The Real Danger of Cannabis
It is folly to legalise a drug that is known to leave users with permanent damage to their ability to reason, argues Susan Greenfield, the distinguished expert on brain processes
Now that those anxious to look cool can puff cannabis freely in the street without fear of arrest, perhaps those of us who have argued that relaxing the laws on cannabis is irresponsible and dangerous should retreat gracefully behind our chintz curtains. Yet the downgrading of the classification of cannabis perpetuates the same tired old myths and the same serious problems.
Take the myth that cannabis is \’just the same as\’ alcohol. A glib yet logical riposte might be that if the drugs are truly identical why not just stick with the booze? What is the distinct appeal of cannabis that can be ignored in equating the two drugs? Such sophistry is inappropriate because alcohol and cannabis work on the brain and body in very different ways. Alcohol has a range of non-specific actions that affect the tiny electrical signals between one brain cell and another; cannabis has its own specialised chemical targets, so far less has a more potent effect. Moreover, although drinking in excess can lead to terrible consequences, there are guidelines for the amount of alcohol that constitutes a \’safe\’ intake. Such a calculation is possible because we know alcohol is eliminated relatively quickly from the body.
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With cannabis, it is a different story. The drug will accumulate in your body for days, if not weeks, so, as you roll your next spliff, you never know how much is already working away inside you. I challenge any advocate of cannabis to state what a \’safe\’ dose is. Until they do, surely it is irresponsible to send out positive signals, however muted?
Another notion is that cannabis is less harmful than cigarettes. I\’m not sure how this idea came about, certainly not as the results of any scientific papers. We do know cannabis smoke contains the same constituents as that of tobacco: however, it is now thought that three to four cannabis cigarettes a day are equivalent to 20 or more tobacco cigarettes, regarding damage to the lining of the bronchus, while the concentration of carcinogens in cannabis smoke is actually higher than in cigarettes.
And if cannabis were \’just the same\’ as alcohol and cigarettes, why are people not taking those already legal drugs for the much-lauded pain-relief effects? After all, another case for the relaxation of the laws on cannabis is the \’medical\’ one that it is an effective analgesic. But there is a world of difference between medication prescribed in a hospital, where the cost-benefit balance tips in favour of pain relief, compared to a healthy person endangering their brain and body needlessly.
Even the most loony of liberals has not suggested tolerance for morphine or heroin abuse, because they are prescribed clinically as potent painkillers. And think about it: if cannabis brings effective relief from pain, then how does it do so? Clearly by a large-scale action on the central nervous system.
Further wishful thinking is that, because cannabis doesn\’t actually kill you, it is OK to send out less negative legal signals, even though the Home Secretary admits that the drug is dangerous. Leaving aside the issue that cannabis could indeed be lethal, in that the impaired driving it can trigger could well kill, there is more to life than death. It is widely accepted that there is a link between cannabis and schizophrenia: as many as 50 per cent of young people attending psychiatric clinics may be regular or occasional cannabis users. The drug can also precipitate psychotic attacks, even in those with no previous psychiatric history. Moreover, there appears to be a severe impairment in attention span and cognitive performance in regular cannabis users, even after the habit has been relinquished. All these observations testify to a strong, long-lasting action on the brain.
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for complete story The real danger of cannabis | Drugs | The Guardian
China and synthetic drugs: Geopolitics trumps counternarcotics cooperation
…China is also the principal supplier of precursor chemicals for methamphetamine production in East Asia and Mexico. Between the 1990s and mid-2010s, meth was produced in southern China both for domestic consumption and export to Australia and throughout East Asia. At first Beijing was defensive and dismissive about any claims that China was the supply source of Australia’s meth epidemic. But as time passed, it grew willing to cooperate with Canberra. Sino-Australian cooperation culminated in the creation in November 2015 of a joint bilateral counternarcotics task force, Task Force Blaze, which scored important interdiction successes, repeatedly seizing large shipments of meth from China to Australia and leading to arrests of important drug traffickers in both countries. China also shut down domestic production of meth.
But meth precursors and pre-precursors from China continue to head to illicit drug producers in Southeast Asia, such as Myanmar. Chinese drug smuggling networks, such as the Triads, then distribute meth across Asia and to Australia and New Zealand. Mexican drug cartels also source their precursors from China and sell finished meth to the U.S. and elsewhere.
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CHINA’S INTERNATIONAL DRUG CONTROL POLICIES
Fentanyl scheduling and China’s adoption of stricter mail monitoring has created some deterrence effects. Instead of finished fentanyl being shipped directly to the U.S., most smuggling now takes place via Mexico. Like with meth, Mexican criminal groups source fentanyl precursors, and increasingly non-scheduled pre-precursors in China, and then traffic finished fentanyl from Mexico to the U.S.
Some Chinese sellers specifically cater to Mexican drug traffickers. As investigative C4ADS research showed, Chinese sellers bundle uncontrolled fentanyl and meth precursors and common cocaine fillers in their Spanish-language advertisements and highlight their capacities to “clear customs in Mexico.”
For complete article China and synthetic drugs: Geopolitics trumps counternarcotics cooperation (brookings.edu)
The Super Bowl of Sin Taxes
State legalizations of sports betting and marijuana prove government is about taking, not helping.
Daniel Henninger Feb. 16, 2022 WALL STREET JOURNAL
Some 31 million Americans are estimated to have bet more than $7 billion on some aspect of Sunday’s Super Bowl LVI, including who won the coin flip and whether Odell Beckham Jr. would score a touchdown. For Joe Biden and the Democrats, Rams-Bengals was a win-win, a sure bet.
Odds are that no small amount of the $7 billion wagered came out of the megabillions Mr. Biden’s mailed out as stimulus checks. Winning a wager is more fun than paying the rent, but when you win more than chump change, Mr. Biden gets a piece of the action. Gambling winnings of $600 or more are taxable as federal income, reportable on IRS Form W-2G and subject to withholding at 24%. The state in which you placed the winning bet also wants its piece. In the new world of legal sports betting, no one will get more hops through the end zone than Uncle Sam.
I don’t expect the Biden White House or Nancy Pelosi will be heard saying that the cost of their pandemic legislation will be close to “zero” because some recipients’ gambling payouts will be coming back to the Treasury as taxes. No doubt some vestigial sense endures that it’s unseemly for the government to make money from an activity with a dark underbelly.
The proliferation of TV commercials by betting services such as DraftKings and FanDuel was enabled after the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that a federal law banning sports betting in most states was an unconstitutional infringement of states’ rights. Since then, 30 states and the District of Columbia have legalized betting on sports. New Jersey, the U.S. sports-bet capital, took in $200 million in gambling tax revenue last year.
Recreational marijuana is now legal in 18 states (and, naturally, Washington, D.C.), often after the voters’ approval in referendums. A Pew poll last year found 60% support for medical and recreational marijuana use. New York’s Sen. Chuck Schumer, one of the most reliable weather vanes in politics, has just given legal pot his enthusiastic support. He plans to introduce a federal legalization bill in April. “As majority leader, I can set priorities,” Mr. Schumer said last week. “This is a priority for me.” It has a cannabis tax that starts at 10% and rises eventually to 25%.
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I’d say we are learning something useful from the concurrent political approval of taxable gambling and marijuana. We are learning that much of contemporary American government, which typically defends itself as providing for society-enhancing public “needs,” is in fact now amoral.
After decades of pretense from government about its good intentions, ultimately it doesn’t much care one way or the other anymore, no matter whether the issue is social welfare spending inside the Build Back Better bill or legalizing a psychoactive drug. Any previous pro-social purpose has been overwhelmed by the crude need simply to maximize revenue no matter the source, especially in such open-spigot Democratic spending states as New York, New Jersey and Illinois. In California, legal betting has been blocked by several casino-operating Native American tribes.
We are legalizing marijuana just as opioid addiction and overdoses from “recreational” fentanyl skyrocket. The phenomenon of gambling addiction is well established, and since sports betting is often a repetitive, screen-based activity, the dopamine hook surely will kick in for some percentage of sports bettors just as TikTok has pulled many adolescent girls into its can’t-stop video world, as described recently in this newspaper.
In virtually all the legalizations of marijuana or gambling, the politicians include language about creating programs for “prevention” and rehabilitation. It’s boilerplate, a pro forma caveat that rarely delivers.
Recall how for decades proponents of deinstitutionalizing the severely mentally ill have promised programs to provide needed meds to patients outside a hospital setting. Well, look at the streets of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, filled with the disorganized, often violent mentally ill and drug addicts.
The burden of any damage done to individuals from on-demand marijuana or betting will be borne by their desperate families. Governments will get the one thing they want–a steady stream of tax revenue from both users and the commercial cannabis and sports-bet interests piling in to exploit these compulsions.
When more people understand that the goal of governments today is to take rather than help, as they piously claim, perhaps we can have a sensible discussion about whom to tax and for what purposes.
For complete story go to Wall Street Journal Opinion
UK: A Generational Shift In The Demand For Drugs?
What does the 2021 drug strategy say about drug prevention?
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Demand reduction
Drugs prevention or demand reduction are typically the most difficult to attain objectives in any drug strategy and many commentators argue that it is not possible for government to control their citizens’ demand for drugs — particularly within a global economy with drugs easily available for purchase in a wide variety of ways. Nonetheless, most governments seem compelled to try and much of the media coverage leading up to the publication of the strategy was about how the government intended to reduce demand for “hard” drugs among middle class users by rescinding passports for those found in possession of Class A substances. Here’s the government’s objective as set out in the strategy:
We will work with experts to encourage people to change their attitudes and behaviour by making sure that drug users are fully aware of the significant risks they are running, including the harms that their use is causing to themselves and others. For those who nevertheless choose to continue with their drug use, there will be swift, certain and meaningful consequences which will be felt more strongly than today and will escalate for those who continue to offend. Drugs are harmful to society and no one is above the law. We will also step up activity aimed at protecting vulnerable children and young people so that they are less likely to start taking drugs.
From harm to hope page 46
The strategy breaks demand reduction down into three separate objectives:
- Building a world-leading evidence base
- Reducing the demand for drugs among adults
- Preventing the onset of drug use among children and young people
Reducing demand amongst adults
This is the section which generated much of the media with its tabloid-focused language: “The strategy is unashamedly clear on our position: illegal drug use is wrong and unlawful possession of controlled drugs is a crime”.
- A “bold, new approach” will promote:
- The introduction or expansion of tough out-of-court disposals.
- A re-introduction of test on arrest.
- The piloting of substance misuse problem solving courts.
- The police will also send messages to discourage drug use to drug dealers’ customers via any seized phones.
The strategy also promises a White Paper (“in due course”) to look at new demand reduction measures: “At this stage nothing is off the table; for repeat offenders we will explore options to change their behaviour via civil sanctions and court orders. This could include, where relevant and proportionate, curfews or the temporary removal of a passport or driving licence, measures that would escalate depending on the severity and frequency of the offences. We will also consider going further than before in fining people who break the law, including consulting on options to increase the level of fines to maximise the deterrent and dissuasion of financial penalties”.
Preventing use by children and young people
The strategy gives details about evaluating current drug education in schools before going on to talk about the Start for Life and Supporting Families programmes designed to support vulnerable families. There is also welcome news about £560m funding in the Youth Investment Fund to try to redress the massive disinvestment in youth services over the last decade.
Conclusion: The government has planned to publish annual progress reports on the implementation of the strategy so that we can judge its impact. In the next post in this series, I will focus on the structures and systems the government intends to use to implement the new strategy.
For complete article A generational shift in the demand for drugs? – Russell Webster
In both 2015 and 2016, U.S. life expectancy fell from the previous year. A single-year drop had not happened in 22 years, and two consecutive drops had not occurred in more than 50 years. This sharp reversal in the national trend toward longer lives is widely understood to be connected to the opioid epidemic that began in the 1990s. The best kept secret about the epidemic, however, is how much of it — arguably most of it — resulted from Federal policy changes initiated by both Democrats and Republicans.
Opioids include![\"\"](\"http://www.dontlegalizedrugs.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CartoonDeathEatingOpioids.jpg\")
prescription drugs like oxycodone as well as illicitly manufactured drugs like heroin and fentanyl. Since 2000, the Federal government has increased subsidies on both types of opioids and cut taxes on illicit opioids.
Regardless of whether the government increases subsidies or cuts taxes, the result is lower prices paid by the opioid consumer, making opioid addiction more affordable. The CEA’s recently released 2020 Economic Report of the President estimates that, adjusted for inflation, out-of-pocket prices for prescription opioids fell by a factor of five between 2001 and 2010. (CEA’s price data is graphed below.) More recently, the quality-adjusted price of illicit opioids fell by at least a factor of two.
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Studies have shown that opioids and other addictive substances obey the law of demand: lower prices mean more demand. If nothing else, the reduced prices for opioids have sharply increased the number of people who can afford an opioid addiction. CEA estimates that lower prescription opioid prices explain 31 to 83 percent of the increase in the death rate from 2001 to 2010 involving prescription opioids. This estimate does not include the additional effects of subsidies for benzos or hospitals, or the effects of reduced heroin prices since 2010.
Without the new subsidies supporting opioid addiction, the number of fatalities from opioid overdoses would be significantly lower, and maybe it wouldn’t even be called an “epidemic.”
Casey B. Mulligan, former chief economist at the Council of Economic Advisers (2018-2019) and a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the author of The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.
For complete article go to How the Government Subsidized Our Opioid Addiction | Economics21
A forgotten (but not gone) approach to drug addiction recovery may yield results today.
Not forgotten, just unobserved, or worse, ignored.
Therapeutic Community models didn’t start with Synanon (though they were in the seminal space) but did get both famous and then infamous in their lifespan — thus the noticeable profile
Synanon failed for a number of disturbing reasons, very much including its own self-sabotaging sub-cultural issues. What it did do was predict what we are now seeing in many large cities run by pro-drug or Harm Reduction only advocates, where personal agency, responsibility, and the very humanity these entail, is allowed to ebb away and the inevitable drug ghetto’s grow.
This is not the fault of ‘conservative’ or ‘institutionalization’ values; No, this the result of a meaninglessness that denies a sound anthropological context that enables sustainable purpose, relationship and the healthy activities needed for these to flourish. In their stead we get what the founder of Synanon predicted decades ago.
Synanon, Dederich proclaimed, would promote “a lifestyle that makes possible the kind of communication between people that must exist if we are to prevent this planet from turning into uninhabitable ghettos.”
Again, the model of Therapeutic Communities was not invented by Synanon, nor did they die with them.
Such communities in various customized iterations are thriving and growing actively on both large and small scales, such as…
Smaller scales like
As Synanon made communalism a form of therapy, the group reinvented institutions like education, work, marriage, child-rearing and leisure. At its best, it was a place where recovering addicts did not have to choose between the pursuit of sobriety and the fullness of life. Some brought their families into Synanon or started new ones. They trained as lawyers, accountants, artists, carpenters, salespeople, truck drivers and more. They experimented with new social, political and economic structures for governing their community.
For more A forgotten approach to drug addiction recovery may yield results today – The Washington Post
Over 850 babies born with drug, alcohol addiction in Scotland: Report
The symptoms include uncontrollable trembling, hyperactivity, blotchy skin, and high-pitch crying.
Since 2017, among the total number of babies born in Scotland, more than 850 showed signs of drug addiction because of their mother abusing legal or illegal substances such as cocaine, heroin, codeine, marijuana, and alcohol during pregnancy.
These figures were revealed on Thursday by the Scottish Liberal Democrat Party.
The statistics were compiled through freedom of information requests made to Scotland´s health boards, and the party´s health spokesperson, Alex Cole-Hamilton, described them as “utterly heartbreaking”.
The opposition lawmaker blamed the problem on the ruling National Scottish Party for cutting funding to drug programs and urged the autonomous government to take radical action. He considered that this is meant “not just to help people struggling with drug misuse today but for future generations too.”
The largest number of babies born with the neonatal abstinence syndrome was recorded in Lothian with 434, followed by Greater Glasgow and Clyde with 143 and Grampian with 118.
The symptoms caused by drugs passing from the mother to her fetus’ bloodstream during pregnancy include uncontrollable trembling, hyperactivity, blotchy skin, and high-pitch crying.
It is worth noting that Scotland recorded 1,339 drug-related deaths in 2020, by far the highest drug death rate recorded by any country in Europe.
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MEDIA RELEASE
Annual Youth Drug Use Survey Funded by NIH Finds Youth Marijuana Use Stubbornly High
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Marijuana is the only substance to show increases among current past year users; Medical marijuana states also show worse outcomes, significantly for 12th graders
Today, the annual Monitoring the Future (MTF) Survey, a record of national youth drug and alcohol use and attitudes data, conducted by the University of Michigan and funded by the National Institutes of Health, found that due to the pandemic causing decreased social interactions, youth drug use rates have dropped among almost all substances–with marijuana standing out as an outlier. Among current users, marijuana is the only substance to report increases, in both student rates of marijuana vaping and smoking (Figure 1).
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Figure 1. Change in Drug Use Since Pandemic Among Past Year Users, All Grades
Not even the pandemic could stop marijuana use rates from rising among current users,\” said Dr. Kevin Sabet, president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM). \”This data is extremely concerning and should act as a wake-up call for policymakers and the public. Legalization is having the effect that the industry wants: more, younger users using more of its THC super-charged substance.\”
This year\’s MTF data showed that although from 2020 to 2021 there were fewer initiates of marijuana, that declining rate was significantly less drastic than the rate for other substances. Annually, youth use of any illicit drug other than marijuana decreased by nearly 40%, whereas marijuana/hashish use decreased by only 27%. For past 30-day use, youth use of any illicit drug other than marijuana decreased by 35%, whereas marijuana/hashish use decreased by less than 25%. Finally, for daily use, youth use of alcohol decreased by over 60%, whereas marijuana use decreased by 24%.
\”This data explodes the myth that fewer kids get their hands on marijuana once it is legalized, commercialized, and promoted,\” said Sabet.
Additionally, students in each grade living in states with medical marijuana laws reported different attitudes toward pot than those who live in states without medical marijuana. Across the board, they reported higher past-year use rates, greater availability, lower risk perception, and lower rates of disapproval. Those rates were significant among 12th graders (Figure 2).
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Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) is a nonpartisan, non-profit alliance of physicians, policy makers, prevention workers, treatment and recovery professionals, scientists, and other concerned citizens opposed to marijuana legalization who want health and scientific evidence to guide marijuana policies. SAM has affiliates in more than 30 states.
For more information about marijuana use and its effects, visit www.learnaboutsam.org.
Media Contact: Jordan Davidson
T: (203) 295-5020 E: [email protected]
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