the developmental cascade of adolescent risk factors for substance use.”

Castellanos-Ryan said her team hopes to follow up with the same cohort of boys who are now 30 years old, to see if the intervention is still paying dividends.

Source:  www.scpr.org  16 Aug 2013

Do you know how “industrial hemp”** is being used to promote the legalization of marijuana? Jeanette McDougal, Drugwatch International

 

If you don’t know the facts you may be deceived into promoting a dangerous psychoactive and addictive drug! Nobody likes to be tricked . . Nobody likes to be used…………..

 

Matthew Cheng and Alex Shum, importers of hemp fabric, “feel that the way to legalize marijuana is to sell marijuana legally.  When you can buy marijuana in your neighborhood shopping mall, IT’S LEGAL!  So, they are going to produce every conceivable thing out of hemp . . .”                                as reported High Times, “Hemp Clothing Is Here!”, March 1990

 

“Legal Hemp is Here!  Hemp clothing is now available!  The Hemp Tour.  Stoned Wear.  HEMP FOR VICTORY!”

Cover of High Times, March 1990

 

“The issue of legalizing marijuana needs to be publicized and not just worn on clothes to look cool.  NORML is trying to educate people on the usefulness of hemp, the plant that produces marijuana.

as reported in Minnesota Daily — University of Minnesota — 12-4-93

 

” ‘It’s the leaky bucket strategy,’ says Eric E. Sterling.’Legalize it in one area, and sooner or later it will trickle down into the others.’ ”

as reported in Mademoiselle Magazine, 1993

 

 

“The issue of legalizing marijuana needs to be publicized and not just worn on clothes to look cool.  NORML is trying to educate people on the usefulness of hemp, the plant that produces marijuana.

as reported in Minnesota Daily — University of Minnesota — 12-4-93

 

 

“After the Freedom Fighter Convention in April 1994, “Thus began the first national letter-writing campaign in the movement.  Members wrote letters about hemp to elected officials and requested a reply.”     as reported in High Times, p. 46 May 1994

 

 

“Over 1500 protesters attended the [Hash] Bash, 10 times the number of the previous year.  The HIGH TIMES hemp movement had officially begun.”

as reported in High Times, p. 45, May 1994

 

“In 1989 . . . We put Jerry Garcia on the cover of the issue, employing Masel’s strategy of promoting hemp through the Deadhead underground.”

as reported in High Times, p. 45, May 1994

 

“Unexpectedly, an ad for Stoned Wear, the first hemp clothing line, suddenly appeared in HIGH TIMES. . . The hemp industry in America had officially begun.”

as reported in High Times, p.46, May 1994)

 

“HIGH TIMES had been instrumental in getting the hemp movement off the ground.  Now it was time for us to step back and let the movement run itself.”

as reported in High Times, p. 47, May 1994

 

“[Colorado] Sen. Lloyd Casey had planned on introducing legislation to legalize marijuana this session, but he’s been persuaded to wait until 1995.” “He said the government should treat marijuana like tobacco and alcohol.” “For the last few months, pro-hemp activists have staged smoke-ins on the steps of the [Colorado] Capitol to call attention to the importance of legalizing marijuana.”

as reported in The Capitol Reporter, Colorado, January 19, 1994

 

One problem for farmers has been keeping pot smokers away.  Cannabis fields have been raided by people used to growing individual cannabis plants on high-rise balconies or deserted rail sidings.”

as reported in “British farmers experiment with hemp,” Sarnia Observer,

Sarnia, Ontario,Canada, Oct. 4/94

 

“All activist groups, including the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), were severely hampered by lack of support and funding.  Could

hemp be the issue capable of drawing the smokers [marijuana users] out of their closets?”

as reported in High Times, p. 45,  May 1994

 

“Don’t forget that the joints you smoke and the fiber you make into clothes are the same plant.”

as reported in High Times, “Desert Showdown”, p. 52, April 1995

 

A trio of “twenty something” Americans — Dunn, Mignola and Markgraff — own a hemp and marijuana seed emporium in Amsterdam.  “He [Markgraff] and his partners fervently believe that once the rest of the world accepts the practical uses of the cannabis plant, it’s only a matter of time before they warm to the beneficent uses of smoking it as well.”

 

as reported in Details Magazine, “Weed the World”, p. 70, May 4/95

 

“The prosecutor in the Swiss canton of Thurgau seized hemp plants in October after forensic tests showed that the THC contents of the hemp was 4 – 5.5%, instead of 0.5%.)

Hassela Nordic Network press release, 12/6/95

A study of risk factors for early-onset dementia finds alcohol abuse tops the list, HealthDay reports.

In contrast, the influence of hereditary factors is small, according to the researchers.

They define early-onset dementia as occurring before age 65. The researchers studied 488,484 men drafted at about age 18 into the Swedish military over a 10-year period. They were followed for approximately 37 years.  During that time, 487 men developed early-onset dementia, at an average age of 54.

Besides alcohol intoxication, other risk factors included drug abuse, the use of antipsychotic drugs, stroke, depression,having a father with dementia, poor mental functioning as a teen, being short and having high blood pressure. Men who had at least two of these risk factors, and were in the lowest third of overall mental ability, had a 20-fold increased risk.

“These risk factors were multiplicative, most were potentially modifiable, and most could be traced to adolescence, suggesting excellent opportunities for early prevention,” the researchers wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Source: Join Together August 16, 2013

by Fabio Bernabei

The consequences of what’s happening in Uruguay are certainly not destined to remain within the boundaries of that South American nation and could have important consequences for the peoples all over the world.

The Uruguay left-wing government have decided to pass a national law, for now in the Lower House by a narrow margin (50 votes against 46), pending the vote in the Senate, which unilaterally wipe out the obligation to respect the rules and controls set under UN Conventions on Drugs, legitimizing the cultivation and sale of cannabis.   José Alberto Mujica Cordano, current head of State and Government, is the kingpin for this decisive turning-point against the population will who’s for 63% contrary to the legitimacy of cannabis.

The President Mujica Cordano, at the beginning of the parliamentary process to ratify that unjustified violation of international law, refused to meet the delegation of the International Narcotics Control Board-INCB, an independent body that monitors implementation of the UN Conventions on Drugs by the signatory States such as Uruguay.   The INCB, stated in an press release, in line with its mandate, “has always aimed at maintaining a dialogue with the Government of Uruguay on this issue, including proposing a mission to the country at the highest-level. The Board regrets that the Government of Uruguay refused to receive an INCB mission before the draft law was submitted to Parliament for deliberation”

. A one more (il)legal precedent disrespectful the International Community.

In an attempt to reassure the international public opinion, President José Mujica, told the Brazilian press his government will not allow unlimited use of marijuana and illicit drug dealing: “And if somebody buys 20 marijuana cigarettes, he will have to smoke them. He won’t be able to sell them”.    Amazing statement, unless you put a police officer to shadow each individual, legal, buyer, as long as he has smoked it all and he did it in moderation!

In order to convince the majority of the Uruguayan population, contrary to the legalization, the President Mujica has promised to launch at the same time “a campaign aimed at young people on how to consume marijuana. Avoid, for example, to smoke to not damage the lungs but inhale or consume it with food”.

Nothing new: the Pro-Legalizer Lobby is interested from the very beginning in the psychoactive effects of cannabis on the conscience of the people, to scale up drug use and to cause a social revolution in “interiore homine” .But for that it’s necessary do not have big health emergencies so to provoke a social alarm inside the public opinion that could spark a strong reaction of parents in defense of their kids as happened in some countries in the past times.

For the ideological anti-prohibitionist front the so called “Harm Reduction”of the drug use is a constant concern so to scheme a “pragmatic” strategy, seemingly far from the “ideal” one of the Hippy movement, which was codified in 1990 “Frankfurt Resolution”.

An anti-prohibitionists stereotype, used by President Mujica Cordano, is also the cliché according to the promotion by the State of production and use of the drugs would defeat the illegal drug trafficking, whereas each legalization in any part of the world has always created a “gray” market close to the “black” one which was never replaced by the “legal” market.    The popular protests seem to push the Uruguayan government to hold a referendum on the new anti-prohibitionist legislation. For that reason the Open Society

Foundation headed by the financier George Soros has announced the launch of a massive media campaign across the nation to manipulate the public consensus

.Yesterday a social revolution by “armed propaganda” …  today by drugs?

How it is possible that a government violates international law and respect for human rights enshrined in the UN Conventions on Drugs in a such harsh way, you can tell by reading the biography on the official page of the President of Uruguay, José Mujica Cordano, cofounder of the ‘60 Movimiento de Liberación Nacional-MLN-Tupamaros, along with Raúl Sendic and others.

The Marxist inspired group practiced guerrilla warfare, along with every kind of crime: theft, robbery and kidnapping of people, by what they call “armed propaganda” in their manual of subversion “Nous les Tupamaros” (We, the Tupamaros).

Convicted of numerous crimes José Mujica will be arrested and his organization dismantled. Convicted of numerous crimes will serve fourteen years in jail until the general amnesty of 1985 enacted to reopen a national reconciliation and a new democratic season. José Mujica, who never abandoned his own ideals, once free gave life, with other leaders of the MLN and some sectors of the Left, to a new party: the Movimiento de Participación Popular (MPP).

The Tupamaros, founded by the current President of Uruguay, represented a turning point in Latin America bringing the Terror firmly inside the cities with spectacular actions that gave them worldwide visibility: “The Tupamaros attracted a great deal of attention in the world media , but in final analysis the only result of their operations was the destruction of freedom in a country that is almost alone in Latin America, had an unbroken democratic tradition, however imperfect.”

More, the Tupamaros extolled the primacy of the intellectual propaganda, summed up in their slogan: “Las palabras nos separan, the acción nos une” (Words divide us, the action unites us).

The ideology of Tupamaros was never presented in any single official document. In fact the Tupamaros  actions, nor political statement or ideological platform, “were the way most important for the creation of a revolutionary consciousness”.

For their goals the Tupamaros argued it should be used every means, even the use of the violence, in their words, “a legitimate means, the more powerful tool and more effective way to gain power.”  Violence never indiscriminate or excessive,  to not frighten the public opinion in which they sought sympathy and support.

The Tupamaros, former or epigones, nowadays to set off a “revolutionary collective consciousness” seems to prefer the use of marijuana but with the foresight to put, at least nominally, some limitations. This to avoid to be defeated, as happened in Italy, Sweden and the United States, by the popular reaction to the suffering, moral degradation and violence subsequent to the legalization laws pro “personal” drug use during the ’60 and ’70.

The unprecedented attack to the International Law, and the disregards of the uruguayan people will, have obtained the same worldwide clamor of the violent actions of the Tupamaros led by, the now President, Mujica,

Imposing the production and sale of drugs as a Common Good to be protected by law is unquestionably, for all its possible consequences, the more “revolutionary” act never accomplished by Tupamaros in respect of International law, Human Rights and Core Democratic Values.  But drug legalization is a key factor who anyone want a deep revolution inside a civil society. Legalize marijuana it’s an important step, the Radical

Party leader, Marco Pannella, told at the founding meeting of the International League Antiprohibitionist (LIA) in 1987, “as has been the introduction of the Divorce and Abortion laws”.

That’s because, the then European Commissioner, and now italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Emma Bonino admitted: “in fact, on the question of drugs (old, new or brand new) you play one fundamental game. A challenge between two opposing political and cultural models. A comparison between two different kind of societies to be built. ”

Pope Francis: “Do not let yourselves be robbed of hope!” Fight the drug legalization !

Pope Francis, following in predecessors footsteps, gave a warning about the danger of marijuana legalization in a speech during the Brazil Apostolic Journey: “The scourge of drug-trafficking, that favours violence and sows the seeds of suffering and death, requires of society as a whole an act of courage. A reduction in the spread and influence of drug addiction will not be achieved by a liberalization of drug use, as is currently being proposed in various parts of Latin America”. In the same speech, the Holy Father invited all of us to consider that there is “a sure future, set against a different horizon with regard to the illusory enticements of the idols of this world, yet granting new momentum and strength to our daily lives” (Lumen Fidei, 57). To all of you, I repeat: Do not let yourselves be robbed of hope! Do not let yourselves be robbed of hope! And not only that, but I say to us all: let us not rob others of hope, let us become bearers of hope!”

Let us not “be ropped of hope” of a future that has “a different perspective” from the “illusory enticements of the idols” of the Tupamaros and High Finance and the Antiproibitionist utopias.

In his Pastoral Handbook, the Pontifical Council for Health Pastoral Care wrote on that topic: “We need to be able to identify and recognise the importance of drug lobbies, as well as the pressure they place on civil authorities and within the whole society, in order to fight them with the various weapons at our disposal: political, economic, and judicial; and, at national, regional and international levels.

In particular, it would be wise for all civil authorities, to set in place laws and norms to effectively fight at all levels the networks of drugs, refusing to decriminalise any use of them. Decriminalisation opens the door to total liberation, leading only to the perpetuation of drug addiction”.

Let us “become bearers of hope”, and push stronger the fight against any kind of sale, free or for profit, authorized or illegal, of any drugs!

Fabio Bernabei  (fabio.bernabei@gmail.com)

Footnotes 1http://globovision.com/articulo/para-producir-cannabis-uruguay-planea-entregar-licencias-a-privados#.UfrRNQ4VB8U.twitter 2  www.elobservador.com.uy/septimodia/post/889/la-revolucion/ 3  www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2013/unisnar1176.html 4 www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/uruguay/9347452/Uruguay-marijuana-sales-to-be-controlled-by-state.html 5www.lastampa.it/2013/02/21/esteri/l-ultima-sfida-del-presidente-mujica-vi-insegno-come-usare-la-marijuana-9DqZIHKyZ7zAX1sA3cAL3K/pagina.html

CHEVY CHASE, MD, AUGUST 12, 2013 – The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) expresses its concern that the CNN documentary “Weed”, hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, may mislead Americans about the “medical” nature of smoked marijuana.

 

ASAM, the largest American medical professional society dedicated to the treatment and prevention of addiction, issued a white paper in 2011 that examined the therapeutic potential of cannabis and the role that Medicine, in particular, physicians, play in the delivery of “medical” marijuana. In short, there is some evidence that the cannabis in marijuana has certain palliative properties when it interacts with the body’s endocannabinoid receptor system. However, cannabis used for medicinal purposes is neither standardized nor quality-controlled. Furthermore, it is typically smoked which is not a safe means of drug delivery.

 

“Dr. Gupta is a respected physician, recognized by many as a medical authority, “offers Dr. Stuart Gitlow, MD, ASAM President. “We are concerned that his endorsement of marijuana as medicine may support the idea that smoked marijuana is safe and non-addictive.” Neither notion is supported by research. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, marijuana is an intoxicating drug that impairs memory, motor function, and, when smoked, respiratory health. And, for nearly one in ten habitual users, marijuana is addictive.

 

“I see more and more patients who regularly use marijuana and many of them are young people”, reflects Dr. Gitlow. “They think marijuana is harmless because it’s ‘medicine’.” In fact, according to the 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (SAMHSA, 2011), the decreasing perception among youths of risk of smoking marijuana from 2007 to 2011 is consistent with the increase in past month marijuana use among youths between 2007 and 2011 (7.9 percent reported using marijuana in the past month in 2011 versus 6.7 percent reporting use in 2007).

 

ASAM encourages an open and balanced dialogue about the possible benefits and risks of marijuana and is grateful to CNN and Dr. Gupta for advancing this discussion. “Marijuana may prove to have some clinical applications,” says Dr. Gitlow. “But, until and when high quality scientific research supports that and the drug is subject to the same standards that are applicable to other prescription medications, marijuana cannot be called “medical.”

 

The American Society of Addiction Medicine is a national medical specialty society of over 3,000 physicians. Its mission is to increase access to and improve the quality of addiction treatment, to educate physicians, and other health care providers and the public, to support research and prevention, to promote the appropriate role of the physician in the care of patients with addictive disorders, and to establish Addiction Medicine as a specialty recognized by professional organizations, governments, physicians, purchasers and consumers of health care services and the general public. ASAM was founded in 1954, and has had a seat in the American Medical Association House of Delegates since 1988.

Source:    www. ageier@asam.org  12th August 2013

Filed under: Addiction (Papers) :

Here is an excellent op-ed by Howard Samuels, president of The Hills Treatment Center in Los Angeles. He uses Kevin’s point that legalization is a step too far and addresses the real purpose behind the marijuana legalization movement   – recreational use.

 

Legalizing pot isn’t about medicine, it’s about getting high

 

Howard C. Samuels, author of “Alive Again: Recovering from Alcoholism and Drug Addiction,” is the founder and president of The Hills Treatment Center in Los Angeles.

 

(CNN) — At first glance, my 11-year-old son seems like your everyday, all-American kid. He loves baseball and basketball, plays Xbox with his friends when they come over, and posts innocuous pictures of the family dog on his Instagram feed. Given these mundane facts about the boy, you can imagine my surprise when, while watching the news (again, seemingly from out of nowhere) he asked me, “If pot is so bad, why are they trying to legalize it?”

 

And, just like that, the long and involved talk my wife and I had given our children about drugs was tossed out the window.  We had explained the harmful effects of marijuana. Like cigarettes, smoking marijuana introduces tar, carbon monoxide and cancer-causing agents into your body.

 

Neither my wife nor I anticipated that our son would be stopped on the street by unscrupulous potheads petitioning outside of the local grocery store and being fed a line of rhetoric that went against what we were trying to teach him.

 

It turns out that potheads weren’t exactly the problem; they were the symptom. Let me tell you why.  If you have a fever and you go to the doctor and he tells you that you have pneumonia, do you ask him to treat the fever, or do you ask him to treat the pneumonia? Most of us would ask him to treat the pneumonia because the pneumonia is the problem; the fever is the symptom.

 

It’s the same way with the argument about the legalization of marijuana. I’m not interested in focusing on the symptom; I want to eradicate the problem. And the problem is that we’re even considering legalizing marijuana at all.

 

Let’s take a look at the medical marijuana issue in Los Angeles (where I live) and we can see where legalization takes us. It has been my experience that anyone can get a medical marijuana card in L.A.; all you need is $25-$100 and the ability to lie about needing it. You just make an appointment with some company, walk in and state your problem(s) and why you need a card (with no proof of medical conditions whatsoever) and you will be prescribed a card that is good for one year. It’s a toothless system that isn’t well-regulated.

 

Why are some of the people who petition for legalizing marijuana so passionate about it? Because when you smoke pot, you get loaded. You fry your brain. That’s why the patients I see in my treatment center call it “getting baked.” Pot is all about getting really high.

 

Now, I have nothing against people who smoke pot. In fact, I believe it is a crime to put someone in prison for smoking pot. Honestly, do we really need some idiot frat boy to get picked up during Mardi Gras for smoking pot and find himself locked in a cage with a monster for six months? Kevin Sabet, a former senior adviser to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy poses a terrific point when he says that criminal processing for possession of marijuana needs improvement, but legalization is a step too far.

 

Marijuana supporters like to argue that marijuana is similar to alcohol. While alcohol is legal, it also accounts for tens of thousands of deaths every year in car accidents or other drinking-related misfortunes. But we can’t turn the clock back on that one because it’s too embedded in our society.

 

Supporters of marijuana say that marijuana should be legalized because old people and women and children who have ailments like glaucoma or cancer or intractable seizures need it.   It is painful to watch people suffer. I am not against helping people. In a perfect world, a woman suffering from cancer should be able to get a prescription from her doctor, go to a pharmacy, acquire her medical marijuana, go home and recuperate from her last round of chemotherapy. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and you don’t need a Ph.D. to see that the spirit of that argument is being exploited by people who aren’t using the marijuana for medical reasons at all; they are using it to get high.

 

Introducing legalized marijuana into our culture would be like using gasoline to put out a fire, because it stunts growth.

 

Do you know why we don’t see potheads out in public? It’s because they’re sitting at home smoking weed and staring at their television sets or playing video games all day. Do you have any idea how many marijuana addicts I encounter at my rehab on a daily basis? They talk about wanting to be productive. But what pot does is it kills their motivation — it destroys people’s ability to go out and work and to have a career. It makes them want to do nothing but lie around all day. Is that what you want for your children? Is that what you want for your loved ones?

 

And how do you market marijuana? We have only just now moved into an era where cigarette smoking is commonly known to be harmful, but now advertisers have a new product to sell. Who do you think they’re going to market their product to? Not you or me, because we’re not stupid enough to believe the lie; we know too much. They’re going to follow in the footsteps of the cigarette companies in the 1980s and market this stuff to young people.

 

The very idea of that sickens me. I know what marijuana does to the human mind because I started smoking weed when I was 15 years old. It literally robbed me of my motivation to participate in my own life. I was absolutely OK with sitting around all day eating cookies and watching television and getting high with my friends. But, to go out and earn a living and do something with my life? That was all stuff that I was going to do later after I came down off of the marijuana. But, then I’d smoke some more and think, “Why bother?” . . . and, eventually, I started shooting heroin. If my family had not intervened and sought professional help, I would probably still be wandering aimlessly through the streets today; searching for that elusive “perfect high.”

 

Even if you only stay with marijuana in your repertoire of illicit drugs to abuse, it will never yield positive results. Ever.

 

And, I posit this to marijuana abusers everywhere: Are you really that weak? Are you really that uncomfortable in your own skin that you can’t handle living your life or having real experiences without being high? Is it really impossible for you to live life without a drug? Because, if it is, it breaks my heart and I feel sorry for you. Because that’s no way to live.

 

And my kid, he’s going to know the truth about you. He’s going to know that every time you approach him arguing for the legalization of marijuana, what you’re really doing is asking him to vote to make it OK for you to spend the rest of your life half-baked on your sofa, too stoned to go out and play with your own kids or do the things you’ve

always dreamed of doing. To my kid, I’m going to say that this means one less competitor on his road to a successful and fulfilling life.

 

And, to the potheads who are so passionate about being allowed to smoke their lives away, I have only one thing to say: Dream On.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/09/opinion/samuels-pot-addiction/  

Filed under: Medicine and Marijuana :

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