“Many studies have linked marijuana use with early onset of psychosis. The question is, does smoking marijuana cause earlier psychosis? A new review of 83 studies involving more than 22,000 participants seeks an answer.

The meta-analysis found that people who smoked marijuana developed psychotic disorders an average 2.7 years earlier than people who did not use cannabis.

 
Context

A number of studies have found that the use of cannabis and other psychoactive substances is associated with an earlier onset of psychotic illness.
Objective

To establish the extent to which use of cannabis, alcohol, and other psychoactive substances affects the age at onset of psychosis by meta-analysis.

 
Data Sources

Peer-reviewed publications in English reporting age at onset of psychotic illness in substance-using and non–substance-using groups were located using searches of CINAHL, EMBASE, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and ISI Web of Science.

 
Study Selection

Studies in English comparing the age at onset of psychosis in cohorts of patients who use substances with age at onset of psychosis in non–substance-using patients. The searches yielded 443 articles, from which 83 studies met the inclusion criteria.

 
Data Extraction

Information on study design, study population, and effect size were extracted independently by 2 of us.

 
Data Synthesis

Meta-analysis found that the age at onset of psychosis for cannabis users was 2.70 years younger (standardized mean difference = –0.414) than for nonusers; for those with broadly defined substance use, the age at onset of psychosis was 2.00 years younger (standardized mean difference = –0.315) than for nonusers. Alcohol use was not associated with a significantly earlier age at onset of psychosis. Differences in the proportion of cannabis users in the substance-using group made a significant contribution to the heterogeneity in the effect sizes between studies, confirming an association between cannabis use and earlier mean age at onset of psychotic illness.

 
Conclusions.

The results of meta-analysis provide evidence for a relationship between cannabis use and earlier onset of psychotic illness, and they support the hypothesis that cannabis use plays a causal role in the development of psychosis in some patients. The results suggest the need for renewed warnings about the potentially harmful effects of cannabis.

 
Matthew Large, BSc(Med), MBBS, FRANZCP; Swapnil Sharma, MBBS, FRANZCP; Michael T. Compton, MD, MPH; Tim Slade, PhD; Olav Nielssen, MBBS, MCrim, FRANZCP

 
Source: Arch Gen Psychiatry. Published online February 7, 2011. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.5

In Illinois in the USA, randomly allocating towns to enforce laws against youth smoking in public led not just to fewer youth smoking but also fewer drinking or using and being offered illegal drugs – did anti-tobacco policing spill-over to create an environment unfriendly to drinking and illegal drug use?

Summary The featured report drew its data from a study which randomly assigned 24 towns in the US state of in Illinois to either more vigorously enforce laws prohibiting under-age possession and use of tobacco, or to continue with existing low-level enforcement practices, a study which showed the intended effects on youth smoking. The issue addressed by the featured report was whether this spilled over to affect other forms of substance use and availability.

The towns selected for and which (via their officials) agreed to participate in the study were also all engaged in a state-sponsored programme intensifying enforcement of the ban on commercial tobacco sales to youngsters under the age of 18. The difference in the 12 towns allocated to enhanced enforcement was that this was supplemented by intensified enforcement of laws against young people having or using tobacco, in particular by levying civic fines against minors caught using or possessing tobacco in public. By design, at the start of the study all the towns only infrequently enforced these laws, a situation continued in the 12 control towns not allocated to enhanced enforcement.

Assignment had the intended effect; over the four years of the study, the average yearly number of anti-tobacco citations issued to minors was significantly higher (17 v. 6) in towns assigned to enhanced enforcement than in control towns.

Earlier reports on the study also showed the intended impact on youth smoking, which increased at a significantly slower rate for adolescents in towns where enforcement was extended. The researcher-administered, confidential surveys of school pupils which established this also asked about current (past 30 days) and ever use of substances other than tobacco. The key statistics for the study were the total number of different types of drugs the student had recently or ever used, averaged over pupils in the same town to assess the impacts on youth in the town as a whole. Pupils were also asked how many times over the past year someone had tried to give or sell them illegal drugs. These surveys were administered in four succeeding years to students from grade seven (age 12–13) up to grade ten in 2002, 11 in 2003, and 12 in 2004 and 2005, meaning that in each year some of the same pupils but also many new ones were sampled.

Across the four waves of data collection 52,550 pupils were eligible to be surveyed of whom 29,851 (57%) completed at least one survey. From these were selected only the 25,404 pupils (who completed 50,725 surveys) living in the 24 towns in the study.

Main findings

At the start of the study towns in the two sets of 12 did not differ in the number of substances currently or ever used by their pupils. As the different tobacco enforcement policies were implemented, over the succeeding three years the number of different drugs that a pupil currently or had ever used increased significantly less steeply in towns assigned to enhanced tobacco enforcement. There was a similar and also statistically significant result for offers of illicit drugs.

Use of substances other than tobacco was dominated by alcohol, so a further analysis focused on this substance alone. Again, increases in the average proportions of pupils who had recently or ever drank alcohol were significantly less steep in towns assigned to enhanced tobacco enforcement.

Though differences between the two sets of towns were statistically significant they were modest, and in both sets most substances had or were being used by few pupils.

The authors’ conclusions

In this study, towns allocated to heightened enforcement of laws prohibiting youth possession and use of tobacco experienced relatively lower increases in the probability that their young people had or were using a number of different substances or had been exposed to an offer of illicit drugs, providing preliminary evidence that police efforts to reduce specific substance use behaviours might have a positive spill-over effect on other high-risk activities. Given the co-occurrence of different forms of substance use, strategies that strengthen community norms against youth tobacco use might work synergistically to help reduce youth drug use and illicit drug offers.

How did an enforcement effort focused exclusively on tobacco affect use and availability of other substances? There are several possible explanations. Being punished for tobacco-related crimes might deter individual children from possessing and using other drugs, and the knowledge that police in enforcement towns approach youngsters to enforce anti-tobacco laws may deter young people and even adults from selling drugs in these communities. Possibly relevant too is the ‘broken window’ approach to enforcement, supported by studies which have shown that enforcement of laws against lower-level crimes can deter more serious offences. According to this theory, creating an environment where youth cigarette use is not tolerated might create an unfavourable environment for drug use. More directly, greater contact between young people and police enforcing underage tobacco laws might give police more chances to search for and confiscate illegal drugs.

Police believe that publicly smoking cigarettes acts as a signal to drug dealers that a young person might also be in the market for drugs. If so, making youth smoking less visible in a town may also make that town less attractive to dealers. Reduced visibility may also minimise the perception that illegal behaviour is normal and acceptable in that community. The effect could be to reduce sales attempts by make potential young customers less obvious and by making the entire town seem an undesirable dealing location. Alternatively, the findings might reflect reduced offers of alcohol or other drugs from friends rather than drug dealers, because reductions in use of tobacco spread to other substances, especially alcohol.

However, alcohol not illegal drugs might account for the bulk of the findings. Use of tobacco and alcohol tend to go together, so if police crack down on tobacco, they might also discourage drinking.

Source: Journal of Community Psychology: 2010, 38(1), p. 1–15.

Dublin city coroner Dr Brian Farrell is to write to the Department of Health to highlight a link between methadone use and heart failure following an inquest into the death of a 30-year-old man.   Philip Wright of Celbridge, Co Kildare, died on December 13th, 2011, having collapsed after taking heroin.

He had discharged himself on December 12th from Connolly Hospital Blanchardstown where he had been taken off methadone, a heroin replacement drug, because of the dangerous effect it was having on his heart. Mr Wright had attended the hospital on December 9th after collapsing at home. He was also on antibiotics for a chest infection.

Dr Joseph Galvin, consultant cardiologist at the hospital, told the coroner an electrocardiogram (ECG) carried out on Mr Wright picked up a problem with his heart and his methadone was stopped on December 11th. He said the drug could put the heart out of rhythm by changing its electrical properties “in a dangerous way”.

Mr Wright’s heart returned to normal after he was taken off methadone, he said. Recent studies had shown up to 18 per cent of people on methadone had experienced the same heart problems, he said.   The doctor recommended that anyone who collapsed while using methadone should have an ECG carried out. “It is not as benign a drug as was first thought,” Dr Galvin said.

He also said he had recommended an alternative drug for Mr Wright to replace the methadone: buprenorphine.  By lunchtime on Monday, December 12th, Mr Wright had not received the drug. His father, James Wright, told the coroner his son feared he would go into severe withdrawal without it.  He discharged himself from hospital against medical advice and obtained heroin. He died of respiratory failure in the bathroom of his parents’ home the following day having injected the heroin.

Evidence was also given that the pharmacy in the hospital did not receive a request for buprenorphine for Mr Wright and there were issues around access to the drug.

There was also a recommendation that there should be an interval between the time methadone is stopped and buprenorphine is given.  Returning a verdict of death by misadventure, Dr Farrell said he would write to the department and to methadone maintenance authorities and clinics about the potential cardiac effects of methadone.

He would also raise the issue of availability of buprenorphine.

Source: www.irishtimes.com Sat. 5th Jan

Beverages Target Youth

Alcohol Justice reported this week that an updated version of the alcopop Buzzballz is once again targeting youth. Buzzballz, with its bright colors and candy-like flavors packs a punch. The beverage has a 60-proof, or 30 percent alcohol by volume. That’s an additional 10-15 percent more alcohol than the original product that debuted several years ago.

The product is sold in a 750ml container of pre-mixed cocktails and a shot glass attached to the bottle.

The original flavored, colored, spirits-in-a-ball was created by a former high school teacher, who got the idea for a beverage that would be non-breakable and safe while sitting by the pool. According to the creator, Buzzballz is all meant to be fun, and not meant to be a harmful beverage.

Health advocates say the product is anything but harmless, and, in fact, appeals to youth. Flavors include Lemon Squeeze, Chocolate Caramel Cake, Red Hot Cinnamon Shot, Jalapeño Lime and Licorice Bomb.

To learn more about the dangers of alcopops and other flavored alcoholic beverages, see Alcohol Justice’s recent report.

Source:  http://www.cadca.org/resources/re-branded-buzzballz  28^th Jan.2016

More than 200 people in Colorado who smoked synthetic marijuana during a 1-month period last summer developed altered mental status severe enough to require emergency care, according to a state public health investigation.

The investigation was prompted by several hospitals that contacted the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE). Increasing numbers of patients had come to their emergency departments with aggression, agitation, confusion, and other symptoms after smoking the synthetic drug. The CDPHE asked all Colorado emergency departments to report through a Web-based system any patients treated with altered mental status who used synthetic marijuana between August 21 and September 18.

Source:   JAMA. 2014;311(5):457. doi:10.1001/jama.2014.47.

A study that followed children from birth to midlife found that heavy marijuana users who smoked for years often fared worse as adults than their parents: Many ended up in jobs that paid less, required fewer skills and were less prestigious.

That wasn’t so much the case for other people.

“The rest of the people in the study who were not regular and persistent cannabis users ended up in a higher social class than their parents,” said Magdalena Cerda, lead investigator and associate professor at the University of California, Davis.

The study, published Wednesday in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, also found that marijuana users who smoked at least four times a week experienced more financial difficulties, such as problems with debt and food insecurity, than their parents. Their lives were fraught with more social problems, too.

“They experienced more antisocial behaviour at work such as lying to get a job or stealing money and more relationship problems such as intimate partner violence or controlling behaviour towards their partner,” Cerda said.

Other studies have associated heavy and persistent marijuana use with problems in adulthood but haven’t always ruled out other factors. This research tried to do that by tracking and comparing variables such as intelligence, family structure, gender, ethnicity, parental substance abuse, criminal convictions and antisocial behaviour and depression in childhood.

In accounting for so many variables, researchers made the study’s conclusions stronger, Cerda said, acknowledging that there may be unknown factors that they didn’t track.

Dr. Colin Roberts, a paediatric neurologist at Oregon Health & Science University and a member of Oregon’s Cannabis Research Task Force created to study medical marijuana, said the findings are worth considering.

“It’s a good study,” Roberts said. “They established an association that’s pretty compelling.”

The study’s sample size, almost 950 people, also gives it heft, he said.

The study is based on four decades of data collected in New Zealand, where marijuana is illegal. Investigators have been following people born between 1972 and 1973 in Dunedin, the second largest city on the South Island. The participants in the study come from a range of socio-economic classes, from professionals to unskilled labourers, who had physical, psychological, social and financial assessments at birth and ages 3, 5, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 21, 26, 32 and 38.

“There was a large number of people that were looked at which is really important,” Roberts said. “We can’t do studies like this in the U.S. because it’s really hard to collect information on people over that period of time. We don’t have a central source for people’s medical records.”

The study analyzed the data from the childhood evaluations to determine pre-existing conditions that might cause financial or social problems later in life. Then it evaluated the marijuana use of people starting at age 18 through 38 and financial and social problems at age 38. It found that 15 percent were frequent users, which they defined as smoking marijuana four or more times a week.

The longer those people smoked, the worse their problems in midlife.

That’s consistent with what professionals like Dr. Kevin Hill see in their practices. He’s the author of “Marijuana: The Unbiased Truth about the World’s Most Popular Weed” and an addiction psychiatrist at McLean Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts.

“This paper supports what we see clinically,” Hill said. “If you’re using at a level that’s consistent with cannabis addiction, you will have problems in multiple spheres – work, school and relationships.”

Not everyone who smoked marijuana four times or more a week for years experienced downward mobility and not everyone who abstained fared better than their parents. But a higher proportion of the former group – nearly 52 percent – had a worse outcome compared with 14 percent of the latter.

The study also looked at alcohol use. Those with an alcohol dependency experienced more social problems than their parents and landed lower-paying jobs. But the marijuana users who were dependent on the drug had even more financial worries than those addicted to alcohol.

“Those of us in the field know that cannabis is potentially dangerous but the same argument should be made with alcohol,” Hill said. “We have 22 million Americans who used cannabis last year and yet we rarely talk about cannabis being dangerous and we should.”

Yet he cautioned that people who are dependent on marijuana remain in the minority, just as those who abuse alcohol are.

Alcohol remains the bigger problem because it’s more widespread, Cerda said, but she added that the increasing acceptance of marijuana could increase the cost to society. Oregon is one of 23 states where marijuana is legal for medical use and four states that have approved recreational marijuana use.

The study points to a need for investment in prevention and treatment, she said.

“If we do that, it may have long-term consequences for the potential burden that this may place on communities, families and on the broader social welfare system,” Cerda said.

Source:  http://www.oregonlive.com/marijuana   23^rd March 2016

A study by doctors from the National Institute of Drug Abuse found that people who smoked marijuana had changes in the blood flow in their brains even after a month of not smoking. The marijuana users had PI (pulsatility index) values somewhat higher than people with chronic high blood pressure and diabetes, which suggests that marijuana use leads to abnormalities in the small blood vessels in the brain. These findings could explain in part the problems with thinking and remembering found in other studies of marijuana users.

According to two studies, marijuana use narrows arteries in the brain, similar to patients with high blood pressure and dementia, and may explain why memory tests are difficult for marijuana users. In addition, chronic consumers of cannabis lose molecules called CB1 receptors in the brain‘s arteries, leading to blood flow problems in the brain which can cause memory loss, attention deficits, and impaired learning ability.

Source: drugabuse.gov

The nature of the teenage brain makes users of cannabis amongst this population particularly at risk of developing addictive behaviours and suffering other long-term negative effects, according to researchers at the Univ. of Montreal and 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,” write Prof. Didier Jutras-Aswad of the Univ. of Montreal and Yasmin Hurd 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 behaviour, the current evidence suggests that it has a far-reaching influence on adult addictive behaviours 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,” Jutras-Aswad says.

Although it is difficult to confirm in all certainty a causal link between drug consumption and the resulting behaviour, the researchers note that rat models enable scientists to explore and directly observe the same chemical reactions that happen in human brains. 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.

Only a minority (approximately one in four) of teenage users of cannabis will develop an abusive or dependent relationship with the drug. This suggests to the researchers that specific genetic and behavioural factors influence the likelihood that the drug use will continue. Studies have also shown that cannabis dependence can be inherited through the genes that produce the cannabinoid receptors and an enzyme involved in the processing of THC. Other psychological factors are also likely involved. “Individuals who will develop cannabis dependence generally report a temperament characterized by negative affect, aggressivity and impulsivity, from an early age. Some of these traits are often exacerbated with years of cannabis use, which suggests that users become trapped in a vicious cycle of self-medication, which in turn becomes a dependence” Jutras-Aswad says.

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 says.

“Continuing research should be performed to inform public policy in this area. Without such systematic, evidenced-based research to understand the long-term effects of cannabis on the developing brain, not only the legal status of cannabis will be determined on uncertain ground, but we will not be able to innovate effective treatments such as the medicinal use of cannabis plant components that might be beneficial for treating specific disorders,” Hurd says.

Source:  Tue, 08/27/2013 – Univ. of Montreal and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Despite the increasing use of cannabis among adolescents, there are little and often contradictory studies on the long-term neurobiological consequences of cannabis consumption in juveniles.

Adolescence is a critical phase for cerebral development, where the endocannabinoid system plays an important role influencing the release and action of different neurotransmitters.

Therefore, a strong stimulation by the psychoactive component of marijuana, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), might lead to subtle but lasting neurobiological changes that can affect adult brain functions and behaviour.

The literature here summarized by use of experimental animal models, puts forward that heavy cannabis consumption in adolescence may induce subtle changes in the adult brain circuits ending in altered emotional and cognitive performance, enhanced vulnerability for the use of more harmful drugs of abuse in selected individuals, and may represent a risk factor for developing schizophrenia in adulthood.

Therefore, the potential problems arising in relation to marijuana consumption in adolescence suggest that this developmental phase is a vulnerable period for persistent adverse effects of cannabinoids.

Source: Mol Cell Endocrinol. 2008 Apr 16;286

On July 28 and July 29, agents of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office assisted by the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) and the United States Forest Service (USFS) responded to USFS property on Brush Mountain, Gainor Peak and Oak Knob in eastern Humboldt County after sighting marijuana being cultivated on USFS land. The deputies were also accompanied by three scientists, two from Integral Ecology Research Center, and one associated with UC Davis and Hoopa Tribal Wildlife Ecologist.

During the two days deputies seized 3,760 marijuana plants ranging in size from 18 inches to four feet. Deputies and scientists located water diversion, mounds of trash and 24 pounds of rodenticides, of which nine pounds were peanut butter flavored and 15 pounds were second generation rodenticide. Malathion and fertilizers were also located at the scenes. No suspects were located in the area of the trespass marijuana grows, however deputies obtained evidence from the scenes that is being processed and the investigation is ongoing.

The spring fed water sources, which had been diverted and used to water marijuana plants, flow into the South Fork of the Trinity River. The springs were part of a network of subterranean water sources. The scientists reported that impacts from the water diversions and chemicals used on the grows could affect Coho salmon, Chinook salmon, steelhead, foothill yellow-legged frogs and the western pond turtles.

The scientists reported the rodenticides could potentially kill fishes, Northern spotted owls, American black bears, black tailed deer and Humboldt martens.

Below are some quotes from Dr. Mourad Gabriel of the UC Davis Wildlife Ecologist/Integral Ecology Research Center, who was present with the deputies and USFS agents.

“The removal of this massive amount of killing agents within prime spotted owl and fisher habitat is pertinent for the conservation of these species.”                                                        

“The illegal diversion of this amount of water prohibits the flow of cool water into tributaries that support our salmon populations.”

In light of the current drought and high water temperatures, this represents another blow to our already taxed watersheds.”

“The remediation efforts are crucial in protecting our forest ecosystems.”

Anyone with information for the Sheriff’s Office regarding this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Sheriff’s Office at 707-445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office crime tip line at 707-268-2539.

Redwood Times  Posted:   08/11/2014

http://www.redwoodtimes.com/news/ci_26315593/trespass-grows-found-usfs-land

Imagine for a minute a world in which marijuana is available in a vending machine or corner grocery store near you — like any other snack machine — pot-infused lollipops, gummy candies, baked goods and beverages available at the push of a button.

As futuristic as this farfetched tale sounds, this is Colorado’s reality, a state with the dubious distinction of becoming the first to legalize marijuana, which has helped spawn legalization efforts across the U.S., including in New Jersey.   And while Colorado’s experiment has sparked heated debate over drug legalization, a critical and unbiased look at the data clearly shows that marijuana legalization has serious and far-reaching consequences that far outweigh any of its alleged benefits.

Strong emotions on both sides of this issue should not obscure the facts. Marijuana is an addictive substance that is harmful to users, especially to its younger users. As a teen’s brain development is disturbed by chronic marijuana use, the risk for physical and psychological dependency grows exponentially.

In addition to permanently affecting brain functioning, marijuana use can lead to a wide array of negative consequences, ranging from lower grades and isolation from family to an increased risk of psychotic symptoms, depression and suicide.

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, legalization will cause a substantial increase in economic and social costs.  The expansion of drug use will increase crime committed under the influence of drugs, as well as family violence, vehicular crashes, work-related injuries and a variety of health-related problems. These new costs will far outweigh any income from taxes on drugs.

Few would argue that a drug that can cause such destruction is something that we should counsel people to avoid. However, legalization efforts do just the opposite. In fact, experience has shown that when drugs are legalized, drug use increases because the perception of harm is reduced.

Moreover, the Drug Enforcement Agency has estimated that legalization could double or even triple the amount of marijuana users.

While it is hard to fathom the societal impact of an additional 17 million to 34 million marijuana users, it is safe to assume that those who profit from legalization have calculated the impact on their bottom line.

Those in favor of legalization often fail to tell you that levels of drug use have gone down substantially since the 1970s when the “war” on drugs began. This is not to say that our drug laws, including those governing marijuana, are not in need of reform.

For instance, the effort to place more drug users into treatment instead of prison is a positive development, both for those struggling with addiction and for taxpayers.

However, reforming and improving our drug laws does not mean we should abandon our fight against the use of illegal drugs like marijuana.

On the contrary, the more we learn about effective methods of combating drug use, the more we learn that legalization is not the answer, and is, in fact, very much part of the problem.

Source:  Source:  www.njassemblyrepublicans.com  Daily Record 13 Apr 2014

Given that the health of American youth is in question and that so many states base their policies on reports issued by the State of Colorado, it is important to understand what the 2015 Healthy Kids Colorado Survey (HKCS) actually tells us.

The survey’s results are gleaned from voluntarily self-reported information collected every other year from Colorado middle-school and high-school students. It is produced by a partnership of the Colorado Department of Education, Colorado Department of Human Services, the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment and the University of Colorado.



News organizations tracking the impact of marijuana on Colorado since voters sanctioned the drug for medical and recreational use are understandably quick to report the survey’s findings — but they’re unfortunately just as quick to deliver inaccurate and misleading information. Coverage of the 2015 survey results was especially poor. Dozens of news organizations — including The Denver Post, Fox News, the Washington Post, Time, Scientific American and Reuters — should correct and clarify their work.

Why? Because for many reasons, the 2015 survey’s data do not support claims that marijuana use among Colorado teenagers has remained flat or has declined. Examination of the survey’s aggregate data, segmented by grade and geographic region, tells a different story than the Marijuana Infographic and some passages of the executive summary distributed by state officials.

New reporting should inform the public about youth marijuana use rates in several Colorado regions — particularly where marijuana is most heavily commercialized.

Here are some important things to know about the 2015 survey:

Because of its methodology and sample size, this survey is a snapshot in time that represents no one other than the Colorado youth who took it. It is inaccurate to present or describe the 2015 survey as a “state survey” or to present its findings as average use rates among Colorado youth. The 2015 survey does not include data from El Paso County (home to the state’s second largest city, Colorado Springs), Jefferson and Douglas counties (home to two of the state’s largest school districts) and Weld County. It is also important to note that Colorado’s private and parochial schools do not participate in this survey and that only students attending school are surveyed. Students with drug problems are less likely to be in school — and, therefore, less likely to be surveyed.

Differences in methodology make it difficult to compare the 2015 survey to previous HKC surveys. The randomly selected sample size dropped from 40,206 in 2013 to 15,970 in 2015. Similarly, the high school response rate dropped from 58 percent in 2013 to 46.5 percent in 2015. Counties participating in the survey also changed from 2013 to 2015. Clearly, something in the survey methods changed from 2013 to 2015, making direct comparisons risky. But if state officials and journalists insist on making these direct comparisons, there are significant increases in youth marijuana use to report from 2013 to 2015 — as detailed below. They should report this information to the public.

Because of differences in methodology, Colorado survey results should not be directly compared to other national studies of adolescent marijuana-use rates, such as the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). These surveys are different. For example, the YRBS requires a response rate of at least 60 percent. If student responses fall below that mark, the YRBS states the results “represent only the students participating in the survey.” Of note, the HKCS did not reach this threshold for high school students in either 2013 or 2015. Therefore, direct comparisons of the two studies is risky. Such differences in methodology also make it risky to compare the Colorado data and other national studies, such as the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health and the Monitoring the Future (MTF), a survey from the National Institute on Drug Abuse run by contract through the University of Michigan. Further, the 2015 state report’s comparisons to a “national average” of youth marijuana use are also problematic. Please review explanations here and here from David Murray, a former chief scientist of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, who now serves as a senior fellow analyzing drug policy at the Hudson Institute. Among his observations:

“What is the possible source for deriving that ‘national average’? There is one genuinely national sample of youth drug use, that from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) that covers all states. But this cannot be the basis for the (State of Colorado’s) claim. In their latest 2014 estimates, NSDUH reported that 7.2 percent of adolescents aged 12 to 17 across the nation used marijuana in the past month – that figure, not 21.7 percent, would be the youth ‘national average.’ Moreover, the NSDUH specifically declared that Colorado had the nation’s highest rates. Adolescent marijuana use ranged from 4.98 percent in Alabama to 12.56 percent in Colorado. Worse, the NSDUH showed for youth that from 2009, when medical marijuana took off in Colorado, there has been a stunning rise of 27 percent through 2014 (from 9.91 percent to 12.56 percent). So Colorado youth use rates in the NSDUH are not only higher than the national average, but, after freer access to marijuana, have been steeply climbing.”

To examine drug-use trends from year to year and make comparisons between states, the NSDUH is more reliable (not perfect, but more reliable). The NSDUH interviews youth who are in and out of school. It is conducted in every state — and, unlike the current version of the Colorado Healthy Kids survey, it has data from before 2013. Unfortunately, as Murray notes above, this survey shows the prevalence of past-month marijuana use among Colorado youth has increased, with Colorado ranked first among 12-17 year olds in 2014.


One strength of the HKCS is that it offers some county-level data. It is helpful to have a fine-grain look at what is happening at a local level. So, if we must compare 2013 and 2015 survey results, it is best to limit comparisons to the responses of specific regions as defined by the survey. You can find a map of those regions here. Because there are many differences between high school freshmen and seniors, combining their class data — especially given that 18-year-olds in Colorado can purchase medical marijuana legally — can give false impressions about “teen use” rates. So, it is important to segment students by grade for a more accurate look at marijuana use rates.

Remember: Because of significant differences in methodology and sample size, the 2015 HKCS shouldn’t be compared to its 2013 predecessor or any national survey — but if state officials and journalists insist on doing so, let’s all consider this closer look at student respondents by grade and region. It suggests adolescent marijuana use rates has reached levels worth considering a serious health problem in some parts of the state.

For a full breakdown of the regional data, please see this chart (produced with the significant help of Christine Miller, a Ph.D. pharmacologist and Colorado native). Among the findings:


Region 16 (Boulder, Broomfield): High school seniors in this region reported the highest rate of past-month use among 12th graders in the state. In 2015, 42.2 percent of high school seniors reported past-month use, versus 28.5 in 2013. That’s a 48.1 percent increase. The use rate among high school juniors in this region jumped from 22.3 percent to 33.4 percent, a 49.8 percent increase.

Region 20 (Denver): Use among high school seniors increased from 30 percent in 2013 to 33 percent in 2015, a jump of 10 percent. Among juniors, the use rate increased from 29 percent to 37.7 percent, an increase of 30 percent.

Region 12: Western Corridor (Summit, Eagle-Vail): Use among high school seniors increased 90 percent from 20.1 percent in 2013 to 38.2 percent in 2015. As a curious side note, this region also reported a 2.3 percent decrease in past-month marijuana use among high school juniors and a 54.7 percent increase among its high school sophomores.

Region 11: Northwest (Steamboat Springs, Craig): Marijuana use among this region’s high school students rose in grades 9-12. Among seniors the rate increased 57.3 percent from 22.5 percent in 2013 to 35.4 percent in 2015. Among juniors, use rose 18.8 percent from 18.1 percent to 21.5 percent. Among sophomores, use rose 72 percent from 8.2 percent in 2013 to 14.1 percent in 2015. Among freshmen, use rose 22.2 percent from 8.1 to 9.9 percent.

Region 19: (Mesa County/Grand Junction): Use among freshmen jumped to 13.7 percent, an increase of 57.5 percent from 2013. Use among sophomores increased 50.6 percent from 26.2 percent from 17.4 percent in 2013. The use rate among high school seniors rose to 24.4 percent, an increase of 20.8 percent.

Region 7: Pueblo: Although there was little change in use rates, the rates remain stubbornly high. They are higher than the state average for all grades; ranges from double the state average for high school freshmen to 31 percent greater than the state average for high school seniors.

A common theme among these regions is a high level of marijuana commercialization in the forms of retail and medical stores. Other commonalities should be investigated to determine the most appropriate interventions.

Analysis of the 2015 survey also found some good news — particularly in regions 8 (San Luis Valley), 10 (West Central, including Gunnison, Hinsdale and Montrose ) and 17 (Central, including Gilpin and Teller).The reasons for these reported declines in past-month use should be explored. For example, are the declines because of an effective intervention, or are they related to a change in the survey methodology from 2013 to 2015? Based on the findings, protocols for prevention and intervention should be implemented to encourage similarly favorable results in other school districts throughout the state.

This entry for DrThurstone.com was co-written by Dr. Christian Thurstone and Christine Tatum. He is an associate professor of addiction psychiatry and the director of medical training of the addiction psychiatry fellowship program at the University of Colorado. She is a longtime journalist, former national president of the Society of Professional Journalists and Dr. Thurstone’s wife. Together, they also wrote Clearing the Haze: Helping Families Face Teen Addiction(Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

Source:  http://drthurstone.com/healthy-kids-colorado-survey-2015/    5^th July 2016

The California National Guard on Monday joined more than a dozen other agencies to help the Yurok tribe combat rampant marijuana grows that have threatened the reservation’s water supply, harmed its salmon and interfered with cultural ceremonies.

Law-enforcement officers began serving search warrants at about 9 a.m. in the operation, which came at the request of Yurok officials and targeted properties in and near the reservation along the Klamath River.

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Drug Enforcement Unit coordinated the raid and was joined by, among others, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, California Department of Justice’s North State Marijuana Investigation Team, and Yurok police.

State environmental scientists were standing by to enter the properties and survey for damage once the sites were secured.

Yurok Tribal Chairman Thomas O’Rourke joined officers as they staged at a hillside fire station Monday morning and thanked them for assisting in what was dubbed “Operation Yurok.”

“They’re stealing millions and millions of gallons of water and it’s impacting our ecosystem,” he told the officers. “We can no longer make it into our dance places, our women and children can’t leave the road to gather. We can’t hunt. We can’t live the life we’ve lived for thousands of years.”

California’s largest tribe has sought help combating marijuana grows in the past but until now never received such a vigorous response. Then the drought hit.

The strains on dual water systems that serve 200 households and rely entirely on surface water became apparent last summer, when residents began complaining of plummeting pressure.

When tribal staff surveyed the land from a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter, they were startled at the number of grows. By this summer they had tripled, officials estimated. And when the marijuana crop was planted in late spring, community water gauges once again swung low.

This time, creeks ran dry.

“Streams I’ve seen in prior years with more severe droughts where water ran, there’s no water now,” said O’Rourke.

To strengthen its enforcement abilities, the tribal council last fall approved a new controlled-substance ordinance that allow for civil forfeiture in circumstances where cultivation has harmed the environment.

(All growing on the reservation is illegal, as the Yurok tribe does not honor state medical-marijuana law.)

The breakthrough came in April when staffers from the governor’s office were discussing the drought with tribal officials. Gov. Jerry Brown, tribal officials were told, had pressed for California National Guard assistance with marijuana eradication and specifically urged the Office of the Adjutant General to assist in the Yurok operation, said Capt. Pat Bagley, operations officer in charge at the scene.

He was expecting to haul out two miles of irrigation hose at one grow alone.

For the Yurok, the damage is broad. Sediment and chemical runoff have suffocated juvenile fish, and warmer, shallower water has triggered an increase in the parasite Ceratomyxa shasta, which targets salmon.

Rodenticide has poisoned the Humboldt marten and weasel-like fisher, which the Yurok consider sacred. The danger of encroaching on a guarded grow site has made it unwise to gather medicine, acorns and materials for baskets, or to prepare sites for ceremonial dances.

Source:  www.seattletimes.com  21^st July 2014

Photo:Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons*

 “Live long and prosper.” The Vulcan salute is immediately identifiable with the actor Leonard Nimoy  and his most famous character, Mr. Spock. The  beloved cultural icon was admired for his sterling character on Star Trek and off-screen as well. In  recent years and up until his last few months, while  suffering the debilitating effects of a respiratory illness, he took steps to ensure that others would indeed “live long and prosper” by speaking clearly about the role that smoking played in the illness that caused his death.

Nimoy started smoking, like many, when he was young. He managed to quit more than 30 years before his death, but not early enough to prevent the respiratory disease that took his life late February. Nimoy took great pains to show us that cigarettes are a deadly addiction – encouraging followers on Twitter to quit or never start. While he was just one of the 480,000 people in the U.S. who will die prematurely from tobacco-related diseases in 2015, he will surely be among the most well-known and widely missed by an admiring public. That makes the steps took to tell his story so vital.

Tobacco is one of the toughest addictions to overcome and by far the most deadly product available. About 14 million major medical conditions in the U.S. can be blamed on smoking. Yet, despite that inescapable fact, more than 42 million Americans still smoke.

And it isn’t just smoking. Smokeless tobacco products, like those used by sports legend,Tony Gwynn, and other professional baseball players, are linked to oral cancer and other illnesses. Like Nimoy, Gwynn was outspoken before his death last year in naming chewing tobacco as the cause of his cancer. His efforts to speak the truth give meaning to the efforts of a coalition working to eliminate tobacco consumption on and around American baseball fields. Knock Tobacco Out of the Park will succeed, in part, because icons like Gwynn and Nimoy shared their stories and demonstrated the painful cost of tobacco-related illness.

The glamour and appeal of smoking and the power of nicotine addiction are forces that we work to counter every day at Legacy. Even that first cigarette does damage to your body and can spur a life-long addiction and struggle. Nimoy could not imagine what would happen to him five decades after he smoked his first cigarette. By sharing his story, he may help other smokers comprehend the illness and death that lie in wait for them.

As fans remember Leonard Nimoy and Tony Gwynn for cherished memories and contributions to our shared culture, we celebrate them as ambassadors of truth and of knowledge in the fight to build a future where illness and death, caused by the use of tobacco, are things of the past.

Source: www.drugfree.org 18^th March 2015

• Participants in study who smoked drug daily for around three years had abnormally shaped hippocampus brain region which is vital to memory

• They also performed around 18 per cent worse in long-term memory tests than individuals who had never touched cannabis

• Results were uncovered using sophisticated brain-mapping scans taken two years after participants stopped smoking cannabis   

Teenagers who smoke cannabis for just three years could be damaging their long- term memory, researchers have warned.

Participants in a study who had used the drug daily for around three years in their teens had an abnormally shaped hippocampus – a region of the brain vital to memory – by the time they were in their early 20s.

They also performed around 18 per cent worse in long-term memory tests than individuals who had never touched the drug. The results were uncovered using sophisticated brain-mapping scans taken two years after they stopped smoking cannabis.

Professor John Csernansky, from Northwestern University in the US, who co-led the research, said: ‘The memory processes that appear to be affected by cannabis are ones that we use every day to solve common problems and to sustain our relationships with friends and family.’

Those who took part in the Northwestern University study who smoked cannabis in their teens performed around 18 per cent worse in long-term memory tests than individuals who had never touched the drug.

The study is one of the first to suggest that abnormally shaped brains in heavy cannabis users are directly related to memory impairment. The longer a participant had been exposed to cannabis the more misshapen their hippocampus appeared on scans. This could mean brain regions related to memory may be more susceptible to the effects of the drug the longer the abuse occurs.

In total, 97 people took part in the study, including some who started smoking cannabis daily between the ages of 16 and 17 and continued for around three years. At the time of the study, they had been cannabis-free for around two years. The scientists used new computer software to fine-map MRI scans of the hippocampus.

Beforehand participants had taken a memory test in which they listened to a series of stories for around one minute before recalling as much of the content as possible 20 to 30 minutes later.

Results of the memory test were correlated with the scans and cannabis use for each individual. Lei Wang, a senior author of the study and assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at the university, said: ‘Advanced brain mapping tools allowed us to examine detailed and sometimes subtle changes in small brain structures.’

The study also found that young adults with schizophrenia who abused cannabis in their teens performed about 26 per cent worse on memory tests than young adults with schizophrenia who had never smoked cannabis.

Previous research by the same team has linked poor short- term and working memory performance to abnormal shapes of three other brain regions: the striatum, globus pallidus and thalamus.

Co-author Dr Matthew Smith, whose study is published in journal Hippocampus, said: ‘Both our recent studies link the chronic use of marijuana during adolescence to these differences in the shape of brain regions that are critical to memory and that appear to last for at least a few years after people stop using it.

‘It is possible that the abnormal brain structures reveal a pre-existing vulnerability to marijuana abuse.

‘But evidence that the longer the participants were abusing marijuana, the greater the differences in hippocampus shape suggests marijuana may be the cause.’

Source:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2990806/Smoking-cannabis-three-years-teens-ruin-long-term-memory-Using-drug-daily-changes-shape-brain-linked-recall.html#ixzz3XVpmGmKI 

Historic fundraising effort to counter non-medical marijuana initiatives comes on the heels of proposed measures that would legalize pot advertising and candies.  [Alexandria, VA] – SAM Action, the non-profit 501(c)(4) affiliate of SAM, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, co-founded by a former Obama Administration drug policy advisor Kevin Sabet, announced today a fundraising milestone of more than $2 million dedicated to defeating ballot measures that would legalize marijuana advertising, pot candies, and legitimize massive marijuana special interest groups across the country.

“The ballot initiatives in California, Arizona, Nevada, Massachusetts, and Maine usher in massive commercialization of kid-friendly marijuana products,” said Sabet. “They go way beyond just legalization for adults’ personal use. These proposed initiatives do things like legalize marijuana advertising on television and industrial production and marketing of pot candies like gummy bears and lollipops. It’s a money grab by a massive new addictive industry – and particularly ironic given how we are in the process of tightening tobacco laws.”

For example, the initiatives include provisions that would:

* allow pot smoking ads on prime-time television (CA)

* pack the state marijuana advisory bodies with industry representatives (AZ, CA, MA)

* weaken impaired driving laws (AZ, CA)

* give special treatment to existing marijuana business over ordinary citizens (AZ, CA, NV, MA, ME)

* allow kid-friendly edibles to be advertised and sold (AZ, CA, NV, MA, ME)

* provide no criminal penalties for pot shops that sell to minors (ME),

“For those of us who care about public health and civil rights, marijuana legalization can sound like a good idea at first,” said Patrick J. Kennedy, SAM’s Honorary Advisor. “But marijuana legalization has turned out to be a false promise on both fronts. It is putting our children at-risk, and has exposed children from communities of color to more racial discrimination than before. ”

“The marijuana industry wants to turn back the clock to the 1970s and put smoking commercials back on TV after a 40-year ban,” noted Jeffrey Zinsmeister, SAM Action’s Executive Vice President. “And in one state, unlike cigarettes, they’ll also be able to advertise pot candies and brownies on prime-time shows with millions of children and teenage viewers. These are regressive initiatives in the most literal sense of the word.”

The multimillion dollar commitment represents the single largest fundraising amount ever dedicated to fighting the legalization of non-medical marijuana via ballot initiative. The money was given by private citizens concerned about addiction for profit. None of this money was donated by corporations, corporate interest groups, or people acting on their behalf.

“Private citizens heard that these initiatives were written so broadly, and they acted,” said Sabet. “This is about stopping the next Big Tobacco.”

Source:  www.samaction.net  1st August 2016

At one point a few days ago I feared to turn on the radio or TV because of the ceaseless accounts of blood, death and screams, one outrage after another, which would pour out of screen or loudspeaker if I did so.

And I thought that one of the most important questions we face is this: How can we prevent or at least reduce the horrifying number of rampage murders across the world?

Let me suggest that we might best do so by thinking, and studying. A strange new sort of violence is abroad in the world. From Japan to Florida to Texas to France to Germany, Norway and Finland, we learn almost weekly of wild massacres, in which the weapon is sometimes a gun, sometimes a knife, or even a lorry. In one case the pilot of an airliner deliberately flew his craft into a hillside and slaughtered everyone on board. But the victims are always wholly innocent – and could have been us.

The culprits of the Charlie Hebdo murders, all had drugs records or connections. The same was true of the Bataclan gang, of the Tunis beach killer and of the Thalys train terrorist

I absolutely do not claim to know the answer to this. But I have, with the limited resources at my disposal, been following up as many of these cases as I can, way beyond the original headlines.

* Those easiest to follow are the major tragedies, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Nice, Orlando, Munich and Paris killings, the Anders Breivik affair and the awful care-home massacre in Japan last week. These are covered in depth. Facts emerge that do not emerge in more routine crimes, even if they are present.

Let me tell you what I have found. Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma bomber, used cannabis and methamphetamine. Anders Breivik took the steroid Stanozolol and the quasi-amphetamine ephedrine. Omar Mateen, culprit of the more recent Orlando massacre, also took steroids, as did Raoul Moat, who a few years ago terrorised the North East of England. So did the remorseless David Bieber, who killed a policeman and nearly murdered two others on a rampage in Leeds in 2003.

Eric Harris, one of the culprits of the Columbine school shooting, took the SSRI antidepressant Luvox. His accomplice Dylan Klebold’s medical records remain sealed, as do those of several other school killers. But we know for sure that Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland school shooting, and Jeff Weise, culprit of the 2005 Red Lake Senior High School shootings, had been taking ‘antidepressants’.

So had Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 Wakefield massacre in Massachusetts. So had Kip Kinkel, responsible for a 1998 murder spree in Oregon. So had John Hinckley, who tried to murder US President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and is now being prepared for release. So had Andreas Lubitz, the German wings pilot who murdered all his passengers last year. The San Bernardino killers had been taking the benzodiazepine Xanax and the amphetamine Adderall.

The killers of Lee Rigby were (like McVeigh) cannabis users. So was the killer of Canadian soldier Nathan Cirillo in 2014 in Ottawa (and the separate killer of another Canadian soldier elsewhere in the same year). So was Jared Loughner, culprit of a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. So was the Leytonstone Tube station knife attacker last year. So is Satoshi Uematsu, filmed grinning at Japanese TV cameras after being accused of a horrible knife rampage in a home for the disabled in Sagamihara.

I know that many wish to accept the simple explanation that recent violence is solely explained by Islamic fanaticism. No doubt it’s involved. Please understand that I am not trying to excuse or exonerate terrorism when I say what follows.

But when I checked the culprits of the Charlie Hebdo murders, all had drugs records or connections. The same was true of the Bataclan gang, of the Tunis beach killer and of the Thalys train terrorist.

It is also true of the two young men who murdered a defenceless and aged priest near Rouen last week. One of them had also been hospitalised as a teenager for mental disorders and so almost certainly prescribed powerful psychiatric drugs.

The Nice killer had been smoking marijuana and taking mind-altering prescription drugs, almost certainly ‘antidepressants’.

As an experienced Paris journalist said to me on Friday: ‘After covering all of the recent terrorist attacks here, I’d conclude that the hit-and-die killers involved all spent the vast majority of their miserable lives smoking cannabis while playing hugely violent video games.’

The Munich shopping mall killer had spent months in a mental hospital being treated (almost certainly with drugs) for depression and anxiety

Now look at the German events, eclipsed by Rouen. The Ansbach suicide bomber had a string of drug offences. So did the machete killer who murdered a woman on a train in Stuttgart. The Munich shopping mall killer had spent months in a mental hospital being treated (almost certainly with drugs) for depression and anxiety.

Here is my point. We know far more about these highly publicised cases than we do about most crimes. Given that mind-altering drugs, legal or illegal, are present in so many of them, shouldn’t we be enquiring into the possibility that the link might be significant in a much wider number of violent killings? And, if it turns out that it is, we might be able to save many lives in future.

Isn’t that worth a little thought and effort?

Source:  PETER HITCHENS FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

PUBLISHED: 00:55, 31 July 2016 | UPDATED: 18:36, 31 July 2016

A few years ago Dr. Diana Martinez and Dr. Marco Diana decided to investigate a new technology that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate brain cells. Both had been trying to develop medications to treat cocaine addiction, and both had come to feel that the pace of progress—their own and others’—was unequal to the urgency of the need. In the new technology, transcranial brain stimulation (TMS), they saw a potential treatment that might be developed relatively rapidly for clinical use.

Dr. Martinez, a neuroimaging specialist at Columbia University Health Center in New York City, planned a preclinical study. She was using a relatively new type of TMS coil (magnetic pulse generator), and her first objective was to identify machine settings with potential clinical efficacy.

Participants in her study were cocaine users who did not want to stop. They came into the hospital research unit, and attended a self-administration session in which they repeatedly chose between smoking a dose of the drug and receiving a sum of money. They then underwent TMS for 3 weeks, after which they repeated the self-administration session. If they chose cocaine less often after treatment than they had before, the setting that was used would be a good candidate for further testing.

Dr. Diana, a research pharmacologist at the University of Sassari, Italy, designed a pilot clinical trial. Sixty people who were trying to quit cocaine would receive TMS, real or sham, every other day for a month. Dr. Diana would assess their cocaine use though interviews and hair analysis before they started TMS, at the end of the treatment month, and every 3 months thereafter for a year. He hoped that the patients who received real TMS would reduce their cocaine use.

Both researchers’ projects hit snags early on. In this installment, we follow Dr. Martinez as she resolves an initial impasse and advances her project to a new stage. Meanwhile, circumstances close in on Dr. Diana. He is forced to cut short his trial, but comes away with encouraging data and increased enthusiasm for TMS.

Frequency and Intensity

The first TMS settings Dr. Martinez tested appeared to reduce cocaine intake among participants who completed the course of treatment. However, only one third completed the course. The rest complained of pain and anxiety during their first treatment session, and refused to continue.

Dr. Martinez adjusted one of her settings to try to prevent patient dropout. Reducing the magnetic pulse frequency from 10 Hz to 1 Hz abolished the aversive responses, but also the reductions in cocaine use.

Dr. Martinez considered testing an intermediate frequency. In the end, she decided to look for a way to make 10 Hz more tolerable. She says, “If you look at the literature on TMS in psychiatric disorders, there’s a strong rationale for using 10 Hz, or even 15 or 20 Hz.”

She asked herself why so many participants hadn’t tolerated TMS at 10 Hz, when many other researchers had used it without problems. Of several possible explanations, one stood out: Cocaine users tend to have exceptionally high motor thresholds.

Dr. Martinez explains, “A person’s motor threshold is the lowest TMS intensity that will stimulate his or her motor neurons to fire and contract a muscle. The TMS technician ascertains the motor threshold to determine how much stimulus to apply in treatment. If the stimulus is strong enough to activate motor neurons, it’s presumably enough to activate neurons in other cortical areas as well.”

To ascertain the motor threshold, the technician directs the TMS pulse at an area of motor cortex that controls a muscle, for example a hand or calf muscle. The technician delivers a pulse at a low intensity setting, then dials the intensity up in small steps until the target muscle twitches. The twitch gives visible proof that motor neurons have fired.

Dr. Martinez says, “The motor thresholds of the cocaine users in our study were in the range of 80 percent to 84 percent of the power output of our TMS coil. That’s higher than the thresholds that have been recorded in other studies with coils of this type. It’s also been reported in the literature that cocaine users have high motor thresholds.”

Because of their high motor thresholds, Dr. Martinez’ study participants received exceptional amounts of stimulation during the ascertainment procedure. She says, “We had to keep turning up the intensity of the stimulus, and it would often take us a good 40 minutes to work up to the threshold.” Maybe, she thought, so much stimulation during the ascertainment, plus the additional stimulation applied during treatment, hyper-excited neurons in a way that caused pain and alarm.

Dr. Martinez tested her conjecture on herself. She recounts, “When we first started working with TMS, I was curious about the experience, so I went under the coil to ascertain my motor threshold. I found out that, like cocaine users, I tend to have a higher threshold than the average person. During the ascertainment procedure I developed a headache and some other mild symptoms, but nothing too unpleasant. Now I decided to see how I would feel if I underwent what our study participants were getting—motor threshold ascertainment followed by a 10-Hz treatment. I was miserable.”

Tweak and Succeed

Dr. Martinez considered how she might adjust her study protocol to make TMS at 10 Hz comfortable for cocaine users despite their high motor thresholds. She could obtain no guidance from colleagues or the scientific literature, because no one had ever before used the specific TMS coil she was using, called the H coil, with cocaine users.

Dr. Martinez turned for advice to Dr. Abraham Zangen, of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel, a researcher and developer of the H coil. Brainstorming together, the two came up with two adjustments:

* Dr. Martinez had been administering TMS treatment directly after motor threshold ascertainment. Going forward, she would separate the two:  ascertain the motor threshold in the morning and deliver treatment in the afternoon. Doing so would spread the stimulation over a longer time.

* She would lower the intensity of the TMS treatment. Dr. Zangen had been using the H coil to treat patients with obsessive compulsive disease, and had found that intensities lower than the motor threshold could be effective.

Dr. Martinez says that when she returned to the TMS laboratory, “We weren’t sure that these adjustments would work. We were nervous. And the participants picked up on our unease. They were looking at us like, ‘Why are you nervous?'” The adjustments worked (see Figure). Participants no longer reported pain, and most now stayed on to complete the treatment. A further protocol adjustment—spreading motor threshold ascertainment over 4 days—further increased the completion rate.

Dr. Martinez says, “These adjustments to our protocol give people time to acclimate to the stimulation. We’ve seen that TMS definitely gets less painful over time.”

With the amended protocol, Dr. Martinez quickly reached her goal of treating 6 participants with TMS at 10 Hz. These patients reduced their choices for cocaine, from about 5.5 before the treatment to 2.2 after it. No changes in the choice for cocaine were seen in the groups that received sham or low-frequency TMS.

Dr. Martinez says, “I must thank Dr. Zangen, who spent a lot of time discussing ways to fix my protocol. I’m also grateful to Brainsway Corporation, makers of the H coil, who have a real interest in treating addiction, and provided me with the equipment to do this work.”

Judging that she had enough evidence that her TMS protocol was efficacious to warrant a pilot clinical trial, Dr. Martinez began to prepare a grant proposal. In the next installment of this Narrative of Discovery, we’ll follow Dr. Martinez into this next stage of her project.

Figure. TMS Frequency and Intensity Settings Determine Efficacy and Tolerability In Dr. Martinez’ study, participants who completed a course of TMS with a frequency of 10 hertz (Hz, pulses per second) (A) reduced their cocaine use, but many found the treatment intolerable. Participants tolerated TMS with a frequency of 1 Hz well (B), but did not reduce their cocaine use. Dr. Martinez adjusted the schedule of her TMS protocol and tried 10 Hz again, this time with success. For her final settings, she also lowered the TMS pulse intensity (amplitude) from 120 percent of motor threshold to 110 percent of motor threshold (C).

Bad News

Dr. Diana’s recruitment effort ran into a deep fund of suspicion. When Dr. Diana showed potential trial participants the TMS machine and explained its purpose, many accused him of intending to subject them to electroshock. Some declined to participate. In 2 years, he enrolled only 20 patients.

In mid-2015, Dr. Diana applied to the Italian Department of Anti-Drug Policies for an extension of his funding for the project. Weeks, then months, passed with no response. Dr. Diana’s remaining funds from the past year dwindled. In July, he stopped recruiting patients because he was out of money to pay the laboratory to test hair samples for cocaine metabolites. He continued to provide his existing patients with psychological support and ask them about their cocaine use. Without biological confirmation, however, the scientific community would accord less weight to his patients’ self-reports.

“Finally, in November, the Agency was forced to respond because I was making thousands of phone calls,” Dr. Diana says. “I reminded them that we knew from the start this was going to be a 3-year project. It would be a shame not to finish, because we had encouraging preliminary findings. They told me, ‘Look, we wish you all the luck you certainly deserve, but we don’t have money to give you.”

Striking the Tent

Unable to continue his study, Dr. Diana set out to reap what he could from his years of work.  He had administered real or sham TMS to 19 patients, far short of the 60 he needed to establish that his TMS approach was effective. “I can’t do any statistics on such a small number and hope to persuade my colleagues that our findings are predictive,” he says.

Nevertheless, Dr. Diana says, “We didn’t have any choice. We had to either analyze our data and see what was there or just throw everything out.” Although he could prove nothing with results from so few patients, at least he would find out if their outcomes were consistent with TMS being effective. If they were, his work might inspire others to try TMS.

The outcomes were indeed consistent. Patients in both the TMS- and sham-treated groups were using less cocaine 1 and 3 months after starting the treatment. The difference in the amount of reductions was not statistically significant, but a significant difference emerged at the 6-month follow-up. At that time, the patients in the TMS-treated groups were using about 70 percent less cocaine than they had before starting the trial, and the sham-treated group about 45 percent less.

In addition, Dr. Diana says, “The study participants commonly reported that their mood was much better. They were more comfortable with life. They didn’t feel overwhelmed with guilt. Their anxiety levels went down significantly after the treatment. Some also described regularization of sleep, with better circadian rhythms.”

For Dr. Diana, the persisting effect of TMS past 6 months hints that his most ambitious hope for TMS may pan out:  The treatment may not just temporarily remit cocaine addiction, but actually restore the patient’s brain to a pre-addicted state (see “Can Neurons Be Reeducated?”).

Enthused and wishing to share his findings, Dr. Diana wrote a report to submit for publication. He knew the chances were slim that a journal would accept it. As of this writing, one journal has turned down the manuscript, and Dr. Diana awaits a decision from a second journal. (Update: In July 2016, Dr. Diana’s manuscript was accepted for publication in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry−Addictive Disorders.)

Lessons and Plans

Dr. Diana sees his loss of funding in perspective. He notes that Italy is experiencing tight economic times and the government has reduced its investment in research: “We have a new prime minister who looks very efficient, very pragmatic. Everybody seems to be reporting that the country’s situation is improving economically. But when you apply for funding for research, many times the answer you get is, ‘We are now fixing things more important than research.’ Unfortunately, they don’t understand that it’s through research and innovation that you generate more jobs and well-being for people.”

Dr. Diana’s broad perspective has not precluded disappointment. He says, “I worked on this study for five years. Before I even started to recruit patients, I worked 2 years to get it approved by the ethics committee and the hospital director, plus paperwork for this and that, endless paperwork. So it’s very frustrating. But what can I say?”  Despite his disappointment, Dr. Diana remains excited about TMS. He has already teamed up with a collaborator, Dr. Giorgio Corona, in Cagliari, Sardinia. “We are set to continue this work and to replicate my observations with a larger sample,” Dr. Diana says.

For Dr. Diana, starting over, although far from what he would have wished, presents opportunities to implement new knowledge and lessons learned. In his new trial, for example, he will measure patients’ central dopamine levels, using a technique that came to his attention too late to be used in his previous trial (see “Windows Into the Brain”).

The new trial’s recruitment protocol will incorporate another lesson, this one learned at great cost: To put to rest misperceptions and mistrust, potential recruits will receive a thorough orientation designed to put them at ease about TMS. Dr. Diana says, “Our strategy will be to persuade patients that TMS really is safe and without side effects. We’ll show them the machine. We’ll show them videos of other people who have taken the treatment. And we’ll tell them that if they perceive anything is wrong, they can leave the study whenever they decide.”

Dr. Diana is eager to get his new trial underway. He says, “The idea that TMS can be useful has been reinforced in me. Comparing the effects we observed with TMS to what others are reporting with medications, I think TMS is the way to go. The new machine is being delivered as we speak.”

Can Neurons Be Reeducated?

Dr. Diana explains, “We know from studies by Nora Volkow, Diana Martinez, and others that cocaine use over time weakens dopamine neurons. These neurons fire less often and less vigorously in the addicted brain, and this accounts for a person’s cocaine craving and compulsive responses to cocaine cues. We administer TMS to increase those neurons’ firing rate and strength back to their pre-cocaine levels. That might be therapeutic, but it won’t be so great if the neurons just revert to their weakened state after the treatment, and the patient has to keep coming back indefinitely. We want an effect that lasts for a long time.

“Therefore our aim with TMS is to induce an effect called long-term potentiation, LTP, of the dopamine neurons. LTP is something that occurs naturally when a neuron repeatedly receives intense high-frequency stimulation from other neurons. The neuron develops structural changes that make it more active and sensitive to future stimulation, and that endure for extended periods.

“In my personal opinion, the results of my trial, although they are preliminary, indicate that TMS produced LTP of our patients’ dopamine neurons. Our TMS-treated patients continued to use much less cocaine for 5 months after our 1-month treatment. The contrast in outcomes between our TMS-and sham-treated groups also supports this idea. We think that the sham TMS had a strong placebo effect that lasted 2 months after the treatment, possibly because the experience of sitting under the apparatus makes a powerful impression. After 5 months, however, the placebo effect began to wear off, while LTP kept the neurons in the TMS-treated group strong.’

Dr. Diana adds, “With TMS we were trying to tell the dopamine neurons, ‘Okay. You fire faster, and remember that you are able to fire faster.’ I think the neurons got the message.”

Windows Into the Brain

The underlying idea of using TMS to treat cocaine addiction is that stimulation with magnetic pulses can re-invigorate hypofunctional dopamine signaling in the prefrontal cortex. To make the best case for TMS’ efficacy, Dr. Martinez and Dr. Diana would like to show not only that TMS reduces cocaine use, but also that the reductions are paralleled by increases in dopamine. Retinography is a tool—albeit a tricky one—for accomplishing this. With retinography, researchers measure dopamine levels in the retina, and interpret them as indicators of levels in other parts of the central nervous system.

Source:  www.drugabuse.gov/news-events/nida-notes/articles/term/836/narrative-of-discovery  July 2016

Cocaine use among wealthy professionals continues to rise

Over the past decade drug use has fallen significantly according to the annual Crime Survey of England and Wales.

Stronger ecstasy is tempting some users back to the market

But figures published by the Home Office suggested the group bucking that trend are the professional middle classes with household incomes in excess of £50,000 a year.

It comes as statistics from the Health and Social Care Information Centre showed that the number of deaths from illicit drug use was at its highest level since 1993.

The number of hospital admissions for drug related poisoning was also up 57 per cent on the previous decade.

Three per cent of people aged between 16 and 59 with a household income higher than £50,000 admitted taking cocaine over the past 12 months, up from 2.2 per cent the previous year; while 2.2 per cent admitted taking MDMA or ecstasy, up from 1.5 per cent in 2014.

However the figures for people from lower income households suggested that their use of the deadly Class A drugs were down year on year.

This comes despite a high profile campaign by the police to warn the middle classes that they were being targeted in the war on drugs. Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, recently said affluent people who indulged in cocaine use at home, were fuelling the £1 billion market deadly drugs market.

He even suggested that employers should consider introducing regular drug testing as a condition of employment.

But experts believe the warnings have done little to deter the middle classes, who have been tempted into taking drugs because of an improvement in quality.

Niamh Eastwood of the charity Release said: “We know from experience that legislation does not have a significant impact on drug use, but this is particularly the case for middle class users who often get their narcotics from friends or trusted suppliers and then take them in the safety of their own home.

“In previous years, use fell because the quality of the drugs was poor, but recently the purity of cocaine and the strength of ecstasy has improved has improved, so well off professionals, who perhaps used to take drugs in the 1990s they have returned to the marketplace.”

Almost 40 per cent of adults who took part in the survey said they believed it would be easy for them to get hold of drugs within 24 hours if they wanted them.  However the figures did show that drug use amongst women had  fallen to its lowest level in more than 20-years.

Source:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/  28th July 2016

Introduction.

A belief that the U.S. government holds a patent for medical marijuana is a yet another example of scientific imprecision that obfuscates the national debate on the uses of marijuana as medicine. Advocates for marijuana as medicine, including the journalist Dr. Sanjay Gupta, refer to U.S Patent No. 6,630,507 as evidence of government hypocrisy on marijuana. “the United States already holds a patent on medical marijuana for that very purpose… How can the government deny the benefits of medical marijuana even as it holds a patent for those very same benefits?” The patent in question, “Cannabinoids as Antioxidants and Neuroprotectants” is assigned to the U.S. government (HHS) on behalf of three inventors serving at that time at the National Institutes of Health: Aidan J. Hampson, Julius Axelrod (a Nobel laureate) and Maurizio Grimaldi. The issued patent was published Oct 7 2003, with a priority date of 1998.

A primer on patent claims. Claims are the heart of a patent. Patents protect inventions listed in the patent claims. If a substance is not listed in the claims, the patent does not protect the substance. Claims define the limits of precisely what the patent covers and protects. The patent holder has the right to exclude others from making, using or selling those things which are described by the claims. The claims define, in technical terms, the extent, the scope, of the protection conferred by a patent.

The US government does not hold a patent for marijuana as a medicine. This U.S. patent makes a number of claims but marijuana and THC are not among them. It clearly distinguishes unprocessed botanical marijuana from individual cannabinoids. It specifically rejects marijuana or THC as claims. Instead the patent claims uniquely designed novel cannabinoids not found in nature, or cannabidiol made by the marijuana plant, or endocannabinoids made by the brain. It specifically rejects marijuana and the most abundant plant cannabinoid THC because of their psychoactivity and psychotoxicity. The claims in this patent focus on non-psychoactive cannabinoids synthesized in laboratories or by the brain that act at different targets (receptors) than marijuana or THC. The claims are for specific neuroprotective and antioxidant actions, which are distinct from the majority of reasons currently stated for using marijuana.

Even though the marijuana plant contains some chemicals that may be useful for treating illnesses or symptoms or as leads for chemical modification, the plant itself is psychoactive and the effects of its 750 chemicals, including some 104 different cannabinoids remain largely unknown. The inventors of this U.S. government patent did not patent medicinal uses of whole plant marijuana, nor its most prominent cannabinoid, THC, because they explicitly chose to avoid their undesirable, unacceptable psychoactive effects based on actions at cannabinoid receptors. Instead, the patent claims focus on specific cannabinoids, the majority of which are designed by medicinal chemists and are not found in the marijuana plant. The inventors discovered that certain cannabinoids have neuroprotective and antioxidant properties and antagonize specific glutamate receptor subtypes (neurotoxicity), without activating cannabinoid receptors (psychoactivity), as does the (2) marijuana plant or THC therein. The claim that the U.S. government has a patent on marijuana as a medicine is untenable.

Patent Claims in U.S. Patent No. #6,630,507. Patents protect inventions listed in the patent claims. If a substance is not listed in the claims, the patent does not cover the substance. This patent focuses on individual cannabinoids, mostly synthetic cannabinoids designed and created in laboratories. The claims do not mention marijuana nor are most of the claims based on cannabinoids found in the marijuana plant. Marijuana cannot be used interchangeably with the term cannabinoid (see The Folly of Extrapolation). A few claims include endocannabinoids made by the brain and CBD of the marijuana plant. Even these cannabinoids are not addictive, psychoactive, or intoxicating, in contrast to marijuana and the cannabinoid THC of the marijuana plant which are psychotoxic.

The following outline more specifically the reasons why it is erroneous to conclude that the United States government has patented “medical marijuana” (#6,630,507).

1. Marijuana is not a claim of this invention. The inventions/claims in this patent do not include marijuana (medical or otherwise), and do not mention marijuana in the abstract, which summarizes key concepts of what is claimed and why. The invention refers to single cannabinoids designed by medicinal chemists, including synthetic analogs of cannabidiol (CBD). With the exception of CBD, the cannabinoids claimed are synthetic or derivatives from the brain and not produced by, or have been discovered in the marijuana plant.

2. The claims of this invention are unique, single cannabinoids, not a mixture of 104 cannabinoids or 650 other chemicals found in the marijuana plant. The chemical claims in this patent are single, unique cannabinoids, each of which is to be assessed alone in biological tests – in marked contrast to marijuana, a complex mixture of over 750 chemicals that include 104 known cannabinoids, terpenoids, small molecules like ammonia and hydrogen cyanide and heavy metals. The chemical composition of marijuana is quite similar to that of tobacco, except that it instead of nicotine, it contains cannabinoids (1). If this had been a marijuana patent, it would, by necessity, claim a complex mixture of at least 750 chemicals.

1 Moir et al, A Comparison of Mainstream and Sidestream Marijuana and Tobacco Cigarette Smoke Produced under Two Machine Smoking Conditions. Chem. Res. Toxicol., 2008, 21 (2), pp 494–502

3. A primary objective of the patent is to develop individual cannabinoids that are free of psychoactive or psychotoxic effects and that are substantially non-toxic even at very high doses. The inventors specifically focus on developing single cannabinoids without actions at cannabinoid receptors. This precludes marijuana or THC. Marijuana would not qualify as a claim, and is not claimed because it is psychoactive, psychotoxic at high doses, is a complex mixture that acts primarily at cannabinoid receptors. THC, the most prominent cannabinoid in the marijuana plant is also excluded and not claimed, for the same reasons that

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marijuana is avoided. It is psychoactive and psychotoxic and acts at cannabinoid receptors. The patent defines the term “psychoactivity” to mean “cannabinoid receptor mediated psychoactivity.” “Such effects include euphoria, lightheadedness, reduced motor coordination, and memory impairment.” Unprocessed marijuana and THC mediate psychoactivity via cannabinoid receptors.

4. The majority of the newly designed compounds in the claims not produced by the marijuana plant and may have effects distinctly different from, or may be medicinally advantageous compared with cannabinoids made by whole plant marijuana. The patent covers and assesses unique, synthesized cannabinoids, the majority not found in the marijuana plant. It focuses on newly designed dibenzopyran cannabinoids and newly designed analogs of CBD, as previous studies have indicated that cannabidiol is not psychotoxic or psychoactive or acts at cannabinoid receptors.

5. The patent states that the “cannabinoid may be a cannabinoid other than THC” (the main cannabinoid in marijuana), and excludes “other potent cannabinoid receptor agonists”. This exclusion eliminates any potent cannabinoid receptor agonist that has a cannabinoid receptor potency of 50 nM or less (or even as weak as 190 nM or 250 nM or less). The cannabinoid receptor (CB1) is the mediator of psychoactive effects of marijuana and THC.2 THC potency is higher (25 nM) than the stated cut-off potency and is excluded for this reason. Marijuana is not mentioned and if it were, it would be excluded because it contains psychoactive THC (25 nM) and other cannabinoids with high cannabinoid receptor potency. The patent states: “THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) is another of the cannabinoids that has been shown to be neuroprotective in cell cultures, but this protection was believed to be mediated by interaction at the cannabinoid receptor, and so would be accompanied by undesired psychotropic side effects.” There are no claims of isolating cannabinoids from marijuana or assessing marijuana or THC.

2 Huestis MA, Gorelick DA, Heishman SJ, Preston KL, Nelson RA, Moolchan ET, Frank RA. Blockade of effects of smoked marijuana by the CB1-selective cannabinoid receptor antagonist SR141716. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2001 Apr; 58(4): 322-8.

6. The neuroprotective and antioxidant actions of listed cannabinoids in the claims are based on actions independent of cannabinoid receptors. De facto, marijuana and THC are excluded. The results presented in the patent “therefore surprisingly demonstrate that cannabinoids can have useful therapeutic effects that are not mediated by cannabinoid receptors, and therefore are not necessarily accompanied by psychoactive side effects. The inventors further state, “the therapeutic potential of nonpsychoactive cannabinoids is particularly promising, because of the absence of psychotoxicity, and the ability to administer higher doses than with psychotropic cannabinoids, such as THC.”

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7. Most of the cannabinoids claimed in this patent are not made by, or found in the marijuana plant. 14 claims describe a number of newly designed cannabinoids that can be synthesized in a medicinal laboratory. CBD is claimed, but many of the CBD analogs claimed are novel and not found in the marijuana plant. Separate, unique individual cannabinoids designed and created de novo represent the majority of the patent claims.

The Folly of Extrapolation. The inventors appreciated the pursuit of individual cannabinoids regardless of their origins (plant, synthetic, brain) and not whole plant marijuana. They rejected cannabinoids acting at cannabinoid receptors, the major target of marijuana and THC, to avoid psychoactive and psychotoxic effects. Thus extrapolating the claims of this patent to include whole plant marijuana or even THC is folly. The patent also avoids extrapolating from whole plant marijuana to individual isolated cannabinoids for the same reasons. The patent also recognizes that individual cannabinoids may engender markedly different effects via different brain targets, and eschews extrapolating from one unique cannabinoid to another. For this reason, it outlines biological testing templates designed to assess the therapeutic potential of individual cannabinoids. Currently, about 104 different cannabinoids have been identified in the marijuana plant, which in smoked or ingested form, may be delivered as an ensemble to the brain or body. These include THC that acts at cannabinoid receptors (precluding its development), its active metabolite, and others that may or may not produce similar or opposing pharmacological effects.

Some reasons to avoid extrapolation from whole plant marijuana to cannabinoids: 

a. To avoid confusing terminology of marijuana and cannabinoids;

b. The composition, bioavailability, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of botanical marijuana differs from extracts or purified individual cannabinoids;

c. The bioavailability of active cannabinoids in marijuana, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), cannot be predicted because differences in smoking or vapor inhalationor ingestible products vary between users and types of delivery systems. In contrast, a fixed oral dose of a cannabinoid can be quantified in plasma or whole blood samples, yielding relatively predictable results;

d. To avoid extrapolating to marijuana, conclusions drawn from efficacy of purified cannabinoid or newly designed cannabinoids of known doses, and delivered by common routes used for medications. Marijuana is used predominantly by smoking, inhalation from water pipes or vaporizing, a rapid form of brain delivery considered a route of administration with higher addiction potential;

e. To avoid extrapolation and appropriation of safety data generated from isolated or newly synthesized and medically approved cannabinoids (with known doses) to whole plant marijuana, for which there are no guidelines for doses.

f. To avoid extrapolating from marijuana and THC to novel cannabinoids that may have different medicinal properties and sites of action.

Examples of why modern medicinal chemistry, biology and drug development focus on isolated or synthesized compounds for drug discovery and not on whole plants. Examples of why extrapolating evidence from one unique cannabinoid to another cannabinoid if folly. 5

THC and CBD (cannabidiol) research has shown that these cannabinoids in the marijuana plant have opposite effects in the brain.

a. THC is intoxicating, psychoactive and addictive, can induce psychosis, anxiety, memory impairment and in some cases seizures.

b. THC principal targets are cannabinoid receptors, which the patent clearly states is not a desired biological target.

c. CBD is neither psychoactive nor addictive, does not impair memory, and may alleviate psychosis, anxiety and seizure activity, even antagonizing these THC-induced adverse effects.

d. CBD has very weak activity at cannabinoid receptors (affinity greater than 1,000 nM) and apparently acts on different brain receptors than THC.

e. From the perspective of medicinal properties, it is illogical to deliver two chemicals to the brain which produce opposite effects.

f. In peripheral organs, there are examples of CB2 receptors having beneficial functions in specific organs whereas CB1 receptors may be associated with disease processes. Yet THC targets both receptors with similar potency.

Conclusion. Dr. Gupta and others who allege that the U.S. government is hypocritical because it holds a marijuana patent while simultaneously classifying marijuana in the most restrictive Schedule I category, use the term marijuana inaccurately and indiscriminately to refer to the patented cannabinoids, the vast majority of which don’t exist in the marijuana plant. They disregard the primary focus of this patent, individual and novel cannabinoids created in chemical laboratories. The patent claims are restricted to individual cannabinoids and their structures, regardless of origin: chemically synthesized in a laboratory, made by brain, or CBD made by the marijuana plant. The patent recognizes the complexity, unpredictability and undesirability of marijuana or THC, as both activate undesirable targets (cannabinoid receptors) and display undesirable psychoactive and psychotoxic effects. As marijuana contains over a hundred cannabinoids that may act synergistically, antagonistically, the patent recognizes the value of pursuing individual cannabinoids with their knowable biological targets, beneficial or adverse effects.

The claim that the U.S. government has patented medical marijuana is analogous to claiming that a patent on medicinal amphetamine or digoxin or quinine sulphate or oxycodone, or lidocaine is the same as a patent on Ma Huang, or foxglove, or cinchona bark, or opium poppies, or coca bushes. By this reductio ad absurdum, garden centers marketing foxglove or poppy plants for decorative purposes, Whole Foods marketing cinchona bark as a source for creating tonic water, chemical companies that sell digitonin (an isolate from the digitalis plant) to dissolve lipids in water, would violate patents that protect medicinal preparations of chemically modified drugs whose lead structures are of plant origins. The extrapolation of this patent to a marijuana patent is as irrational as claiming that coca bushes and lidocaine (a cocaine derivative) are one and the same.

Source:  Bertha Madras in a letter to Drugwatch International Feb. 2016

Pot for the poor! That could be the new slogan of marijuana legalization advocates.

In 1996, California became the first state to legalize the use of medical marijuana. There are now 25 states that permit the use of marijuana, including four as well as the District of Columbia that permit it for purely recreational use.

Colorado and Washington were the first to pass those laws in 2012. At least five states have measures on the ballot this fall that would legalize recreational use. And that number is only likely to rise with an all-time high (no pun intended) of 58 percent of Americans (according to a Gallup poll last year) favoring legalization.

The effects of these new laws have been immediate. One study, which collected data from 2011-12 and 2012-13, showed a 22 percent increase in monthly use in Colorado. The percentage of people there who used daily or almost daily also went up. So have marijuana-related driving fatalities. And so have incidents of children being hospitalized for accidentally ingesting edible marijuana products.

But legalization and our growing cultural acceptance of marijuana have disproportionately affected one group in particular: the lower class.

A recent study by Steven Davenport of RAND and Jonathan Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon notes that “despite the popular stereotype of marijuana users as well-off and well-educated . . . they lag behind national averages” on both income and schooling.

For instance, people who have a household income of less than $20,000 a year comprise 19 percent of the population but make up 28 percent of marijuana users. And even though those who earn more than $75,000 make up 33 percent of the population, 25 percent of them are marijuana users. Having more education also seems to make it less likely that you are a user. College graduates make up 27 percent of the population but only 19 percent of marijuana users.

The middle and upper classes have been the ones out there pushing for decriminalization and legalization measures, and they have also tried to demolish the cultural taboo against smoking pot. But they themselves have chosen not to partake very much. Which is not surprising. Middle-class men and women who have jobs and families know that this is not a habit they want to take up with any regularity because it will interfere with their ability to do their jobs and take care of their families.

But the poor, who already have a hard time holding down jobs and taking care of their families, are more frequently using a drug that makes it harder for them to focus, to remember things and to behave responsibly.

Legalization and our growing cultural acceptance of marijuana have disproportionately affected one group in particular: the lower class.

The new study, which looked at use rates between 1992 and 2013, also found that the intensity of use had increased in this time. The proportion of users who smoke daily or near daily has increased from 1 in 9 to 1 in 3. As Davenport tells me, “This dispels the idea that the typical user is someone on weekends who has a casual habit.”

Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and lecturer at Yale, says that “it is ironic that the people lobbying for liberalized marijuana access do not appear to be the group that is consuming the bulk of it.” Instead, it’s “daily and near-daily users, who are less educated, less affluent and less in control of their use.”

In fact, the typical user is much more likely to be someone at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, whose daily life is driven, at least in part, by the question of how and where to get more marijuana. Just consider the cost. Almost a third of users are spending a tenth of their income on marijuana. And 15 percent of users spend nearly a quarter of their income to purchase the drug. The poor have not only become the heaviest users, but their use is making them poorer.

To all the middle-class professionals out there reading this: Do you know anyone who spends a quarter of their income on pot? Of course not. But these are the people our policies and attitudes are affecting.

As the authors of the study note, marijuana use today actually more closely resembles tobacco use than alcohol use. Cigarette smoking has completely fallen off among the educated and well-off, while the poor and working class have continued their habits. Even as far back as 2008, a Gallup poll found that the rate of smoking among people making less than $24,000 a year was more than double that of those making $90,000 or more.

But at least the rates have been going down for everyone. Thanks to a cultural shift on the acceptability of smoking, awareness campaigns about its dangers and a variety of legal measures regarding smoking in public facilities, smoking is significantly less popular. You could object to some of these public policies on the grounds that the government should mind its own business. But the truth is that Americans across all incomes are now less likely to suffer from the harmful effects of smoking.

Maybe the upper classes in this country have some romantic notion of what marijuana can do to the mind (though we once thought cigarettes were terribly classy too). But it is time to get over such silliness and consider the real effects of our attitudes.

As Manhattan Institute fellow and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple says, this is like the 1960s all over again. He tells me, “I’m afraid I can’t hear all that stuff about ‘tune in, drop out’ without being infuriated because the people affected really deleteriously [are] people at the bottom.”

Source: http://nypost.com/2016/08/20/legalized-pot-is-making-americas-lower-class-poorer-and-less-responsible/

Problems resulting from abuse of opioid drugs continue to grow

JUL 22 (WASHINGTON) – Hundreds of thousands of counterfeit prescription pills, many containing deadly amounts of fentanyl and fentanyl-related compounds, have made their way into the U.S. drug market, according to a DEA intelligence report released today.  Law enforcement nationwide report higher fentanyl availability, seizures, and known overdose deaths than at any other time since the drug’s creation in 1959.

Fentanyl is a synthetically produced opioid that, when produced and administered legitimately, is used to treat severe pain. Overseas labs in China are mass-producing fentanyl and fentanyl-related compounds and marketing them to drug trafficking groups in Mexico, Canada and the United States.

In addition to being deadly to users, fentanyl poses a grave threat to law enforcement officials and first responders, as a lethal dose of fentanyl can be accidentally inhaled or absorbed through the skin. DEA recently released a Police Roll Call video nationwide to warn law enforcement about this danger. The video can be accessed at www.DEA.gov.  Other findings from the report:

* Fentanyl and fentanyl-related compounds are traditionally mixed into or sold as heroin, or on its own, oftentimes without the customer’s knowledge. Since 2014, U.S. law enforcement agencies have been seizing a new form of fentanyl—counterfeit prescription opioid pills containing fentanyl or fentanyl-related compounds. The counterfeit pills often closely resemble the authentic medications they were designed to mimic, and the presence of fentanyl is only detected upon laboratory analysis.

* Fentanyl traffickers have been successful at expanding the fentanyl market and introducing new fentanyl-laced drug products to the U.S. drug market. The DEA National Forensic Laboratory Information System (NFLIS) reported that there were 13,002 fentanyl exhibits tested by forensic laboratories across the country in 2015 (the latest year for which data is available), which is a 65 percent increase from the 7,864 fentanyl exhibits in 2014. There were approximately eight times as many fentanyl exhibits in 2015 as there were during the 2006 fentanyl crisis, clearly demonstrating the unprecedented threat and expansion of the fentanyl market.

* The rise of counterfeit pills that contain fentanyl in the illicit drug market will likely result in more opioid-dependent individuals, overdoses, and deaths. There were over 700 fentanyl-related deaths reported in the United States between late 2013 and 2014. During 2013-2014, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that deaths from synthetic opioids increased 79 percent, from 3,097 to 5,544. Although the synthetic opioid category does contain other opioids, this sharp increase coincides with a sharp increase in fentanyl availability, and the CDC reports that a substantial portion of the increase appears to be related to illicit fentanyl.

* In March 2016, law enforcement officers in Lorain County, Ohio, seized 500 pills that visually appeared to be oxycodone. The pills were blue and had “A 215” markings, consistent with 30 milligram oxycodone pills. Laboratory analysis indicated that the pills did not contain oxycodone, but were instead the research chemical U-47700.  U-47700 is an unscheduled synthetic opioid

not studied for human use that has caused at least 17 overdoses and several deaths in the United States.

* Many Chinese laboratories illicitly manufacturing synthetic drugs, such as fentanyl and their precursors, also manufacture legitimate chemicals for purchase by U.S. companies. This means that laboratories responsible for supplying fentanyl in counterfeit pills can also run legitimate businesses. Although Chinese clandestine laboratories may be contributing to the fentanyl supply, legitimate laboratories may also be sources of supply.

* Traffickers can typically purchase a kilogram of fentanyl powder for a few thousand dollars from a Chinese supplier, transform it into hundreds of thousands of pills, and sell the counterfeit pills for millions of dollars in profit. If a particular batch has 1.5 milligrams of fentanyl per pill, approximately 666,666 counterfeit pills can be manufactured from 1 kilogram of pure fentanyl. The entire intelligence brief, “Counterfeit Prescription Pills Containing Fentanyls: A Global Threat” can be accessed at www.DEA.gov.

Source:  https://www.dea.gov/divisions/hq/2016

Highlights

* •People arrested multiple times for drug-related offences have shorter life expectancy.

* •Accidental overdosing with drugs was a common manner of death in repeat offenders.

* •In 44% of poisoning deaths four or more drugs were identified in autopsy blood samples.

* •Illicit recreational drugs, such as heroin, cannabis and amphetamine were common findings.

* •The major prescription drugs identified in blood were opioid analgesics and sedative-hypnotics.

Abstract

Background

Multiple arrests for use of illicit drugs and/or impaired driving strongly suggests the existence of a personality disorder and/or a substance abuse problem.

Methods

This retrospective study (1993–2010) used a national forensic toxicology database (TOXBASE), and we identified 3943 individuals with two or more arrests for use of illicit drugs and/or impaired driving. These individuals had subsequently died from a fatal drug poisoning or some other cause of death, such as trauma.

Results

Of the 3943 repeat offenders 1807 (46%) died from a fatal drug overdose and 2136 (54%) died from other causes (p < 0.001). The repeat offenders were predominantly male (90% vs 10%) and mean age of drug poisoning deaths was 5 y younger (mean 35 y) than other causes of death (mean 40 y). Significantly more repeat offenders (46%) died from drug overdose compared with all other forensic autopsies (14%) (p < 0.001). Four or more drugs were identified in femoral blood in 44% of deaths from poisoning (drug overdose) compared with 18% of deaths by other causes (p < 0.001). The manner of death was considered accidental in 54% of deaths among repeat offenders compared with 28% for other suspicious deaths (p < 0.001). The psychoactive substances most commonly identified in autopsy blood from repeat offenders were ethanol, morphine (from heroin), diazepam, amphetamines, cannabis, and various opioids.

Conclusions

This study shows that people arrested multiple times for use of illicit drugs and/or impaired driving are more likely to die by accidentally overdosing with drugs. Lives might be saved if repeat offenders were sentenced to treatment and rehabilitation for their drug abuse problem instead of conventional penalties for drug-related crimes.

Source:  www.fsijournal.org. August 2016  Volume 265, Pages 138–143  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2016.01.036

Abstract

It has been shown that cosmetic treatment like bleaching and perming may lead to an important decrease of drugs of abuse content in hair. Currently, hair straightening has become a regular hair treatment especially for women. The aim of this preliminary study was to investigate the effect of in vitro treatment of hair with heat straightener on cannabis and cocaine concentrations in hair.

17 positive cannabis and 7 positive cocaine hair samples were treated in vitro with a hair straightener. During this treatment hair was put sequentially 30 times in contact with heated iron plates at 200 °C during 2 s corresponding to a total time of contact of 1 min. THC and Cannabinol (CBN) were analysed in cannabis positive hair and cocaine, benzoylecgonin (BZE) and cocaethylene were analysed in cocaine positive hair. Analyses were performed with routine methods using GC/MS in electron impact mode.

Regarding cannabis results a decrease of THC concentrations was found in 11 of 17 hair samples after thermal treatment, whereas in 6 cases an increase was shown. In all the hair samples CBN concentrations was explicitly higher after the in vitro treatment. Regarding cocaine results cocaine and cocaethylene concentrations decreased after treatment in all seven hair samples; in contrast, higher concentrations of BZE were determined.

The strong increase of CBN and BZE content in hair after thermal treatments may be due to the fact that THC is converted by heat into CBN and cocaine into BZE, thus changing the respective ratios of the analysed substances. In conclusion, thermal straightening should be considered as other cosmetic hair treatments for a correct interpretation of hair results.

Source:  http://www.fsijournal.org/    August 2016   Volume 265, Pages 13–16 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.forsciint.2016.01.002

Colorado’s marijuana industry, brought into being by a state ballot initiative, stopped citizens from floating a public-health initiative by paying companies hundreds of thousands of dollars NOT to collect signatures for it. The initiative, Amendment 139, would have limited THC potencies and required health warnings on labels and child protective packaging.

Background

Some 26 states and the District of Columbia allow citizens to write laws and take them to voters. Americans who live in the other 24 states are generally not aware of how the ballot initiative process works.

In his book, Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money, journalist David Broder, now deceased, revealed how political campaigns and moneyed special interest groups are threatening our democracy.

“Government by initiative is not only a radical departure from the Constitution’s system of checks and balances,” he wrote, “it is also a big business, in which lawyers and campaign consultants, signature-gathering firms, and other players sell their services to affluent interest groups or millionaire do-gooders with private policy and political agendas.” Many don’t live in the states whose laws they are writing.

Signature-gathering firms? To place an initiative on the ballot, most initiative states require proponents to collect signatures from a given percent of people who voted in the last election. The standard is five percent, but it can vary from state to state.

There are actually businesses whose single purpose is to pay people, usually from $2 to $5 per signature, to go out and collect them. In fact, all of the ballot initiatives that have legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use, have succeeded because proponents were able to pay millions of dollars to collect enough signatures to get their measures on the ballot and then pay millions more to promote them to voters in TV commercials.

With the exception of Florida last year, opponents of these measures have been unable to come close to matching proponents’ riches, raising only thousands vs millions of dollars. Where’s the check and balance in that?

Amendment 139

Last week, we reported that a court decision gave a group of Colorado citizens, Healthy Colorado, clearance to begin collecting signatures for Amendment 139.

Colorado’s marijuana industry claimed that 139’s THC cap would shut down the industry. It took the issue to the state Supreme Court to challenge the initiatives and reduce the amount of time proponents had to collect signatures. But the Court ruled in Healthy Colorado’s favor two months later.

With polls showing widespread support for the amendment, the marijuana industry struck back by paying signature-gathering firms NOT to gather signatures for Amendment 139.

“The 139 opponents went out and bought up some of the most important circulators in the state, and without them we didn’t have the ability to get it to the ballot,” said a 139 spokesman. “They went out and paid these circulating firms to not circulate petitions for 139.”

Last Friday, July 8, Healthy Colorado withdrew Amendment 139.

Said Ali Pruitt, a Denver mother and a designated representative of Amendment 139, “As concerned moms, dads, teachers and friends, we simply couldn’t keep up with the financial costs brought on by the underhanded tactics and baseless delays used by the marijuana industry to keep us off of the ballot. The marijuana industry built a wall of money between us and the November ballot that we simply couldn’t break through.”

Added Healthy Colorado member Jo McGuire, “Unlimited THC has allowed the marijuana industry to create marijuana by-products that pose a public health and safety risk. THC potencies as high as 80 to 90 percent have not only caused an upsurge in Colorado ER visits and hospitalizations, but also have caused psychotic episodes that have led to death. The industry has refused to hear voters’ concerns by disabling the very process by which it introduced legalization in Colorado in 2012.”

Charlotte’s Web Maker Targets Broader Market with CBD from Domestic Hemp

Here’s another Colorado marijuana company that refuses to play by the rules.

Marijuana is illegal under the federal Controlled Substances Act. But an entirely different federal law makes it illegal to market a medicine to the public before it has been approved as safe and effective by the Food and Drug Administration.

A lack of FDA approval hasn’t stopped Colorado’s Stanley Brothers from marketing Charlotte’s Web CBD Oil to parents of children with epilepsy throughout the United States. CBD is cannabidiol, one of more than 100 cannabinoids found in marijuana along with some 400 more chemicals, few of which have been studied.

Made famous by Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s CNN specials Weed, Weed II, and Weed III, in which Dr. Gupta declared marijuana is medicine, the brothers claim the oil is a “low THC, high CBD” marijuana product.

But on their Facebook pages and in their non-profit Realm of Caring private patient portal, there is much discussion about how much THC parents should add to Charlotte’s Web to quell their children’s seizures. This is deeply troubling because THC damages the developing brain.

Now the brothers are re-branding their company name and its products. CW Botanicals, their old company, is now CW Hemp, their new one. Same company, different name.

Because an amendment to the federal farm bill a few years ago enabled state universities and agricultural departments to legally grow hemp for research, the brothers believe it is legal to skip research, skip FDA approval, skip the US Controlled Substances Act, and ship Charlotte’s Web Oil to all 50 states. Sales have grown to $1 million a month in the past few months.

Not content with Charlotte’s Web as a medicine for epilepsy, CW Hemp is now marketing Charlotte’s Web Hemp Extract to veterans who suffer PTSD and as a general wellness product. This expands its market from half a million children suffering intractable seizures to hundreds of millions of Americans who care about being healthy.

The company also is raising funds for a survey of current and retired NFL players to build a case for CW Hemp as a cure for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma.

While little to no scientific evidence supports any of the Stanleys’ claims, GW Pharmaceuticals has spent years developing and testing a new drug, Epidiolex. This drug is currently going through FDA Phase III clinical trials to treat intractable seizures.

What’s the difference between Charlotte’s Web and Epidiolex? Plenty.

Charlotte’s Web contains about 20 percent CBD and “low” levels of THC. Epidiolex contains 98 percent CBD and only trace amounts of THC. GW worked hard to eliminate all but trace amounts of THC from Epidiolex because of THC’s effect on the brain.

Further, Epidiolex has been:

* Extracted from marijuana grown in greenhouses without pesticides

* Purified

* Tested in animals to make sure it’s safe to give to humans

* Tested in randomized controlled clinical trials involving patients who have been given informed consent, meaning they have been told all known harms of the drug before consenting to participate in the trials

* Is expected to be approved by FDA in 2017.

If so, doctors will be able to prescribe, rather than recommend, Epidiolex. Pharmacists will be able to dispense it, rather than budtenders. Insurance companies will likely cover its cost. Charlotte’s Web?

* None of the above.

Also underway is a top secret, million-dollar research and development project to help CW Hemp compete with legitimate companies like GW Pharmaceuticals.

It would be nice if CW Hemp would devote its research and development towards obtaining FDA approval for the good of its patients rather than using it to find ways to compete with companies that play by the rules and comply with federal law.

Maybe then, Colorado epilepsy specialists would no longer “have to be at the bedside of children having severe dystonic reactions and other movement disorders, developmental regression, intractable vomiting, and worsening seizures that can be so severe they have to put the child into a coma to get the seizures to stop,” as the American Epilepsy Society reports. It explains that no one knows whether these severe side-effects result from contaminants or unregulated, artisanal CBD products, like Charlotte’s Web.

Only research and testing on the road to FDA approval can tell us that – as well as whether artisanal CBD products have any positive effect at all.

Source:  The Marijuana Report 13th July 2016 The Marijuana Report is a weekly e-newsletter published by National Families in Action in partnership with SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana).

Subscribe to The Marijuana Report and visit our website, The Marijuana Report.Org, to learn more about the marijuana story unfolding across the nation. About National Families in Action (NFIA) NFIA consists of families, scientists, business leaders, physicians, addiction specialists, policymakers, and others committed to protecting children from addictive drugs. Our vision is: * Healthy, drug-free kids * Nurturing, addiction-free families * Scientifically accurate information and education * A nation free of Big Marijuana * Smart, safe, FDA-approved medicines developed from the cannabis plant (and other plants)  * Expanded access to medicines in FDA clinical trials for children with epilepsy About SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana)  SAM is a nonpartisan alliance of lawmakers, scientists and other concerned citizens who want to move beyond simplistic discussions of “incarceration versus legalization” when discussing marijuana use and instead focus on practical changes in marijuana policy that neither demonizes users nor legalizes the drug. SAM supports a treatment, health-first marijuana policy.  SAM has four main goals:  * To inform public policy with the science of today’s marijuana. * To reduce the unintended consequences of current marijuana policies, such as lifelong stigma due to arrest.

* To prevent the establishment of “Big Marijuana” – and a 21st-Century tobacco industry that would market marijuana to children. * To promote research of marijuana’s medical properties and produce, non-smoked, non-psychoactive pharmacy-attainable medications.

As legislation looms in Arizona, voters need to say ‘show me the money’ and ‘what are the real costs?’

Efforts to legalize marijuana in Arizona this fall are currently focused on touting the revenue it would create for education.

Whether or not that money is really going to improve education is a key concern. The other is this: People seem to think marijuana is the answer to school funding — but not that long ago, school districts nationwide seemed appalled at taking money from soda machine revenues.

“Pot legalization brings far more costs than benefits, in the form of car accidents, emergency room admissions from pot edibles, and school dropouts,” said a drug expert.

The effort is polling badly, said Dr. Kevin Sabet, president of the nonprofit group Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM Action), which is dedicated to  defeating recreational pot initiatives. Sabet said the effort has barely more than 40 percent support.

“People are seeing through the smoke and mirrors — that pot legalization brings far more costs than benefits, in the form of car accidents, emergency room admissions from pot edibles, school drop outs, and other costs,” Sabet told LifeZette. “The Arizona initiative would commercialize pot candies, high THC concentrates, and other items marketable to young people.”    We’ve seen how poorly legalization has gone in Colorado, where money is not building new schools or helping the education system, he said. “In fact, they are experiencing more problems since legalization.”

Taxes Laid Bare In Colorado, there is a 15 percent excise tax, a 10 percent special sales tax that goes to state and local governments, and a 2.9 percent state sales tax on recreational marijuana. For medical marijuana, there is a 2.9 percent state sales tax.

Pro-legalization efforts claim Colorado was successful in giving money to education. In 2014, the state collected about $87.3 million in taxes, licenses, and fees. The state vowed to give the first $40 million raised by its marijuana tax to public school construction — but only about $13.6 million was collected last year for schools.

“Slick pro-pot pollsters know that by saying marijuana will bring in revenue, they attract key voters,” said Kevin Sabet.

Instead, most of the Colorado marijuana tax money goes directly into the state’s general fund, not the school-construction account, according to a USA Today report.

Advocates in Arizona claim legalization will bring in an additional $40 million a year for education. They say it would come in under the Regulation and Taxation of Marijuana Act, which allows adults 21 and older to have up to 1 ounce of marijuana and grow up to six plants in their homes without obtaining licenses if the plants are in a secure area. It would entail a distribution system similar to the one in Colorado, where licensed businesses can generate and sell marijuana.

They would then pay a 15 percent tax on recreational sales to be allocated to education (including full-day kindergarten) and public health.

Of those funds, 40 percent of taxes would go to the Department of Education for construction, maintenance, and operational costs at schools — including teacher compensation, according to The Arizona Republic. Another 40 percent would go toward a full-day kindergarten program, and the other 20 percent would go to the Department of Health Services for “unspecified uses.”

While the dollar signs appear to be what everyone is trying to sell in order to win votes, others firmly believe the dangers of legalization outweigh the perks of new school funding.

Long-term Effects of Marijuana

*  Respiratory issues

*  Lowered mental functionality

*  Decreased fertility

*  Compromised immune system

*  Increased risk of cancer  Source: http://www.muirwoodteen.com

Legalizing marijuana in the state could create “social, educational and health damage that would outweigh all of the potential collected revenue,” Seth Leibsohn, chairman of Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, told The Arizona Republic.

Backers of recreational marijuana never talk about how to pay for the other financial consequences of legalization, said Sheila Polk, vice chair of Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy. There are increased addiction and treatment needs, increased emergency room visits, hospitalizations that are marijuana-related, lower academic outcomes for students, and increased marijuana-related traffic fatalities, she said. There is also underemployment and unemployment, and an increase in homelessness, among other issues.

All of this is from the “new normalcy” of marijuana use.

Arizona voters need to know what they’re voting for, said Henny Lasley, a founder of the Smart Colorado initiative, which aims to protect kids’ health in that state.    “Products can include those with exceptionally high, dangerous potencies,” she noted.

“I think if you talk to teachers and principals, most will tell you marijuana has had a negative effect at school. It isn’t as if schools see pot revenue as their saviour — rather, slick pro-pot pollsters know that by saying marijuana will bring in revenue, they attract key voters,” Sabet said.

“I think it won’t be too long before most of us will look at today’s effort by the pot lobby as Big Tobacco 2.0. We will regret we were taken for another ride,” he added.

Source:  http://www.lifezette.com/healthzette/arizona-divided-dope/   14th July 2016

COBURG, Ore.  Serenity Lane says they’re seeing a growing number of people battling “Marijuana Use Disorder.” Many people have become habitual users to start their day by using the drug In Oregon, marijuana is legal for recreational and medical use, but one local drug rehab facility is concerned about pot addiction. Serenity Lane is an alcohol and drug treatment facility in Coburg.  Staff members said they’re seeing an increase in people with what they call “Marijuana Use Disorder.”

Manager Jerry Gjesvold at Serenity Lane said they see addiction trends years in advance. “Just like the opioid epidemic”, Gjesvold , “said we are seeing the beginning stages of a growing marijuana addiction”.

“Well, we know now that in the DSM-5, which is the manual that’s used to diagnose substance use disorders, there’s a specific marijuana use disorder diagnosis,” said Gjesvold.   Gjesvold said they see more patients as young as 18 years old even though the legal age for recreational marijuana use is 21.

“[Marijuana use] has become a much more acceptable, and because of that there’s more people that are using it,” Gjesvold said.   He said youth tend to be at higher risk for addiction. It’s because they use devices like vaping and assortments of marijuana like hash oil.

Products with higher THC concentration are more dangerous, but are easier to hide from parents.  “The universal response on the part of parents is that, ‘I had no clue,'” Gjesvold said.

The interim medical director, Paul Steier, at Serenity Lane says highly concentrated levels of THC can have a negative impact on the developing brains of young people. “They have trouble sequencing, doing numbers, word recollection,” Steier said.

Steier said in some cases it creates schizophrenic types of behavior. He said side effects from marijuana use disorder persist for a minimum of five months.  “But there clearly is a withdrawal experience from cannabis, especially in the habitual users, who are the people who sort of wake and bake,” said Steier.

Steier said the withdrawal experience is the same as other addictions causing changes in heart rate, blood pressure, and body temperature.

Source:  http://kval.com/news/local/rehab-facility-says-more-people-are-battling-marijuana-use-disorder    11th July 2016

Dr. Raj Waghmare says Cannabinoid Hyperemesis syndrome is stomach pain and nausea that can be helped by hot baths or stopping cannabis use.

Marijuana is having a moment. The once recreational-use-only drug is now considered by many as a medicine, an anti-nauseant and pain reliever, even an epilepsy medication.

But some long-term “pot heads” are finding the drug they once loved can suddenly turn on them and become almost toxic.   These users are developing a little-understood condition called cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome that brings on unrelenting vomiting, nausea and stomach pain.

Standard medications do not relieve it, smoking more marijuana only seems to worsen it, and some doctors say they are seeing a lot more cases of it.

It was intense stomach pains that brought Dave to his doctors four months ago. The 45-year-old from southern Ontario (who’d prefer not to use his full name) knew he needed help when intense cramping left him balled up on the sofa, unable to work.  “I really wasn’t able to function much at all. I was constantly having to lie down with a constant pain,” he told CTVNews.ca by phone.

Even after Dave’s doctor ordered reams of ultrasounds, CT scans, and colonoscopies, no one could find anything wrong with him, leaving Dave frustrated.  “It was starting to take a toll on me after a few months. I was doing all these tests and not knowing what was wrong with me or who to turn to,” he says.  Dave finally turned to the internet, where he stumbled on discussions about cannabinoid hyperemisis, a condition he had never heard of.

History of hyperemesis

The first mention of the syndrome appeared in 2004, when a doctor in Australia published an article in the journal Gut describing several patients with a “cyclical vomiting illness” (or hyperemesis). All the patients had a history of “chronic cannabis abuse” and all seemed to find relief from their symptoms by taking multiple hot showers or baths a day.

“Everything I read about this CHS fit the picture,” Dave says.

“The only thing I didn’t have was the vomiting. But I had nausea and constant stomach pain and I was getting relief with hot baths and showers,” he said.

Dave also had a 25-year history of daily pot smoking. He had recently switched to smoking “shatter,” a marijuana concentrate high in THC, that he believes made things worse. Though Dave had told his doctor about his drug use, he connect his symptoms to

CHS. In fact, the physician may have never seen another patient with CHS. Emergency room doctors such as Dr. Raj Waghmare are seeing them, however. Waghmare recently wrote a blog post about the first time hediagnosed a patient with CHS, just under two years ago.

The well-dressed man had come into his ER with non-stop vomiting and abdominal pain. Like Dave, this man’s blood and urine test came out normal, yet no matter what drug Waghmare offered him, nothing seemed to quell his nausea.

Then the man mentioned that hot baths helped to dull the pain. That’s when Waghmare recognized CHS from an article he had read about in a Canadian medical journal.

It’s a condition that can’t be easily diagnosed, since there is no one test that can spot it. It’s only after everything else has been ruled out and a history of pot use has been established that doctors are left with CHS.

Waghmare says he’s since seen dozens more patients with CHS come through the doors of Southlake Regional Health Centre where he works.

“I probably see this every week in the ER,” he says. “if we were to go through all the charts from a full week, I’m sure we’d see at least a case of day among all the doctors.”

Most of the patients Waghmare sees had no idea that the drug they used every day could suddenly become toxic to them.  “People don’t know that this exists,” he says.

What actually causes CHS remains a mystery. The THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) in marijuana causes the drug’s high by stimulating the brain’s cannabinoid receptors, but one theory is that in some patients, those receptors eventually become overloaded.

“So it will work for nausea in the beginning, but then it will totally desensitize the receptors so that people will just feel nauseated all the time,” says Waghmare.

Why some patients develop the syndrome and others don’t remains a mystery; the condition hasn’t been the subject of rigorous scientific study. It appears to develop in those who smoke weed several times a day for a decade or so. But there is some evidence that people who begin daily pot use at a young age are more at risk.

The majority of CHS patients coming to see Waghmare are young men who have been smoking marijuana since high school. By the time they reach their mid-20s, they have a decade of use under their belts.

And yet many refuse to believe the pot is the problem.

When Waghmare tells young pot users the only thing that will end their vomiting and pain is to quit smoking weed for good, they often stop listening.  “A lot of these patients who come in are ‘frequent flyers,’ They’ve heard it before and they refuse to believe it. They refuse to give it up,” he says.

But older patients often take his advice and quit cold turkey, as the patient who Waghmare wrote about promised he would do. As an ER doc, however, he has no way of following up. At least one Facebook group has also been formed in which users discuss their symptoms and experiences.

As for Dave, he says has stopped smoking both marijuana and shatter. In fact, he wishes he never tried shatter at all, since he suspects that is what triggered his symptoms. Now, after three months of pain, he’s finally beginning to feel better. He’s also found a new doctor and has begun a new drug regimen for his Type 2 diabetes, which is also helping him feel better.

But doctors like Waghmare says there needs to be more awareness that this syndrome can develop in some pot users.

With all the recent discussions about the medicinal uses for marijuana, and the ongoing discussion about legalization, Waghmare says many pot users assumes the drug is benign, that it relieves pain and nausea, that there’s no way it could cause it.

“There’s this belief that (marijuana) is totally safe, a miracle drug, Not true,” he says.

Source:  http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/pot-pains-why-marijuana-can-become-toxic-for-some-1.2984756     13th July 2016

NEW YORK — More than two dozen people were sickened in an apparent mass drug overdose on a New York City street corner, sparking warnings from police and health officials about the dangers of using K2, also known as synthetic marijuana.

Calls started coming in Tuesday morning that numerous people appeared to be overdosing in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn. Witnesses reported seeing victims lying on the sidewalk, shaking and leaning against trees and fire hydrants.

Thirty-three people were taken to area hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, police said. It was not immediately clear what drugs the victims had ingested, but police said some of the victims had been smoking K2.

Dennis Gonzalez of Bushwick told WNBC-TV that K2 use in that part of Brooklyn is out of control.

“It’s gotten out of hand,” Gonzalez said. “They even sleep in the street, we have to walk around them. It’s just too much to keep under control.”

The Health Department issued a statement Tuesday saying it “recorded a spike in K2-related emergency room visits” connected to the incident in Brooklyn. The department said it’s investigating and monitoring emergency rooms across the city.

“We remind New Yorkers that K2 is extremely dangerous,” the Health Department said in its statement. “The city’s public awareness efforts and aggressive enforcement actions over the past year have contributed to a significant decline in ER visits related to K2.”

Though K2 affects the same area of the brain as marijuana, it contains chemicals made in laboratories and sprayed onto dry leaves. These chemicals are not derived from the marijuana plant, according to the Health Department.

K2 can cause extreme anxiety, confusion, paranoia, hallucinations, rapid heart rate, vomiting, fainting, kidney failure and reduced blood supply to the heart.

The production and sale of the drug was outlawed in New York City in October 2015.

Source: http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/33-sick-after-apparent-mass-drug-overdose-in-new-york-city-1.2984643    13th July 2016

SPICE IN THE CITY: NEW YORK DEA LEADS HUGE ATTACK

AGAINST SYNTHETIC DRUG TRAFFICKERS

Money flow from synthetic drug sales to Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan continues

 Contact: DEA Public Affairs   (202) 307-7977

MANHATTAN, N.Y.- DEA, NYPD and a host of other state, local and federal agencies today announced a massive takedown that targeted the local sale of dangerous designer synthetic drugs manufactured in China.  The scheme, which operated in all five boroughs of New York City, allegedly involved the unlawful importation of at least 100 kilograms of illegal synthetic compounds, an amount sufficient to produce approximately 1,300 kilograms of dried product, or approximately 260,000 retail packets.  As part the operation, five processing facilities were searched, as well as warehouses used to process, store, and distribute the drugs. In addition, over 80 stores and bodegas around New York City were searched.

Communities, families, and individuals across the United States have experienced the scourge of designer synthetic drugs, which are often marketed as herbal incense, bath salts, jewellery cleaner, or plant food. These dangerous drugs have caused significant abuse, addiction, overdoses, and emergency room visits. Those who have abused synthetic drugs have suffered vomiting, anxiety, agitation, irritability, seizures, hallucinations, tachycardia, elevated blood pressure, and loss of consciousness. They have caused significant organ damage as well as overdose deaths. Over the past several years, DEA has identified over 400 designers drugs from eight different structural classes, the vast majority of which are manufactured in China. Smoke able synthetic cannabinoids (SSC) represent the most common class of designer drugs. In addition, DEA cases involving synthetic drugs often reveal the movement of drug proceeds from the United States to Middle East countries such as Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. ……..

DEA Special Agent in Charge James J. Hunt said:  “There is a misconception that synthetic cannabinoids, known on the street as ‘synthetic marijuana,’” ‘K2,’ and ‘spice,’ are safe.  Synthetic cannabinoids are anything but safe.  They are a toxic cocktail of lethal chemicals created in China and then disguised as plant material here in New York City. Today’s arrests represent law enforcement’s efforts to combat this emerging public threat.  By investigating and arresting manufacturers and distributors of ‘spice’ in the city, we have cut off the accessibility for those feeding the beast.”

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said:  “Today, we launch an aggressive assault on a public health crisis that is reaching epidemic proportions: the scourge of dangerous new drugs that are killing people and sending thousands upon thousands to emergency rooms in New York City and around the country.  Despite sometimes being called synthetic marijuana, this is not marijuana – it can have unpredictably severe and even lethal effects.  What is more, use of these drugs aggravates all manner of other societal ills: it is entering prisons; preying on the homeless; burdening our hospitals and emergency rooms; fuelling addiction; exacerbating mental health problems; and increasing risks to cops who must deal with people high on this poison.  Synthetic cannabinoids are a deadly serious problem that demands an equally serious response.  Today’s collective action is just the start of that response, one that will not end until this poison in a packet no longer endangers our community.”

NYPD Commissioner William Bratton said:  “This is a scourge on our society, affecting the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods and our most challenged citizens. It affects teenagers in public housing, homeless in the city shelter system, and it’s quite literally flooding our streets. This is marketed as synthetic marijuana, some call it K2. It is sold by the names of Galaxy, Diamond, Rush, and Matrix. But its real name is poison.”

HSI Acting Special Agent in Charge Glenn Sorge said:  “Synthetic marijuana is rapidly becoming a huge problem in our communities.  It is cheap and dangerous, especially for our teens and young adults.  We are working side by side with our law enforcement partners both here and abroad to combat the sale of this hazardous alternative to marijuana.”

Sheriff Joseph Fucito said:  “The Sheriff’s Office stands ready with our partners in law enforcement in addressing the sudden proliferation of synthetic drugs sales in licensed retail locations throughout New York City. Owners and operators of licensed locations have an obligation to keep illegal and highly dangerous substances out of the hands of our children. The Sheriff’s Office is committed to agency partnerships and enforcement strategies that advance this goal.”

…….The SSC retail packets were sold under names such as “AK-47,” “Blue Caution,” “Green Giant,” “Geeked Up,” “Psycho,” “Red Eye,” and “Black Extreme,” each containing between approximately three and six grams of product, and sometimes marked “not for human consumption,” or “potpourri.”  The illegal SSC retail packets were sold to individual customers for approximately $5 per packet.

.SSC are widely accessible because they are inexpensive and commonly sold at otherwise legitimate retail locations.  The colorful logos used on the SSC retail packets and the flavors used, such as lime, strawberry, and blueberry, make SSC attractive to teenagers and young adults.  Physical effects of SSC include agitation, rapid heart rate, confusion, dizziness, nausea and vomiting, paranoia, panic attacks, and acute kidney injury.  In addition, SSC products have inconsistent potencies, often containing more than one synthetic compound, and are sometimes laced with other toxic chemicals.  In a recent two-month period, use of SSC resulted in 2,300 emergency room visits in New York State.  Nationally, calls to poison centers in the United States related to synthetic cannabinoid use between January and May 2015 increased 229% over the same period in 2014.

 Source:  Press Release   US Drug Enforcement Administration.  16th Sept. 2016

A backlash is growing in a state where marijuana has quickly become a $1 billion legal business. For months, Paula McPheeters and a handful of like-minded volunteers have spent their weekends in grocery-store parking lots, even in 95° F heat. Sitting around a folding table draped with an American flag, they asked passing shoppers to sign a petition. Inevitably a few sign-wielding young protesters would show up to argue that McPheeters’s group was dead wrong. With the two sides often just yards away from each other, shouting matches erupted. “We’re peaceful people,” one woman yelled. “You’re drugged out,” countered an angry man. Threats and phone calls to police became the norm.  The wedge dividing the people of this small blue-collar city of Pueblo, Colo.?   Legal marijuana.

Colorado gave the green light to recreational marijuana back in 2012, when it passed a law to make nonmedical pot sales legal starting Jan. 1, 2014. But now opposition is rising in communities across the state. Colorado has become a great social experiment, the results of which are still not clear. “The jury is still out as to whether this was a good idea,” says Colorado attorney general Cynthia Coffman.

What’s undeniable is this: Legal marijuana is in high demand in Colorado. Only three other states—Alaska, Washington, and Oregon—plus the District of Columbia currently permit recreational adult use of cannabis. (It’s legal for medical use in another 19 states.) Of that group, Colorado led the way in 2015 with $996.5 million in licensed pot sales—a 41.7% jump over 2014 and nearly three times the figure in Washington State. Recreational sales made up nearly two-thirds of the total.

Now, as citizen groups attempt to put the brakes on the growing industry, a heated debate has emerged about the drug’s societal impact. Doctors report a spike in pot-related emergency room visits—mostly due to people accidentally consuming too much of potent edible pot products. Police face new cartel-related drug operations. Parents worry about marijuana being sold near their homes and schools. And less affluent communities like Pueblo struggle with the unintended consequences of becoming home to this emerging and controversial industry.

Amendment 64 decriminalized marijuana statewide, but Colorado’s cities and counties still decide if the drug can be grown and sold locally. At least 70% of the municipalities in the state have banned commercial operations, either by popular vote or board decisions.

Many other communities have begun pushing back. Last fall, controversy arose in the small western Colorado town of Parachute when an antipot group attempted to recall members of the town council who had welcomed pot shops. (Voters defeated the recall 3 to 1.) Debate has since emerged in Aspen, Carbondale, Glenwood Springs, Grand Junction, Littleton, and Rifle over the number, location, smell, and mere existence of retail and cultivation facilities. Citizens in the San Luis Valley, in the southern part of the state, say their schools and social services have been overwhelmed by a flood of newcomers coming to grow cannabis on cheap land, despite limited water. And just this spring officials in Colorado Springs and Englewood opted to ban pot social clubs, which are akin to lounges in which people can legally smoke weed in public.

“I’m getting calls now from people who voted for legalization thinking it wouldn’t affect them,” says Kevin Sabet, co-founder of national antimarijuana legalization group Smart Approaches to Marijuana. “They’re surprised to see these are sophisticated businesses opening up next to their schools selling things like marijuana gummy bears. And they’re angry.”

Officials in Denver, which is home to one-third of the state’s cannabis market, moved this spring to rein in pot capitalism. The city passed an ordinance capping the number of dispensaries and grow facilities at the present level. But discontent continues to fester in poorer communities, where many of these operations inevitably land. “We were told that legalization would take drugs out of our community,” says Candi CdeBaca, a community activist who grew up in the mostly Latino and poor Denver neighborhood of Elyria-Swansea. “The drugs stayed—and the drug dealers changed.”

CdeBaca points to, for example, an increase in school suspensions related to marijuana. And unlike the meatpacking plants and refineries that once dotted the area, CdeBaca says, this new industry hasn’t brought her neighbors jobs. Instead, the money is flowing to outsiders.

“It’s the Wild West, and the well-funded marijuana industry has dominated the regulatory process, and people are finally speaking up,” says Frank McNulty, a lawyer for Healthy Colorado, which plans to put a measure on the November state ballot—an easier task in Colorado than in many other states—that would limit the active drug ingredient THC in cannabis candy and concentrates and require health warnings on packaging. The marijuana industry has objected to the proposal, and the issue is now before the Colorado Supreme Court.

Cannabis backers bristle at the pushback, calling it a back-door effort by prohibitionists who simply disagree with the legalization of the drug. Mason Tvert, director of the Marijuana Policy Project, which leads legalization efforts nationwide, cites studies showing minimal impact on society and no harm to Colorado’s growing economy. Says Tvert: “Anyone who says it’s caused an increase in this or that [problem] is full of shit.”

What plays out in Colorado may influence what happens across the nation. Pot remains illegal under federal law. But legalization of recreational marijuana for adult use will be on the November ballot in California, Massachusetts, and Nevada, and likely in Arizona and Maine too. Voters in Arkansas, Florida, and Missouri will be voting on whether to approve it for medical use. The growth of the cannabis industry has begun to attract the interest of big companies. Microsoft announced in mid-June that it has developed a software product to help states track marijuana growth and sales.

In a recent appearance on CNBC, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper offered this advice to other states considering legalization: “I would suggest wait a year or two and see how it goes.”

Nowhere has the impact of legalization in Colorado been felt more powerfully than in the small community of Pueblo, located 114 miles south of Denver. At least 20 dispensaries and 100 growing facilities with 4 million square feet of cultivation now dot the highways near this town of 160,000, which has aggressively embraced the budding industry, making it the top cultivation spot in the state. “We’re sort of like the Napa Valley of cannabis,” says Pueblo County commissioner Sal Pace.

Pueblo has struggled for decades, ever since the 1983 recession, when most of the jobs at the local CF&I steel mill disappeared. Today the community is dealing with failingschools, rising gang activity, and increased crime. With a total of 26 homicides in 2014 and 2015, Pueblo earned the highest per capita murder rate in the state.

When the county’s three commissioners approved licenses for marijuana operations in 2014, Pueblo’s problems got worse, argues McPheeters, a Pueblo mom and community-college budget manager who is the driving force behind a group called Citizens for a Healthy Pueblo. “The promises of marijuana have not come true,” she argues. After weeks of contentious petition drives, McPheeters’s group believes it has gathered enough signatures to put a measure on the November ballot to revoke all the recreational marijuana licenses in the county. Marijuana industry groups, however, have sued, arguing that the number of signatures falls short under a new state law. A judge is set to decide in July.

Groups serving the poor in Pueblo report a flood of homeless people arriving from other states. Local homeless shelter Posada, for instance, has witnessed a 47% jump in demand since 2014, including 1,200 people who reported to shelter workers that they came to smoke pot or get jobs in the industry, says Posada’s director, Anne Stattelman. She says her funding is tapped out. “It’s changed the culture of our community,” she says.

The city’s three hospitals officially threw their support behind the antipot ballot measure after reporting a 50% spike in marijuana-related ER visits among youth under age 18 and more newborns with marijuana in their system. A number of local businesses are also backing the ban after struggling to find sober employees.

Commissioner Pace, in particular, has emerged as a target of criticism for citizens hoping to rid Pueblo of legal marijuana.  As a state legislator he drafted early pot regulations and then as commissioner led local efforts to launch the industry in Pueblo County after 56% of voters in the city approved Amendment 64. “It will take time to change some people’s opinions that pot is bad,” he says.

The pro-marijuana contingent in Pueblo say critics are misplacing blame for the area’s problems. They argue that the pot business has generated jobs and taxes as well as a college scholarship and a local playground. Revoking the licenses of cannabis shops, they say, will only fuel the black market. Says Chris Jones, an employee at a local dispensary clad in a Bob Marley T-shirt: “We already voted on this one time. Let it stand.”

Both antipot groups and marijuana advocates tend to cherry-pick data to support their claims. However, Larry Wolk, chief medical officer for the state department of health, says it’s too early to draw conclusions about the true social and health impacts on Colorado.

Marijuana-related hospitalizations have tripled in Colorado since legalization, and emergency room visits have climbed 30%, according to a state report released this spring. And pot-related calls to poison control have jumped from 20 to 100 a year, says Wolk. Drug-related school suspensions have also climbed. Yet teen usage hasn’t shot up dramatically, and crime has remained fairly stable. Marijuana-related DUIs increased 3%, and traffic fatalities involving THC increased 44%—but the absolute numbers were small in comparison to those that involved alcohol, according to the report.

The data is tricky, Wolk says, because Colorado didn’t track these numbers the same way prior to legalization. Are there more suspensions, he asks, because teachers are more aware? Are doctors now asking about marijuana at hospitals when they didn’t previously? “It may be a year or two before we’ll really have good answers,” says Wolk.

Marijuana legalization has delivered some surprises statewide to regulators, police, and citizens alike. For instance, many people thought legalization would quash the black market for the drug. “That’s been a fallacy,” says Coffman, Colorado’s attorney general. Legalization of cannabis stores and grow operations has drawn more drug-related crime, she says, including cartels that grow the plant in Colorado and then illegally move it and sell it out of state. “They use the law,” she says, “to break the law.”

Since 2013, law officials say, they have busted 88 drug cartel operations across the state, and just last year law-enforcement made a bust that recovered $12 million in illegal marijuana. Adds Coffman: “That’s crime we hadn’t previously had in Colorado.”

The state legislature is trying to play catch-up. Last year it passed 81 bills enacting changes to drug laws, prompting state law-enforcement groups to request a two-year moratorium on new laws so that they could have time to adjust. Lawsuits are also flying—including one from Colorado’s neighbors. Nebraska and Oklahoma have sued Colorado, claiming that it is violating federal drug statutes and contributing to the illegal drug trade in their states.

Another surprise to many Coloradans is that a promised huge tax windfall to benefit schools hasn’t materialized. Of the $135 million generated in 2015, for example, $20 million goes to regulatory and public-safety efforts related to cannabis, $40 million funds small rural school construction projects, and the rest goes to youth drug prevention and abuse programs. That’s a drop in the bucket for a $6.2 billion education budget.

A third revelation to parents in particular is the potency of today’s pot, says Diane Carlson, a mother of five who started Smart Colorado to protect teens from the drug. The weed, edibles, and concentrates sold in stores have THC levels that average 62% and sometimes as high as 95%, according to a 2015 state report. That compares with levels of 2% to 8% in the 1990s. “We passed this thinking it was benign, that it was the stuff from college,” says Carlson. “The industry is just moving too fast, and we’re playing catch-up while the industry is innovating.”

Sitting in a Denver café, Carlson compares marketing by the marijuana industry to that of Big Tobacco in the 1950s, portraying the product as a harmless cure-all for everything from ADHD to anxiety. Yet research shows that marijuana is harmful to the developing brain. She supports Healthy Colorado’s ballot initiative to limit the active drug ingredient in THC in marijuana edibles, candy, and concentrates to 17%.

The backlash worries Mike Stettler, the founder of Marisol, one of Pueblo County’s largest dispensaries, which has been endorsed by comedian and weed smokers’ icon Tommy Chong. The onetime construction worker fears that Pueblo’s pushback against pot will shut down his entire recreational dispensary and its 10-acre grow operation,

which generated $4.5 million in revenue last year. “I’m hoping and praying this thing doesn’t go through, but you don’t know,” he says.

He says he has invested millions in his business and has more plans for growth. In May he flew to Las Vegas to discuss a partnership with famed guitarist Carlos Santana to create a Santana brand of weed called Smooth, named after the artist’s hit song.

Inside, Marisol is a veritable wonderland for cannabis enthusiasts. Customers can consult a “budtender” for advice on the right weed for energy, sleep, or relaxation. They can also choose from a seemingly boundless variety of marijuana merchandise—from vegan “dabbing” concentrates for water pipes to pot-infused bottled beverages to peanut-butter-and-jelly-flavored THC candies. There are even liquid products designed to alleviate marijuana overdoses.

Giving a tour of the store, employee Santana O’Dell, clad in green tights with tiny marijuana leaves on them, sighs as a beatific smile appears on her face. “This is freedom,” she says.

For a growing number of her neighbors, however, legalized marijuana is starting to feel like a really bad high.

Source:  a version of this article appears in the July 1, 2016 issue of Fortune.

Abstract

The recent demonstration that massive scale chromosomal shattering or pulverization can occur abruptly due to errors induced by interference with the microtubule machinery of the mitotic spindle followed by haphazard chromosomal annealing, together with sophisticated insights from epigenetics, provide profound mechanistic insights into some of the most perplexing classical observations of addiction medicine, including cancerogenesis, the younger and aggressive onset of addiction-related carcinogenesis, the heritability of addictive neurocircuitry and cancers, and foetal malformations.

Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and other addictive agents have been shown to inhibit tubulin polymerization which perturbs the formation and function of the microtubules of the mitotic spindle. This disruption of the mitotic machinery perturbs proper chromosomal segregation during anaphase and causes micronucleus formation which is the primary locus and cause of the chromosomal pulverization of chromothripsis and downstream genotoxic events including oncogene induction and tumour suppressor silencing.

Moreover the complementation of multiple positive cannabis-cancer epidemiological studies, and replicated dose-response relationships with established mechanisms fulfils causal criteria. This information is also consistent with data showing acceleration of the aging process by drugs of addiction including alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, stimulants and opioids. THC shows a non-linear sigmoidal dose-response relationship in multiple pertinent in vitro and preclinical genotoxicity assays, and in this respect is similar to the serious major human mutagen thalidomide.

Rising community exposure, tissue storage of cannabinoids, and increasingly potent phytocannabinoid sources, suggests that the threshold mutagenic dose for cancerogenesis will increasingly be crossed beyond the developing world, and raise transgenerational transmission of teratogenicity as an increasing concern.

Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

KEYWORDS:

Cannabis; Chromothripsis; Dose-response relationship; Epigenetics; Foetal malformations; Heritable; Interdisciplinary; Microtubules; Oncogenesis; Population effects; Threshold dose; Transgenerational; Tubulin

Source:      Reece AS1, Hulse GK2.   Mutat Res. 2016 Jul;789:15-25. doi: 10.1016/j.mrfmmm.2016.05.002. Epub 2016 May 4.PMID: 27208973    10.1016/j.mrfmmm.2016.05.002   DOI: [PubMed – in process] 

Some cannabis users have developed an “inverted expertise” on the drug – often equipped with more up-to-date knowledge than the people trying to help them, a conference being held at the University of York was told today.

A group of national experts gathered at the University’s King’s Manor to exchange ideas on effective treatment for cannabis users.

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of people seeking treatment for problems related to cannabis use over the last decade. Research has revealed there was a 64% increase in the number of people seeking treatment between 2005 through to 2015 in England. Cannabis has also now overtaken heroin as the drug most likely to prompt calls for help.

The increase in requests for treatment is in contrast with the steady decline in the population’s use of cannabis, delegates were told.

Researchers at the University of York – including Ian Hamilton, Lecturer in Mental Health and Charlie Lloyd, Senior Lecturer in Health Sciences – and the University of Leeds are investigating why so many cannabis users are seeking treatment and how services are responding.

Initial findings suggest that individuals seek help with problems which are not usually associated with cannabis, such as irritability and poor impulse control.

Also, that treatment services are not sufficiently prepared to offer effective interventions, as cannabis is still seen as a benign drug.

Dr Mark Monaghan, a lecturer in Criminology and Social Policy at Loughborough University, told the delegates: “There is this ‘inverted expertise’ around cannabis in which the users have all the up-to-date knowledge of the local markets and the service providers are lagging behind.

“This can have a significant knock-on effect for the kind of services they are providing. Cannabis users are quite knowledgeable in what is going on in terms of the market.

“The providers are slightly lagging behind in terms of their knowledge base. Because they are lagging behind they don’t have intelligence on what the consumers are using; it creates this situation where they don’t really know what to do.”

He added: “We need to know what people are using and we need to offer them evidence-based treatments.

“Treatment across the sector is really variable. We do need more research on the changing nature of the cannabis market. We need to explore the reason why more people are presenting to treatment centres.”

Ian Hamilton, Department of Health Sciences’ Lecturer in Mental Health, who organised the event, said: “This is the first research that has looked at both the demand for cannabis treatment and the reasons why there’s been a significant rise in it. The outcome of the conference today was agreement amongst commissioners, providers and researchers that there is a problem we need to explore, around why people are presenting to treatment services, and how we can offer effective interventions once they are in treatment.”

Source:  https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events   7th June 2016

A new study, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior by researchers affiliated with New York University’s Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR), compared self-reported sexual experiences related to use of alcohol and marijuana. Since marijuana has increased in popularity in the U.S., the researchers examined if and how marijuana use may influence risk for unsafe sexual behavior.

“With marijuana becoming more accepted in the U.S. along with more liberal state-level policies,” notes Joseph J. Palamar, PhD, MPH, an affiliate of CDUHR and an assistant professor of Population Health at NYU Langone Medical Center (NYULMC), “it is important to examine users’ sexual experiences and sexual risk behavior associated with use to inform prevention and harm reduction.”

In this study, the researchers interviewed 24 adults (12 males and 12 females, all self-identified as heterosexual and HIV-negative) who recently used marijuana before sex. Compared to marijuana, alcohol use was more commonly associated with social outgoingness and use often facilitated connections with potential sexual partners; however, alcohol was more likely than marijuana to lead to atypical partner choice or post-sex regret.

Alcohol was commonly used as a social lubricant to meet sexual partners, and this was related, in part, to alcohol being readily available in social gatherings.

“Interestingly, some users reported that the illegality of marijuana actually facilitated sexual interactions,” notes Dr. Palamar. “Since smoking marijuana recreationally is illegal in most states and smoking it tends to produce a strong odor, it usually has to be used in a private setting. Some individuals utilize such private or intimate situations to facilitate sexual encounters.”

While users often described favorable sexual effects of each drug, both alcohol and marijuana were reportedly associated with a variety of negative sexual effects including sexual dysfunction. For example, marijuana use was linked to vaginal dryness and alcohol was commonly described as increasing the likelihood of impotence among males.

The researchers noted that the sexual effects tended to be similar across males and females, and both alcohol and marijuana were generally associated with loss of inhibitions. Both drugs appear to be potentially associated with increased feelings of self-attractiveness, but possibly more so for alcohol, and participants reported feelings of increased sociability and boldness while consuming alcohol.

While some participants reported that marijuana use made them more selective in choosing a partner, many participants— both male and female—felt that their “standards” for choosing a partner were lowered while under the influence of alcohol.

“It wasn’t surprising that alcohol use reportedly led to less post-sex satisfaction than marijuana,” said Dr. Palamar. “Participants reported feelings of regret more frequently after sex on alcohol, but compared to alcohol they generally didn’t report poor judgment after using marijuana.”

When smoking marijuana, participants tended to reported increased feelings of anxiety or a sense of wariness in unfamiliar situations that they did not generally seem to experience after using alcohol. Therefore, these drugs appear to have different effects with regard to socialization that may precede a sexual encounter.

“Sexual encounters on marijuana tended to be with someone the individual knew,” comments Dr. Palamar. “Sex on alcohol was often with a stranger so the situation before sex may be much more important than the drug used.” Marijuana and alcohol are associated with unique sexual effects, with alcohol use reportedly leading to riskier sexual behavior. Both drugs appear to potentially increase risk for unsafe sex.

“Research is needed continue to study sexual effects of recreational drugs to inform prevention to ensure that users and potential users of these drugs are aware of sexual effects associated with use,” emphasizes Dr. Palamar. “Our results can inform prevention and harm reduction education especially with regard to marijuana, since people who smoke marijuana generally don’t receive any harm reduction information at all. They’re pretty much just told not to use it.”

More information: Joseph J. Palamar et al. A Qualitative Investigation Comparing Psychosocial and Physical Sexual Experiences Related to Alcohol and Marijuana Use among Adults, Archives of Sexual Behavior (2016). DOI: 10.1007/s10508-016-0782-

Source:  http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-08-drunk-stonedcomparing-sexual-alcohol-marijuana.html   4th Aug.2016

Hard-partying Baby Boomer parents are more tolerant of drugs and alcohol, and their liberal attitudes may be paying off in an unexpected way.

There’s something terribly wrong with kids these days: a series of major surveys, conducted by the government every two years, suggest that they might just be the most well-behaved generation in recent memory. Teens are increasingly swearing off alcohol, cigarettes, drugs likesynthetic marijuana, and prescription painkillers, according to the latest survey of of more than 50,000 8th, 10th, and 12th graders from the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey. For some illicit substances, such as cocaine and heroin, consumption has dropped to its lowest point since the MTF’s inception in 1975 (fading stigmas around marijuana consumption may be responsible for its relatively consistent popularity amid this decline). The most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) shows that cigarette smoking is at its lowest level in 24 years—11 percent in 2015, down from 28 percent in 1991. Rates of underage sex, teen pregnancy, HIV, and other sexually transmitted diseases have also declined according to a survey of 16,000 students by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The kids, apparently, are all right.

But why? Conventional wisdom suggests this shouldn’t be the case. This is a generation that’s taking its cues from their Baby Boomer parents, those 76 million Americans born roughly between 1946 and 1964 who are veterans of the sexual and psychedelic revolutions of the 1960s and 70s and launched the modern trends in risky behaviors measured by surveys like the MTF and YRBS. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Baby Boomers havemaintained their hard-partying ways more than any other generation. Parental attitudes towards addiction matter. Research suggests that children of addicted parents are more likely to develop substance abuse problems themselves—due to both modeling and lax oversight. A recent longitudinal study of adolescents between 1994 and 2008 confirms that parents with permissive attitudes tend to breed self-destructive behaviors in their children; by contrast, the children of authoritative parents (or were even connected to authoritative adults through friends) were “40 percent less likely to drink to the point of drunkenness, 38 percent less likely to binge drink, 39 percent less likely to smoke cigarettes, and 43 percent less likely to use marijuana.”

So why are today’s young people resisting the allure of binge-drinking and illicit drugs that ensnared their Boomer parents? Perhaps it is precisely due to Baby Boomers’ libertine drug experiences that their children are inclined to avoid substance abuse. This may not just be out of disgust with their parental cautionary tales. Thanks to theirenthusiastic embrace of coddling- and self-esteem-focused helicopter parenting—Boomer parents may actually be better equipped to preemptively (and subsequently) engage their children in the type of interventions that help inoculate their kids against the risks of substance abuse.

Part of that progress is due to our increased knowledge about just what kind of interventions are effective in deterring drug use. Nancy Reagan’s famous “Just Say No” campaign in the 1980s catalyzed concern around adolescent drug use, but interventions that focused purely on abstinence or punishment (like, say, the armed police officer at the front of a D.A.R.E. session) tended to be ineffective. Programs centered on the threat of discipline — you’re going to get arrested, suspended or labeled a criminal in some other way — tend to alienate young people from seeking help from authority figures by perpetuating the stigma surrounding drug addiction, creating a gulf between young people and their parents. A 2014 examination of “just say no” programs by Scientific American found that the most effective substance abuse regimes focused on positive interactions between instructors and students that worked on developing social skills and behavioral norms. Skill development, including communication, goal setting, and negotiation, are the most important tools young people can learn regarding substance abuse, says Dr. Stephanie Zaza, the director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health (DASH) which oversees the YRBS. “When students are confronted with an environment that has a lot of temptations, they need to be able to ask questions, talk things through, and stand up for themselves,” she says.

In other words, the same impulse that inspired Baby Boomers’ enthusiastic rebellion—the desire to push back against the strict traditions and institutions of their parents—led to a shift in parenting styles that incorporated their relatively lax views of alcohol and drug consumption with a less authoritative mode of parenting than they experienced as children themselves. More productive interventions (think “talk to your kids about drugs)” emerged as parenting methods of choice. These were widely embraced among open-minded Boomer parents with first-hand experience in the risky behavior they want to prevent. After all, the Boomers have always been “less moralistic about drug use” and more likely to blame society for their ills than their parents, as sociologist Robert Putnam observed in 2001; drugs are a problem to be addressed, not a behavior to be punished. Hell, Boomer parents are more likely to worry about bullying and depression than drug abuse, according to 2015 data from the Pew Research Center. This change in approach seems to be paying off: A 2010 longitudinalexamination of parenting practices across three generations (Gen X and older Millennial children, their Boomer parents and their “Greatest Generation” grandparents) published in Developmental Psychologyfound that the harsh discipline and overbearing monitoring Boomers experienced tended to catalyze externalized behavior problems like “poor

impulse control and oppositional, aggressive, or delinquent behavior.” When harsh discipline was in turn handed down by Boomers, it also spurred bad behavior among their children. But Boomers, by contrast, also engaged in other forms parental monitoring (observing behavior, frank conversations and the like) that lacked harsh behavioral consequences. These more gentle interventions tended to have a mediating effect between Baby Boomers and their children, a unique relationship absent from Boomers and their own discipline-happy parents.

For Boomers, “parental monitoring” takes the form of openness and trust, a propensity to engage with their children rather than merely discipline or alienate them with the likes of D.A.R.E. or Scared Straight. According UC Berkeley psychologist Diana Baumrind’s landmark 1991 research published in The Journal of Early Adolescence, it’s this balance between being demanding (focused on discipline and control) and being responsive (focused on fostering individuality and self-regulation) that both deters children from substance abuse and engenders them with the important social skills that help them avoid risky behaviors without constant parental supervision. Though we often write off this type of engagement as intrusive helicopter parenting and debilitating condescension, this style also comes with a level of empathy, openness, and engagement that helps children fully absorb and comprehend the consequences of substance abuse.

“What [the CDC] knows about parental and school engagement is simple: the more you talk with children about these issues, the less likely they are to do things,” says Dr. Zaza.

It takes more than a bad trip (or a really, really good one) at college to induce parents to change how they communicate to their kids about youth attitudes about illicit substances. The high expectations of overachieving established by Boomer parents certainly help ward kids away from addiction. According to SAMHSA, fear of disappointing ones parents is an increasingly common disincentive to experiment with illicit substances. But those parents who were either less demanding (i.e. permissive parents) or less responsive (authoritarian parents) were less likely to keep their children drug-free. By ensuring interventions are staged by emotional peers and not merely authority figures, parents are more likely to impart the social skills designed to help their children avoid developing a drug problem.

Of course, not every Boomer parent is immediately equipped to stage an in-home intervention just because they smoked a few joints at Woodstock. While a 2001 study found that some 94 percent of parents claimed to have discussed the consequences of substance abuse with their kids, 39 percent of their teenagers said the conversations never actually took place. And too much leniency can be a serious problem: a lack of boundaries and rules in an overly-permissive parent can increase the risk of drug or alcohol abuse, a reminder that “letting kids drink in a safe space” like your home probably isn’t the best idea.

But as far as today’s kids are concerned, actually talking with their once-wild and crazy parents may be the best cure for the scourge of drug addiction. Growing up, I knew that no matter what I did in the way of drugs and alcohol, I could always turn to my own Boomer parents for help and support if I was in trouble, an unspoken agreement that was, in some ways, the foundation of our relationship during my turbulent teen years—all because I knew they would actually understand what I was talking about. While the Boomers have their own issues with illicit substances, they have the experience and compassion to help future generations prepare for the dangerous world of drugs and alcohol better than any previous one. It may have been a long strange trip for the Boomers, but it needn’t go on forever.

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/07/your-kids-are-better-behaved-than-you.html     7th August 2016 

Newswise — New research from the University of British Columbia suggests there may be some truth to the belief that marijuana use causes laziness– at least in rats.

The study, published today in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, found that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, makes rats less willing to try a cognitively demanding task.

“Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that when we gave THC to these rats, they basically became cognitively lazy,” said Mason Silveira, the study’s lead author and a PhD candidate in UBC’s department of psychology. “What’s interesting, however, is that their ability to do the difficult challenge was unaffected by THC. The rats could still do the task– they just didn’t want to.”

For the study, researchers looked at the effects of both THC and cannabidiol (CBD) on rats’ willingness to exert cognitive effort.  They trained 29 rats to perform a behavioural experiment in which the animals had to choose whether they wanted an easy or difficult challenge to earn sugary treats.  Under normal circumstances, most rats preferred the harder challenge to earn a bigger reward. But when the rats were given THC, the animals switched to the easier option, despite earning a smaller reward.

When they looked at the effect of CBD, an ingredient in marijuana that does not result in a high, researchers found the chemical did not have any effect on rats’ decision-making or attention. CBD, which is believed to be beneficial in treating pain, epilepsy and even cancer, also didn’t block the negative effects of THC.

“This was surprising, as it had been suggested that high concentrations of CBD could modulate or reduce the negative effects of THC,” said Catharine Winstanley, senior author of the study and an associate professor in UBC’s department of psychology. “Unfortunately, that did not appear to be the case.”  Given how essential willingness to exert cognitive effort is for people to achieve success, Winstanley said the findings underscore the importance of realizing the possible effect of cannabis use on impairing willingness to engage in harder tasks.

While some people view marijuana as a panacea that can cure all ailments, the findings also highlight a need for more research to determine what THC does to the human brain to alter decision-making. That could eventually allow scientists to block these effects of THC, allowing those who use medical marijuana to enjoy the possible benefits of cannabis without the less desirable cognitive effects.

Method

At the beginning of each behavioural experiment, rats chose between two levers to signal whether they wanted an easy or hard challenge.

Choosing the easy challenge resulted in a light turning on for one second, which the rats could easily detect and respond to by poking it with their nose, receiving one sugar pellet as a reward. In the more difficult challenge, the light turned on for only 0.2 seconds, rewarding the rat with two sugar pellets if they responded with a nose poke.

Source:  http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/659725/?sc=dwtn  24th Aug.2016

By Thomas Lifson

George Soros is a brilliant mastermind, the closest thing to a real-life Bond villain in human history.  He thinks strategically, targeting sources of leverage, and he wants to bring about structural change.  See, for instance, his close involvement in the Secretary of States Project.

Another attempt at targeting strategic sources of leverage has been outed at Politico (!) by Scott Bland:

While America’s political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system.

The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district attorney campaigns in six states over the past year — a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors.

Typically, D.A. races do not attract big bucks, so the Soros money can become a major factor.  Needless to say:

His money has supported African-American and Hispanic candidates for these powerful local roles, all of whom ran on platforms sharing major goals of Soros’, like reducing racial disparities in sentencing and directing some drug offenders to diversion programs instead of to trial. It is by far the most tangible action in a progressive push to find, prepare and finance criminal justice reform-oriented candidates for jobs that have been held by long-time incumbents and serve as pipelines to the federal courts — and it has inspired fury among opponents angry about the outside influence in local elections.

That is a remarkably long time horizon for a man as old as Soros to embrace.  Generational in scope.  Maybe he expects his sons to complete his vision, but my guess is that his money has funded a vast organization that will operate tax-free to accomplish this huge political transformation.

Throughout the progressive agenda.  For many decades ahead.

There is a lot of good reporting in the story on the various races Soros has funded.  Kudos to Politico for this one.

Ed Lasky adds:

Soros runs rings around the Koch brothers and everyone else yet merits little attention from the media.  He drills down to state level and probably county levels when it comes to judges as well.  Also, he led the way with the Secretary of State Project that helped elect various secretaries of state – positions responsible for ensuring the integrity of voting practices and results – and can be manipulated, as was most probably the reason we have Al Franken as the senator from Minnesota.  I wrote about the SOS strategy of his and the Democracy Alliance years ago.  The judiciary is supposed to be independent.  There is no branch of government on the federal or state level – and county level – that Soros does not want to manipulate.

Richard Baehr adds:

The amount Soros spends – a few million here, a few million there – look benign compared to Adelson throwing 100 million into the 2012 campaign.  But he is far more effective.

The recent release of emails was a complete non-story for major media.  They won’t attack him.

Source:  http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/08/another_soros_puppet