There is current research into the probable genotoxicity of marijuana and this has been likened to the harm to the foetus in the womb from the drug Thalidomide in the 1960’s.

In the annals of modern medicine, it was a horror story of international scope: thousands of babies dead in the womb and at least 10,000 others in 46 countries born with severe deformities. Some of the children were missing limbs. Others had arms and legs that resembled a seal’s flippers. In many cases, eyes, ears and other organs and tissues failed to develop properly. The cause, scientists discovered by late 1961, was thalidomide, a drug that, during four years of commercial sales in countries from Germany to Australia, was marketed to pregnant women as a miracle cure for morning sickness and insomnia.

The tragedy was largely averted in the United States, with much credit due to Frances Oldham Kelsey, a medical officer at the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, who raised concerns about thalidomide before its effects were conclusively known. For a critical 19-month period, she fastidiously blocked its approval while drug company officials maligned her as a bureaucratic nitpicker. Dr. Kelsey, a physician and pharmacologist later lauded as a heroine of the federal workforce, died Aug. 7 at her daughter’s home in London, Ontario. She was 101. Her daughter, Christine Kelsey, confirmed her death but did not cite a specific cause.

Dr. Kelsey did not single-handedly uncover thalidomide’s hazards. Clinical investigators and health authorities around the world played an important role, as did several of her FDA peers. But because of her tenacity and clinical training, she became the central figure in the thalidomide episode.

In July 1962, The Washington Post directed national attention on the matter — and on Dr. Kelsey — with a front-page article reporting that her “scepticism and stubbornness … prevented what could have been an appalling American tragedy.” [From 1962: ‘Heroine’ of FDA keeps bad drug off the market].

The global thalidomide calamity precipitated legislation signed by President John F. Kennedy in October 1962 that substantially strengthened the FDA’s authority over drug testing. The new regulations, still in force, required pharmaceutical companies to conduct phased clinical trials, obtain informed consent from participants in drug testing, and warn the FDA of adverse effects, and granted the FDA with important controls over prescription-drug advertising.

As the new federal law was being hammered out, Kennedy rushed to include Dr. Kelsey in a previously scheduled White House award ceremony honouring influential civil servants, including an architect of NASA’s manned spaceflight program.“In a way, they tied her to the moonshot in showing what government scientists were capable of,” said Stephen Fried, a journalist who investigated the drug industry in the book “Bitter Pills.” “It was an act of incredible daring and bravery to say we need to wait longer before we expose the American people to this drug.”

Dr. Kelsey became, Fried said, “the most famous government regulator in American history.”

‘I was the newest person there and pretty green’

Dr. Kelsey had landed at the FDA in August 1960, one of seven full-time medical officers hired to review about 300 human drug applications per year.The number of women pursuing careers in science was minuscule, but Dr. Kelsey had long been comfortable in male-dominated environments. Growing up in Canada, she spent part of her childhood in an otherwise all-boys private school. She had two daughters while shouldering the demands of medical school in the late 1940s.

In Washington, she joined a corps of reform-minded scientists who, although not yet empowered by the 1962 law that required affirmative FDA approval of any new drug, demanded strong evidence of effectiveness before giving their imprimatur.At the time, a drug could go on the market 60 days after the manufacturer filed an application with the FDA. If the medical officer determined that the submission was incomplete, the drug company could provide additional information, and the clock would start anew.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical drug companies commonly supplied doctors with new drugs and encouraged them to test the product on patients, an uncontrolled and dangerous practice that relied almost entirely on anecdotal evidence. Thalidomide, which was widely marketed as a sedative as well as a treatment for pregnancy-related nausea during the first trimester of pregnancy, had proven wildly popular in Europe and a boon for its German manufacturer, Chemie Grünenthal.

By the fall of 1960, a Cincinnati-based drug company, William S. Merrell, had licensed the drug and began to distribute it under the trade name Kevadon to 1,200 U.S. doctors in advance of what executives anticipated would be its quick approval by the FDA.The government later estimated that more than 2.5 million tablets were given to about 20,000 patients, several hundred of whom were pregnant.

The Merrell application landed on Dr. Kelsey’s desk within weeks of her arrival at the agency. “I was the newest person there and pretty green,” she later said in an FDA oral history, “so my supervisors decided, ‘Well, this is a very easy one. There will be no problems with sleeping pills.’ ” Immediately the application alarmed her. Despite what she called the company’s “quite fulsome” claims, the absorption and toxicity studies were so incomplete as to be almost meaningless.

Dr. Kelsey rejected the application numerous times and requested more data. Merrell representatives, who had large potential profits riding on the application, began to complain to her bosses and show up at her office, with respected clinical investigators in tow, to protest the hold-up. Dr. Kelsey’s FDA superiors backed her as she conducted her research. By February 1961, she had found more evidence to support her suspicions, including a letter in the British Medical Journal by an English doctor who reported that his patients on thalidomide experienced a painful “tingling” in the arms and feet.

Dr. Kelsey also discovered that, despite warnings of side effects printed on British and German drug labels, Merrell had not notified the FDA of any adverse reactions.  Another reason for her concern was that the company had apparently done no studies on pregnant animals. At the time, a prevailing view among doctors held that the placental barrier protected the foetus from what Dr. Kelsey once called “the indiscretions of the mother,” such as abuse of alcohol, tobacco or illegal drugs. Earlier in her career, however, she had investigated the ways in which drugs did in fact pass through the placenta from mother to baby.

While Dr. Kelsey stood her ground on Kevadon, infant deaths and deformities were occurring at an alarming rate in places where thalidomide had been sold. The development of seal-like flippers, a condition known as phocomelia that previously affected an estimated 1 in 4 million infants, began to crop up by the dozens in many countries.

Clinical investigators, because of a variety of complications including spotty tracking systems, only belatedly made the link to thalidomide.  Grünenthal began pulling the drug from the market in Germany in late 1961. Health authorities in other countries issued warnings. Merrell waited until March 1962 to withdraw its U.S. application. By then, at least 17 babies were born in the United States with thalidomide-related defects, according to the FDA

Influence beyond thalidomide

Dr. Kelsey might have remained an anonymous bureaucrat if not for the front-page story in The Post. The newspaper had received a tip about her from staffers working for Sen. Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat who had been stalled in his years-long battle with the pharmaceutical industry to bolster the country’s drug laws. The coverage of Dr. Kelsey gave her — and Kefauver — a lift. As thousands of grateful letters flowed in to Dr. Kelsey from the public, the proposed legislation became hard to ignore or to water down. The new law was widely known as the Kefauver-Harris Amendments.

“She had a huge effect on the regulations adopted in the 1960s to help create the modern clinical trial system,” said Daniel Carpenter, a professor of government at Harvard University and the author of “Reputation and Power,” a definitive history of the FDA. “She may have had a bigger effect after thalidomide than before.”

In 1963, Dr. Kelsey was named chief of the FDA’s investigational drug branch. Four years later, she was named director of the new Office of Scientific Investigations, a position she held until 1995.  She spent another decade, until her retirement at 90, working at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. In that role, she advised the director of its compliance office on scientific and medical issues and analyzed historical drug review issues.

According to historians of the FDA, she was instrumental in establishing the institutional review boards — a cornerstone of modern clinical drug development — that were created after abusive drug testing trials were exposed in prisons, hospitals and nursing homes. For decades, Dr. Kelsey played a critical role at the agency in enforcing federal regulations for drug development — protocols that were credited with forcing more rigorous standards around the world.

Name mistaken for a man’s

Frances Kathleen Oldham was born near Cobble Hill, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, on July 24, 1914. Her father was a retired British army officer, and her mother came from a prosperous Scottish family.  The young “Frankie,” as she was called, grew up exploring the woods and shorelines, sometimes bringing home frogs for dissection. At McGill University in Montreal, she studied pharmacology — the effects of drugs on people — and received a bachelor’s degree in 1934 and a master’s degree in 1935.

A McGill professor urged her to apply for a research assistant job at the University of Chicago, where pharmacology professor Eugene Geiling accepted her without an interview. Geiling, who had mistaken the names Frances for the masculine Francis, addressed her by mail as “Mr. Oldham.”

“When a woman took a job in those days, she was made to feel as if she was depriving a man of the ability to support his wife and child,” Dr. Kelsey told the New York Times in 2010. “But my professor said: ‘Don’t be stupid. Accept the job, sign your name and put “Miss” in brackets afterward.’ ”

In Chicago, she helped Geiling investigate the 107 deaths that occurred nationwide in 1937 from the newly marketed liquid form of sulfanilamide, a synthetic antibacterial drug used to treat streptococcal infections. In tablet form, it had been heralded as a wonder-drug of the age, but it tasted unpleasant.Because the drug was not soluble in water or alcohol, the chief chemist of its manufacturer, S.E. Massengill Co. of Bristol, Tenn., dissolved the sulfanilamide with an industrial substance that was a chemical relative of antifreeze. He then added cherry flavouring and pink colouring to remedy the taste and appearance.

Massengill rushed the new elixir to market without adequately testing its safety. Many who took the medicine — including a high number of children — suffered an agonizing death.  At the time, the FDA’s chief mandate, stemming from an obsolete 1906 law, was food safety. At the agency’s request, Geiling joined the Elixir Sulfanilamide investigation and put Dr. Kelsey to work on animal testing of the drug. She recalled observing rats as they “shrivelled up and died.”

Amid national outrage over Elixir Sulfanilamide, Congress passed the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, legislation that vastly expanded federal regulatory oversight over drugs and set a new benchmark for drug safety before marketing. Massengill’s owner ultimately was fined a maximum penalty of $26,000 for mislabelling and misbranding; by technical definition, an elixir contains alcohol.

‘We need to take precautions’

Dr. Kelsey received a doctorate from Chicago in 1938, then joined the faculty. In 1943, she wed a pharmacology colleague, Fremont Ellis Kelsey.  After graduating from Chicago’s medical school in 1950, Frances Kelsey taught pharmacology at the University of South Dakota medical school and was a fill-in doctor at practices throughout the state. She also became a U.S. citizen before arriving in Washington in 1960 when her husband was hired by the National Institutes of Health. He died in 1966 after a heart attack.

Survivors include their daughters, Susan Duffield of Shelton, Wash., and Christine Kelsey of London, Ontario; a sister; and two grandchildren. Dr. Kelsey moved to Ontario from suburban Maryland in 2014.

Babies who suffered from the effects of thalidomide and survived grew up with a range of impairment. Some required lifelong home care. Others held jobs and were not severely hindered by their disabilities. Many legal settlements were reached between drug companies and the victims of thalidomide, and new claims continue to surface. Grünenthal formally apologized to victims of thalidomide in 2012.

The drug, however, never disappeared entirely. Researchers have investigated thalidomide’s effects on H.I.V. and Crohn’s disease and have conducted clinical trials for on its use for rheumatoid arthritis and macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness.

In 1998, the FDA approved the drug for the treatment of lesions from leprosy. In 2006, thalidomide was cleared for use with the medicine dexamethasone for certain cases of multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow.

The agency enforced strict safeguards, including pregnancy testing, for such new uses. “We need to take precautions,” Dr. Kelsey told an interviewer in in 2001, “because people forget very soon.”

Source:https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/frances-            oldham-kelsey-heroine-of-thalidomide-tragedy-dies-at-101/2015/08/07

Researchers at Western University have found a way to use pharmaceuticals to reverse the negative psychiatric effects of THC, the psychoactive chemical found in marijuana. Chronic adolescent marijuana use has previously been linked to the development of psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia, in adulthood. But until now, researchers were unsure of what exactly was happening in the brain to cause this to occur.

“What is important about this study is that not only have we identified a specific mechanism in the prefrontal cortex for some of the mental health risks associated with adolescent marijuana use, but we have also identified a mechanism to reverse those risks,” said Steven Laviolette, professor at Western’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.

In a study published online today in Scientific Reports the researchers demonstrate that adolescent THC exposure modulates the activity of a neurotransmitter called GABA in the prefrontal cortex region of the brain. The team, led by Laviolette and post-doctoral fellow Justine Renard, looked specifically at GABA because of its previously shown clinical association with schizophrenia.

“GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter and plays a crucial role in regulating the excitatory activity in the frontal cortex, so if you have less GABA, your neuronal systems become hyperactive leading to behavioural changes consistent with schizophrenia,” said Renard.

The study showed that the reduction of GABA as a result of THC exposure in adolescence caused the neurons in adulthood to not only be hyperactive in this part of the brain, but also to be out of synch with each other, demonstrated by abnormal oscillations called ‘gamma’ waves. This loss of GABA in the cortex caused a corresponding hyperactive state in the brain’s dopamine system, which is commonly observed in schizophrenia.

By using drugs to activate GABA in a rat model of schizophrenia, the team was able to reverse the neuronal and behavioural effects of the THC and eliminate the schizophrenia-like symptoms.

Laviolette says this finding is especially important given the impending legalization of marijuana in Canada. “What this could mean is that if you are going to be using marijuana, in a recreational or medicinal way, you can potentially combine it with compounds that boost GABA to block the negative effects of THC.”

The research team says the next steps will examine how combinations of cannabinoid chemicals with compounds that can boost the brains GABA system may serve as more effective and safer treatments for a variety of mental health disorders, such as addiction, depression and anxiety.

Source:  The Marijuana Report.Org, Sept. 2017

Louise Stanger is a speaker, educator, licensed clinician, social worker, certified daring way facilitator and interventionist who uses an invitational intervention approach to work with complicated mental health, substance abuse, chronic pain and process addiction clients.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, Red Bull, an energy drink high on energy and low on nutritional value, made its North American debut with the famous “Red Bull gives you wings” campaign. The tag line, a nod to the “pick me up” qualities it gives to drinkers of the product, set the stage for the way in which teens and young adults relate to the nascent product category.

In essence, advertising birthed energy drinks as the way to find uplift, fight fatigue, and give that extra boost. Regrettably, no one was paying attention to the drinks’ negative side effects.

Red Bull has since spawned its own grocery store aisle of knock-offs – Monster, Rockstar, Full Throttle, Amp – to name a few. In 2016, U.S. retail sales of energy drinks topped $11 billion (Red Bull generated $5.1B in revenue in 2010). By comparison, that number is roughly how much Hollywood makes on movie tickets in a year.

Paradoxically, energy drinks’ meteoric rise in popularity and consumption has coincided with major health risks and the onslaught of addiction to other harmful substances. How did a drink that tastes like cough syrup land with such a huge impact?

Long before Red Bull “gave us wings,” Chaleo Yoovidhya, a Southeast Asian pharmacist, developed energy “tonics” aimed at labourers and truck drivers in the 1960s, according to The Dragonfly Effect, a book that looks at successful branding campaigns for products like energy drinks.

Then in the 1980s, an Austrian billionaire businessman named Dietrich Mateschitz discovered the tonics and married them with innovative guerrilla marketing to launch in North America. The aim was to put cans of Red Bull, the syrupy concoction of sugar and caffeine, in the hands of their target market: young adult males and teens who are oblivious to the drinks’ ingredients. The ad campaign struck like a lightning bolt and a multibillion dollar industry took ro

The key ingredient in energy drinks that gives the consumer energizing effects is caffeine. Though caffeine, found in commonly consumed drinks like coffee, tea and sodas, isn’t outright bad for you, the serving size, frequency and consumption patterns are cause for alarm.

Most energy drinks contain 70-200 milligrams of caffeine; for example, Rockstar 2X has 250 mg per 12 ounces, a 12 ounce can of Red Bull has 111 mg, and a 5-Hour Energy shot, a variation of the energy drink craze, is a whopping 207 mg of caffeine in just 2 ounces.

To put these concentration levels into perspective, the American Academy of Paediatrics maintains adolescents must not consume more than 100 mg of caffeine per day (it’s 500 mg for adults).

And more alarming than the serving sizes are the rates at which teens consume energy drinks. When young adults and teenagers get with their friends, they’ll consume 3-4 drinks in a short period of time or even chug (i.e. “shotgun”) whole cans in an instant. Despite this binge-style consumption, teens remain oblivious to the high caffeine content and unaware of the effects energy drinks have on the body. Other studies and researchers have observed energy drinks become the chaser for alcohol consumption in certain situations.

At these high levels of consumption, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reports serious health risks associated with energy drinks. These include:

· Increased heart rate, irregularities and palpitations

· Increased blood pressure

· Sleep disturbances, insomnia

· Diuresis or increased urine production

· Hyperglycaemia (increased blood sugar), due to the high levels of sugar content, which may be harmful for people at risk for diabetes or already diabetic

Perhaps most dangerous are the serious side effects caused when energy drinks are consumed with alcohol. According to University Health News Daily, “the dangers of energy drinks mixed with alcohol are related to reduced sensation of intoxication and impaired judgment.”

Here’s how it goes: the user gets a burst of energy and alertness (increased heart rate and dilated blood vessels) from the high content of caffeine in the energy drink, prompting the person to feel less intoxicated and therefore drinking more alcohol and putting themselves at risk for alcohol poisoning and severely impaired judgment.

Teens, young adults and college-aged students who play drinking games or drink in high-risk environments such as parties, boating, swimming, beach days, etc. put themselves at greater risk of injury and bodily harm with these combinations.

In addition to high-risk environments and dangerous situations, energy drink and alcohol mixing lowers inhibitions, making room for engaging in high-risk behaviours such as unwanted sexual encounters, driving vehicles, boats and jet skis under the influence, and other behaviours that may lead to hospitalization or encounters with law enforcement.

We need look no further than the case of Four Loko, an energy drink that comes ready made with alcohol and caffeine for proof that mixing the two is dangerous. The drink gets its name from its four signature ingredients: alcohol, caffeine, taurine and guarana.

According to a report in The Week, the company that produced Four Loko, Phusion Projects of Chicago aka Drink Four Brewing Company, came under ethical fire for marketing to adolescents under the age of 21 (as most energy drink companies do – though this was the first to pre-mix alcohol and caffeine).

Four Loko also caught fire with college students and it didn’t take long for reports of blackouts and other alcohol overdose related incidents to take hold of its users. University campuses across the nation including the University of Rhode Island, Central Washington University and Worcester State University began to ban the beverage and companies with similar beverages have since reformulated its drinks and reduced its marketing toward underage students and young adults. In 2014, the company reached a settlement to stop production and distribution of Four Loko in the United States, according to a report in The Atlantic.

Moreover, the University of Maryland’s research on the topic has found a link between high energy drink consumption and developing addiction to other harmful substances later on. Researchers looked at the health and risk-taking habits of 1,099 college students over a four year period.

Their analysis of the study found that participants who consumed highly caffeinated drinks (energy drinks, sodas, etc.) are more likely to develop an addiction to cocaine, alcohol, or other substances when compared to students who did not consume such beverages. “The results suggest that energy drink users might be at heightened risk for other substance use, particularly stimulants,” says Amelia Arria, an associate professor and lead author of the study.

New research from Purdue University found that mixing alcohol and highly caffeinated drinks could significantly change the brain activity of a teenager. Dr. Richard van Rijn, the lead researcher, says “it seems the two substances (energy drinks and alcohol) together push [teenagers] over a limit that causes changes in their behaviour and changes the neurochemistry in their brains.”

Although energy drinks are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, little oversight is given to labelling cans and packages with the risks related to consumption. As an educator, I believe the FDA must first do a better job of labelling. Just as cigarettes and alcohol have warning labels, so too must energy drinks.

Grocery stores should move energy drink products to areas where alcohol is sold – away from wandering young eyes. Public health discussions in high schools and middle schools need to take place. Youth and young adult sports teams must reconsider energy drink sponsorships and greater oversight concerning marketing practices toward under-aged youth.

As a young adult, if you do choose to consume these beverages, be sure to read the labels for serving sizes, caffeine content, and try to avoid mixing with alcohol. Parents, teachers, sports coaches, and community leaders must communicate to teenagers and young adults the harm energy drinks may cause. Together we must work together to be educated and informed against aggressive advertising to keep our teens and young adults healthy and engaged.

To learn more about Louise Stanger and her interventions and other resources, visit her website.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/red-bull-monster-four-loko-rockstar-the-downside_us_59b021cce4b0bef3378cdcee    6th Sept.2017

by  Elizabeth Stuyt, MD

For the past 27 years, working as an addiction psychiatrist, I have struggled with big industries that push their products more for their financial gain rather than the best interests of the clients they serve. The most disconcerting piece occurs when physicians or other treatment providers or governmental entities appear to be influenced by big industry, touting the party line and minimizing any downsides to the product. I have experienced this with the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical industry and now with the marijuana industry.

It is clear to me that wherever it happens, the push to legalize medical marijuana is simply a back-door effort, by industry, to legalize retail marijuana. However, the lack of any regulations on the potency of THC in marijuana or marijuana products in Colorado has allowed the cannabis industry to increase the potency of THC to astronomical proportions, resulting in a burgeoning public health crisis.

The potency of THC in currently available marijuana has quadrupled since the mid-1990s. The marijuana of the 1980s had <2% THC, 4.5% in 1997, 8.5% in 2006 and by 2015 the average potency of THC in the flower was 17%, with concentrated products averaging 62% THC.

Sadly, the cannabidiol (CBD) concentrations in currently available marijuana have remained the same or decreased. CBD is the component of marijuana that appears to block or ameliorate the effects of THC. Plants that are bred to produce high concentrations of THC cannot simultaneously produce high CBD. Higher-potency THC has been achieved by genetically engineering plants to product more THC and then preventing pollination so that the plant puts more energy into producing cannabinoids rather than seeds. This type of cannabis is referred to as sinsemilla (Spanish for without seed). (It has also been referred to as “skunk” due to its strong smell.)

In my view, this is no different than when the tobacco industry increased the potency of nicotine by genetically engineering tobacco plants to produce more nicotine and then used additives like ammonia to increase the absorption of nicotine. Industry’s efforts to increase the potency of an addictive substance seem to be done purely with the idea of addicting as many people as possible to guarantee continued customers. This certainly worked for the tobacco industry. And we have increasing evidence that high potency THC cannabis use is associated with an increased severity of cannabis dependence, especially in young people.12

Although marijuana has been used for thousands of years for various medical conditions, we have no idea if the benefit comes from the THC or CBD or one of the other multiple cannabinoids present in marijuana, or a combination. And we have no idea how much is needed or how often. Most of the research indicates that it is likely the CBD that is more helpful but we obviously need research on this. There is no evidence that increasing the potency of THC has any medical benefits. In fact, a study on the benefits of smoked cannabis on pain actually demonstrated that too high a dose of THC can cause hyperalgesia – similar to what is seen with high dose opiates – meaning that the person becomes more sensitive to pain with continued use. They found that 2% THC had no effect on pain, 4% THC had some beneficial effects on chronic pain and 8% resulted in hyperalgesia.3

The discovery of the “active component” in marijuana that makes it so desirable is a fairly recent phenomenon. THC and CBD were first discovered in 1963 in Israel.4

Because cannabis was made a DEA schedule I drug in 1970, very little research has been done on cannabis in the United States and most of the indications for medical marijuana have very little good research backing up the use. The chemical that is made by the body and fits the receptor which accommodates THC was discovered in 1992.5

The researcher named the chemical anandamide which means “supreme joy” in Sanskrit.  However, it turns out that the endocannabinoid system plays a very significant role in brain development that occurs during childhood and adolescence. It controls glutamate and GABA homeostasis and plays a role in strengthening and pruning synaptic connections in the prefrontal motor cortex. The consequences of using the high potency THC products during this period, especially without the protective benefits of CBD, are multifaceted and include disturbance of the endocannabinoid system, which can result in impaired cognitive development, lower IQ and increased risk of psychosis.

There is also evidence that marijuana use contributes to anxiety and depression. A very large prospective study out of Australia tracked 1600 girls for 7 years and found that those who used marijuana every day were 5 times more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety than non-users.6

Teenage girls who used the drug a least once a week were twice as likely to develop depression as those who did not use. In this study, cannabis use prior to age 15 also increased the risk of developing schizophrenia symptoms.

While there definitely are people who can use marijuana responsibly without any untoward effects, similar to how some people can drink alcohol responsibly and not have any problems, there are people who are very sensitive to the effects of THC, and its use can precipitate psychosis. The higher the potency of THC the more likely this may happen and we have no idea how to predict who will be affected. In one of the first double blind randomized placebo controlled trials on smoked cannabis (maximum of 8% THC) for the treatment of pain, a cannabis naïve participant had a psychotic reaction to the marijuana in the study and this then required that all future study participants have some experience with smoking marijuana.7

This kind of makes it difficult to have “blind” unbiased participants.

A 2015 study out of London analyzed 780 people ages 18-65, 410 with first episode psychosis and 370 healthy controls, and found that users of high potency (“skunk-like”) cannabis (THC > 15%) are three times as likely to have a psychotic episode as people who never use cannabis, and the risk is fivefold in people who smoke this form of the drug every day.89 There was no association of psychosis with THC levels < 5%. Most of the marijuana in the U.S. is of the high-THC variety. Many retailers in Colorado sell strains of weed that contain 25 percent THC or more.

Sadly, Colorado has now joined several other states in approving PTSD as an indication for the use of medical marijuana. Marijuana does not “treat” PTSD any more than benzodiazepines or opiates “treat” PTSD. All these addictive drugs do is mask the symptoms, allowing the person to continue life unaffected by the memory of the trauma. However, the psychological trauma is never resolved and the individual has to continue to use the substance in order to cope. This sets the individual up for the development of addiction to the substance or the use of other addictive substances. There is absolutely no good research to support the use of marijuana for PTSD, and there is observational data that this would be a bad idea unless this use was supported by a lot more (and better-designed) longitudinal research.

In an excellent longitudinal, observational study from 1992 to 2011, 2,276 Veterans admitted to specialized VA treatment programs for PTSD had their symptoms evaluated at intake and four months after discharge.10

They found that those who never used marijuana or quit using while in treatment had the lowest levels of PTSD symptoms, while those who continued to use or started using marijuana after treatment had worse symptoms of PTSD. Those who started using the drug during treatment had higher levels of violent behavior too.

Those of us working in the trenches in Colorado are seeing the downsides of what our governor has called “one of the great social experiments of the 21st century.” Emergency room physicians are seeing a significant increase in people experiencing consequences from marijuana use since it was legalized. One such physician wrote a very poignant piece about his experience returning to his home town of Pueblo, Colorado where he is now practicing.11

His experiences are totally supported by the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Report, volume 4 from September 2016 which documents significant increases in marijuana related emergency department visits (49%) and hospitalizations related to marijuana (32%) compared to rates prior to retail legalization. This report also documents significant increases in the use of marijuana by youth, with Colorado youth “past month marijuana use” for 2013/2014 being 74% higher than the national average, compared with 39% higher in 2011/2012.

In Pueblo, Colorado, where I practice, it has developed into a perfect storm. According to the Healthy Kids Colorado Survey in 2015, we have the highest incidence of youth marijuana use in the state, with 30.1% reporting using marijuana in the last 30 days. The legalization of retail marijuana seems to be reflected in the increased abuse of opiates and heroin too. In addition to the highest rates of marijuana use by youth, Pueblo has the highest rates of heroin-related deaths in the state.

This is a very disturbing correlation that needs attention. I have definitely seen in my practice that marijuana acts as a gateway drug to opiates, and to relapse to opiates after treatment if the person goes back to using marijuana. The Smart Approaches to Marijuana status report, which assesses state compliance with federal marijuana enforcement policy, following what is known as the Cole memo, documents that Colorado, four years after legalization, has failed to meet the specific DOJ requirements on controlling recreational marijuana production, distribution and use. This report documents a significant increase in drugged driving crashes, youth marijuana use, a thriving illegal black market and unabated sales of alcohol, which supports the idea that people are not using marijuana instead of alcohol but rather in addition to alcohol.

In spite of all this information, powerful people in the government of Colorado have publicly minimized the consequences. Larry Wolk, MD, the Chief Medical Officer for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, has reported that he has “not seen any significant problems” with the legalization of marijuana.

Governor Hickenlooper’s response to Attorney General Sessions recent questions about compliance with the Cole Memo minimized the adolescent use of marijuana by saying that youth marijuana use in Colorado has “remained stable since legalization.” This is not true for Pueblo, but in any event, any use of marijuana by youth in Colorado should not be minimized and should be a major concern for future generations.

While there are people who believe we need to enforce federal law and go back to making marijuana illegal, I am afraid the horse is already out of the barn and cannot be put back in as we already have several states with “legal” retail marijuana and multiple more with “medical marijuana.” I cannot conceive of any way this could be reversed at this point, when the majority of society supports the legalization of marijuana.

Solutions to our marijuana problems have to be realistic to our current situation/environment. The number one solution is more education. Many people seem to lack a true understanding of the drug and all the potential negative consequences of the higher-potency THC. This is why education is so important. Adults should have the right to make their own decisions but they need informed consent, just like with any drug.

The biggest concern is with adolescent use and the developing brain. This requires a lot more education and increased efforts at prevention, early intervention and treatment. I believe society would be truly served by a federal ban on all advertising of addicting drugs including alcohol, tobacco and marijuana, as well as all pharmaceutical drugs. The decision to use a pharmaceutical medication should be between the patient and the medical professional, not influenced by big industry. We clearly have the big industries— alcohol, tobacco and marijuana—doing everything they can to influence the public and convince them to use their product.

Since we only have anecdotal evidence at this point that marijuana can aid any medical condition, I recommend eliminating “medical marijuana” and just have retail marijuana with limits on THC and regulations similar to alcohol and tobacco. This could help take away the perception, which adolescents and others have, that because is it “medical” it must be “safe.” In order to be able to say it is medical, it should go through the same standards for testing the safety and efficacy of any prescription drug.

In this vein, I believe we do need more research and that marijuana should be reclassified as a schedule II drug so this can occur. Since marijuana has been used medicinally for thousands of years, I believe that the plant deserves some true research to determine if and what parts of the plant are helpful medicinally. The reports that marijuana use resulted in less than 10% becoming addicted to it were done back in the 1990s when THC levels were <5%. Since we are seeing significant increases in people developing marijuana use disorder with the higher doses of THC, perhaps the limits on THC should be <5%. Editor’s note: for more information, see the pdf of the author’s talk on this topic.     Show 11 footnotes

Source:  https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/09/unintended-consequences-colorado-social-experiment/  11th September 2017

A Staffordshire bull terrier that mauled its owner to death while taking part in a BBC documentary had eaten a stash of crack cocaine, an inquest was told.

The dog, named Major, repeatedly bit the throat and face of its owner Mario Perivoitos, an IT expert, in front of a two-man crew from the BBC show Drugs Map Britain shortly after filming.

The crew managed to lock the dog in another room and call an ambulance but Mr Perivoitos died at the scene. The animal was found to have taken enough drugs to put a human eight times over the drug-drive limit.

North London coroner’s court was told that Mr Perivoitos, 41, was a heroin user and had suffered an epileptic fit before the dog set upon him at his flat in Wood Green, north London.

Jessica Winteringham, the assistant producer, said that after the crew had finished filming, Mr Perivoitos had appeared angry, before becoming unresponsive and lying on the bed next to the dog. “Then the dog got up and got his right cheek and then his left and then clamped on to his neck,” she said. “We were shouting ‘no Major’ to try and stop him. Mario did not make any attempt to move or do anything.”

Joshua Haddow, the show’s producer, said he struggled to pull Major off its owner: “I just started hitting the dog, I just did not know what else to do and as I did that it started to loosen its grip.

“I picked it up by the scruff of its neck and I threw it into a room . . . the idea being that I shut the door and I went back to Mario to try and see if we could do anything. The dog was very peaceful, it was friendly with us, it would lick our hands and say hello, there was no way we could have pre-empted it.

“When Mario disturbed the dog on the bed he was behaving quite strangely, the dog was relaxing, he essentially clambered and disturbed the dog, he started to nip his face at first a little bit and then it quickly escalated.”

Nicholas Carmichael, an expert in veterinary toxicology, said cocaine and morphine were found. “It is very likely that this dog had consumed drugs, probably eaten them. It is almost impossible to say whether that will make the dog attack. The dog was eight times the drug-drive limit.”

Andrew Walker, senior coroner, recorded a conclusion of death as a consequence of injuries received from a dog.

Source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/staffordshire-bull-terrier-had-eaten-crack-cocaine-before-fatal-attack-on-owner-mario-perivoitos-during-filming-of-bbc-documentary-drugs-map-britain-in-wood-green-bbxfmd6p2    12th Sept.2017

And Addiction-Connected Carcinogenicity, Congenital Toxicity And Heritable Genotoxicity

Albert Stuart Reece, Gary Kenneth Hulse

Extracts from the above research.  Recommend readers go to source for complete study.

A B S T R A C T

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.

CONCLUSION

As mentioned above high dose cannabis and THC test positive in many genotoxicity assays, albeit often with a highly non-linear threshold like effects above low doses. As long ago as 2004 it was said that 3–41% of all neonates born in various North American communities had been exposed to cannabis [172]. Since cannabis is addictive [187], is becoming more potent [77,83,86], quickly builds up in adipose tissues [62,82] and seems generally to becoming more widely available under fluid regulatory regimes [187,188], real concern must be expressed that the rising population level of cannabinoid exposure will increasingly intersect the toxic thresholds for major genotoxicity including chromosomal clastogenicity secondary to interference and premature aging of the mitotic apparatus.

Under such a conceptualization, it would appear that the real boon of restrictive cannabis regimes [189] is not their supposed success in any drug war, but their confinement in the populations they protect, to a low dose exposure paradigm which limits incident and transgenerational teratogenicity, ageing, mental retardation and cancerogenicity.

Source:   Mutation Research/Fundamental and Molecular Mechanisms of Mutagenesis Journal Homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/molmut    January 2016

Mathias B. Forrester and Ruth D. Merz

Hawaii Birth Defects Program, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Extracts from Study 

The literature on the association between prenatal illicit drug use and birth defects is inconsistent. The objective of this study was to determine the risk of a variety of birth defects with prenatal illicit drug use.

Data were derived from an active, population based adverse pregnancy outcome registry. Cases were all infants and foetuses with any of 54 selected birth defects delivered during 1986–2002.

The prenatal methamphetamine, cocaine, or marijuana use rates were calculated for each birth defect and compared to the prenatal use rates among all deliveries.

Among all deliveries, the prenatal use rate was 0.52% for methamphetamine,0.18% for cocaine, and 0.26% for marijuana.

Methamphetamine rates were significantly higher than expected for 14 (26%) of the birth defects.

Cocaine rates were significantly higher than expected for 13 (24%) of the birth defects.

Marijuana rates were significantly higher than expected for 21 (39%) of the birth defects. Increased risk for the three drugs occurred predominantly among birth defects associated with the central nervous system, cardiovascular system, oral clefts, and limbs. There was also increased risk of marijuana use among a variety of birth defects associated with the gastrointestinal system. Prenatal uses of methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana are all associated with increased risk of a variety of birth defects.

The affected birth defects are primarily associated with particular organ systems.

DISCUSSION

Using data from a Statewide, population-based registry that covered over 300,000 births and a 17-yr period, this investigation examined the association between over 50 selected birth defects and maternal use of methamphetamine, cocaine, or marijuana during pregnancy. Much of the literature on prenatal illicit drug use and birth defects involved case reports, involved a small number of cases, were not population-based, or focused on only one or a few particular birth defects.

There are various limitations to this investigation. The number of cases for many of the birth defects categories was relatively small, limiting the ability to identify statistically significant differences and resulting in large confidence intervals.

In spite of this, a number of statistically significant analyses were identified. Some statistically significant results might be expected to occur by chance. If 1 in every 20 analyses is expected to result in statistically significant differences solely by chance, then among the 162 analyses performed in this study, 8 would be expected to be statistically significant by chance. However, 48 statistically significant differences were identified. Thus, not all of the statistically significant results are likely to be due to chance.

This study included all pregnancies where methamphetamine, cocaine, or marijuana use was identified through either report in the medical record or positive toxicology test. This was done because neither self-report nor toxicology testing is likely to identify all instances of prenatal illicit drug use (Christmas et al., 1992).

In spite of using both methods for determining prenatal illicit drug use, all pregnancies involving methamphetamine, cocaine, or marijuana were not likely to have been identified. The degree of under ascertainment is unknown. A previous study examined the maternal drug use rate around the time of delivery in Hawaii during 1999 (Derauf et al., 2003). This study found 1.4% of the pregnancies involved methamphetamine use and 0.2% involved marijuana use. Among 1999 deliveries, the HBDP identified a prenatal methamphetamine use rate of 0.7% and a marijuana use rate of 0.4%. However, comparisons between the 2 studies should be made with caution because the previous study collected data from a single hospital during only a 2-mo period.

Another limitation is that the present study did not control for potential confounding factors such as maternal demographic characteristics, health behaviors, and prenatal care. Increased risk of birth defects has been associated with inadequate prenatal care (Carmichael et al., 2002), maternal smoking (Honein et al., 2001), and maternal alcohol use (Martinez-Frias et al., 2004).

These factors are also found with maternal illicit drug use (Cosden et al., 1997; Hutchins, 1997; Norton-Hawk, 1997). Thus the increased risk of selected birth defects with illicit drug use in this study might actually be due to one of these other underlying factors. Unfortunately, informationon some of the potential confounding factors such as socioeconomic status are not collected by the HBDP. Information collected on some other factors such as smoking and alcohol use is suspect because of negative attitudes toward their use during pregnancy. Moreover, the small number of cases among many of the birth defects groups would make controlling for these factors difficult.

Finally, this investigation included use of the illicit drugs at any time during the pregnancy. Most birth defects are believed to occur at 3–8 wk after conception (Makri et al., 2004; Sadler, 2000). In a portion of the cases, the drug use might have occurred at a time when it could not have caused the birth defect. Furthermore, this study does not include information on dose; however, teratogenicity of a substance may depend on its dose (Werler et al., 1990). In spite of the various potential concerns of the present study, data may suggest future areas of investigation where the limitations inherent in the present one are excluded.

This investigation found significantly higher than expected rates for prenatal use of methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana among a number of specific birth defects. Although not identical, there were general similarities between the three illicit drugs and the birth defects with which they were associated. Increased rates for methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana occurred predominantly among birth defects affecting the central nervous system, cardiovascular system, oral clefts, and limbs. There were also increased rates of marijuana use with a variety of birth defects associated with the gastrointestinal  system. With the exception of marijuana and encephalocele, none of illicit drugs were associated with neural-tube defects (anencephaly, spina bifida, encephalocele). The rates of use for the three illicit drugs were not significantly elevated with eye defects other than anophthalmia/microphthalmia, genitourinary defects, and musculoskeletal defects aside from limb defects.

In the majority of instances, the associations between particular illicit drugs and birth defects were found whether or not those cases involving use of multiple types of drugs were included.

Of the 14 significant associations between methamphetamine and specific birth defects, 10 (71.4%) remained once multiple drug cases were excluded. Corresponding rates were 61.5% (8 of 13) for cocaine and 81.0% (17 of 21) for marijuana.

The similarities in the patterns of birth defects with which methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana are associated might suggest that the three drugs exert similar effects on embryonic and foetal development. This might not be expected, considering that the three illicit drugs differ in their mechanisms of action and clinical effects (Leiken & Paloucek, 1998).

Some of the associations between methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana observed in the present investigation were previously reported. Other studies observed similar associations, or lack thereof, of methamphetamine or amphetamine with neural-tube defects (Shaw et al., 1996) and cardiovascular and musculoskeletal defects (McElhatton et al., 2000); cocaine with neural-tube defects (Shaw et al., 1996), cardiovascular defects (Lipshultz et al., 1991), ventricular septal defect and atrial septal defect (Ferencz et al., 1997c; Martin & Edmonds, 1991), tricuspid atresia (Ferencz et al., 1997d), craniosynostosis (Gardner et al., 1998), and situs inversus (Kuehl & Loffredo, 2002); and marijuana with neural-tube defects (Shaw et al., 1996), single ventricle (Steinberger et al., 2002), ventricular septal defect (Williams et al., 2004), tricuspid atresia (Ferencz et al., 1997d), and gastroschisis (Torfs et al., 1994).

In contrast, this study differed from other research with respect to their findings regarding methamphetamine or amphetamine and gastroschisis (Torfs et al., 1994); cocaine and microcephaly (Martin & Edmonds, 1991), conotruncal defects (Adams et al., 1989), endocardial cushion defect (Ferencz et al., 1997b), situs inversus (Ferencz et al., 1997a), oral clefts (Beatyet al., 2001), and genitourinary defects (Abe et al., 2003; Battin et al., 1995; Martin & Edmonds, 1991); and marijuana and conotruncal defects (Adams et al., 1989), Ebstein anomaly (Ferencz et al., 1997e; Correa-Villasenor et al., 1994), and oral clefts (Beaty et al., 2001).

The inconsistent findings between this and the other studies could be due to differences in study methodology, case classification, or number of cases. The mechanisms by which methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana might contribute to the rates for birth defects is currently unknown. Any potential explanation would have to take into account the observation that each of the illicit drugs was associated with a variety of specific birth defects affecting different organ systems. This might suggest that these three drugs would need to influence a basic, common factor involved in embryonic development.

Folic acid is involved in nucleic acid synthesis and cellular division (Scholl & Johnson, 2000) and thus would play an important role in the early growth and cellular proliferation of the embryo. Folic acid has been found to prevent a variety of birth defects (Forrester & Merz, 2005). Thus, anything that interferes with the activity of folic acid might be expected to increase the risk for these birth defects. Many of these birth defects were associated with methamphetamine, cocaine, and/or marijuana in the present study.

However, two of the birth defects most closely affected by folic acid—anencephaly and spina bifida—were not associated with any of the three illicit drugs. Vascular disruption has been suggested as a potential cause for a variety of different birth defects such as intestinal atresia/stenosis, limb reduction defects, and gastroschisis.

Since cocaine is a vasoconstrictor, it has been hypothesized that cocaine use could increase the risk of these vascular disruption defects (Hume et al., 1997; Martin et al., 1992; Hoyme et al., 1983; de Vries, 1980). Although this investigation found an association between cocaine and limb reduction deformities, no association was found with intestinal atresia/stenosis or gastroschisis.

In conclusion, this study found that prenatal use of methamphetamine, cocaine, or marijuana were associated with increased risk of a variety of birth defects. The affected birth defects were primarily associated with particular organ systems. Because of various limitations of the study, further research is recommended.

Source:  Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, 70: 7–18, 2007

Women who inject drugs are about 39% more likely to become infected with hepatitis C virus than men who inject drugs, research suggests.

A range of factors could account for the disparity, the researchers wrote in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

“Our findings provide important evidence that sex disparities in  exist independent of selected behavioral risk and demographic factors,” researcher Kimberly Page, PhD, MPH, division chief of the department of internal medicine at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, and colleagues wrote. “When considering HCV risk differential among women, multiple factors including biological, social and network factors — as well as differential access to prevention services — need to be considered.”

The researchers assessed data from seven of the 10 InC3 Collaborative studies of HIV and HCV among PWID ((people who inject drugs ), which included locations in the United States, Europe and Australia.

Page and colleagues included data from 1,868 PWID, 590 (31.58%) of whom were women. No data from participants who reported being transgender were assessed. In all, the researchers found 511 PWID with incident HCV during follow-up. Of those, 182 (31.5%) were female.

The unadjusted female-to-male HR for HCV infection was 1.38 (95% CI, 1.15-1.65). The disparity remained significant after adjustment for behavioral and demographic risk factors, the researchers said, slightly rising to 1.39 (95% CI, 1.12-1.72).

Page and colleagues cited previous studies suggesting biological and social factors that may help to explain the difference.

“All of these factors should be studied further to better understand sex-related differences in risk and to maximize prevention effects of drug treatment programs and their potential to reduce acquisition of blood-borne viruses, including HCV and HIV,” they wrote.

Disclosure: Esmaeili reports no relevant financial disclosures. Please see the study for all other authors’ relevant financial disclosures.

Source: https://www.healio.com/infectious-disease/hepatitis-c/news/in-the-journals/%7Be0c3d409-03c9-4d3b-a277-13edeb16b8e6%7D/women-injecting-drugs-at-higher-risk-for-hcv-than-men 2nd Sept.2017

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) is a common condition that affects a substantial number of children, adolescents, and adults. Individuals can manifest FASD in a variety of ways, with many co-morbidities. They can present with birth defects, learning difficulties, intellectual disability, academic struggles, behavioral and psychiatric issues (e.g. attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, conduct disorder, depression, and drug and alcohol addiction), and difficulties with the law, with a risk for incarceration, unemployment, poverty, and dependency. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder is important because it can potentially be prevented, and early recognition and diagnosis can lead to earlier interventions and supports that are associated with improved outcomes. Prevention is important because FASD is associated with a high cost to affected individuals, families, systems of care, and communities.

Source:   http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2649222

See also:

Taylor & Francis. “Fathers drinking: Also responsible for fetal disorders?.” ScienceDaily,   www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140214075405.htm.

Am J Stem Cells 2016;5(1):11-18 www.AJSC.us /ISSN:2160-4150/AJSC0030217 Review Article Influence of paternal preconception exposures on their offspring: through epigenetics to phenotype

The BBC Today programme has long been a shill for liberalising the drug laws. This morning’s edition, however, ran an item at 0810 which almost caused me to fall off my chair.

The item was pegged to the collapse of the prosecution case against people accused of supplying nitrous oxide (the “laughing gas” used by dentists). This has called into question a law passed last year banning such so-called “legal highs” which are considered a loophole in the drug laws. All too predictably, the discussion was soon steered from this specific issue into “bringing fresh thinking to bear on the whole problem” (code for drug liberalisation).

What was startling was the choice of interviewees and the way in which they were introduced by the Today anchor, John Humphreys.

The first, Kirstie Douse, was described as “head of legal services for Release, that’s an organisation that campaigns on drugs and drugs law”.

Humphrys didn’t say whether Release campaigned for drug liberalisation or further restriction. But Release is Britain’s veteran drug liberalisation campaign group which for decades has been at the centre of attempts to liberalise the drug laws. So why so coy?

The second interviewee in such a discussion would normally be expected to provide balance through an alternative view. The person chosen for this role turned out to be Mike Trace. Humphrys introduced him with these words: “Mike Trace, the former deputy drugs czar”. That was it.

What was not revealed was that, in 2003, Trace was outed in a newspaper article as a pro-drug legalisation mole who had just been appointed to a key position in global anti-drug strategies which he was helping to undermine.

I know this because I was the journalist who outed him.

Trace was appointed deputy drug czar in Tony Blair’s government. For a time, he occupied a position of great influence in the drugs world. He was Director of Performance at the Government’s National Treatment Agency. He was chairman of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, (ENCDDA) the body which effectively draws up EU drug policy. And he was appointed Head of Demand Reduction at the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime. In all these posts, he was supposed to be upholding laws to reduce drug use.

In 2003, however, he was forced to resign from his new role as the UN’s Head of Demand Reduction after I exposed him helping assemble a secret network of lobbyists working to subvert the UN drug control laws — which underpin the use of criminal penalties for the drug trade — and pressurise governments into legalising drugs.

Trace was — in his own words — a “fifth columnist”: an underground agitator who was supposed to be upholding the laws to reduce drug use but who was a key player in a co-ordinated international effort to disband the world’s anti-drug laws by stealth – and who was being secretly paid to do so by notorious international legalisers.

The legalisers’ main obstacle was the UN conventions on drugs which require countries to prevent the possession, use, production and distribution of illegal narcotics. I discovered that Trace was at the heart of a network operating covertly to undermine those conventions.

The British headquarters of his operation was to be financed in part by the Open Society Institute, funded by the billionaire financier George Soros, which openly campaigns for “harm reduction” and legalisation on the grounds that the war on drugs causes more harm than drugs themselves. I wrote:

“But that’s not all. For Mr Trace’s attempts to obtain additional funds from European sources disclose a vast and intricate web of non-governmental organisations, all beavering away at drug legalisation.

“In particular, Mr Trace sought funding from the Brussels-based Network of European Foundations for Innovative Cooperation (NEF). This innocuous-sounding grant-giving body has actually spawned a proliferation of drug legalisation efforts through its offshoot ENCOD, the European NGO Council on Drugs and Development.

“ENCOD says that ‘drug use as such does not represent the huge threat for society as it is supposed to do’. The real threat, it says, is posed by the war on drugs to the ‘millions of peasants in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia’ — the people cultivating the drug crops! So it wants a legal framework to bring about the industrialisation of drug production, no less. And to achieve this, it proposes that public opinion should be softened up by ‘harm reduction’ policies which will pave the way to eventual legalisation.”

Subsequently, Trace claimed he had been selectively quoted, that he had used the term “fifth columnist” as a joke and that the idea of some organised conspiracy was “completely insane.”

But I had drawn my revelations from a cache of Trace’s email correspondence detailing this huge covert attempt to subvert the UN drug laws. Here are some extracts from that correspondence.

“In terms of my own involvement”, Trace wrote, “I think that it would be of most use providing advice and consultancy from behind the scenes, in the light of my continuing role as chair of the EMCDDA, my association with the UK government and some work I am being asked to put together by the UNDCPD in Vienna. This ‘fifth column’ role would allow me to oversee the setting up of the agency – while promoting its aims subtly in the formal governmental settings.’

In another message, he wrote: “The host organisation in London [to challenge the UN drugs conventions] will be Release, a long established drugs and civil liberties NGO.”

He wrote to Aryeh Neier, president of Open Society Institute New York: “The basic objectives remain the same – to assemble a combination of research, policy analysis, lobbying and media management that is sufficiently sophisticated to influence governments and international agencies as they review global drug policies in the coming years. The key decision points remain the reviews of the European Union Drug Strategy in 2003 (and again in 2004), and the political summit of the UN Drug Programme in Vienna in April 2003.”

His involvement was kept secret and advice was given about the line to take to conceal it. One meeting minuted thus: 

“Mike to remain on the group, and contribute to the initiative, but members need to ensure that, externally, the line is that he gave advice on policy and lobbying in the summer but is no longer involved.”

Trace himself wrote: “Now I have taken up my post at the UN, I absolutely cannot be associated with a lobbying initiative – the line I am using is that, through the summer, I gave advice to several groups on how the EU and UN policy structures worked, but am now no longer in contact.” He also warned a colleague: “A small but crucial point – can I from now on not be referred to by name in any written material.”

He also wrote: “Finally, I have been offered the post of Head of Demand Reduction at the UN, and intend to accept it. The Executive Director, Antonio Costa, is, at least for the moment, asking me for guidance on how to handle the April meeting, so I have the opportunity to influence events from the inside, while continuing to work on this initiative.”

I put a stop to that. Now the BBC is adding its own underhand efforts to this sinister, and sinisterly sanitised, cause.

Source:  http://www.melaniephillips.com/no-trace-objectivity/31st August 2017

St. Petersburg, FL – Thursday, August 31, 2017 – Drug Free America Foundation today introduced a first-of-its-kind Opioid Tool Kit in an effort to help address the opioid epidemic gripping the United States.

The Opioid Tool Kit was unveiled in conjunction with International Overdose Awareness Day, a global event held on August 31st each year that aims to raise the awareness of the problem of drug overdose-related deaths.

“With more than 142 people dying each day, drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50,” according to Calvina Fay, Executive Director of Drug Free America Foundation. “Moreover, deaths from drug overdose are an equal opportunity killer, with no regard to race, religion or economic class,” she said.

“While alcohol and marijuana still remain the most common drugs of abuse, the nonmedical use of prescription painkillers and other opioids has resulted in a crisis-level spike in drug overdose deaths,” said Fay.

The Opioid Tool Kit has been designed to educate people about the opioid epidemic and offer strategies that can be used to address this crisis. “The Tool Kit is also intended to encourage collaboration with different community sectors and stakeholders to make successful and lasting change,” Fay continued.

The Opioid Tool Kit is a comprehensive guide that defines what an opioid is, examines the scope of the problem, and addresses why opioids are a continuing health problem.  The Tool Kit also provides strategies for the prevention of prescription drug misuse and overdose deaths and includes a community advocacy and action plan, as well as additional resources.

Fay emphasized that the best way to prevent opioid and other drug addiction is not to abuse drugs in the first place.  “The chilling reality is that the long-term use and abuse of opioids and other addictive drugs rewire the brain, making recovery a difficult and often a life-long struggle,” she concluded. The Opioid Tool Kit can be found on Drug Free America Foundation’s website at https://dfaf.org/Opioid%20Toolkit.pdf.

Source:   https://dfaf.org/Opioid%20Toolkit.pdf..  August 2017

Background

On August 29, 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued guidelines to Federal prosecutors and law enforcement officials regarding where to focus their drug enforcement efforts in states that have passed laws legalizing the retail sales of marijuana. The so-called “Cole Memo” directs enforcement officials to focus resources, including prosecutions, “on persons and organizations whose conduct interferes with any one or more of [eight] priorities, regardless of state law.”

Per the memorandum, the eight DOJ priorities are:

● Preventing distribution of marijuana to minors

● Preventing marijuana revenue from funding criminal enterprises, gangs or cartels

● Preventing marijuana from moving out of states where it is legal

● Preventing use of state-legal marijuana sales as a cover for illegal activity

● Preventing violence and use of firearms in growing or distributing marijuana

● Preventing drugged driving or exacerbation of other adverse public health consequences associated with marijuana use

● Preventing growing marijuana on public lands

● Preventing marijuana possession or use on federal property

According to the Department of Justice, the Federal “hands-off” approach to marijuana enforcement enumerated in the Cole Memo is contingent on its expectation that “states and local governments that have enacted laws authorizing marijuana-related conduct will implement strong and effective regulatory and enforcement systems that will address the threat those state laws could pose to public safety, public health, and other law enforcement interests.

A system adequate to that task must not only contain robust controls and procedures on paper, it must also be effective in practice.”

Unfortunately, since Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize the recreational sale of marijuana in 2012, evidence has emerged that regulations intended to control the sale and use of marijuana have failed to meet the promises made by advocates for legalization.

For example, states with legal marijuana are seeing an increase in drugged driving crashes and youth marijuana use. States that have legalized marijuana are also failing to shore up state budget shortfalls with marijuana taxes, continuing to see a thriving illegal black market, and are experiencing an unabated sales of alcohol, despite campaign promises from advocates promising that marijuana would be used as a “safer” alternative instead.

Moreover, state regulatory frameworks established post-legalization have failed to meet each of the specific DOJ requirements on controlling recreational marijuana production, distribution, and use.

While long-term studies and research on the public health and safety impacts of marijuana legalization are ongoing, this report provides a partial census of readily available information that demonstrates how Colorado, Oregon, and Washington State –

the jurisdictions with the most mature regulatory markets and schemes – have not fulfilled the requirements of the Cole Memo.

DOJ Guideline 1: “Preventing distribution of marijuana to minors”

● According to the nation’s largest and most comprehensive survey of drug use trends in the nation, past-month use of marijuana among 12 to 17-year-olds in Colorado increased significantly – from 9.82% to 12.56% after marijuana retail sales began (Colorado legalized marijuana in 2012 and implemented legal marijuana stores in 2014).

The same study notes that teens and adults in Colorado now use marijuana at a higher rate than the rest of the country. No other representative sample of drug users in Colorado has contradicted this sample.

● A 2017 study from the University of Colorado found that marijuana-related emergency room visits and visits to its satellite urgent care centers by teens in Colorado more than quadrupled after the state legalized marijuana.

● In Colorado, a new report from the state’s public safety agency reveals that after the state legalized the drug, marijuana-related arrests for black and Hispanic youth rose by 58% and 29% respectively, while arrest rates for white kids dropped by eight percent. School Resource Officers in Colorado have reported a substantial increase in marijuana-related offenses in Colorado schools after the state commercialized the drug.

● According to data from the State of Washington, there have been over 240 violations of legal marijuana sales to minors and of minors frequenting restricted marijuana sales areas as of July 2017. ● Youth use – among 8th and 10th graders at least – is increasing in Washington State. According to a special analysis of teenage drug use published in the peer-reviewed, highly regarded Journal of American Medical Association Pediatrics, the perceived  harmfulness of marijuana in Washington declined 14.2% and 16.1% among eighth and 10th graders, respectively, while marijuana use increased 2.0% and 4.1% from 2010-2012 to 2013-2015.

● According to the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction during 2013-2014, 48 percent of statewide student expulsions were for marijuana in comparison to alcohol, tobacco, and other illicit drugs. During the 2014-2015 school year, statewide student expulsions for marijuana increased to 60 percent. Marijuana related suspensions for the 2013-2014 school year reported 42 percent and for the 2014-2015 school year, suspensions increased to 49 percent.

● In Washington State, youth (12-17) accounted for 64.9% of all state marijuana seizures in 2015 as compared to 29.9% in 2010, according to data from the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS).

● From 2012 to 2016, reported exposure calls for marijuana increased 105 percent in Washington. According to the 2016 Annual Cannabis Toxic Trends Report, of exposures related to children under the age of five, 73 percent occurred in those one to three years of age. The counties with the highest reported exposures for both 2015 and 2016 were: King, Spokane, Snohomish, and Pierce.

DOJ Guideline 2: “Preventing revenue of the sale of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, gangs, and cartels”

● In June 2017, Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman announced a takedown of a massive illegal marijuana trafficking ring in Colorado. The bust is the largest since legalization and indicted 62 individuals and 12 businesses in Colorado. The operation stretched into other states including Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma.

● In March 2017, a leaked report from the Oregon State Police uncovered evidence from state officials that the black market for marijuana continues to thrive in the state. The 39-page report noted that, “The illicit exportation of cannabis must be stemmed as it undermines the spirit of the law and the integrity of the legal market…it steals economic power from the market, the government, and the citizens of Oregon, and furnishes it to criminals, thereby tarnishing state compliance efforts.”

Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Instruction. (2016, Jan. 26). Behavior Report. http://www.k12.wa.us/SafetyCenter/Behavior/default.aspx

Washington State Poison Center – Toxic Trends Report: 2016 Annual Cannabis Report

● In 2016, Seattle Police spokesman Sean Whitcomb noted that “large-scale illegal grow operations… are still prevalent in Seattle, and we do come across those with a degree of frequency.” DOJ Guideline 3: “Preventing the diversion of marijuana from states where it is legal under state law in some form to other states”

● In 2014, two states – Nebraska and Oklahoma – sued their neighbor state of Colorado by citing evidence of increased marijuana flowing into those states. Law enforcement officials have reported a substantial increase in marijuana flow across state borders into neighboring states.

● In 2016, there were multiple raids conducted by state law enforcement in Colorado, leading authorities to seize more than 22,0000 pounds of marijuana intended for sales outside of Colorado.

● According to the Oregon State Police, the state has an “expansive geographic footprint” on marijuana exports across the U.S. Several counties in Oregon including Jackson, Multnomah, Josephine, Lane, Deschutes and Washington “lead the way” in supplying marijuana to states where it is not legal.

● According to the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force, “there were 360 seizures of marijuana in Colorado destined for other states. This is nearly a 600% increase in the number of individual stops in a decade, seizing about 3,671 pounds in 2014. Of the 360 seizures reported in 2014, 36 different states were identified as destinations, the most common being Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma and Florida.”

● Law enforcement officials report that since legalization in 2012, Washington State marijuana has been found to be destined for 38 different states throughout the United States. Between 2012 and 2017, 8,242.39 kilograms (18,171.35 pounds) have been seized in 733 individual seizure events across 38 states. From 2012 to 2016, 470 pounds of marijuana have been seized on Washington State highways and interstates. Since 2012, 320 pounds of Washington State-origin marijuana have been seized during attempted parcel diversions. DOJ Guideline 4: “Preventing state-authorized marijuana activity from being used as a cover or pretext for the trafficking of other illegal drugs or other illegal activity”

● According to Jorge Duque from the Colorado Department of Law, cartels operating in Colorado are now “trading drugs like heroin for marijuana,” and the trade has since opened the door to drug and human trafficking. Duque also explains that money 5 laundering is a growing problem as “cartels are often disguising their money through legally purchasing marijuana or buying houses and growing marijuana in it.”

● In June 2017, a former Colorado marijuana enforcement officer and a Denver-based marijuana entrepreneur were indicted for running a statewide marijuana trafficking ring that illegally produced and sold “millions of dollars worth of marijuana across state lines.” This trafficking organization obtained 14 marijuana licenses in order to present their activities as protected business endeavors, despite “never ma[king] a single legal sale of cannabis in their two years of operation.”

● In Oregon, State Police officials report that criminals are exploiting Oregon’s legal marijuana industry for financial crimes and fraud. In one example, according to the Oregon State Police report, “Tisha Silver of Cannacea Medical Marijuana Dispensary falsified licensing to solicit investors and worked with Green Rush Consulting to locate unwitting investors. Silver exploited the burgeoning cannabis industry in the state to entice investors to back an illegitimate company, securing a quarter of a million dollars in fraudulent gains. According to some analysts, cannabis investors fell prey to ‘pump and dump’ schemes and lost up to $23.3 billion in 2014 alone.”

● Officials in Oregon note that the U.S. Postal Service is being exploited to ship marijuana products and revenue. According to former Attorney General Eric Holder, “The Postal Service is being used to facilitate drug dealing,” a clear violation of federal law and a violation of the sanctity of the U.S. mailing system.

DOJ Guideline 5: “Preventing violence and the use of firearms in the cultivation and distribution of marijuana”

● While crime rates dropped or remained stable in many of the nation’s largest cities, Colorado’s crime rate increased. There has been an increase in rape, murder, robbery and auto thefts. While it is not possible to link legalization to a direct change in crime rates, officials in Colorado cited marijuana legalization as one of the reasons behind the rise.

● In Colorado, prosecutors are reporting an increase in marijuana-related homicides since the state legalized the drug.  This situation is detailed here: http://www.oregonlive.com/marijuana/index.ssf/2016/07/state_slaps_portland_dispensar.h tml.

Other instances of fraud have been discussed here: Sapient Investigations Newsletters (2015, Feb. 10) “High Times for Fraud,” available online at https://sapientinvestigations.com/spi-news/high-times-for-fraud/

● In Oregon, state police report that, “Cannabis is a lucrative target for robbery. As recently as December 2016, a state-licensed cannabis producer was targeted for a violent armed robbery. In the aforementioned case, a well-known cannabis grower in Jackson County was assaulted, bound, and his harvest was taken by armed assailants.”

● In Prince George’s County Maryland, Police Chief Henry Stawinski noted a significant rise in marijuana-related homicides since neighboring D.C. legalized the drug. Stawinski said 19 homicides in 2016 were related to marijuana.

DOJ Guideline 6:  “Preventing drugged driving and the exacerbation of other public health consequences associated with marijuana use”

● Drugged driving has increased in states with legal marijuana sales. According to a study published by the American Automobile Association, fatal drugged driving crashes doubled in Washington State after the state legalized marijuana. The Governors Highway Safety Association also notes a disturbing rise in drugged driving crashes even as alcohol-related crashes are declining.

● A Denver Post analysis found the number of marijuana-impaired drivers involved in fatal crashes in Colorado more than doubled since 2013, the year after the state voted to legalize recreational marijuana use. Colorado saw a 145 percent increase in the number of marijuana-impaired drivers involved in fatal crashes between 2013 and 2016. Marijuana is also figuring into more of Colorado’s fatal crashes overall: in 2013, marijuana-impaired drivers accounted for 10 percent of all fatal crashes, but by 2016 it reached 20 percent.

● According to a study published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, poison control calls for children more than tripled after marijuana legalization. Much of this is linked to a boom in the sale of marijuana “edibles.” THC concentrate is mixed into almost any type of food or drink, including gummy candy, soda, and lollipops. Today, these edibles comprise at least half of Colorado’s marijuana market.

● In Washington State, the number of marijuana-involved DUIs are increasing with 38 percent of total cases submitted in 2016 testing above the five nanogram per milliliter of blood legal limit for those over the age of twenty-one. In addition, 10 percent of drivers involved in a fatal accident from 2010 to 2014 were THC-positive.

● A study by the Highway Loss Data Institute reveals that Colorado, Oregon, and Washington have experienced three percent more collision claims overall than would ( NWHIDTA Drug Threat Assessment For Program Year 2018)  have been expected without legalization.

Colorado witnessed the largest jump in claims. The state experienced a rate 14 percent higher than neighboring states.

● In Washington State, from 2012 to 2016, calls to poison control centers increased by 79.48%. Exposures increased 19.65% from the time of marijuana commercialization in 2014 to 2016. Of the marijuana calls answered by the Poison Center in 2016, youth under the age of 20 accounted for almost 40% of all calls.

According to the 2016 Annual Cannabis Toxic Trends Report, 42% of the calls reported were for persons aged 13 to 29. Additionally, among exposures related to children under the age of five, 73% involved children one to three years of age. The counties with the highest reported number of exposures for 2015 remained in the top four for 2016: King, Spokane, Snohomish, and Pierce.

DOJ Guideline 7: “Preventing the growing of marijuana on public lands and the attendant public safety and environmental dangers posed by marijuana on public lands”

● In Washington State, 373,778 marijuana plants were found growing illegally on public and private lands between 2012 and 2016. Of the illegal marijuana plants eradicated in 2016, 60% were being cultivated on state land, and the 58,604 illegal marijuana plants eradicated in 2016 consumed an estimated 43.2 million gallons of water over a full growing season (120-day cycle).

More than 400 pounds of fertilizers, chemicals, and pesticides were removed from illegal marijuana growing operations in 2016, and Furadan, a neurotoxin that is extremely dangerous to humans, was found in an illegal marijuana growing operation the same year.

● In June 2017, Colorado officials found more than 7,000 illegal plants on federal land in the state’s San Isabel National Forest. This was the fifth illegal grow found in that area alone since the year marijuana legalization passed, demonstrating legalization has not curbed the problem of grows exploiting public lands.

● In Oregon, the legalization of marijuana in the state has failed to eliminate illegal growing operations and public lands continue to be exploited despite a legal market. According to a report from state officials, “To date in Oregon, cannabis legalization has not had a noticeable influence on Mexican National [Drug Trafficking Organizations] illicit cannabis cultivation operations on public lands… leaving a lasting scar on Oregon’s unique ecosystems.

Illicit cannabis grows employ excessive amounts of pesticides, rodenticides, and herbicides, thereby threatening local wildlife habitats. Additionally, many illicit grow sites clear-cut timber, furthering soil erosion and water contamination. Research on the environmental impact of illicit cannabis grows indicates that grows tend to be bunched near water sources, resulting in disproportionate impacts on ecologically important areas…

Oregon is robbed of roughly 122 Olympic swimming pools 8 worth of water annually, or roughly 442,200 gallons of water daily during the growth season.”

DOJ Guideline 8: “Preventing marijuana possession or use on federal property”

● Advocates for legal marijuana frequently flout federal laws by possessing and using marijuana on federal properties purportedly in acts of civil disobedience. In January 2017, one group gave away free marijuana in Washington, D.C. to smoke on the National Mall during the inauguration of President Trump. On April 24, 2017, four activists were arrested after purposely flouting federal law and publicly using marijuana on U.S. Capitol grounds.

Conclusion and Key Recommendations

Federal resources should target the big players in the marijuana industry. Individual marijuana users should not be targeted or arrested, but large-scale marijuana businesses, several of which now boast of having raised over $100 million in capital, and their financial backers, should be a priority. These large businesses are pocketing millions by flouting federal law, deceiving Americans about the risks of their products, and targeting the most vulnerable.

They should not have access to banks, where their financial prowess would be expanded significantly, nor should they be able to advertise or commercialize marijuana.

These businesses target many of the marijuana products they sell toward kids, such as pot candies, cookies, and ice cream. And despite state regulations, these products continue to have problems with contamination. Recently, one of the largest, most sophisticated manufacturers of these pot “edibles” was forced to recall a number of products because they contained non-food-grade ingredients.

Additionally, the black market continues unabated in legalized states. A leaked report from Oregon police showed that at least 70 percent of that state’s marijuana market is illegal, despite legalization. In June 2017, Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman said, “The black market for marijuana has not gone away since recreational marijuana was legalized in our state, and in fact continues to flourish.”

Further, state-legal businesses have acted as top cover for these illegal operations, as recent large-scale arrests in Colorado have shown. These large marijuana operations, which combine the tactics of Big Tobacco with black marketeering, should form the focus of federal law enforcement, not individual users.  Recalls are becoming more commonplace because of pesticides, moulds, and other issues.

See The Denver Post for news stories related to these recalls in legalized states: http://www.thecannabist.co/tag/marijuana-recall/

At the same time, the federal government along with non-government partners should implement a strong, evidence-based marijuana information campaign, similar to the truth ® campaign for tobacco, which alerts all Americans about the harms of marijuana and the deceitful practices of the marijuana industry.

Background:

Cannabis is increasingly available for the treatment of chronic pain, yet its efficacy remains uncertain.

Purpose: 

To review the benefits of plant-based cannabis preparations for treating chronic pain in adults and the harms of cannabis use in chronic pain and general adult populations.

Data Sources:

MEDLINE, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and several other sources from database inception to March 2017.

Study Selection: 

Intervention trials and observational studies, published in English, involving adults using plant-based cannabis preparations that reported pain, quality of life, or adverse effect outcomes.

Data Extraction: Two investigators independently abstracted study characteristics and assessed study quality, and the investigator group graded the overall strength of evidence using standard criteria.

Data Synthesis: From 27 chronic pain trials, there is low-strength evidence that cannabis alleviates neuropathic pain but insufficient evidence in other pain populations. According to 11 systematic reviews and 32 primary studies, harms in general population studies include increased risk for motor vehicle accidents, psychotic symptoms, and short-term cognitive impairment. Although adverse pulmonary effects were not seen in younger populations, evidence on most other long-term physical harms, in heavy or long-term cannabis users, or in older populations is insufficient.

Limitation: Few methodologically rigorous trials; the cannabis formulations studied may not reflect commercially available products; and limited applicability to older, chronically ill populations and patients who use cannabis heavily.

Conclusion: 

Limited evidence suggests that cannabis may alleviate neuropathic pain in some patients, but insufficient evidence exists for other types of chronic pain. Among general populations, limited evidence suggests that cannabis is associated with an increased risk for adverse mental health effects.

Source:  http://annals.org/aim/article/2648595/effects-cannabis-among-adults-chronic-pain-overview-general-harms-systematic#.WZXJbYbta0I.email

Arrests are up. We still have a black market. And people are in danger.

Last week, Senator Cory Booker introduced the Marijuana Justice Act in an effort to legalize marijuana across the nation and penalize local communities that want nothing to do with this dangerous drug. This is the furthest reaching marijuana legalization effort to date and marks another sad moment in our nation’s embrace of a drug that will have generational consequences.

Our country is facing a drug epidemic. Legalizing recreational marijuana will do nothing that Senator Booker expects. We heard many of these same promises in 2012 when Colorado legalized recreational marijuana.

In the years since, Colorado has seen an increase in marijuana related traffic deaths, poison control calls, and emergency room visits. The marijuana black market has increased in Colorado, not decreased. And, numerous Colorado marijuana regulators have been indicted for corruption.

In 2012, we were promised funds from marijuana taxes would benefit our communities, particularly schools. Dr. Harry Bull, the Superintendent of Cherry Creek Schools, one of the largest school districts in the state, said, “So far, the only thing that the legalization of marijuana has brought to our schools has been marijuana.”

In fiscal year 2016, marijuana tax revenue resulted in $156,701,018. The total tax revenue for Colorado was $13,327,123,798, making marijuana only 1.18% of the state’s total tax revenue. The cost of marijuana legalization in public awareness campaigns, law enforcement, healthcare treatment, addiction recovery, and preventative work is an unknown cost to date.

Senator Booker stated his reasons for legalizing marijuana is to reduce “marijuana arrests happening so much in our country, targeting certain communities – poor communities, minority communities.” It’s a noble cause to seek to reduce incarceration rates among these communities but legalizing marijuana has had the opposite effect.

According to the Colorado Department of Public Safety, arrests in Colorado of black and Latino youth for marijuana possession have increased 58% and 29% respectively after legalization. This means that Black and Latino youth are being arrested more for marijuana possession after it became legal.

Furthermore, a vast majority of Colorado’s marijuana businesses are concentrated in neighborhoods of color. Leaders from these communities, many of whom initially voted to legalize recreational marijuana, often speak out about the negative impacts of these businesses.

Senator Booker released his bill just a few days after the Washington Post reported on a study by the Review of Economic Studies that found “college students with access to recreational cannabis on average earn worse grades and fail classes at a higher rate.” Getting off marijuana especially helped lower performing students who were at risk of dropping out.

Since legalizing marijuana, Colorado’s youth marijuana use rate is the highest in the nation, 74% higher than the national average, according to the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Report. This is having terribly negative effects on the education of our youth.

If Senator Booker is interested in serving poor and minority communities, legalizing marijuana is one of the worst decisions. There is much work to be done to reduce incarceration and recidivism, but flooding communities with drugs will do nothing but exacerbate the problems.

The true impact of marijuana on our communities is just starting to be learned. The negative consequences of legalizing recreational marijuana will be felt for generations. I encourage Senator Booker to spend time with parents, educators, law enforcement, counsellors, community leaders, pastors, and legislators before rushing to legalize marijuana nationally. We’ve seen the effects in our neighborhoods in Colorado, and this is nothing we wish upon the nation.

Jeff Hunt is the Vice President of Public Policy at Colorado Christian University. Follow him on Twitter: @jeffhunt.

Source:  https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/08/07/marijuana 

The Advocates for Substance Abuse Prevention (ASAP) coalition serves the top two counties of the northern panhandle of West Virginia. The coalition got creative and utilized trending youth activities to draw youth to prevention work.

The coalition is located only a half hour from Pittsburgh, PA, and roughly three hours from Columbus, Ohio.  Based on a 2015 United States Census, the total population served is 53,165 combined for Brooke and Hancock counties.  One of the largest cities, Weirton, resides in both counties and has always had a proud tradition of steel making and industrial employment.  Unfortunately, this tradition has seen many declines in recent years and the increase in unemployment has hit the area hard, causing many families and young adults to move or have long commutes to find decent work.

Hancock County borders a major interstate where drug trafficking occurs easily between three states.  The local news reports multiple drug arrests in the Ohio Valley almost daily with incidents involving drug trafficking, abuse, and death, as is illustrated by the story of four heroin overdoses in Weirton in one weekend.  The ASAP coalition started as a small committee who met to discuss the drug problems in the area in 1996 and grew to where they are today.  The coalition’s main focus remains towards community youth with the mission of “working together to reduce substance abuse in the Brooke and Hancock communities, focusing on youth and families, by means of prevention efforts in community education, mobilization, and the change of values and beliefs.”

In 2014, ASAP found a group of youth to form a new committee called the Youth Council.  Thanks to these youth, they have gained new insight about how they should be hosting and promoting alternate activities to community youth, and actually get them to participate.  They have seen a vast increase in participation at events targeted towards youth. One such activity, that has become an instant hit, is the ASAP Youth Council Video Game Tournament.

Youth focused activities are hard for any group, but thanks to the ASAP Youth Council, the coalition has been having success getting youth involved.

“Their input is invaluable, and when you have youth telling you “don’t advertise you are doing drug prevention to kids or they won’t come,” you listen,” said Mary Ball, ASAP Coordinator. “Their ideas were simple, focus on what kids like to do, then use that as a way into their world.  So, we did.  The first event we held was a video game tournament that we used for multiple purposes.  First, it was a great fundraiser for the kids.  Second, it was the perfect draw to get youth to show up.  Third, it was fun!  We chose a game everyone, young and old could play (Smash Bros.) and changed how we promoted the event to word-of-mouth, flyers where kids hang out, and utilized social media promotions.  The response was amazing.  But nothing in the advertising said anything about substance abuse prevention.  We had over 50 attendees at our first event, which was a small miracle compared to the 10-12 we normally got, if we were lucky.“

To incorporate the message of prevention, displays were placed at the event and announcements dispersed, reminding attendees about the dangers of sharing prescriptions; where to dispose of prescriptions; and pointing out how much fun they were having at an alcohol-free event.

The event not only drew youth, but the parents, friends, grandparents of the youth who participated, did not leave.  They stayed for the entire thing to cheer those competing in the tournament on, expanding the audience from the target of just youth, to all ages.  The success of this program led the coalition to try other things, such as taking advantage of the Pokémon Go game to bring people to ASAP by hosting a “Lure Party.”  The coalition got creative and added a cosplay contest to the video game tournament and increased participation by almost 10 percent. The coalition even designed pop culture prevention buttons that kids snag off the prevention tables because they want to wear that message.

“Listen to your youth members.  They are smart, they know what other kids want to see and will participate in,” advises Ball. “Do not be closed off to stepping out of your adult-zone and entering their world.  If we want kids to listen to our messages, we need to go to them and not expect them to come to us.”

Source: http://www.cadca.org/resources/coalitions-action-asap-coalition-uses-smash-creativity-engage-youth   8th Aug.2017

Kevin Sabet, the president and CEO of Virginia-based Smart Approaches to Marijuana, has become arguably the most influential critic of marijuana legalization in the United States. But in an extended interview on view below, he fights against the perception that he’s a one-dimensional prohibitionist along the lines of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Sabet stresses that he and his organization, shorthanded as SAM, take what he sees as a sensible approach to cannabis by arguing in favor of treatment rather than jail time for users in trouble and advocating for greater study of the substance to determine the best ways to utilize it medically.

We first spoke to Sabet in January 2013, just prior to SAM’s launch in Denver, when he appeared alongside co-founder Patrick Kennedy, a former congressman from Rhode Island and a member of the Kennedy political dynasty. Sabet’s background is similarly stocked with connections to heavyweights. The author of Reefer Sanity: Seven Great Myths About Marijuana, he served stints in the Clinton and Bush administrations and spent two years as senior adviser to President Barack Obama’s drug-control director before taking on the SAM cause.

In the more than four years since then, he’s made countless media appearances while lobbying behind the scenes to try and stop the momentum generated by the pot legalization bandwagon.

Sabet, who says SAM’s funding mainly comes from small donors and grants as opposed to hard-core drug-war groups or Big Pharma, doesn’t think it’s too late to accomplish this goal, in part because only a relatively small percentage of the populace actually uses marijuana. Moreover, he feels that plenty of those who abstain will more actively fight against pot’s normalization if public use (and its attendant smoke and scent) becomes more prevalent in cities such as Denver, which he sees as having been demonstrably harmed by legalization. He blames cannabis for turning the 16th Street Mall into a homeless haven that visitors actively avoid and suspects that in his heart of hearts, Governor John Hicklenlooper knows legalization was a terrible mistake but can’t admit it publicly because the right to toke is enshrined in the state constitution.

Likewise, Sabet considers it inarguable that the marijuana industry is targeting young people with colorfully packaged pot edibles and argues that simply keeping cannabis away from kids isn’t enough. He cites studies showing that the brains of 25-30 year olds are still developing — and can still be harmed by weed.

Continue to learn more about Sabet’s cause and the arguments he makes to support it.

Westword: SAM recently put out a release about the amount of tax revenue Colorado has collected as a result of the marijuana industry [in reference to a VS Strategies report estimating that the state has generated more than $500 million in cannabis revenue since legalization]. In it, you talk about how drug use and its consequences cost taxpayers $193 billion per year, with Colorado’s annual share being approximately $3.3 billion. But that’s for all drugs, correct?

Kevin Sabet: Oh, yeah, absolutely. But you need to look at the fact that marijuana is used far more than any of the other drugs, and look at the costs associated with driving, crashing, mental illness — and long-term costs we’re not able to account for. Marijuana isn’t correlated with mental illness overnight. If often takes time. And so the cost of that can’t be calculated in any way. There was a study done a few weeks ago by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction finding that just in

Canada alone, a much smaller country than the U.S. in population, marijuana-related car crashes cost a billion dollars. That’s just the car crashes, and those were directly related to marijuana. And the report came from a government think tank, not any kind of anti-drug group.

I honestly think it isn’t surprising coming from this group [VS Strategies]. It’s an industry group that wants to basically make money from marijuana — much more money than the State of Colorado will make after you account for costs. When you look at the actual number and context of just education alone, the marijuana revenue is barely newsworthy. The Department of Education in Colorado says they need $18 billion in capital construction funds alone. The reality is, the Colorado budget deficit is actually rising, not falling. This isn’t plugging a hole in the deficit. It’s actually costing money. There’s one area where I’d agree with [former Colorado Director of Marijuana Coordination] Andrew Freedman: You don’t do this for the money. But it’s a great talking point, and it polls well, just like the talking point of it being safer than alcohol polls well. This polls well, too, so you’re going to have an industry group that thrives off commercialization touting the numbers. That’s not surprising at all.

SAM is usually described as an anti-marijuana organization. Is that an accurate description from your viewpoint? Or is it pejorative in some way?

I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s pejorative, but I think it’s overly simplistic. It’s true that we don’t want to see the legalization of another illegal substance. We think that our experience with pharmaceuticals, which are, of course, legal, as well as alcohol and tobacco, has been an utter disaster from a public cost and public-policy point of view. We’ve never regulated those drugs in a responsible way. Lobbyists and special interests own the rule-making when it comes to these drugs. And what we’re saying is, do we really want to repeat history once again? It just happens to be marijuana. It really could have been any substance. And we will be talking about the legalization of other drugs if marijuana goes through. Because it doesn’t stop with marijuana in terms of the policy goals of many of these organizations. So I think it is overly simplistic. And we’re very concerned about commercialization.

Also, we don’t want to see a return to an enforcement-heavy policy that throws everybody behind bars or saddles young people, especially, with criminal records that prevent them from getting a job or being able to access public benefits or being able to go to school. We want to see people given another chance. But we also want to see this treated as a health issue, and you don’t treat marijuana as a health issue by ignoring it or facilitating its use. You do brief interventions if they’re needed, treatment if it’s needed. I don’t think everyone who uses marijuana needs treatment, just like everyone who drinks or uses other drugs doesn’t need treatment. But some people are using it in a way that is problematic, and they need an early intervention, perhaps, to prevent them from moving on to a substance-use disorder — or they need more intense treatment. It really just depends.

We also want to see research into components of marijuana that may have therapeutic value. We don’t want to see people needlessly suffering. But if Perdue Pharma or Pfizer said tomorrow that they have a new blockbuster drug but they don’t want it to go through the FDA and instead want to put it up to a vote, we’d be up in arms. And rightfully so. Everybody would be up in arms. And we don’t think marijuana should get a free pass because there are stories of it helping people. I don’t doubt that it helps some people — things like cannabidiol oil, etc., or even smoking marijuana to relieve pain. I don’t doubt that it helps some people. But we don’t want to turn back the clock to pre-FDA days, where we had snake-oil salesmen and wild claims about drugs. We want to put it through the same system, and if that system is problematic and difficult, then let’s look at what those barriers are and resolve them.

So I think we are a sensible organization that takes our cues from science. That’s why, on our board, you don’t see people benefiting from the policy position that we take. If anything, people like the doctors from Boston Children’s Hospital who are on our advisory board, or Harvard professors, they’re going to have more business if marijuana is legal, because they’re going to have people with more problems. We’re working counter to their self-benefit, if you think about it. That’s why we’re led by the science. And the reason we started this…. I left the White House and saw there was a huge disconnect between the public’s understanding of marijuana and what was being told to them by various sources, and we’re trying to bridge that gap. Many of the things you just touched upon are on the four items in the “What We Do” section of your website. But some things, such as “To promote research on marijuana in order to obtain FDA-approved, pharmacy-based cannabis medications,” we don’t hear your organization talking about very often. Is that the fault of the media, because they’re only focusing on the legalization-is-bad angle? Are you giving equal weight to some of these other goals?

I think that’s just people looking through the glasses they want to look through. I think the legalization groups are threatened by a sensible organization led by Harvard doctors that doesn’t want to put people in prison, so they want to paint us as the most irrational dinosaurs from the Stone Age on these issues. The reality is, we spend a lot of our time on all of these issues. In fact, we have released the most comprehensive document that any policy organization has released, I think, on the hurdles of medical marijuana research. That’s right on our website — the six-point plan. And we’ve also done a CBD guide — everything you need to know about CBD. After the guide to everything you need to know about CBD, we did a report on research barriers, and we got a lot of people from both extremes that didn’t like it. John Walters, my former boss, wrote a scathing editorial, saying we were off the mark in calling for more research. When we get criticized from multiple angles, I think people can decide for themselves whether that’s credible or not….

It’s just not sexy, though. I can’t remember the last time that someone from USA Today or Huffington Post said, “Oh, we want to cover the fact that you released a wonky policy document aimed at FDA senior scientists with ten letters after their name.” They’re not banging on the door to get that story. Instead, they’re banging on the door to say, “The governor of Nevada has just declared a state of emergency on pot. What do you think?”

I’m not going to say it’s the fault of the media. I think that’s overused these days. But we’re doing our best, and whether it’s noticed by USA Today or the Huffington Post or the Washington Post or not, that doesn’t matter as much. We’re getting it out there, and I know that hundreds of lawmakers have read it. In fact, three out of our six recommendations have been adopted since we released that report. I don’t think we’re the only reason they’ve been adopted, but I think us pushing and prodding and putting it down on paper gave some political cover to some people who may not have supported it in the past, and I’m very proud of that. I know it doesn’t satisfy Medical Marijuana Inc. or these hundreds of CBD manufacturers who are selling God knows what because they don’t get it looked at by the FDA; they’re not going to be happy about that. But I think the science speaks for itself, and scientists and others have noticed. That’s why they’ve asked to join my advisory board — top researchers who want to be part of this team not because we’re zealots, but because we look at the science and are able to get it out there….

Another of the talking points on your website says, “Alcohol is legal. Why shouldn’t marijuana be legal?” How do you answer that question?

To me, saying, “Alcohol is bad and it’s legal, so why shouldn’t marijuana be legal?” is like saying, “My headlights are broken, so why don’t we break the taillights, too?” It doesn’t make much sense. First of all, alcohol and marijuana are apples and oranges in many ways. They’re different just because of their biology and their pharmacology, but they’re also different in their cultural acceptance and prevalence in Western society. Alcohol has been a fixed part in Western civilization since before the Old Testament. The reason alcohol prohibition didn’t work — and that’s debatable….

What’s the debate?

If you look at scholars who studied Prohibition much more than I have, there is a vigorous debate. Alcohol use fell during Prohibition, harm fell as well. Cirrhosis of the liver, which is a top-ten killer of white men, wasn’t a top-ten killer. Organized crime had been in place, and obviously it was strengthened from Prohibition, although it isn’t like it caused it, and it certainly didn’t go away when Prohibition ended…. But it’s very difficult to prohibit something that 60 to 70 percent of the population are doing on a regular basis. Marijuana is still used by fewer than 10 percent of the population monthly, and so the idea that it’s the same in terms of acceptance is wrong. Right now, those 10 percent of users have convinced 55 percent of Americans that this is a good idea.  HOW

That also points to the fact that I think support for marijuana is very soft. I think the industry has overplayed its hand about things like public nuisance, public use, secondhand smoke, car crashes. Once these things become greater in prevalence, which they inevitably will if more states legalize and commercialize, then I think you’re going to have the backlash I think will come, and it will come because of the increased problems….

Alcohol is such an accepted part of society. We accept the negative consequences. Alcohol is not legal because it’s safe. Alcohol isn’t legal because it’s so good for you. Alcohol is legal because it’s been a fixed part of Western civilization for millennia. Marijuana has not been. Of course it was used thousands of years ago. Was it used by certain cultures? Absolutely. But there’s no comparison, complete apples and oranges, when it comes to alcohol’s culture acceptability. So that’s why alcohol is legal — not because we love the effects it has on society. No parent, no teacher, no police officer, says, “I’d be better if I was drinking all the time.” No police officer says, “Man, I wish more people drank.” No parent says, “I wish my kid drank more.” That’s not why it’s legal, because it’s so great.

And alcohol has done very little for our tax base. One of the reasons Prohibition was repealed was because the industrialists were convinced that it would help eliminate or mitigate the corporate tax or even the personal income tax. That’s laughable today. It doesn’t do that at all. Instead it costs us way more money than any revenue we bring in. I think marijuana would be the same story. It affects our bodies differently.

Alcohol affects the liver, marijuana affects the lungs. Alcohol is in and out of your system quite rapidly, but marijuana lingers in the system longer, and according to studies, the effects also linger for longer. They affect different parts of the brain. So they’re different in many ways, but in some respects, they’re the same. They’re both intoxicants, and unlike tobacco, they specifically cause changes in behavior. And that’s a difference with tobacco, another legal drug. Tobacco isn’t correlated with paranoia or obsessiveness or mental illness and car crashes, and obviously, marijuana is.

In some ways, legal drugs offer an interesting example. I think they offer an example of the sort of social and financial consequences that would come with legalizing other drugs.

Source:  http://www.westword.com  14th August 2017

Key Points

Question  Are US state medical marijuana laws one of the underlying factors for increases in risk for adult cannabis use and cannabis use disorders seen since the early 1990s?

Findings  In this analysis using US national survey data collected in 1991-1992, 2001-2002, and 2012-2013 from 118 497 participants, the risk for cannabis use and cannabis use disorders increased at a significantly greater rate in states that passed medical marijuana laws than in states that did not.

Meaning  Possible adverse consequences of illicit cannabis use due to more permissive state cannabis laws should receive consideration by voters, legislators, and policy and health care professionals, with appropriate health care planning as such laws change.

Abstract

Importance  Over the last 25 years, illicit cannabis use and cannabis use disorders have increased among US adults, and 28 states have passed medical marijuana laws (MML). Little is known about MML and adult illicit cannabis use or cannabis use disorders considered over time.

Objective  To present national data on state MML and degree of change in the prevalence of cannabis use and disorders.

Design, Participants, and Setting  Differences in the degree of change between those living in MML states and other states were examined using 3 cross-sectional US adult surveys: the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiologic Survey (NLAES; 1991-1992), the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC; 2001-2002), and the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions–III (NESARC-III; 2012-2013). Early-MML states passed MML between NLAES and NESARC (“earlier period”). Late-MML states passed MML between NESARC and NESARC-III (“later period”).

Main Outcomes and Measures  Past-year illicit cannabis use and DSM-IV cannabis use disorder.

Results  Overall, from 1991-1992 to 2012-2013, illicit cannabis use increased significantly more in states that passed MML than in other states (1.4–percentage point more; SE, 0.5; P = .004), as did cannabis use disorders (0.7–percentage point more; SE, 0.3; P = .03).

In the earlier period, illicit cannabis use and disorders decreased similarly in non-MML states and in California (where prevalence was much higher to start with). In contrast, in remaining early-MML states, the prevalence of use and disorders increased.

Remaining early-MML and non-MML states differed significantly for use (by 2.5 percentage points; SE, 0.9; P = .004) and disorder (1.1 percentage points; SE, 0.5; P = .02). In the later period, illicit use increased by the following percentage points: never-MML states, 3.5 (SE, 0.5); California, 5.3 (SE, 1.0); Colorado, 7.0 (SE, 1.6); other early-MML states, 2.6 (SE, 0.9); and late-MML states, 5.1 (SE, 0.8). Compared with never-MML states, increases in use were significantly greater in late-MML states (1.6–percentage point more; SE, 0.6; P = .01), California (1.8–percentage point more; SE, 0.9; P = .04), and Colorado (3.5–percentage point more; SE, 1.5; P = .03).

Increases in cannabis use disorder, which was less prevalent, were smaller but followed similar patterns descriptively, with change greater than never-MML states in California (1.0–percentage point more; SE, 0.5; P = .06) and Colorado (1.6–percentage point more; SE, 0.8; P = .04).

Conclusions and Relevance

Medical marijuana laws appear to have contributed to increased prevalence of illicit cannabis use and cannabis use disorders. State-specific policy changes may also have played a role. While medical marijuana may help some, cannabis-related health consequences associated with changes in state marijuana laws should receive consideration by health care professionals and the public.

Source:  JAMA Psychiatry. 2017;74(6):579-588. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2017.0724

LONDON (Reuters) – People who smoke marijuana have a three times greater risk of dying from hypertension, or high blood pressure, than those who have never used the drug, scientists said on Wednesday. The risk grows with every year of use, they said.

The findings, from a study of some 1,200 people, could have implications in the United States among other countries. Several states have legalized marijuana and others are moving toward it. It is decriminalized in a number of other countries.

“Support for liberal marijuana use is partly due to claims that it is beneficial and possibly not harmful to health,” said Barbara Yankey, who co-led the research at the school of public health at Georgia State University in the United States.

“It is important to establish whether any health benefits outweigh the potential health, social and economic risks. If marijuana use is implicated in cardiovascular diseases and deaths, then it rests on the health community and policy makers to protect the public.”

Marijuana is also sometimes used for medicinal purposes, such as for glaucoma.

The study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, was a retrospective follow-up study of 1,213 people aged 20 or above who had been involved in a large and ongoing National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. In 2005–2006, they were asked if they had ever used marijuana.

For Yankey’s study, information on marijuana use was merged with mortality data in 2011 from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, and adjusted for confounding factors such as tobacco smoking and variables including sex, age and ethnicity.

The average duration of use among users of marijuana, or cannabis, was 11.5 years.

The results showed marijuana users had a 3.42-times higher risk of death from hypertension than non-users, and a 1.04 greater risk for each year of use.

There was no link between marijuana use and dying from heart or cerebrovascular diseases such as strokes.

Yankey said were limitations in the way marijuana use was assessed — including that researchers could not be sure whether people had used the drug continuously since they first tried it.

But she said the results chimed with plausible risks, since marijuana is known to affect the cardiovascular system.

“Marijuana stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, leading to increases in heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen demand,” she said.

Experts not directly involved in the study said its findings would need to be replicated, but already raised concerns.

“Despite the widely held view that cannabis is benign, this research adds to previous work suggesting otherwise,” said Ian Hamilton, a lecturer in mental health at Britain’s York University. Source:  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-marijuana-hypertension-idUSKBN1AP0JS   9th Aug.201

Just a few miles from where President Trump will address his blue-collar base here Tuesday night, exactly the kind of middle-class factory jobs he has vowed to bring back from overseas are going begging.

It’s not that local workers lack the skills for these positions, many of which do not even require a high school diploma but pay $15 to $25 an hour and offer full benefits. Rather, the problem is that too many applicants — nearly half, in some cases — fail a drug test.

The fallout is not limited to the workers or their immediate families. Each quarter, Columbiana Boiler, a local company, forgoes roughly $200,000 worth of orders for its galvanized containers and kettles because of the manpower shortage, it says, with foreign rivals picking up the slack.

“Our main competitor in Germany can get things done more quickly because they have a better labor pool,” said Michael J. Sherwin, chief executive of the 123-year-old manufacturer. “We are always looking for people and have standard ads at all times, but at least 25 percent fail the drug tests.”

Source:   https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/business/economy/drug-test-labor-hiring.html

A string of recent deaths in New Zealand is being attributed to the rise of so-called synthetic cannabis is made to look like normal cannabis

A man in his 20s died on Tuesday night, bringing the number of fatalities this month linked to the illegal substance to eight.  The drug consists of dried plants sprayed with synthetic drugs – it triggers effects similar to cannabis but is more powerful and dangerous.  Synthetic cannabis has already caused huge concerns in the US and Europe.

In each of the eight deaths this month, the victim was thought to have used the drug before dying or was found with the drug on them.  The actual substance in the drug responsible for the deaths is not yet known.

All eight deaths have occurred in Auckland and authorities say there is a much higher number of non-fatal cases where people had to be taken to hospital.

Earlier this month, the Auckland City District Police issued a warning on Facebook over the drug use and the apparent link to the rising number of victims.

“This is not an issue unique to Auckland,” the statement warned. “Police are also concerned at the impact of synthetic cannabis in other communities in New Zealand.”

Auckland police also took the rare step of releasing CCTV footage of a man violently ill and barely able to stand after smoking synthetic cannabis.

“We have grave concerns as users don’t know what poisonous chemicals they are potentially putting into their bodies when they’re smoking this drug,” Det Insp Lendrum said.

What is synthetic cannabis?

§ Actual cannabis contains an active ingredient which interacts with certain receptors in the brain.

§ Synthetic cannabis is dried plant matter sprayed with chemicals that interact with the same receptors.

§ Produced and sold illegally, the chemicals used vary a lot. That means the effect of the drug is a lot less predictable, so a lot more dangerous.

§ Effects can be extreme, including increased heart rates, seizures, psychosis, kidney failure and strokes.

Cannabis-simulating substances – or synthetic cannabinoids – were developed more than 20 years ago in the US for testing on animals as part of a brain research programme.  But in the last decade or so they’ve become widely available to the public.

In the UK, synthetic cannabis was also temporarily legal, being sold under a variety of names most prominently Spice and Black Mamba.  The drugs were banned in 2016 but continue to cause widespread problems in the country.

Synthetic cannabis has also been banned in the US but continues to be widely available as an illegal drug.

Source:   http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-40724390      26 July 2017

MS Society says there is sufficient evidence of drug’s effectiveness to relax ban for patients with no other options

Ten thousand people with multiple sclerosis in the UK should be allowed to use cannabis legally in order to relieve their “relentless and exhausting” symptoms, experts in the disease have told ministers.

The MS Society claims the one in 10 sufferers of the condition whose pain and spasticity cannot be treated by medication available on the NHS should be able to take the drug without fear of prosecution.

The evidence on cannabis’s effectiveness, while not conclusive, is now strong enough that the government should relax the ban on the drug for MS patients who have no other treatment options, the society says in a report.

Doctors who treat MS patients have backed the society’s call, as have the Liberal Democrats and the Green party. Legalisation would ease “the extremely difficult situation in which many people with MS find themselves”, the charity said.

The society is calling for the first time for the 10,000 patients – one in 10 of the 100,000 people in Britain with MS – to be able to access cannabis without fear of arrest. It has changed its position after reviewing the evidence, consulting its medical advisers and seeking the views of 3,994 people who have the condition.

“We think cannabis should be legalised for medicinal use for people with MS to relieve their pain and muscle spasms when other treatments haven’t worked,” said Genevieve Edwards, the MS Society’s director of external affairs.

“The level of clinical evidence to support cannabis’s use for medicinal purposes is not conclusive. But there is sufficient evidence for our medical advisers to say that on the balance of probability, cannabis could benefit many people with MS experiencing pain and muscle spasms.” The charity is also urging NHS bosses to make Sativex, a cannabis-based drug used by some people with MS, available on prescription across the UK so that patients who can afford it no longer have to acquire it privately, at a cost of about £2,000 a year. Wales is the only home nation to provide the mouth spray through the NHS.

Patients’ inability to access Sativex on the NHS in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland “has resulted in many people with MS turning to illegal forms of cannabis as an alternative. It’s simply not right that some people are being driven to break the law to relieve their pain and spasticity. It’s also really risky when you’re not sure about the quality or dosage of what you’re buying,” Edwards said.

Norman Lamb, the Lib Dem health spokesman, said: “This is the strongest proof yet that the existing law on cannabis is a huge injustice that makes criminals of people whose only crime is to be in acute pain. This draconian law is potentially opening anything up to 10,000 MS sufferers to prosecution, and underlines why the Liberal Democrats have braved a tabloid backlash to campaign for the legalisation of cannabis. It is about time the government listened to the science.”

One in five (22%) MS patients who took part in a survey by the society said they had used cannabis to help manage their symptoms, but only 7% were still doing so. A quarter (26%) of those who had stopped taking it said they had done so out of fear of

prosecution. Another 26% of respondents had considered trying cannabis but had not done so for the same reason and also because they were concerned about the drug’s safety.

Doctors are divided over cannabis’s potential role in treating MS. Some are supportive while others are anxious about endorsing the use of a drug that can cause psychiatric problems. The Royal College of GPs said it was currently drawing up policy on the issue and could not comment. The Royal College of Physicians, which represents hospital doctors, said it had no policy on the issue.

Dr Willy Notcutt, a pain management specialist at the James Paget hospital in Norfolk, who has been treating MS patients for more than 20 years, said: “Every week I come across patients wishing to use cannabis to control their symptoms but who are unable to get proven drugs like Sativex from the NHS. Many patients seek illegal cannabis to get help. They can’t be sure of its origin but are being forced to commit a criminal act in order to obtain relief.”

Dr Waqar Rashid, a consultant neurologist at Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS trust, said: “[Cannabis is] not a cure-all, and there are other treatments that should be tried first. But it makes sense for criminality not be a barrier to a treatment which could reduce the debilitating impact of symptoms and transform someone’s quality of life.”

Caroline Lucas, the Green party co-leader and its sole MP, said: “The MS Society’s new position is a big step forward, and recognises the fact that thousands of people with MS could benefit from the the use of medicinal cannabis. By rigidly sticking to criminalising cannabis the government drives MS sufferers to illegally acquire the drugs, thus putting themselves as risk of prosecution simply for searching for pain relief.” The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), which advises the government, has told the NHS not to prescribe Sativex for spasticity because it is not cost-effective. The Home Office said: “This government has no plans to legalise cannabis. Cannabis is controlled as a Class B drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and, in its raw form, currently has no recognised medicinal benefits in the UK.”

Case study: Steven Colborn, 55, from Seaham, County Durham

Imagine running a marathon while sharp pain darts up and down your legs. This is what multiple sclerosis feel like for me. When muscle spasticity kicks in my legs just twist and turn and bend back on themselves and it’s excruciatingly painful.

But three years ago I was offered a treatment that could help. During a regular appointment, a specialist nurse said they had managed to get a month’s supply of Sativex, a drug derived from cannabis, from the manufacturer.

The results were incredible. My muscle tension eased and I started to feel my legs moving better. I was able to get a good night’s sleep. I could exercise without getting as tired as quickly. For the first time in a long time I felt that I was managing my condition.

My month’s supply ran out and the drug wasn’t available free on the NHS. I was offered a muscle relaxer called Baclofen which hadn’t worked for me in the past.

I have been forced to pay for this drug myself. I can’t work any more so I rely on disability benefits. I have to save up a lot of money to be able to afford it – it costs £412 a month. Over the past four years I’ve only managed to buy about seven months’ worth.

I take Sativex but other people get similar relief from cannabis in its pure form. I don’t like taking this myself because of the narcotic effect, which you don’t get with Sativex. But for those it helps, it should be made legal.

I have had this illness for 36 years and every day I wake up and think ‘maybe there has been a breakthrough’. I know there will never be a cure, but I am just looking for a way to make things easier. Now I have been presented with something that offers me hope and the NHS say they cannot afford it. My question is: can you afford people like me getting worse?

Source:  https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jul/27/legalise-cannabis-as-treatment-of-last-resort-for-multiple-sclerosis-says-charity

——————————————————————————–

Comments by  NDPA:

UK  is 1st world nation with 1st world medicine approval system, even then we get things wrong e.g Thalidomide.

Cannabis based medicine is no problem if it goes through that system.

Sadly, ill people have been and are being exploited by the drug legalisation lobby, in furtherance of their nirvana of recreational cannabis for all.

Cannabis is a very harmful psychoactive drug, it induces dependency in around 1 in 9 or 10 users. It has numerous bad effects.

Smoking is obviously not a sensible delivery system for medication, yet a lot of those complaining want to smoke cannabis.

Cannabis based drugs like Sativex are in the pharmacopeia thanks to the wise licensing of the research on them by successive UK governments.

The mechanisms by which those cannabis based drugs are made available to  specific MS sufferers are a matter for the relevant authorities who deal with all pharmaceutical drugs. They must show efficacy and they must satisfy NICE.

There are no grounds at all for making cannabis any sort of special case, in fact the recreational user base and the legalisation lobby distort the arguments and would be better remaining silent.

Legalizing marijuana not only harms public health and safety, it places a significant strain on local economies and weakens the ability of the American workforce to compete in an increasingly global marketplace.

Today, a growing class of well-heeled lobbyists intent on commercializing marijuana are doing everything they can to sell legal weed as a panacea for every contemporary challenge we face in America. Over the past several years we’ve been barraged by claims that legal pot can cure the opioid crisis, cure cancer, eliminate international drug cartels, and even solve climate change.

One seemingly compelling case made by special interest groups is that legal marijuana can boost our economy too: after all, marijuana businesses create jobs and bring in millions of dollars in much-needed tax revenue.

Yet, a closer look at the facts reveals a starkly different reality. The truth is, a commercial market for marijuana not only harms public health and safety, it also places a significant strain on local economies and weakens the ability of the American workforce to compete in an increasingly global marketplace.

We already know that drug use costs our economy hundreds of millions of dollars a year in public health and safety costs. The last comprehensive study to look at costs of drugs in society found that drug use cost taxpayers more than $193 billion – due to lost work productivity, health care costs, and higher crime. A new study out of Canada found that marijuana-impaired driving alone costs more than $1 billion. Laws commercializing marijuana only make this problem worse and hamper local communities’ ability to deal with the health and safety fallout of increased drug use.

“So far in Colorado, marijuana taxes have failed to shore up state budget shortfalls. The budget deficit there doubled in the last few years, despite claims that pot taxes could turn deficit into surplus.”

This isn’t just a theory – it’s already happening. As marijuana use has increased in states that have legalized it, so has use by employees, both on and off the job. Large businesses in Colorado now state that after legalization they have had to hire out-of-state residents in order to find employees that can pass a pre-employment drug screen, particularly for safety-sensitive jobs like bus drivers, train operators, and pilots.

And now drug using employees – supported by special interest groups – are organizing to make drug use a “right” despite the negative impacts we know it will have on employers and the companies that hire them.

And what about that promised tax revenue? So far in Colorado, marijuana taxes have failed to shore up state budget shortfalls. The budget deficit there doubled in the last few years, despite claims that pot taxes could turn deficit into surplus.

Collected pot taxes only comprise a tiny fraction of the Colorado state budget— less than one percent. After costs of enforcement and regulation are subtracted, the remaining revenue used for public good is very limited.

Even viewed solely in the context of Colorado’s educational needs, pot revenue is not newsworthy. The Colorado Department of Education indicates their schools require about $18 billion in capital construction funds alone. Marijuana taxes do not even make a dent in this gap.

In Washington State, half of the $42 million of marijuana tax money legalization advocates promised would reach prevention programs and schools by 2016 never materialized. We’ve seen this movie before: witness our experience with gambling, the lottery, and other vices.

We should also care about the human fallout of increased marijuana acceptance. Recent evidence demonstrates that today’s marijuana isn’t the weed of the 1960s. It is addictive and harmful to the human brain, especially when used by adolescents.

Moreover, in states that have already legalized the drug, there has been an increase in drugged driving crashes and youth marijuana use. States that have legalized marijuana also continue to see a thriving black market, and are experiencing a continued rise in alcohol sales despite arguing users will switch to a “safer” drug.

Over the past several months, the Trump Administration has signaled it is considering a crackdown on marijuana in states where it is legal. We don’t yet know what this policy change may look like, but one thing we know for sure is that incarcerating low-level, nonviolent offenders in federal prisons is not the answer. Individual users need incentives to encourage them to make healthy decisions, not handcuffs.

But we do need to enforce federal law. Indeed, by reasserting federal control over the exploding marijuana industry, we know we can make a positive difference in preventing the commercialization of a drug that will put profits over public health and fight every regulation proposed to control its sale and use. Marijuana addiction is real, and simply ignoring this health condition will only cost us down the road. We should assess marijuana users for drug use disorders as well as mental health problems, and assist those into recovery. This can’t happen in a climate that promotes use.

Source:  http://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/27/trump-should-crackdown-on-legal-weed-commentary.html

Introduction  

On 31 July 2017 a court case commences in the Pretoria High Court about the constitutional legality of South Africa’s dagga legislation. The media is calling it the “Trial of the Plant”.

What is the “Trial of the Plant” about?

It is about the dagga plant and its prohibition in our society. Scientists have long since proven that the dagga plant is highly complex and dangerous and must be prohibited, but some believe it is not dangerous and even medicinal.

What does the law in SA say about dagga?

Except for medical and research exemptions, the possession, use, cultivation, transportation and distribution of dagga is criminalised in terms of the Drugs and drug trafficking act as well as the Medicines and related substances act.

Was the law not settled by the Constitutional court in 2002?

In 2002 a Rastafarian brought a case to the Constitutional Court about Dagga where he complained that the law prevented him smoking dagga as a religious observance and this violated his rights to religious freedom.

The court accepted that a Rastafarian’s religious rights were violated but dismissed the case as there is no objective way for law enforcement officials to distinguish between the possession or use of cannabis for religious or for recreational purposes.

The trial of the plant will in all likelihood be the final decider.

Why is that?

Because the Trial of the Plant will be the first and only case where there will be oral evidence given and tested, in the witness stand.

These other cases were fought and decided on affidavit evidence in a day or two.

The trial of the plant is very different and will take many days in court starting on 31 July and continuing through the month of August.

There are three legal teams comprising 6 attorneys, 11 advocates, 16 expert witnesses and as many as 12 other witnesses.  The trial will probably be recorded by the media and will also probably go all the way to the Constitutional Court to be finally decided.

DFL’s lead counsel is Adv Reg Willis instructed by the University of Pretoria Law Clinic.

How did this case start?

In 2010 a couple were arrested with approximately R500 000.00 worth of dagga in their home. They became known as the dagga couple.

To avoid prosecution they obtained an interdict in the Pretoria High Court against their prosecution, pending the outcome of a case to declare that all the SA dagga legislation is unconstitutional.

The case is against various government departments and against Doctors for Life International.

DFL joined this case to be of assistance to the State.

So for example DFL will lead the evidence of Harvard Professor Bertha Madras who is one of the foremost authorities on cannabis in the world. She contends that the legalisation of cannabis has to be resisted in the interests of the human brain.

Who is Doctors for Life and what does it do?

DFL is a non-profit relief and civil society organisation of doctors who care and give voluntarily of their own time and money to the many needs of the poor.

DFL serve the needs of the underprivileged communities they serve in South Africa and Southern Africa.  DFL also has an extensive track record of being involved in public interest cases predominantly as a friend of the court, especially to assist with scientific and similar evidence.

So then how is the dagga couple funding their case?

The dagga couple dragged the case out for some years, while they raised money.  They started an organisation called “Fields of Green for All” “FOGFA” which now has over 45000 supporters who are funding the case.

How important is this case for South Africa?

Given the role of dagga in crime, women and child abuse and the future of our youth, this trial is one of the most important to ever reach our courts.  If the dagga couple win their case as they want to, there will be no restriction on the possession, consumption, cultivation, transportation and distribution of cannabis.  A free for all.

Read our dagga court case press releases and more info on cannabis Media Release: High Court Blunders into Dagga Minefield

Source:  Letter from Johan Claassen  www.doctorsforlife.co.za) sent to Drugwatch International  27th July 2017

A new study provides credible evidence that marijuana legalization will lead to decreased academic success. (Elaine Thompson/AP)

The most rigorous study yet of the effects of marijuana legalization has identified a disturbing result: College students with access to recreational cannabis on average earn worse grades and fail classes at a higher rate. Economists Olivier Marie and Ulf Zölitz took advantage of a decision by Maastricht, a city in the Netherlands, to change the rules for “cannabis cafes,” which legally sell recreational marijuana. Because Maastricht is very close to the border of multiple European countries (Belgium, France and Germany), drug tourism was posing difficulties for the city. Hoping to address this, the city barred noncitizens of the Netherlands from buying from the cafes.

This policy change created an intriguing natural experiment at Maastricht University, because students there from neighboring countries suddenly were unable to access legal pot, while students from the Netherlands continued.

The research on more than 4,000 students, published in the Review of Economic Studies, found that those who lost access to legal marijuana showed substantial improvement in their grades. Specifically, those banned from cannabis cafes had a more than 5 percent increase in their odds of passing their courses. Low performing students benefited even more, which the researchers noted is particularly important because these students are at high-risk of dropping out. The researchers attribute their results to the students who were denied legal access to marijuana being less likely to use it and to suffer cognitive impairments (e.g., in concentration and memory) as a result.

Other studies have tried to estimate the impact of marijuana legalization by studying those U.S. states that legalized medicinal or recreational marijuana. But marijuana policy researcher Rosalie Pacula of RAND Corporation noted that the Maastricht study provide evidence that “is much better than anything done so far in the United States.”

States differ in countless ways that are hard for researchers to adjust for in their data analysis, but the Maastricht study examined similar people in the same location — some of them even side by side in the same classrooms — making it easier to isolate the effect of marijuana legalization. Also, Pacula pointed out that since voters in U.S. states are the ones who approve marijuana legalization, it creates a chicken and egg problem for researchers (i.e. does legalization make people smoke more pot, or do pot smokers tend to vote for legalization?). This methodological problem was resolved in the Maastricht study because the marijuana policy change was imposed without input from those whom it affected.

Although this is the strongest study to date on how people are affected by marijuana legalization, no research can ultimately tell us whether legalization is a good or bad decision: That’s a political question and not a scientific one. But what the Maastricht study can do is provides highly credible evidence that marijuana legalization will lead to decreased academic success — perhaps particularly so for struggling students — and that is a concern that both proponents and opponents of legalization should keep in mind.

Source:https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/25/these-       college-students-lost-access-to-legal-pot-and-started-getting-better-grades/?   

In his last article for Pro Talk, Renaming and Rethinking Drug Treatment, psychologist Robert Schwebel, Ph.D., author and developer of The Seven Challenges program, expressed his views about problems in typical drug and alcohol treatment. In this interview, he focuses on changes that he thinks would better meet the needs of individuals with substance problems.

The Seven Challenges Program

The Seven Challenges is described as “a comprehensive counselling program for teens and young adults that incorporates work on alcohol and other drug problems.” The program addresses much more than substance issues because it also helps young people develop better life skills, as well as manage their situational and psychological problems. Although there is an established structure for each session and a framework for decision-making (see website for the youth version of “The Seven Challenges”), it is not pre-scripted as in many traditional programs. Rather it is “exceptionally flexible, in response to the immediate needs of the clients.”

Independent studies funded by The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment and published in peer-reviewed journals have provided evidence that The Seven Challenges significantly decreases substance use of adolescents and greatly improves their overall mental health status. The program has been shown to be especially effective for the many young people with drug problems who also have trauma issues.

Just recently, a new version of The Seven Challenges program was introduced for adults and is being piloted in a research project. Soon, a book geared toward the general public by Dr. Schwebel that incorporates much of the philosophy of the program, as well as many of the decision-making and behavior change strategies, will be available.

Q&A: What Should Treatment Look Like?

Q: In your last article for Pro Talk, you argued strongly against the word “treatment” and suggested that we use the word “counselling” instead. Will you reiterate why you prefer using “counselling” when talking about professional help for people with substance problems?

Dr. S.: Counselling is an active and interactive process that’s responsive to the needs of individuals. It may include education, but it’s more than that because the information is personalized and offered in the context of a discussion about what’s happening in a person’s life. Effective counsellors help clients become aware of their options, expand those options, and make their own informed choices.

Treatment, on the other hand, sounds like something imposed and passive that an authority (say a doctor) does to someone else or tells them to do. It also implies recipients receive a standardized protocol or regime with a preconceived goal, usually abstinence when we’re talking about addiction. It doesn’t suggest autonomy of choice or collaboration.

Q: You stress the importance of choice and collaboration, suggesting both are important in addiction counselling. Please tell us more.

Dr. S.: In collaborative counselling that allows choices, clients get to identify the issues they want to work on. They make the decisions. We make it clear that we’re not there to make them quit using drugs…and couldn’t even if we tried. We tell them, “We’re here to support you in working on your issues, things that are important to you; things that are not going well in your life or as well you would like them to be going.”

We also support clients in decision-making about drugs. They set their own goals about using. One person might want to quit using, while another might want to set new limits. For those who want to change their drug use behavior, we check in with them about how they’re doing regarding their decision on a session-by-session basis. If they have setbacks, we’ll provide individualized support to help them figure out why, We’re not doubting them or trying to “catch” them. Rather, we’re helping them succeed with their own decisions to change. This type of check-in would not apply to individuals who have not yet decided to make changes.

Q: Many addiction programs feel that dealing with addiction should be the first priority and that other issues are secondary. What are your thoughts about this?

Dr. S.: I’ll start by saying that they have equal importance. Drug problems have everything to do with what is going on in a person’s life. And, a person’s life is very much affected by drug problems. I do want to say, however, that not everyone who winds up in an addiction program has an addiction. That’s a ridiculous generalization. They may be having problems with binge drinking, issues with family or jobs because of substance misuse, or legal problems because they were unlucky and got caught. (For instance they got arrested for another crime and tested positive for drugs.) They often wind up in places that require abstinence and wonder, “What am I doing here?” Then they’re told they’re “in denial.”

Traditional treatment tends to focus narrowly on drug problems, usually pushing an agenda of immediate abstinence. However, drug problems – whether or not they qualify as “addiction,” are very much connected to the rest of life. Therefore, clients need comprehensive counselling that addresses what’s happening in their overall lives and helps clients make their lives better. So it’s not all about use of substances and making the individual quit. The goal is to support clients and to help them make their own decisions about life and substance use.

We use the term “issues” – not “problems.” Whatever is most important to the individual that day is what we work on. A client might say, “I have an issue with my mother.” We don’t just want to have a discussion about the issue; we want to set a session goal so that a client gets practical help with an issue each time. Ideally we try to facilitate a next step, some sort of action that can be taken between sessions. We want to support our clients in making their own lives better. We like to reassure clients that we won’t be harping on drugs all the time: At least half of what we do is about everything else besides drugs. This means that counsellors need to know how to help people with their other problems. Unfortunately, many have a narrow background in drug treatment and don’t yet know how to do that.

Q: How do you address the issue of “powerlessness” which a number of young people have told me they struggled with in12-step treatment programs they’ve attended? Don’t adolescents by nature resist anything that threatens to take away their autonomy?

Dr. S.: One of our main messages is “You are powerful; people do take control over their drug use. You have that power within you.” We also say, “You don’t need to do it alone. You are entitled to support. We’re behind you. We’re not saying it’s easy and

there won’t be setbacks along the way. If there are, we’ll help you figure out why and how to handle it differently the next time. At the same time we’ll help you with other issues in your life so you’ll have less need for drugs.”

I think there is great harm in the all-or-nothing approach to drug and alcohol problems and that more people would come for help if they were not told that they’re powerless. Also, many more would come if they felt they could make a choice about drugs and did not expect to be coerced.

A New Version of The Seven Challenges

Following is the new adult version of Dr. Schwebel’s The Seven Challenges program:

· Challenging Yourself to Make Thoughtful Decisions About Your Life, Including Your Use of Alcohol and Other Drugs

· Challenging Yourself to Look at Your Responsibility and the Responsibility of Others for Your Problems

· Challenging Yourself to Look at What You Like About Alcohol and Other Drugs, and Why You Use Them

· Challenging Yourself to Honestly Look at Your Life, Including Your Use of Alcohol and Other Drugs

· Challenging Yourself to Look at Harm That Has Happened or Could Happen From Your Use of Alcohol and Other Drugs

· Challenging Yourself to Look at Where You Are Headed, Where You Would Like to Go, and What You Would Like to Accomplish

· Challenging Yourself to Take Action and Succeed With Your Decisions About Your Life and Use of Alcohol and Other Drugs

Source:  http://www.rehabs.com/pro-talk-articles/what-drug-and-alcohol-treatment-should-look-like-an-interview-with-dr-robert-schwebel/     17th July 2017

Medication-assisted treatment is often called the gold standard of addiction care. But much of the country has resisted it.

If you ask Jordan Hansen why he changed his mind on medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction, this is the bottom line.

Several years ago, Hansen was against the form of treatment. If you asked him back then what he thought about it, he would have told you that it’s ineffective — and even harmful — for drug users. Like other critics, to Hansen, medication-assisted treatment was nothing more than substituting one drug (say, heroin) with another (methadone).

Today, not only does Hansen think this form of treatment is effective, but he readily argues — as the scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows — that it’s the best form of treatment for opioid addiction. He believes this so strongly, in fact, that he now often leads training sessions for medication-assisted treatment across the country.

“It almost hurts to say it out loud now, but it’s the truth,” Hansen told me, describing his previous beliefs. “I was kind of absorbing the collective fear and ignorance from the culture at large within the recovery community.” Hansen is far from alone. Over the past few years, America’s harrowing opioid epidemic — now the deadliest drug overdose crisis in the country’s history — has led to a lot of rethinking about how to deal with addiction. For addiction treatment providers, that’s led to new debates about the merits of the abstinence-only model — many of which essentially consider addiction a failure of willpower — so long supported in the US.

The case for prescription heroin

The Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, which Hansen works for, exemplifies the debate. As one of the top drug treatment providers in the country, it used to subscribe almost exclusively to the abstinence-only model, based on an interpretation of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous popularized in American addiction treatment in the past several decades. But in 2012, Hazelden announced a big switch: It would provide medication-assisted treatment.

“This is a huge shift for our culture and organization,” Marvin Seppala, chief medical officer of Hazelden, said at the time. “We believe it’s the responsible thing to do.”

From the outside, this might seem like a bizarre debate: Okay, so addiction treatment providers are supporting a form of treatment that has a lot of evidence behind it. So what?

But the growing embrace of medication-assisted treatment is demonstrative of how the opioid epidemic is forcing the country to take another look at its inadequate drug treatment system. With so many people dying from drug overdoses — tens of thousands a year — and hundreds of thousands more expected to die in the next decade, America is finally considering how its response to addiction can be better rooted in science instead of the moralistic stigmatization that’s existed for so long.

The problem is that the moralistic stigmatization is still fairly entrenched in how the US thinks about addiction. But the embrace of medication-assisted treatment shows that may be finally changing — and America may be finally looking at addiction as a medical condition instead of a moral failure.

The research is clear: Medication-assisted treatment works

One of the reasons opioid addiction is so powerful is that users feel like they must keep using the drugs in order to stave off withdrawal. Once a person’s body grows used to opioids but doesn’t get enough of the drugs to satisfy what it’s used to, withdrawal can pop up, causing, among other symptoms, severe nausea and full-body aches. So to avoid suffering through it, drug users often seek out drugs like heroin and opioid painkillers — not necessarily to get a euphoric high, but to feel normal and avoid withdrawal. (In the heroin world, this is often referred to as “getting straight.”)

Medications like methadone and buprenorphine (also known as Suboxone) can stop this cycle. Since they are opioids themselves, they can fulfil a person’s cravings and stop withdrawal symptoms. The key is that they do this in a safe medical setting, and when taken as prescribed do not produce the euphoric high that opioids do when they are misused. By doing this, an opioid user significantly reduces the risk of relapse, since he doesn’t have to worry about avoiding withdrawal anymore. Users can take this for the rest of their lives, or in some cases, doses may be reduced; it varies from patient to patient.

The research backs this up: Various studies, including systemic reviews of the research, have found that medication-assisted treatment can cut the all-cause mortality rate among addiction patients by half or more. Just imagine if a medication came out for any other disease — and, yes, health experts consider addiction a disease — that cuts mortality by half; it would be a momentous discovery.

“That is shown repeatedly,” Maia Szalavitz, a long time addiction journalist and author of Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, told me. “There’s so much data from so many different places that if you add methadone or Suboxone in, deaths go down, and if you take it away, deaths go up.” That’s why the biggest public health organizations — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the World Health Organization — all acknowledge medication-assisted treatment’s medical value. And experts often describe it to me as “the gold standard” for opioid addiction care.

The data is what drove Hansen’s change in perspective. “If I wanted to view myself as an ethical practitioner and doing the best that I could for the people I served, I needed to make this change based on the overwhelming evidence,” he said. “And I needed to separate that from my personal recovery experience.”

Medication-assisted treatment is different from traditional forms of dealing with addiction in America, which tend to demand abstinence. The standards in this field are 12-step programs, which combine spiritual and moralistic ideals into a support group for people suffering from addiction. While some 12-step programs allow medication-assisted treatment, others prohibit it as part of their demand for total abstinence. The research shows this is a particularly bad idea for opioids, for which medications are considered the standard of care.

There are different kinds of medications for opioids, which will work better or worse depending on a patient’s circumstances. Methadone, for example, is only administered in a clinic, typically one to four times a day — but that means patients will have to make the trip to a clinic on a fairly regular basis. Buprenorphine is a take-home drug that’s taken once or twice a day, but the at-home access also means it might be easier to misuse and divert to the black market.

One rising medication, known as naltrexone or its brand name Vivitrol, isn’t an opioid — making it less prone to misuse — and only needs to be injected once a month. But it doesn’t work in the same way as methadone or buprenorphine. It requires full detoxification to use (usually three to 10 days of no opioid use), while buprenorphine, for example, only requires a partial detoxification process (usually 12 hours to two days). And instead of preventing withdrawal — indeed, the detox process requires going through withdrawal — it blocks the effects of opioids up to certain doses, making it much harder to get high or overdose on the drugs. It’s also relatively new, so there’s less evidence for its real-world effectiveness.

One catch is that even these medications, though the best forms of opioid treatment, do not work for as much as 40 percent of opioid users. Some patients may prefer not to take any medications because they see any drug use whatsoever as getting in the way of their recovery, in which case total abstinence may be the right answer for them. Others may not respond well physically to the medications, or the medications may for whatever reason fail to keep them from misusing drugs.

This isn’t atypical in medicine. What works for some people, even the majority, isn’t always going to work for everyone. So these are really first-line treatments, but in some cases patients may need alternative therapies if medication-assisted treatment doesn’t work. (That might even involve prescription heroin — which, while it’s perhaps counterintuitive, the research shows it works to mitigate the problems of addiction when provided in tightly controlled, supervised medical settings.)

Medication can also be paired with other kinds of treatment to better results. It can be used in tandem with cognitive behavioral therapy or similar approaches, which teach drug users how to deal with problems or settings that can lead to relapse. All of that can also be paired with 12-step programs like AA and NA or other support groups in which people work together and hold each other accountable in the fight against addiction. It all varies from patient to patient.

It is substituting one drug for another, but that’s okay

The main criticism of medication-assisted treatment is that it’s merely replacing one drug with another. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price recently echoed this criticism, saying, “If we’re just substituting one opioid for another, we’re not moving the dial much. Folks need to be cured so they can be productive members of society and realize their dreams.” (A spokesperson for Price later walked back the statement, saying Price supports all kinds of drug treatment.)

On its face, this argument is true. Medication-assisted treatment is replacing one drug, whether it’s opioid painkillers or heroin, with another, such as methadone or buprenorphine.

But this isn’t by itself a bad thing. Under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it’s not enough for someone to be using or even physically dependent on drugs to qualify for a substance use disorder, the technical name for addiction. After all, most US adults use drugs — some every day or multiple times a day — without any problems whatsoever. Just think about that next time you sip a beer, glass of wine, coffee, tea, or any other beverage with alcohol or caffeine in it, or any time you use a drug to treat a medical condition.

The qualification for a substance use disorder is that someone is using drugs in a dangerous or risky manner, putting himself or others in danger. So someone with a substance use disorder would not just be using opioids but potentially using these drugs in a way that puts him in danger — perhaps by feeling the need to commit crimes to obtain the drugs or using the drugs so much that he puts himself at risk of overdose and inhibits his day-to-day functioning. Basically, the drug use has to hinder someone from being a healthy, functioning member of society to qualify as addiction.

The key with medication-assisted treatment is that while it does involve continued drug use, it turns that drug use into a much safer habit. So instead of stealing to get heroin or using painkillers so much that he puts his life at risk, a patient on medication-assisted treatment can simply use methadone or buprenorphine to meet his physical cravings and otherwise go about his day — going to school, work, or any other obligations.

Yet this myth of the dangers of medication-assisted treatment remains prevalent — to deadly results.

In 2013, Judge Frank Gulotta Jr. in New York ordered an opioid user arrested for drugs, Robert Lepolszki, off methadone treatment, which he began after his arrest. In January 2014, Lepolszki died of a drug overdose at 28 years old — a direct result, Lepolszki’s parents say, of failing to get the medicine he needed. In his defense,  Gulotta has continued to argue that methadone programs “are crutches — they are substitutes for drugs and drug cravings without enabling the participant to actually rid him or herself of the addiction.”

This is just one case, but it shows the real risk of denying opioid users medication: It can literally get them killed by depriving them of lifesaving medical care.

The myth is also a big reason why there are still restrictions on medication-assisted treatment. For example, the federal government still caps how many patients doctors can prescribe buprenorphine to, with strict rules about raising the cap. This limits how accessible the treatment is. A Huff Post analysis found that even if every doctor who can prescribe buprenorphine did so at the maximum rate in 2012, more than half of Americans with opioid use disorders could not get the medication. That’s on top of barriers to addiction treatment in general. According to a 2016 report by the surgeon general, just 10 percent of Americans with a drug use disorder obtain specialty treatment. The report attributed the low rate to severe shortages in the supply of care, with some areas of the country, particularly rural counties, lacking affordable options for treatment — which can lead to waiting periods of weeks or even months. Only recently has there been a broader push to fix this gap in care.

The medications used in treatment do carry some risks

None of this is to say that the medications used in these treatments are without any problems whatsoever. Methadone is tied to thousands of deadly overdoses a year, although almost entirely when it’s used for pain, not addiction, treatment — since it’s much more regulated in addiction care. Buprenorphine is safer in that, unlike common painkillers, heroin, and methadone, its effect has a ceiling — meaning it has no significant effect after a certain dose level. But it’s still possible to misuse, particularly for people with lower tolerance levels. And there are some reports of buprenorphine mills, where patients can get buprenorphine for misuse from unscrupulous doctors — similar to how pill mills popped up during the beginning of the opioid epidemic and provided patients easy access to painkillers.

Naltrexone, meanwhile, can heighten the risk of overdose and death in case of full relapse. Overdose and death are risks in any case of relapse, but they’re particularly acute for naltrexone because it requires a full detox process that eliminates prior tolerance. (Although this would typically require someone to stop taking naltrexone, since otherwise it blocks the effects of opioids up to certain doses.)

But when taken as prescribed, the medications are broadly safe and effective for addiction treatment. For regulators, it’s a matter of making sure the drugs aren’t diverted into misuse, while also providing good access to people who genuinely need them.

The fight over medication-assisted treatment is really about how we see addiction

Behind the arguments about medication-assisted treatment is a simple reality of how Americans view addiction: Many still don’t see it, as public health officials and experts do, as a disease.

With other diseases, there is no question that medication can be a legitimate answer. That medication is not viewed as a proper answer by many to addiction shows that people believe addiction is unique in some way — particularly, they view addiction as at least partly a moral failing instead of just a disease.

I get emails all the time to this effect. Here, for example, is a fairly representative reader message: “Darwin’s Theory says ‘survival of the fittest.’ Let these lost souls pay the price of their criminal choices and criminal actions. Society does not owe them multiple medical resuscitations from their own bad judgment, criminal activity, and self-inflicted wounds.”

This contradicts what addiction experts broadly agree on. As Stanford psychiatrist and Drug Dealer, MD author Anna Lembke put it, “If you see somebody who continues to use despite their lives being totally destroyed — losing their jobs, losing loved ones, ending up in jail — nobody would choose that. Nobody anywhere would ever choose that life. So clearly it is beyond this individual’s control on some level.”

Many Americans may understand this with, say, depression and anxiety. We know that people with these types of mental health problems are not in full control of their thoughts and emotions. But many don’t realize that addiction functions in a similar way — only that the thoughts and emotions drive someone to seek out drugs at just about any cost.

Some of the sentiment against medications, as Hansen can testify, is propagated by people suffering from addiction. Some of them believe that any drug use, even to treat addiction, goes against the goal of full sobriety. They may believe that if they got sober without medications, perhaps others should too. Many of them also don’t trust the health care system: If they got addicted to drugs because a doctor prescribed them opioid painkillers, they have a good reason to distrust doctors who are now trying to get them to take another medication — this time for their addiction.

The opioid epidemic, however, has gotten a lot of people in the addiction recovery world to reconsider their past beliefs. Funeral after funeral and awful statistic after awful statistic, there is a sense that there has to be a better way — and by looking at the evidence, many have come to support medication-assisted treatment.

“I remember sitting there,” Hansen said, speaking to his experience at a funeral, as a mother sang her dead son a lullaby, “thinking that we have to do better.”

Source:  German Lopez@germanrlopezgerman.lopez@vox.com  Jul 20, 2017

Werewolf in London? Or maybe it’s a Skunk.

Cannabis is now the most popular illicit drug in the world. Several US states have legalized cannabis for medical or recreational use and more are in the process of doing the same. Numerous prospective epidemiological studies have reported that use of cannabis is a modifiable risk factor for schizophrenia-like psychosis. In 2012, the Schizophrenia Commission in the UK concluded that research to quantify the link between cannabis use and serious mental illness should be pursued.

Between May 1, 2005, and May 31, 2011, researchers culled data from 410 patients with first-episode psychosis and 370 controls. The risk of individuals having a psychotic disorder was approximately three-fold higher among users of “skunk-like” cannabis, compared with those who never used cannabis (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 2•92, 95% CI 1•52–3•45, p=0•001). Further, daily use of skunk-like cannabis resulted in the highest risk of psychotic disorders, compared with no use of cannabis (adjusted OR 5•4, 95% CI 2•81–11•31, p=0•002).

The population attributable fraction of first episode psychosis for skunk use for the geographical area of south London was 24% (95% CI 17–31), possibly because of the high prevalence of high-potency cannabis (218 [53%] of 410 patients) in the study.

Clearly, and as seen elsewhere, availability of high potency cannabis in south London most likely resulted in a greater proportion of first onset psychosis than in previous studies where the cannabis is less potent.

Why Does this Matter?

Changes in marijuana potency and the increased prevalence of use by adolescents and young adults increases the risk of serious mental illness and the burden on the mental health system.

Chronic, relapsing psychotic illness produced by cannabis is similar to that produced naturally in Schizophrenia. However, treatment responses are not the same. Indeed, skunk use appears to contribute to 24% of cases of first episode psychosis in south London. Our findings show the importance of raising awareness among young people of the risks associated with the use of high-potency cannabis. The need for such public education is emphasized by the worldwide trend of liberalization of the constraints on cannabis and the fact that high potency varieties are becoming increasingly available.

Finally, in both primary care and mental health services, developing a simple screening instrument as simple as yes-or-no questions of whether people use skunk or other drugs will aid public health officials to identify epidemiological maps and “hot spots” of increased drug use and to develop interdiction, education and prevention efforts.

Source:  https://www.rivermendhealth.com/resources/cannabis-induced-psychosis-now-spreading-uk     July 2017

Medical Illness Model:

Near the end of the Second World War researchers and leaders in the recovery community jointly formulated the problem of uncontrolled drinking into what is now known as the Disease Model of alcoholism. This model postulates that, like medical illnesses, alcoholism–more specifically alcohol dependence, or addiction—can be diagnosed, its course observed, and its physical causes understood.

Further, scientific trials can be undertaken to identify the best treatments for those who suffer from it. The diagnosis of Alcohol Dependence, in this model, rested on four symptoms: 1) a tolerance to alcohol in which a person needs to drink ever greater amounts to reach a desired effect, 2) withdrawal symptoms, such as “the shakes” and others, on stopping use, 3) the Loss of Control phenomenon in which affected persons lose the ability to control how much they drink at a sitting and thereby can no longer predict how much they will drink from one episode to the next, and 4) social or physical impairment resulting from combinations of the first three symptom categories1.

This model pictures a condition from which many alcohol dependent people emerge every year, and into which many others return. View as a disease, alcoholism takes on the characteristics of a remitting-relapsing illness with primary symptoms that direct us to brain functioning. And, because ethyl alcohol is a very small molecule with easy access to most parts of the body, moderate to heavy alcohol use often injures other organs, such as the liver and heart among others.

Uncontrolled, or dependent, alcohol use also affects the social network setting of family as well as work activities, friendships, and legal involvement. Last, however, the Disease model brings with it the possibilities of treatment and of hope. At this date, effective medicinal agents against alcoholism are very few. But hope, that necessary ingredient for recovery, waxes strong in the illness model. In the words of the alcoholic patient quoted in the Part 2, “It is much easier to think of myself as an ill person working to become well, rather than a bad person trying to become good.”

Genetic Models:

From the Disease model has come another, that of genetic influence. The observation that alcoholism often runs in families for many years meant that family cultures or mores determined who would become alcoholic and who would not. While it is clear that cultural and family life influences are very powerful, more recent studies have noted that an underlying genetic disposition may be at play in some genealogical lines2. If so, the evidence suggests a confluence of many gene effects rather than the dominant/recessive results of inheritance in Mendelian models of genetic death, as for example, in Huntington’s Disease.

Instead, the gene effects seem to have more to do with the vulnerability towards alcoholism. One form appears in those who have a genetically-based insensitivity to alcohol—an “inborn tolerance,” and develop alcohol dependence at much higher rates than alcohol sensitive comparison groups. Another form may require a combination of

gene influences and environment conditions to come together to result in alcohol-plus-multiple drug dependence, sometimes referred to as Type 2 or Type B alcoholics.

Unexpectedly, the news of gene involvement was greeted with enthusiasm among some quarters of the actively drinking alcoholic public: “Since alcoholism is genetic, we can’t escape our genes and may as well keep drinking.” As with older models however, the element of choice remains present in the sober periods between drinking episodes. As some of the other models suggest, healing from alcoholism remains an individual process.

Psychological Adaptation Models in Illness and Recovery:

Further modern research asks that we look at individuals and their abilities to adapt to the stresses of life. Careful observation has established that individual humans have the ability to adapt creatively to the painful thoughts and feelings of living and to do so in ways that connect us together rather than drive us apart3. This model of Mature human psychological adaptation, however, emphasizes that the brain function at its healthy best. Heavy, continuous use of alcohol carries often subtle, if severe, effects on the brain that are as yet poorly understood.

But we know they exist because of their effects in driving down the ability to adapt, from psychological Maturity to much more rigid Primitive mechanisms of coping, such as when an alcoholic “denies” that an obvious problem exists at all. This kind of Denial can occur in the actively drinking alcoholic who understands that resolving his or her ambivalence toward drinking is too painful to contemplate; therefore, a failure to perceive the problem seems preferable than facing it.

So it is that the Adaptation model views the First of the Twelve Steps as addressing primitive Denial in coming to recognize that the individual’s alcoholism exists. Progressing along the continuum of the Steps leads finally to the Twelfth: helping others who have the same problem. In the Psychological Adaptation model, this exemplifies the Mature mechanism of Altruism: selflessly helping others. The occurrence of brain healing as abstinence continues—along with the progression towards psychological maturity, whether viewed in the Psychological Adaptation or the Twelve Step models—suggests that brain recovery process are at work. We can only recognize their existence at this point, and need to understand their biology if we are to improve treatments in the Disease model.

Many Models, More Questions:

With this overview of the different model formulations of the problem of alcoholism and what to do about it, we are now ready to look as specific questions from a scientific point of view. As this series unfolds, we will have recourse to use all of the models mentioned—now adding the crucial ingredient of evidence, systematically gathered. In future Updates, the discussion will focus on specific problems and what we can learn about them.

Source:  https://www.ncadd.org/blogs/research-update/models-of-alcoholism-medical-physiological-causes  14th Jan. 2014

Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug in the United States, and trends show increasing use in the general population. As cannabis consumption rises, there has been significant emerging evidence for cannabis-related risks to health.1

Numerous lines of evidence suggest a correlation between cannabis consumption and a variety of psychiatric conditions, including cannabis-induced psychosis (CIP). While it can be difficult to differentiate CIP from other psychoses, CIP holds distinguishing characteristics, which may aid in its diagnosis. Given the increasing push toward cannabis legalization, assessing CIP and employing timely treatments is critical.

Specifically in youth, there is a direct relationship between cannabis use and its risks. The lack of knowledge surrounding its detrimental effects, combined with misunderstandings related to its therapeutic effects, has potential for catastrophic results.

CASE VIGNETTE

Ms. J, a 19-year-old college sophomore, was admitted to the Early Psychosis Unit at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) displaying signs of agitation and acute psychosis. Her roommates had noted that her behavior had become increasingly bizarre, and she had isolated herself over the past month. She began smoking marijuana at the age of 17 and since starting college used it daily.

Ms. J exhibited signs of paranoia, believing other students in her dorm were stealing from her and trying to poison her. She remained adamant that all her problems were rooted in the competitive environment of the university and that smoking marijuana aided in keeping her sanity. In a sense, she was self-medicating. Her clinical presentation was consistent with a diagnosis of CIP.

After the hospitalization, she received outpatient case management services in the Early Psychosis Program at CAMH, which included motivational interviewing to raise her awareness about the importance of abstaining from cannabis use. She has been abstinent from cannabis for more than a year with no evidence of psychosis; she recently returned to school to finish her degree.

Epidemiology of CIP

Reports have shown a staggering increase in cannabis-related emergency department (ED) visits in recent years. In 2011, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) estimated a total of 1.25 million illicit-drug–related ED visits across the US, of which 455,668 were marijuana related.2 A similar report published in 2015 by the Washington Poison Center Toxic Trends Report showed a dramatic increase in cannabis-related ED visits.3 In states with recent legalization of recreational cannabis, similar trends were seen.4

States with medicinal marijuana have also shown a dramatic rise in cannabis-related ED visits. Moreover, states where marijuana is still illegal also showed increases.5 This widespread increase is postulated to be in part due to the easy accessibility of the drug, which contributes to over-intoxication and subsequent symptoms. Overall, from 2005 to 2011, there has been a dramatic rise in cannabis-related ED visits among all age groups and genders.

Neurobiology of CIP

Cannabis is considered an environmental risk factor that increases the odds of psychotic episodes, and longer exposure is associated with greater risk of psychosis in a dose-

dependent fashion. The drug acts as a stressor that leads to the emergence and persistence of psychosis. While a number of factors play a role in the mechanism by which consumption produces psychosis, the primary psychoactive ingredient is considered to be delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol (delta9-THC). Properties of delta9-THC include a long half-life (up to 30 days to eliminate the long-acting THC metabolite carboxy-THC from urine) and high lipophilicity, which may contribute to CIP.

During acute consumption, cannabis causes an increase in the synthesis and release of dopamine as well as increased reuptake inhibition, similar to the process that occurs during stimulant use. Consequently, patients with CIP are found to have elevated peripheral dopamine metabolite products.

Findings from a study that examined presynaptic dopaminergic function in patients who have experienced CIP indicate that dopamine synthesis in the striatum has an inverse relationship with cannabis use. Long-term users had reduced dopamine synthesis, although no association was seen between dopaminergic function and CIP.6 This observation may provide insight into a future treatment hypothesis for CIP because it implies a different mechanism of psychosis compared with schizophrenia. As cannabis may not induce the same dopaminergic alterations seen in schizophrenia, CIP may require alternative approaches—most notably addressing associated cannabis use disorder.

Polymorphisms at several genes linked to dopamine metabolism may moderate the effects of CIP. The catechol-o-methyltransferase (COMT Val 158Met) genotype has been linked to increased hallucinations in cannabis users.7Homozygous and heterozygous genetic compositions (Met/Met, Val/Met, Val/Val) for COMT Val 158Met have been studied in patients with CIP and suggest that the presence of Val/Val and Val/Met genotypes produces a substantial increase in psychosis in relation to cannabis use. This suggests that carriers of the Val allele are most vulnerable to CIP attacks.

There has been much controversy surrounding the validity of a CIP diagnosis and whether it is a distinct clinical entity or an early manifestation of schizophrenia. In patients being treated for schizophrenia, those with a history of CIP had an earlier onset of schizophrenia than patients who never used cannabis.8Evidence suggests an association between patients who have received treatment for CIP and later development of schizophrenia spectrum disorder. However, it has been difficult to distinguish whether CIP is an early manifestation of schizophrenia or a catalyst. Nonetheless, there is a clear association between the 2 disorders.

Assessment of CIP

DSM-5 categorizes cannabis-induced psychotic disorder as a substance-induced psychotic disorder. However, there are distinguishing characteristics of CIP that differentiate it from other psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. Clear features of CIP are sudden onset of mood lability and paranoid symptoms, within 1 week of use but as early as 24 hours after use. CIP is commonly precipitated by a sudden increase in potency (eg, percent of THC content or quantity of cannabis consumption; typically, heavy users of cannabis consume more than 2 g/d). Criteria for CIP must exclude primary psychosis, and symptoms should be in excess of expected intoxication and withdrawal effects. A comparison of the clinical features of idiopathic psychosis versus CIP is provided in the Table.

When assessing for CIP, careful history taking is critical. Time of last drug ingestion will indicate if a patient’s psychotic symptoms are closely related to cannabis intoxication/withdrawal effects. While acute cannabis intoxication presents with a range of transient positive symptoms (paranoia, grandiosity, perceptual alterations), mood symptoms (anxiety), and cognitive deficits (working memory, verbal recall, attention), symptoms that persist beyond the effects of intoxication and withdrawal are better categorized as CIP, regardless of the route of administration (smoke inhalation, oral, intravenous). CIP has historically been associated with fewer negative symptoms than schizophrenia; however, without a clear timeline of use, distinguishing schizophrenia from CIP may prove difficult.

A diagnosis of primary psychosis (eg, schizophrenia) is warranted in the absence of heavy cannabis use or withdrawal (for at least 4 weeks), or if symptoms preceded onset of heavy use. The age at which psychotic symptoms emerge has not proved to be a helpful indicator; different studies show a conflicting median age of onset.

Clinical features of schizophrenia and CIP share many overlapping characteristics. However, compared with primary psychoses with concurrent cannabis abuse, CIP has been established to show more mood symptoms than primary psychosis. The mood symptom profile includes obsessive ideation, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, and anxiety. Of significance is the presence of social phobia: 20% of patients with CIP demonstrate phobic anxiety compared with only 3.8% of patients with primary psychosis with cannabis abuse.

Hypomania and agitation have also been found to be more pronounced in cases of CIP.9 Visual hallucinations are more common and more distinct in CIP than in other psychoses such as schizophrenia. Perhaps the most discriminating characteristic of CIP is awareness of the clinical condition, greater disease insight, and the ability to identify symptoms as a manifestation of a mental disorder or substance use. The presence of much more rapidly declining positive symptoms is another distinctive factor of CIP.

Finally, family history may help distinguish CIP from primary psychosis. Primary psychosis has a strong association with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders in first- or second-degree relatives, whereas CIP has a weaker family association with psychosis.

Treatment of CIP

As with all substance-induced psychotic states, abstinence from cannabis may be the definitive measure to prevent recurrence. With limited research surrounding CIP, achieving symptomatic treatment during acute phases of CIP has proved to be difficult. The Figure suggests possible treatment progression for CIP.

Pharmacotherapeutic interventions include the second-generation antipsychotic drug olanzapine and haloperidol. While both are equally effective, their different adverse- effect profiles should be taken into consideration when treating a patient; olanzapine is associated with significantly fewer extrapyramidal adverse effects.

One report indicates that antipsychotics worsened the condition in some patients.10 Conventional antipsychotics failed to abate the symptoms of CIP in one 20-year old man. Trials of olanzapine, lithium, and haloperidol had little to no effect on his psychosis. Risperidone was tried but elicited temporal lobe epilepsy with auditory, somatic, and olfactory hallucinations. However, the use of valproate sodium markedly improved his symptoms and cognition, returning him to baseline.

Carbamazepine has also been shown to have rapid effects when used as an adjunct to antipsychotics.11 Use of anti-seizure medication in CIP treatment has been hypothesized to reduce neuroleptic adverse effects, resulting in better tolerance of antipsychotics.10,11 These results suggest the use of adjunctive anti-epileptics should be considered in CIP treatment strategies, although further studies in a broad range of patients with CIP are needed.

Abstaining from cannabis is the most beneficial and effective measure for preventing future CIP events; however, it is likely to be the most difficult to implement.

Psychosocial intervention has a significant impact on early-phase psychosis, and when the intervention is initiated plays a role in disease outcomes. A delay in providing intensive psychosocial treatment has been associated with more negative symptoms compared with a delay in administrating antipsychotic medication.12 Employing cannabis- focused interventions with dependent patients who present with first-episode psychosis can decrease use in a clinically meaningful way and subjectively improve patient quality of life.

Compared with the standard of care, motivational interviewing significantly increases number of days abstinent from cannabis and aids in decreasing short-term consumption.13 Patients who are treated with motivational interviewing in addition to standard of care (combination of antipsychotic medication, regular office-based psychiatric contact, psychoeducation) are reported to also have more confidence and willingness to reduce cannabis use.

Patients with CIP who are unwilling or unable to decrease cannabis consumption may be protected from psychotic relapse with aripiprazole (10 mg/d). Its use suppresses the re-emergence of psychosis without altering cannabis levels. However, no direct comparison has been made with aripiprazole and other antipsychotics in treating CIP. Clearly, well-controlled large studies of putative treatments for CIP are needed.

Conclusions

As more countries and states approve legalization, and marijuana becomes more accessible, CIP and other cannabis-related disorders are expected to increase. Efforts should be made by physicians to educate patients and discourage cannabis use. Just as there was an era of ignorance concerning the damaging effects of tobacco, today’s conceptions about cannabis may in fact be judged similarly in the future. The onus is on psychiatrists to take an evidence-based approach to this increasing problem.

Source:  http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/substance-use-disorder/cannabis-induced-psychosis-review  14th July

New Hampshire has the second-highest rate of drug overdoses in the country. Eric Adams in Laconia (population 16,000) has been assigned one task to stop them.

Eric Adams is a handsome, clean-shaven man, almost 41, with a booming voice and hair clipped short enough for the military, which once was an ambition of his. After high school, he tried to join the Marines but was turned away because of his asthma. He needed three different inhalers then, plus injections. Today he has outgrown the problem. He is 5-foot-10, weighs 215 pounds and can dead lift 350.

Adams has worked in law enforcement for almost two decades.

He began as a guard at the New Hampshire state prison, where he asked to work in maximum security, then left to become a police officer in Tilton and was soon recommended for the Drug Task Force, a statewide operation against narcotics dealers. Adams grew his hair long and arranged undercover buys, a Glock 27 concealed in a holster beneath his jeans. Later he would return wearing a bulletproof vest, surrounded by fellow officers, to kick in the door with his pistol drawn.

Eric Adams in his office at the Laconia Police Department.
CreditNatalie Keyssar for The New York Times

Laconia, where Adams works today, is a former mill town in central New Hampshire surrounded by lakes. In midwinter, Laconia is home to 16,000 residents, though in summer that number swells to 30,000. Those are gleaming, sun-dappled days. Then winter falls on New England like a gavel.

A blight in the region is especially acute. Of the 13 states with the highest death rates from drug overdoses, five are in New England. New Hampshire in particular has more per capita overdose deaths than anywhere but West Virginia. In 2012, the state had 163 such deaths, a majority of them (as elsewhere in the country) from heroin and prescription opioids. In 2015, the state had nearly 500 deaths, the most in its history. In Manchester, its largest city, the police seized more than 27,000 grams of heroin that year, up from 1,314 grams a year earlier. In certain neighborhoods, a single dose of heroin can cost less than a six pack of Budweiser. Waiting lists for treatment programs stretch as long as eight weeks.

Those years spent guarding prisoners, and later kicking down doors, changed Adams’s thinking. So many of the drug users he saw had made one bad decision and then became chained to it, Adams realized. Or they had begun on a valid prescription for pain medication, after an injury, and then grew addicted. When refills grew scarce, they turned to alternatives. Many were no longer even using to get high, only to avoid the agony of withdrawal.

They were teenaged, middle-aged and elderly; they were students, bankers and grocery clerks. They were businesswomen with six-figure salaries and homeless men with shopping carts. Arresting a person like this did no good, because there was always another to replace him or her — and regardless, any jail sentence had limits. Afterward, Adams saw, everyone landed right back where they started.

‘‘We’re not getting anywhere,’’ he told his chief, Christopher Adams (the two men are not related), and his lieutenant. It turned out that they had already reached a similar conclusion. Until recently, Christopher Adams told me, he couldn’t recall ever hearing of a heroin case. ‘‘Now it’s every day,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s a majority. Not just in Laconia. It’s all over.’’ He and his lieutenant sat down to consider what their department might do. It seemed that there were three conceivable approaches to a drug problem: prevention, enforcement and treatment. To accomplish all three would mean regarding drug users, and misusers, as not only criminals. They were also customers who were being targeted and sold to; they were also victims who needed medical treatment. To coordinate all those approaches would require a particular sort of officer.

In September 2014, Eric Adams became the first person in New England — to his knowledge, the only person in the country — whose job title is prevention, enforcement and treatment coordinator. ‘‘I never thought I’d be doing something like this,’’ he told me. ‘‘I learned fast.’’ The department printed him new business cards: ‘‘The Laconia Police Department recognizes that substance misuse is a disease,’’ they read. ‘‘We understand you can’t fight this alone.’’ On the reverse, Adams’s cell phone number and email address were listed. He distributed these to every officer on patrol and answered his phone any time it rang, seven days a week. Strangers called him at 3 a.m., and Adams spoke with them for hours.

The department assigned him an unmarked Crown Victoria, and in it he followed the blips and squawks of a police scanner, driving to the scene of any overdose it reported and introducing himself to the victim, as well as any friends or family he could locate. Residents like these often shrank from the police or stiffened defensively. But when Adams told them that they weren’t under arrest, that he had only come to help, they seemed to sag in relief.

People who work with addicts generally agree that this moment, immediately after an overdose, offers the greatest chance to sway an addict, when he or she feels most vulnerable. ‘‘You’re at a crossroads right then and there,’’ a local paramedic told me. If an addict agreed to Adams’s help, Adams drove him to a treatment facility, sat beside him in waiting rooms, ferried his parents or siblings to visit him there or at the jail or hospital. He added the names of everyone he encountered to a spreadsheet, and he kept in touch even with those who relapsed. Were they feeling safe? Attending support meetings? Did they have a job? A place to sleep?

In the nearly three years since, as overdose rates have climbed across New Hampshire, those in Laconia have fallen. In 2014, the year Adams began, the town had 10 opioid fatalities. In 2016, the number was five. Fifty-one of its residents volunteered for treatment last year, up from 46 a year before and 14 a year before that. The county as a whole, Belknap, had fewer opioid-related emergency-room visits than any other New Hampshire county but one. Of the 204 addicts Adams has crossed paths with, 123 of them, or 60 percent, have agreed to keep in touch with him. Adams calls them at least weekly. Ninety-two have entered clinical treatment. Eighty-four, or just over 40 percent of all those he has met, are in recovery, having kept sober for two months or longer. Zero have died.

On most mornings, Adams arrives at his office well before 9 to answer email. By then, his phone is already chiming. ‘‘I thought when I got this position: Monday through Friday, day shifts, weekends off. I’m going to see my kids and wife more,’’ Adams said, laughing. ‘‘That’s not the case.’’ Pinned to the walls of his office, a windowless room on the second floor of the department, are pamphlets and resource guides for homelessness, peer-support groups and addiction hotlines, as well as a dry-erase board listing drug-treatment centers statewide. In December, when I visited one morning, the floor was cluttered with toys for local families in preparation for Christmas: doll sets, wireless headphones, a pillow the color of sorbet.

As soon as he began the job, Adams researched what social-service organizations the region had to offer and drove to their offices to introduce himself. A few employees at places like these knew one another from previous referrals, but many didn’t, so Adams went about acquainting them. At health conferences, he arrived to the quizzical frowns of social workers and realized that, of some 200 attendees, he was the only police officer. A network gradually sprouted around him. One morning in December, his first call was from Daisy Pierce, the director of a non-profit organization whose doors opened two weeks earlier; Adams is its chairman. Might Adams help her get a teenager into the Farnum Center, a treatment facility in Manchester, an hour south? Adams dialled a pastor he knew, who phoned a recovery coach. ‘‘For the first year and a half, I was the only transportation around here,’’ he told me when he hung up. ‘‘I would drive people down to Farnum all the time.’’

Next, Adams turned to a matter unresolved from the day before: a woman the county prosecutor had phoned about, asking if Adams could find her housing. Until recently, the woman had been staying at a homeless shelter, but that stay had ended and, because she was on probation, with nowhere else to sleep, Adams’s fellow officers had taken her to jail, though they could hold her for only one night. She would be released that day, still with nowhere else to stay. The next 48 hours would be critical, Adams felt. Here was a person who wanted to get sober but for whom the local authorities had little to offer.

From his desk, he dialled a treatment center, then various landlords and non-profit directors he knew. ‘‘Hi, this is Eric Adams over at the Laconia Police Department. I’m calling to see if you have anything. . . . ’’ Then he tried calling back the county prosecutor, tapping his fingers impatiently as the phone rang. When no one answered, he pulled a cellphone from his pocket and looked through it for numbers to dial on his office phone, while scribbling notes on two different legal pads. A cup from Dunkin’ Donuts sat on his desk, but he hadn’t had time to sip from it. After a half-dozen calls, he hung up the phone and sighed. ‘‘This is the biggest problem in the area,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s housing. There are only a handful of landlords that own so many properties.’’ Adams tried to be up front with landlords, and he didn’t blame them for sometimes rebuffing him, because they had to look out for their other tenants. But it meant limited options for a woman like the one he was trying to help.

He swivelled toward his computer and began scrolling through notes. Finding nothing, he rubbed his eyes with frustration, propped his elbows onto his desk and rested his chin on his hands to think. ‘‘Oh! Let me try — I haven’t talked with her in a while.’’ He dialled another number. ‘‘Hi, this is Eric Adams over at the Laconia Police Department. . . . ’’ A moment later, he hung up. ‘‘All right, this is the last one I can think of.’’ He dialled again. ‘‘I was wondering if you had any rentals available for a female. Oh, really? That’d be great.’’ He recited his email address. ‘‘Thank you!’’

Good news?  Adams shook his head. ‘‘Not for a couple weeks.’’ He stood, pushing back his chair, and cursed. Out of the office he strode to make a lap around the building to clear his head, then returned and looked at the clock — 9:40 a.m. He had a meeting at 10 at the local branch of the Bank of New Hampshire to help Pierce, the nonprofit director, apply for a new line of credit for their organization. Halfway to the door, he backtracked to pluck the Dunkin’ Donuts cup from his desk and sipped. ‘‘My coffee’s cold.’’

On a glass table in the bank lobby lay that morning’s copy of The Laconia Daily Sun. ‘‘Drug Sweep in Laconia Results in 17 Arrests,’’ its front page read. Headlines like that had become increasingly common, especially as the drugs themselves changed — first to opiates, then to opioids. They weren’t the same thing, Adams had learned. Opiates are derived from nature, and there are only so many, drugs like morphine, heroin and codeine. By contrast, opioids — though the word is now often used as an umbrella term for all these substances — technically means synthetic drugs like Vicodin, Percocet, fentanyl and OxyContin, all of which were invented in a laboratory.

This is why detectives sometimes encountered new opioids that were 20, 50, 100 times as potent as heroin. In a lab, you can do nearly anything. A dealer, even if he or she knows the difference, rarely bothers labelling, so a dose of so-called heroin might include fractions of nearly anything — meaning, of course, that the potency might be nearly anything. Overdoses happen not just when a person knowingly ingests a large dose but also when he or she ingests a dose of unknown composition.

After the meeting at the bank, Adams’s phone rang, and he vanished briefly. The call was from a woman whose son was arrested on charges of dealing meth. She wanted an intervention and hoped Adams might help. Steering toward the Belknap County jail, past homes spangled with Christmas lights, Adams admitted that he felt wary. He had already met this young man, who wanted nothing to do with him. Still, Adams would try. He never knew when an addict might begin saying ‘‘yes’’ to him. Sometimes this happened quickly: Adams’s phone would ring, and it was someone he met the previous day. ‘‘I’m exhausted,’’ the person would confess. Others waited a year or longer. All that time, they had hung onto his card. ‘‘I think I’m ready now,’’ they said.

Occasionally an addict used similar words even in rebuffing him — ‘‘I don’t think I’m ready yet’’ — a phrase that implicitly acknowledged a problem even as he or she denied one. It was the kind of sign Adams kept on the lookout for. Possibly this moment had come for the young man in jail.

When we arrived, Adams hustled through the drably carpeted lobby, hardly slowing before a receptionist and a guard waved him inside. A half-hour later, he returned, his face tight with frustration, and strode past me to the car without speaking. ‘‘He doesn’t have a problem,’’ he told me. ‘‘That’s what he said. He doesn’t have a problem.’’

Inside, he told me, guards had brought the young man from his cell into a windowed conference room, where he recognized Adams, as Adams predicted. ‘‘You know why I’m here,’’ Adams began gently.  ‘‘You’re trying to be nosy,’’ the man replied.

‘‘If you want to think of it that way, that’s fine.’’ Adams glanced at the young man’s file and explained that the man’s mother had called. ‘‘So I wanted to talk to you a little bit. This is an opportunity for you to get some help.’’ The young man went silent. ‘‘I mean, you got arrested,’’ Adams added, gesturing toward the file.  The man told him that he didn’t do the stuff, just sold it. He didn’t need help.

‘‘O.K.,’’ Adams told him, crossing his arms and leaning forward. Was the young man on any weight-loss program, then? ‘‘Because when I saw you before, to now, you’ve lost a lot of weight.’’ He nodded toward the young man, who was twitching uncomfortably in his chair. ‘‘And you’re all over the place, just sitting there.’’

When the man told Adams he was innocent, Adams reminded him that he was always available and slid him another one of his cards. Adams wished him well, then he asked guards to briefly fetch the woman they were holding overnight — the one for whom Adams was searching for housing — to check in and promise that he was trying.

Even as Adams nosed the Crown Vic out of the parking lot, he couldn’t get the episode out of his head. ‘‘Why won’t you just say, ‘I need this’?’’ he asked aloud, thinking of the young man. ‘‘Your life is going this way. You’ve been arrested. You’re homeless. It’s all drug-related.’’ He sighed. ‘‘The thing I had the hardest time learning was you’re not going to save everyone. That was very hard for me to accept.’’

A common sentiment among the police was that officers interacted with just 5 percent or so of the residents they served. In certain communities, that fraction was smaller. Laconia wasn’t a large town. ‘‘You think, mathematically,’’ Adams began, before pausing, ‘‘why can’t I? Why can’t I fix this?’’

For several miles he steered quietly, past muddied snowbanks. ‘‘It bothers me, but I’ve done what I can do right now. I can’t force him to want help.’’ He turned into the lot of the department and slowed into a parking spot.

‘‘Is there such a thing as an addict you have no sympathy for?’’ I wondered.  Adams considered this, letting the engine idle, and dropped his hands into his lap. Eleven seconds passed in silence. ‘‘I don’t think so,’’ he said finally. ‘‘There are reasons they are the way they are.’’

A kit with Narcan, a nasal spray that blocks the effect of opioids on the central nervous system. CreditNatalie Keyssar for The New York Times

Adams could list, from memory, addicts who had opened their lives to him, had volunteered for treatment, had wept in relief and gratitude. Already I had met two young adults who were newly in recovery and partly credited Adams for the lives they had regained. But those weren’t the names that tormented him.

Inside his office, he noticed two new voice-mail messages. The first was from a woman who read of Adams in the newspaper. ‘‘If you could tell me what to do? I’m more than willing to do whatever I need.’’ Adams scribbled something on a legal pad, then played the second voice mail. The same voice filled the room again, but now it broke into tears. Could Adams please tell her what to do?

Adams jotted another note, then checked his watch. Just past noon. Because he knew the work schedule of the mother of the young man he visited in jail, he knew she would be off soon and expecting his call. ‘‘She’s not going to be happy,’’ he said, mostly to himself. Rubbing his forehead, he sat down and dialed.

In so many towns all across the country, it is difficult to talk about an issue like heroin, not only because there is a stigma or because people worry about sounding impolite, but because everyone calibrates differently, based on neighbors and co-workers they see all day, how much of a problem it is or whether it is a problem at all. There were towns near Laconia — diplomatically, Adams declined to name them — that denied they had any drug crisis, even as the numbers they had showed otherwise. When presented with those numbers, some officials found alternative explanations.

Those were residents from other towns who just happened to cross the border, they argued. This reasoning just contributed to the problem, Adams said. Between 2004 and 2013, the number of New Hampshire residents receiving state-funded treatment for heroin addiction climbed by 90 percent. The number receiving treatment for prescription-opiate abuse climbed by 500 percent. But in terms of availability of beds, New Hampshire ranks second to last in New England in access to drug-treatment programs, ahead of only Vermont. The number who still need treatment is probably much higher. In October 2014, New Hampshire became the second-to-last state in the country to begin a prescription-drug-monitoring program, leaving only Missouri without one.

Engler, who was cautious and businesslike, with slicked hair and a graying goatee, had been mayor for three years, though he had lived in Laconia for almost 17 and owned The Laconia Daily Sun. Over his dress shirt he wore a fleece vest embroidered with the paper’s logo. Engler referred to what was happening in Laconia as ‘‘this so-called heroin epidemic,’’ his tone melodramatic, raising his hands defensively above his head.

‘‘We’re the county seat,’’ Engler told me. ‘‘We’re also the home of the regional hospital. Towns in New Hampshire are extremely close together. I think we tend to get credit for more things than are directly attributable to our residents.’’ Though he thought highly of Eric Adams, he also felt sceptical that heroin deserved to be considered an epidemic, regardless of the statistics. ‘‘When I go to a Rotary Club meeting, I don’t hear people sitting around talking about, ‘Woe is us, everybody’s dying of heroin.’ ’’

Might that be because, in a setting like the Rotary Club, heroin was not a topic of polite conversation?

‘‘There could be something to that,’’ Engler admitted. Still, an overdose death was an overdose death — it would appear in the news that way, and Engler would have heard of it. ‘‘I don’t believe there has been a huge, communitywide reaction to this. There’s not 100 people showing up at City Council meetings saying: ‘You have to do something about this. This is terrible.’ The papers aren’t full of letters to the editor. Not at all. And I think there’s a reason for that. The reason for that is’’ — Engler paused and crossed his arms — ‘‘since we have been in the so-called heroin epidemic in New Hampshire, I don’t believe there has been an instance in the Lakes Region, in Belknap County, where we have had a tragic story involving the son or daughter of someone from a prominent family. All it takes is one, usually. Somebody in Londonderry, some girl who was valedictorian of her class, her dad was a doctor or a lawyer or something like that, overdoses and dies, and suddenly it’s a crisis to everyone in town.’’

That very week, I told Engler, while tagging along with Adams for a meeting at the high school, I’d heard teachers mention a current student, a well-liked senior athlete, a team captain, whose sister had struggled with addiction and who had been open about the experience. Another member of the same graduating class, a girl whose grades ranked her in the top 10, had been walking with a friend in 2012 when a local mother, high while driving to pick up her own child from the middle school, swerved and struck them on the sidewalk. The girl survived. Her friend was killed.

The mayor was unmoved. ‘‘That was oxycodone,’’ Engler said dismissively. ‘‘Here, locally, the heroin epidemic, whatever you want to call it, has not crossed over in any obvious way from the underclass to the middle, middle–upper class.’’

Chadwick Boucher, a former addict and an early client of Eric Adams’s, with his work truck in his father’s yard. CreditNatalie Keyssar for The New York Times

Later that week, another prospective client phoned Adams. ‘‘I’m at wits’ end,’’ the man said. For the woman who needed housing, Adams helped track down a relative, at whose home she could stay until an apartment opened. On Friday evening, two more residents overdosed. Adams intended to visit them. Whether either one would accept Adams’s card, would call him, would enter treatment, would achieve recovery, would some day relapse, Adams couldn’t predict. There were no guarantees in this sort of work.

Early in his tenure, Adams made a presentation to ‘‘some prominent people in the community’’ — he didn’t want to name anyone — and afterward, as much of the room applauded, a man approached to shake Adams’s hand. As he reached out, the man said: ‘‘It’s a really good job you’re doing. I think it’s great. But my opinion is, if they stick a needle in their arm, they should die.’’

‘‘I’m sorry you feel that way,’’ Adams said, startled. ‘‘I’d hope you would feel differently if it was your own family member.’’  But the man shook his head. ‘‘That will never happen.’’

This sort of thing happened all the time when Adams began. Today it happened far less frequently. So many others had grown into Adams’s approach: fellow officers, downtown business owners, the captain at the Belknap County jail. Police officers from around New England and even farther away had phoned or travelled to Laconia to learn what Adams was doing, and whether the model could be replicated. Other towns, independently, had been pressed by the crisis to conceive approaches of their own. Manchester had turned its firehouses into safe stations. Gloucester, across the border in Massachusetts, had a network of community volunteers.

A city as large as Philadelphia or Boston could sensibly implement a PET approach too, Adams’s supervisors argued; a community like that would simply need more than one officer, with each assigned to a geographical area. But the shift this required would be profound, asking departments that for so long had thought mainly of enforcement to think differently. In Adams’s daily work, it was unavoidable that certain values competed. A client might divulge a crime to him, and he would be forced to interrupt her to give a Miranda warning. ‘‘If there is a crime, that individual needs to be held accountable,’’ he said. ‘‘But this is where our prosecutor, our judges, come into play.’’ Some attorneys had expressed discomfort with him and had insisted on being present when he met their clients. ‘‘I’m totally fine with that,’’ he said, ‘‘because it’s an opportunity for me to educate the attorney, to let them know what I do, how I do it, what the processes are.’’ In a role so complicated, with so much at stake, clearly it was vital that the right officer held the job.

In an empty conference room on the first floor of the department, I met a young man named Chadwick Boucher, an early client of Adams’s. The two men hugged when they saw each other, and then Adams disappeared upstairs to make calls while Boucher and I spoke. He was 27, though he had the calm demeanour of someone two or three times as old. As early as middle school, Boucher began sneaking his parents’ liquor, partly to fit in with older boys he admired, he told me. Soon he added marijuana. He played hockey then, and played well — invitations came from showcases in Boston and scouts from Division I colleges, including the University of New Hampshire, a national power. Instead, Boucher quit. It was too much pressure. He finished high school and moved in with a friend, who introduced him to OxyContin.

What followed was difficult to align into a neat chronology. He bounced from one friend’s apartment to another, from Oxy to Percocet and finally, when pills grew scarce, to heroin. There was a criminal distribution charge, probation, two treatment programs that he abandoned, feeling as though he didn’t belong. There were short-term jobs tending bar or waiting tables, collecting pay-checks before inevitably being fired. Suddenly he was high behind the wheel of his father’s Cutlass — not in the road, but in a driveway — startling awake to the police rapping on his window. Then he was at the Laconia police station, in a room with a plainclothes officer named Eric Adams.

‘‘He opened his arms to me,’’ Boucher recalled. It had felt bizarre, sharing the truth with a cop. But things had changed so quickly. Most of his family had stopped returning his calls, and all his friends had vanished. The only people around him now were strangers who shared his addiction, and he didn’t like or trust them. The difference in meeting someone like Adams was obvious. ‘‘He cares about my well-being,’’ Boucher said. ‘‘I needed that.’’

Adams wanted him to call every day, so Boucher called every day. Then every week. He entered another treatment program, and this time he graduated. He was now nearing a year sober. He owned a business and was caught up on his bills. He lived up the road in an apartment and had friends again, some of whom were in recovery, too. They made a point to talk openly about it, to keep an eye out for one another. Some he referred to Adams. He knew that recovery demanded his full attention, that it probably always would. If he lost anything else in his life — an apartment, a business — he lost that one thing only and could do without it. If he lost his recovery, he would lose everything, all at once.

I asked Boucher how he preferred to be named in this article — by only ‘‘Chad’’? Or would he prefer anonymity? But he shook his head. It was important to him to be honest about who he was. He hoped this would send a message to other addicts and to those who encountered them. ‘‘It’s important that people know there’s a way out.’’ Recovery from addiction was an achievable thing and, having discovered this fact, having discovered Eric Adams, Boucher intended to share it. The news might save lives. He knew it was possible that a business client might discover his unflattering past, that he might lose an account or two. ‘‘I’ve come way too far for that,’’ he said.

Source:  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/magazine/a-small-town-police-officers-war-on-drugs 

LOWELL, Mass. — They hide in weeds along hiking trails and in playground grass. They wash into rivers and float downstream to land on beaches. They pepper baseball dugouts, sidewalks and streets. Syringes left by drug users amid the heroin crisis are turning up everywhere.

In Portland, Maine, officials have collected more than 700 needles so far this year, putting them on track to handily exceed the nearly 900 gathered in all of 2016. In March alone, San Francisco collected more than 13,000 syringes, compared with only about 2,900 the same month in 2016. People, often children, risk getting stuck by discarded needles, raising the prospect they could contract blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis or HIV or be exposed to remnants of heroin or other drugs.

Activist Rocky Morrison, of the “Clean River Project,” holds up a fish bowl filled with hypodermic needles, that were recovered during 2016, on the Merrimack River. Charles Krupa / AP

It’s unclear whether anyone has gotten sick, but the reports of children finding the needles can be sickening in their own right. One 6-year-old girl in California mistook a discarded syringe for a thermometer and put it in her mouth; she was unharmed.

“I just want more awareness that this is happening,” said Nancy Holmes, whose 11-year-old daughter stepped on a needle in Santa Cruz, California, while swimming. “You would hear stories about finding needles at the beach or being poked at the beach. But you think that it wouldn’t happen to you. Sure enough.”

They are a growing problem in New Hampshire and Massachusetts — two states that have seen many overdose deaths in recent years.  “We would certainly characterize this as a health hazard,” said Tim Soucy, health director in Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city, which collected 570 needles in 2016, the first year it began tracking the problem. It has found 247 needles so far this year.

Needles turn up in places like parks, baseball diamonds, trails and beaches — isolated spots where drug users can gather and attract little attention, and often the same spots used by the public for recreation. The needles are tossed out of carelessness or the fear of being prosecuted for possessing them.

One child was poked by a needle left on the grounds of a Utah elementary school. Another youngster stepped on one while playing on a beach in New Hampshire.

Even if adults or children don’t get sick, they still must endure an unsettling battery of tests to make sure they didn’t catch anything. The girl who put a syringe in her mouth was not poked but had to be tested for hepatitis B and C, her mother said.

Some community advocates are trying to sweep up the pollution. Rocky Morrison leads a clean-up effort along the Merrimack River, which winds through the old milling city of Lowell, and has recovered hundreds of needles in abandoned homeless camps that dot the banks, as well as in piles of debris that collect in floating booms he recently started setting.

He has a collection of several hundred needles in a fishbowl, a prop he uses to illustrate that the problem is real and that towns must do more to combat it.

“We started seeing it last year here and there. But now, it’s just raining needles everywhere we go,” said Morrison, a burly, tattooed construction worker whose Clean River Project has six boats working parts of the 117-mile river.

Among the oldest tracking programs is in Santa Cruz, California, where the community group Take Back Santa Cruz has reported finding more than 14,500 needles in the county over the past 4 1/2 years. It says it has gotten reports of 12 people getting stuck, half of them children.

“It’s become pretty commonplace to find them. We call it a rite of passage for a child to find their first needle,” said Gabrielle Korte, a member of the group’s needle team. “It’s very depressing. It’s infuriating. It’s just gross.”

Some experts say the problem will ease only when more users get treatment and more funding is directed to treatment programs.  Others are counting on needle exchange programs, now present in more than 30 states, or the creation of safe spaces to shoot up — already introduced in Canada and proposed by U.S. state and city officials from New York to Seattle.  Studies have found that needle exchange programs can reduce pollution, said Don Des Jarlais, a researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital in New York.

But Morrison and Korte complain poor supervision at needle exchanges will simply put more syringes in the hands of people who may not dispose of them properly.

After complaints of discarded needles, Santa Cruz County took over its exchange from a non-profit in 2013 and implemented changes. It did away with mobile exchanges and stopped allowing drug users to get needles without turning in an equal number of used ones, said Jason Hoppin, a spokesman for the Santa Cruz County.

Along the Merrimack, nearly three dozen riverfront towns are debating how to stem the flow of needles. Two regional planning commissions are drafting a request for proposals for a clean-up plan. They hope to have it ready by the end of July.

“We are all trying to get a grip on the problem,” said Haverhill Mayor James Fiorentini. “The stuff comes from somewhere. If we can work together to stop it at the source, I am all for it.”

Source:  http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/americas-heroin-epidemic/discarded-syringes-heroin-crisis-create-health-environmental-problems-n783671  July 2017

As the U.S. is facing its most challenging drug epidemic in history, the need to prevent adolescence drug misuse is imperative. For the past two years, Mentor Foundation USA and George Washington University have piloted an innovative drug prevention peer-to-peer initiative at three high schools in Columbia County, NY. The program, which engages youth through social media is showing some promising results in terms of shifts in attitudes towards drugs and intent to use.

The interactive “multi-media” initiative is called Living the Example (LTE), a program that incorporates messages for prevention specifically designed to counteract the misinformation adolescents have about drugs and alcohol.  Messages are framed to promote the benefits of prevention behaviors. “This approach to branding, an alternative, healthy behavior, or ‘counter-marketing’ as it has been termed in tobacco control, has been highly effective and is recognized as one of the main elements in successful prevention programs, such as in tobacco control,” says Principal Investigator, Dr. Doug Evans, a pioneer in the use of this strategy. Dr. Evans is a Professor of Prevention and Community Health & Global Health, with Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University.

Youth Ambassadors are trained to create LTE branded prevention messages, disseminate them via social media platforms, and engage peers in their preferred social networks, with the intention of increasing peer interaction around the brand’s core messaging.  Positive receptivity to LTE messages was associated with some evidence of reduced self-reported drug use intentions, specifically for marijuana use, and reports of intent to use any drug. Among youth who reported exposure and receptivity to LTE, they reported a significant decrease in marijuana use intentions. The most common overall reason for drug use among all respondents was family stress (81.3%), boredom (40%) and academic stress (40%).

“Findings from the study suggest that peer-to-peer substance use prevention via social media is a promising strategy, especially given the low cost and low burden as an intervention channel, which schools, communities, and prevention programs can use as an approach, even in low resource settings,” says Michaela Pratt, President of Mentor Foundation USA. “Through our international network, Mentor Foundation shares over 20 years of global experience in best prevention practices, and Mentor Foundation USA has always been a pioneer in empowering young people to become their own advocates for drug prevention.”

This program was generously supported by The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Rip Van Winkle Foundation, among local foundations in Columbia County. Mentor Foundation USA is a member affiliate of Mentor International, which was founded in 1994 by Her Majesty Queen Silvia of Sweden and the World Health Organization and is the largest network of its kind for evidence based programs that prevent drug abuse among youth. Collectively, Mentor has implemented projects in over 80 countries impacting more than 6 million youth.  Mentor Foundation USA is a Delaware registered 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

SOURCE http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/200-dc-high-school-students-shatter-the-myths-around-substance-abuse-in-an-innovative-proven

Blue Cross Blue Shield issued a report on the opioid crisis with their data from all members in their commercial plans.  Early in the document, they report a pair of striking numbers.

First, that 21% of members filled a prescription for an opioid in 2015. I’ve heard these kinds of numbers before, but I never get numb. That’s 1 in 5 members, despite growing attention to excessive prescribing of opioids.

Second, a 493% increase in diagnosis of opioid use disorders over 7 years. My reaction is that this has to reflect changes in coding or diagnostic practices rather than the population. It’s implausible that there was an increase this large in the number of people with an opioid use disorder.

The document then devotes a great deal of attention to opioid prescribing.

Toward the end, there are a couple of graphics that caught my attention.

First, a map showing rates of opioid use disorders.

Then, this:

Though critical to treating opioid use disorder, the use of medication-assisted treatments (e.g., methadone) does not always track with rates of opioid use disorder (compare Exhibits 10 and 11). For example, New England leads the nation in use of medication-assisted treatments but it has lower levels of opioid use disorder than other parts of the country

So . . . they note that New England has average rates of opioid use disorders, yet they have high rates of utilization of medication-assisted treatment. This caught my attention because New England has higher rates of overdose, as depicted in the CDC graphics below.

Number and age-adjusted rates of drug overdose deaths by state, US 2015

Statistically significant drug overdose death rate increase from 2014 to 2015, US states

(It’s worth noting that BCBS is not among the top 3 insurers in Maine or New Hampshire, but they are the biggest in Massachusetts and Vermont.)

It begs questions about what the story is, doesn’t it?

I don’t presume to know the answers.

§ What was the sequence of events for the high OD rates and the utilization of MAT? And, what impact, if any, has the expansion of MAT had on overdose rates?

§ Is the BCBS data representative? (This brand new SAMHSA report suggest that the data about use is representative.)

§ We know that opioid maintenance meds reduce risk of OD, but we also know that people stop taking these meds at high rates. Does this imply that, in the real world, these meds end up providing less OD protection than hoped?

§ What are the policies and practices of the other insurers in the state?  (For example, we know that Anthem [the largest insurer in Maine and Vermont] recently ended prior authorization requirements for MAT. It’s not clear how restrictive they had been. They also are attempting to institute reformsto address the fact that, “only about 16 to 19 percent of the members taking the medications for opioid use disorder also were getting the recommended in-person counseling.”)

§ Are there regional differences in drug potency that explain this?

Let’s hope that more insurers follow suit and share their data.

Source:   https://addictionandrecoverynews.wordpress.com/2017/07/16/blue-cross-blue-shield-publishes-major-opioid-report/

An UdeM study confirms the link between marijuana use and psychotic-like experiences in a Canadian adolescent cohort. Credit: © Syda Productions / Fotolia

Going from an occasional user of marijuana to a weekly or daily user increases an adolescent’s risk of having recurrent psychotic-like experiences by 159%, according to a new Canadian study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

The study also reports effects of marijuana use on cognitive development and shows that the link between marijuana use and psychotic-like experiences is best explained by emerging symptoms of depression.

“To clearly understand the impact of these results, it is essential to first define what psychotic-like experiences are: namely, experiences of perceptual aberration, ideas with unusual content and feelings of persecution,” said the study’s lead author, Josiane Bourque, a doctoral student at Université de Montréal’s Department of Psychiatry. “Although they may be infrequent and thus not problematic for the adolescent, when these experiences are reported continuously, year after year, then there’s an increased risk of a first psychotic episode or another psychiatric condition.”

She added: “Our findings confirm that becoming a more regular marijuana user during adolescence is, indeed, associated with a risk of psychotic symptoms. This is a major public-health concern for Canada.”

What are the underlying mechanisms?

One of the study’s objectives was to better understand the mechanisms by which marijuana use is associated with psychotic-like experiences. Bourque and her supervisor, Dr. Patricia Conrod at Sainte Justine University Hospital Research Centre hypothesized that impairments in cognitive development due to marijuana misuse might in turn exacerbate psychotic-like experiences.

This hypothesis was only partially confirmed, however. Among the different cognitive abilities evaluated, the development of inhibitory control was the only cognitive function negatively affected by an increase in marijuana use. Inhibitory control is the capacity to withhold or inhibit automatic behaviours in favor of a more contextually appropriate behaviour. Dr. Conrod’s team has shown that this specific cognitive function is associated with risk for other forms of substance abuse and addiction.

“Our results show that while marijuana use is associated with a number of cognitive and mental health symptoms, only an increase in symptoms of depression — such as negative thoughts and low mood — could explain the relationship between marijuana use and increasing psychotic-like experiences in youth,” Bourque said.

What’s next

These findings have important clinical implications for prevention programs in youth who report having persistent psychotic-like experiences. “While preventing adolescent marijuana use should be the aim of all drug strategies, targeted prevention approaches are particularly needed to delay and prevent marijuana use in young people at risk of psychosis,” said Patricia Conrod, the study’s senior author and a professor at UdeM’s Department of Psychiatry.

Conrod is optimistic about one thing, however: the school-based prevention program that she developed, Preventure, has proven effective in reducing adolescent marijuana use by an overall 33%. “In future programs, it will be important to investigate whether this program and other similar targeted prevention programs can delay or prevent marijuana use in youth who suffer from psychotic-like experiences,” she said. “While the approach seems promising, we have yet to demonstrate that drug prevention can prevent some cases of psychosis.”

A large youth cohort from Montreal

The study’s results are based on the CIHR-funded Co-Venture project, a cohort of approximately 4,000 adolescents aged 13 years old from 31 high schools in the Greater Montreal area. These teens are followed annually from Grade 7 to Grade 11. Every year they fill out computerized questionnaires to assess substance use and psychiatric symptoms. The teens also complete cognitive tasks to allow the researchers to evaluate their IQ, working memory and long-term memory as well as their inhibitory control skills.

To do their study, the research team first confirmed results from both the United Kingdom and Netherlands showing the presence of a small group of individuals (in Montreal, 8%) among the general population of adolescents who report recurrent psychotic-like experiences. Second, the researchers explored how marijuana use between 13 and 16 years of age increases the likelihood of belonging to the 8%. Finally, they examined whether the relationship between increasing use of marijuana and increasing psychotic-like experiences can be explained by emerging symptoms of anxiety or depression, or by the effects of substance use on developing cognitive abilities.

Source:  University of Montreal. “Marijuana and vulnerability to psychosis.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 5 July 2017. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170705104042.htm.

A study by researchers from the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) that followed a sample of almost 2000 Victorian school children from the age of 14 until the age of 35 found that social disadvantage, anxiety, and licit and illicit substance use (in particular cannabis), were all more common in participants who had reported self-harm during adolescence.

The longitudinal study, the Victorian Adolescent Health Cohort Study, was the first in the world to document health-related outcomes in people in their 30s who had self-harmed during their adolescence. Until now, very little has been known about the longer-term health and social outcomes of adolescents who self-harm.

Published in the new Lancet Child and Adolescent Health journal, the study found the following common elements:

· People who self-harmed as teenagers were more than twice as likely to be weekly cannabis users at age 35

· Anxiety, drug use, and social disadvantage were more common at age 35 among participants who had self-harmed during their teenage years. While most of these associations can be explained by things like mental health problems during adolescence and substance use during adolescence, adolescent self-harm was strongly and independently associated with using cannabis on a weekly basis at age 35 years

· Self-harm during the adolescent years is a marker for distress and not just a ‘passing phase’

The findings suggest that adolescents who self-harm are more likely to experience a wide range of psychosocial problems later in life, said the study’s lead author, Dr Rohan Borschmann from MCRI. “Adolescent self-harm should be viewed as a conspicuous marker of emotional and behavioural problems that are associated with poor life outcomes,” Dr Borschmann said.

The study found that anxiety, drug use, and social disadvantage were more common at age 35 among participants who had self-harmed during their teenage years. “While most of this can be explained partly by things like mental healthduring adolescence and substance use during adolescence, adolescent self-harm was strongly and independently associated with using cannabis on a weekly basis at age 35 years,” Dr Borschmann said.

Interventions during adolescence which address multiple risk-taking behaviours are likely to be more successful in helping this vulnerable group adjust to adult life.

More information: Rohan Borschmann et al. 20-year outcomes in adolescents who self-harm: a population-based cohort study, The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health (2017). DOI: 10.1016/S2352-4642(17)30007-X

Source:  https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-07-twenty-year-outcomes-adolescents-self-harm-substance.htm

Residential treatment has received a lot of criticism and scepticism over the last several years, especially for opioid use disorders. (Some of it is deserved. Too many providers are hustlers and others provide little more than detox with inadequate follow-up. Of course, many of the same criticisms have been directed at medication-assisted treatment. But, that’s not what this post is about.)

At any rate, the Recovery Research Institute recently posted about a study looking at completion rates for outpatient and residential treatment.   The study looked at A LOT of treatment admissions, 318,924.  Residential completion rates appear to have surprised a lot of people:

Results: Residential programs reported a 65% completion rate compared to 52% for outpatient settings. After controlling for other confounding factors, clients in residential treatment were nearly three times as likely as clients in outpatient treatment to complete treatment.

But, what really surprised some readers was this:

Compared to clients with a primary alcohol use disorder:
Clients with marijuana use disorder were only 74% as likely to complete residential treatment.
Clients with an opioid use disorder were 1.29x MORE likely to complete residential treatment.

So opioid users were much more likely to benefit from residential treatment compared to alcohol users. . . .

We speculate that for opioid abusers, the increased structure and cloistering of residential treatment provide some protection from the environmental and social triggers for relapse or that otherwise lead to the termination of treatment that outpatient treatment settings do not afford. Indeed, environmental risk characteristics in drug abusers’ residential neighbourhoods, such as the presence of liquor stores and indicators of concentrated disadvantage at the neighbourhood level, have been found to be associated with treatment non-continuity and relapse.

Such environmental triggers may play a particularly substantial role for those addicted to opioids compared to those seeking treatment for marijuana abuse. Since opioid users have the lowest raw completion rates in general, this finding that residential treatment makes a greater positive difference for opioid users than it does for any of the other substances represents an important result that merits further investigation. Given the current epidemic of opioid-related overdoses in the U.S., our results suggest that greater use of residential treatment should be explored for opioid users in particular.

For the differences between residential and outpatient, they say the following:

In general, residential treatment completion rates are usually higher compared to outpatient settings, but what is particularly noteworthy is that even after controlling for various client characteristics and state level variations, the likelihood of treatment completion for residential programs was still nearly three times as great as for outpatient settings. Given the more highly structured nature and intensity of services of residential programs compared to outpatient treatment, it is understandable that residential treatment completion rates would be higher. It requires far less effort to end treatment prematurely in outpatient settings com-pared to residential treatment.

Given the strong association between treatment completion and positive post-treatment outcomes such as long term abstinence, the large magnitude of difference between outpatient and residential treatment represents a potentially important consideration for the choice of treatment setting for clients.

Source:  https://addictionandrecoverynews.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/opioid-users-complete-residential-at-higher-rates

Canada’s Liberal government has stated that marijuana will be decriminalized by July 2018. This means the removal, or at the least, a lessening of laws and restrictions related to marijuana use and associated pot services.

While people on both sides of the debate have strongly held and differing opinions, the protection of youth is an area of agreement.

Marijuana, also known as cannabis, has been illegal in Canada for close to 100 years. Marijuana can’t be produced, sold or even possessed. If caught, one faces fines, jail time or both.

Despite this, Canada has one of the highest rates of cannabis use in the world. Over 40 per cent of Canadians have used cannabis during their lifetime. Furthermore, studies conducted by Health Canada indicate that between 10.2 and 12.2 per cent of Canadians use cannabis at least once a year.

As changes in cannabis regulation occur, new research has been conducted. The findings are, in a word, alarming. According to published research, someone who uses marijuana regularly has, on average, less grey matter in the orbital frontal cortex of the brain. Other research has found increasing evidence of a link between pot and schizophrenia symptoms.

A major factor is the potency of cannabis, which has gone through the roof for the last two decades. In the 1960s, THC levels were reported to have been in the one-to-four-per-cent range. Research reported in the science journal, Live Science, in 21014 indicates that marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient, THC, in random marijuana samples, rose from about four per cent in 1995 to about 12 per cent in 2014. In a more-recent article, the leader of the American Chemical Society stated: “We’ve seen potency values close to 30-per-cent THC, which is huge.”

Despite these clear and increasing dangers, the Government of Canada’s stated objective is to “legalize, strictly regulate and restrict access to cannabis for non-medical purposes.” Unfortunately, the government’s approach has serious flaws.  Most importantly, their approach lacks protections for youth, despite this being another specifically stated objective of the Canadian government’s new law.

While supporters of cannabis often compare it with alcohol, a legal, but carefully controlled substance in Canada, there is an important difference. Cannabis is commonly consumed by smoking, which leads to significant, second-hand affects and, as a result, second-hand structural changes in the brain.

In my neighbourhood, cannabis-users in one house, taking advantage of the decreasing legal response to cannabis in B.C. these days, happily smoke the substance on their back deck, only to have the blue smoke waft across to the trampoline next door, where my younger brother and his friends often play.

The government’s proposed new policy actually encourages youth exposure by making it legal for citizens to grow cannabis in their homes. There is no mention of the protection of children living in those residences, where cannabis is grown, consumed and potentially sold.

The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police makes this point well. They warn that allowing home-grown cultivation will fuel the cannabis black market and that the four-plant limit proposed under the legislation is impossible to enforce. The chiefs further note that home cultivation is a direct contradiction to the government’s promise to create a highly regulated environment that minimizes youth access to the drug.

The biggest concern that the youth of Canada should have about the government’s approach to decriminalization is, however, drug quality — potentially with deadly results. The opportunity for tampering is obvious. A high school friend and classmate of mine casually uses cannabis and landed in the hospital for a few weeks. She believes that some of the cannabis she used was laced with another substance. I often wonder how close my friend came to dying like another of our fellow students at New Westminster Secondary School.

Canada isn’t ready for the decriminalization of cannabis. The Canadian government, and our health-care and legal systems, aren’t fully prepared for the problems and long-term effects that’ll have serious consequences for our youth. Important issues, including second-hand effects and basic safety, not to mention enforcement and legal implications, have yet to be fully defined and planned for. The federal government’s plan to decriminalize pot, as it stands now, doesn’t provide enough protection for Canada’s young people.

Mitchell Moir is a Grade 12 student at New Westminster Secondary.

Source:  http://vancouversun.com/opinion/op-ed/opinion-proposed-cannabis-policy-doesnt-do-enough-to-protect-youth   23rd June 2017