FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 17, 2019

BREAKING: Another Study Links Marijuana and Psychosis

(Alexandria, VA.) – Today, a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry further links the use of marijuana with the onset of severe mental illness such as psychosis and schizophrenia. “This study is big as it is just one more in the scientific pile on connecting today’s potent pot with psychosis,’ said Dr. Kevin Sabet, president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana and a former senior drug policy advisor to the Obama Administration. The evidence is mounting; marijuana legalization is a failed experiment and continuing to expose people to the substance is paving the way for the next public health crisis.”The study followed over 7,600 individuals for a mean of 84 months. Among these, the cumulative risk for progression to schizophrenia was 11.3%. The risk for onset of mental illness was highest among marijuana users and lowest for alcohol abusers. This is just the latest in a string of data highlighting marijuana’s harmful impact.

From previous, recent research we know that the use of high potency can increase the risk of psychosis five-fold.

In addition, a study released just this week found that young people living near a marijuana dispensary are more likely to have used the drug in the past month and hold favorable opinions of the substance.  “At a time when the supporters of Big Marijuana are calling on Congress to legalize the drug, the science continue to point to marijuana being a harm to health and safety,” continued Dr. Sabet. “It is time to put commonsense and public health above the corporate greed of Big Pot.
About SAM

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. Media

Contact: Colton Grace (864) 492-6719 E: [email protected]

Spice vape: Warning as nine collapse in Greater Manchester

16 July 2019

Image copyright GREATER MANCHESTER DRUG ALERTS PANEL Image caption Chemicals tested in the liquids were found to contain the same chemicals found in Spice

Nine young people have collapsed after unwittingly using a vaping liquid containing the synthetic drug Spice, it has emerged.

Health agencies have warned people to avoid products sold as \”THC vape juice\”, \”THC vape pens\” or \”THC oil\”.

Greater Manchester Drug Alerts Panel said it knew of six incidents since February where people had been taken to hospital after inhaling the drug.

Greater Manchester Police is investigating.

The vaping liquid, marketed as a \”natural cannabis\”, has also been sold as \”cannabis oil\” or \”cannabis vape juice\”, the panel said.

It was sold as both a 10ml bottle and a ready-filled cartridge.

Two incidents in the Oldham area led to five school-age children collapsing and being rushed to hospital.

Michael Linnell, who coordinates Greater Manchester Drug Alerts Panel, said the liquids contained the same chemicals as found in Spice.

• Spice \’putting pressure\’ on police
• Police \’helpless\’ against drug Spice
• Child sick after \’spice sweets\’ sold

The panel, which brings together police, NHS, local authorities and drug user support agencies, said incidents occurred in Rochdale, Oldham and Bury between February and June.

Manchester has faced problems with the widespread use of the drug in recent years, with one MP describing the situation as a \”crisis\” and asking for government help.

Also known as Mamba, Spice was formerly referred to as a \”legal high\”, before it was outlawed in 2016.

For More https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-49001669

You can\’t regulate criminal activity.

As was predicted by anti-marijuana groups, prop 64 resulted in a growth of marijuana black market –which now operates in plain sight and sometimes in concert with the legal market.

New Frontier Data, a Denver-based company that studies cannabis trends, estimates there are $70 billion in illegal sales nationally – seven times the size of the legal market. This means the legal market is “capturing only a fraction of total demand.”

A review of Weedmaps listings in mid-June found 229 illegal dispensaries in LA. The Los Angeles Police Department estimates the number is closer to 259, but no one knows exactly how many are in business. There are 186 licensed dispensaries in LA.

Law enforcement is trying and failing to enforce the law against these illegal dispensaries and the black market in general with little success.

The Los Angeles Police Department has accompanied city officials on operations in which they shut off utilities at illegal stores. Nevertheless, about 55% of the stores reopen within a week, said Detective Vito Ceccia.

“When we go out and conduct any type of enforcement effort, when we leave that location it is shut down,” Ceccia said. “It doesn’t mean it’s going to be shut down the next day. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be shut down in a week.”

\”You can\’t regulate a criminal activity. You can only enforce against it. The marijuana industry has always been criminal and having regulations will do nothing to convince criminals to abide by the law.\”
-Scott Chipman, Vice President of AALM

\”Let what is happening in California be a warning to every other state. We urge every city and county in California and every state in the country that has not already allowed commercial marijuana businesses to keep fighting against this drug dealing. Regulation does not and will not work.\”
-Carla Lowe, President of AALM

Media Contact
Southern California, Scott Chipman   619 990 7480 [email protected]
Northern California, Carla Lowe         916 708 4111 [email protected]

ALEX BERENSON EDITORIAL SUGGESTS PARENTS STEP UP TO THE PLATE

ALEX BERENSON EDITORIAL SUGGESTS PARENTS STEP UP TO THE PLATE

This was supposed to be the year full cannabis legalization in the U.S. moved much closer to being a reality.  Instead it has been a disaster for advocates.  Although Illinois legalized recreational use on the final day of its legislative schedule, a half-dozen other deep-blue states that were expected to legalize failed to follow – including New York.

Advocates want to believe legalization on their terms, with few restrictions on marketing and limits potentially as low as 18, remains inevitable.  Polls show that between 62% and 66%of Americans support legalization.  But cannabis supporters are wrong, and the pushback against marijuana has only begun.

Why?  Because teen use is on the rise.  And the experience of the 1970s – the last time cannabis advocates believed they might win full national acceptance – shows that the strongest voices against cannabis use aren’t police officers or even physicians.  They’re parents. …As teenage use of cannabis exploded during the 1970s, many parents became deeply concerned. The drug seemed to damage their children’s motivation, memory and grades. …

Not coincidentally, in states where legalization failed this year, wealthier suburban lawmakers proved a crucial political stumbling block.  Because of the cost of vaping, the habit seems to be more attractive to upper-middle class kids, and their parents are nw seeing marijuana’s real risks up close.  As that knowledge spreads, the media is likely to take a more skeptical stance, and national support for legalization will shrink.

Alex Berenson, The Wall Street Journal As published in the Chicago Tribune, July 3, 2019

Alex Berenson is the author of Tell Your Children the Truth about Marijuana, Mental Health and Violence and 12 other books.

For more https://poppot.org/2019/07/05/alex-berenson-editorial-suggests-parents-step-up-to-the-plate/

Meth is back in King County, bigger than it’s been for decades

June 18, 2019

In recent years, more meth than ever has been smuggled into Washington in secret compartments. This meth was found in a tire seized in the greater Tacoma, Washington, area “within… (DEA) More

By  Scott Greenstone Seattle Times Project Homeless engagement editor

Jay walked into the emergency room at Swedish on First Hill in April and said he was trying to quit meth. The 45-year-old Seattle resident and returning student had been off the drug only a few days. His esophagus, chest and stomach were a river of pain, and he didn’t know why.

“I just wanted somebody to tell me what was wrong with me. I didn’t know and I was so sick,” said Jay, who asked that his last not be used. “I sat in the emergency room for hours, and I got nothing.”

Jay left, and went back to the drug.

The era of the American meth lab is over a decade gone, yet pure, cheap meth is back and bigger than ever in Western Washington. When Seattle residents point to needles proliferating on sidewalks, they usually say heroin’s to blame; however, a bigger proportion of those needles in recent years is actually from people injecting meth, according to King County syringe exchange surveys.

Now, more people are dying in Washington from methamphetamine than during the height of the last meth wave in the early 2000s. Rates of death from meth were four times higher in 2017 than in 2005, right before Congress passed regulations to stop its production. The increase has almost entirely taken place in the last seven years.

In recent years, more meth has been smuggled into Washington in secret compartments, such as the one hidden in this tire, seized in the Tacoma area. (DEA)

“A lot of people have thought of methamphetamine as something that just went away and had been overtaken by the opioid problem,” said Sterling McPherson, head of the Analytics and Psychopharmacology Laboratory at Washington State University. “I didn’t really hear people talking about methamphetamine until relatively recently.”

But while heroin has dominated the drug conversation in King County, meth has crept up and quietly surpassed it. Last year, for the first time, more people in King County died with meth in their systems than heroin – 164 versus 156. (That doesn’t include illicit fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, which was found in another 65 dead people last year.)

“There’s a lot more meth, it’s incredibly pure, and it’s cheap,” said Caleb Banta-Green, director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute at the University of Washington. “In our interviews, we’re hearing people say, ‘I don’t even really want to use meth, but when I go buy my heroin, they just give it to me.’ It’s that cheap and available.”

Opioid-related fatalities in King County have started to level off with the proliferation of the rescue drug NarCan and treatment medications, but unlike heroin, meth addiction can’t be treated with replacement drugs such as buprenorphine.

Even more distressing: As the meth epidemic has risen to stand alongside the heroin epidemic, more people shaking heroin addiction find themselves still hooked on meth. Meth use among people who were getting treatment – like methadone – for opioid use virtually doubled, from 19% in 2011 to 34% in 2017.

To many, meth will seem like a drug of the past. The state logged reports of nearly 9,500 clandestine meth labs from 1999 to 2005, the peak years of the home-cooked-meth epidemic. That year,  Congress passed laws limiting retail over-the-counter sales of drugs like pseudoephedrine, which “mom and pop” meth labs used to make meth. Since 2011, there have been just 212 meth-lab sites reported statewide, according to the state Department of Ecology.

But drug cartels south of the American border stepped in to fill demand, making more and more meth in “superlabs” in Mexico and shipping it, along with heroin and fentanyl, up Interstate 5 – hidden away in tires, paint cans and hidden compartments in semi-trucks – according to Keith Weis, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Pacific Northwest division.

In one four-week period this spring, the DEA seized 400 pounds of meth in the Pacific Northwest.

For complete article https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/meth-is-back-its-bigger-than-ever-in-king-county-and-theres-no-treatment/?utm_source=marketingcloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning+Brief+6-18-19_6_18_2019&utm_term=

What Big Pot doesn’t want you to know about costs of legalizing marijuana

June 13, 2019

Lobbyists and lawmakers everywhere like to make bold-but-reality-challenged claims to advance legislation. But in its push to legalize commercial weed, the marijuana industry has taken legislative myth-peddling to brazen new lows.

New York’s lawmakers have a few days left to show the nation they won’t be duped. Here are some of the tallest of the tales that have swirled around Albany, thanks to the pot industry:

First, the industry claims high-potency commercial weed will provide social justice and economic opportunity for minority communities.

African American legislators in New Jersey didn’t fall for that, and their New York counterparts shouldn’t, either. The pot industry – backed by Big Tobacco and wealthy, mostly white Wall Street investors – is looking to line its own pockets. These multinational forces aren’t getting into pot to help minority entrepreneurs.

Remember when liquor stores and smoke shops were clustered in largely low-income and minority neighborhoods? Pot shops selling high-potency drugs engineered to create regular customers won’t lead to any more empowerment and opportunity for urban populations than clustered vice stores did.

There has been no quantifiable positive economic impact for such communities in legalized states. In fact, taxpayers and communities have had to shoulder an estimated $4.50 in social costs for every $1 in revenue, according to researchers at the Centennial Institute.

Second, the pot industry wants people to think that marijuana laws are the cause of gross racial disparities in arrest and incarceration rates. The argument: Legalize pot to reduce minority arrests.

That’s another canard. No state that passed legalization has seen a drop in prison populations. Studies out of Colorado and Washington show African Americans and Hispanics are still twice as likely to be arrested for marijuana. In Washington, DC, marijuana arrests nearly tripled after legalization.

A study funded by the National Institutes of Health showed that the density of marijuana dispensaries was linked to increased property crimes. Researchers found that in Denver, neighborhoods adjacent to marijuana businesses saw more property crimes each year than neighborhoods without a marijuana shop. Of course, crime and other social pathologies related to pot hit lower-income areas first and hardest.

People shouldn’t get locked up for having a joint in their pocket. Legislators can look to advance criminal justice reforms concerning possession of small amounts of marijuana without throwing the doors open to a predatory industry that will have significant and irreconcilable impact on public health. That’s real social justice.

Third, the industry is peddling the message that pot revenue will do everything from fix the subways to help schools in minority neighborhoods.

Jack-pot! Colorado surpasses $1B in marijuana tax revenue

But former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said it best when he called pot revenue “a drop in the bucket.” Former California Gov. Jerry Brown agreed, noting that “we knew there wasn’t going to be any money.” Revenues aren’t going to swell in New York, either. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s best estimate for pot revenue is $300 million annually, paltry for a state with annual expenditures of $175 billion.

The industry never talks about costs. Law enforcement costs to handle public safety concerns are estimated to range from $820.3 million to more than $1 billion over the first five years for new training and equipment, according to a report from my group, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, and the New York State Sheriffs’ Association. That’s to say nothing of the price of mental-health and other social-services at the local level.

A Washington state traffic study of 2,355 drivers found that only six months after introducing commercial pot, daytime drivers testing positive for THC almost tripled. Traffic fatalities that involved drivers intoxicated with marijuana in Colorado rose by 86% between 2013 and 2017, with roughly one-fifth of all traffic fatalities involving a driver testing positive for marijuana by 2017.

Finally, pro-pot activists want lawmakers to think that this is about smoking some harmless joints. They ignore the fact that the industry is investing billions in high-potency edible and vaping products that are up to 99% THC. There is a growing body of medical and scientific research that demonstrates prolonged exposure to THC is leading to drops in IQ, psychosis, suicide, depression, schizophrenia and other disorders.

Immediately following commercialization in Colorado, calls to poison centers skyrocketed 80%, because high-potency THC is a dangerous drug.

New York’s leaders shouldn’t buy the spin or allow themselves to be pawns in a corporate-funded social experiment for profit. They need to get this right.

For complete story https://nypost.com/2019/06/13/what-big-pot-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-costs-of-legalizing-marijuana/

Cannabis laws up in smoke: Campaigners fear drug is being unofficially legalised after it emerges up to NINE out of ten people caught in possession are not charged with crime

• Across England, an average of just 22 per cent of possession offences led to a criminal charge last year — down from 27 per cent in 2017
• In Cornwall and Devon only 14 per cent of cases of possession led to a charge
• Anti-drugs campaigners say figures show drug is being \’unofficially legalised\’

By SOPHIE BORLAND and IAN DRURY FOR THE DAILY MAIL PUBLISHED: 17 June 2019

Nine in ten cannabis users and growers in some areas of England are being let off without a criminal charge, a Mail investigation reveals.

Despite a string of warnings over the drug’s harmful long-term effects, many are getting away with a simple telling-off.

Figures show the proportion of users who are charged for possession of cannabis has fallen sharply.

Across England, an average of just 22 per cent of possession offences led to a criminal charge last year — down from 27 per cent in 2017.

But in Devon and Cornwall, only 14 per cent of cases led to a charge, while in Leicestershire it was 13 per cent and in Surrey just 12 per cent.

The remainder either escaped with a caution or a fine, an official ‘warning’ or ‘community resolution’ such as attending an educational workshop, or they had their case dropped altogether.

Separate figures for cannabis cultivation — a more serious crime than possession — show that some forces are also charging as few as one in ten offenders.

Last night, anti-drug campaigners said the figures showed the drug was being ‘unofficially legalised’ by police chiefs, and branded the approach as an ‘encouragement to break the law’.

The news comes after Northamptonshire Police revealed on Friday that officers had found a cannabis factory in what used to be a Gala Bingo hall that could have produced drugs worth about £2.8 million each year.

Cannabis has been linked to depression, suicidal thoughts and psychosis, which causes hallucinations. Many fear it acts as a gateway to harder drugs, too.

Only last month the head of the NHS, Simon Stevens, said Britain risked making a ‘big mistake’ by relaxing the laws on cannabis.

Despite the warnings, some police chiefs are actively calling for the drug to be legalised, while others have urged officers to be even more lenient with offenders. Home Office figures on cannabis possession show that in Northamptonshire — where the cannabis factory was discovered — just 18 per cent of offences led to a formal charge in 2018. In North Yorkshire, the rate was just 14 per cent.

In Hampshire, Staffordshire and West Yorkshire, more than half of possession crimes in 2018 led to a ‘community resolution.’ Usually this involves officers confiscating the substance and giving individuals a telling-off. Avon and Somerset Police have half-day education workshops for first-time offenders.

In March, the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, Dave Thompson, revealed how officers were even avoiding issuing ‘warnings’ for cannabis offences, so as not to ‘criminalise’ young people.

Additional data from 20 police forces in England, obtained using Freedom of Information laws, reveal that just 22 per cent of cannabis production crimes in 2018 led to a charge — down from 32 per cent the previous year.

West Yorkshire Police said only 10 per cent of cases led to a charge. In Durham, the rate is 11 per cent.

The dangers of \’skunk\’

Cannabis has been linked to depression, suicidal thoughts and psychosis, which causes hallucinations and delusional thoughts.

A major Lancet study in March found that use of ‘skunk’ — high-strength cannabis — increased the risk of psychosis by five-fold. Oxford University research the previous month showed that teenagers who smoked the substance were a third more likely to develop depression.

NHS figures obtained by the Mail revealed that nine-year-old children had been treated in hospital for harms caused by cannabis. They were among 3,400 under-19s admitted last year with mental and behavioural disorders directly related to the substance. Cannabis is also believed to be a gateway drug to heroin, cocaine and LSD.

David Green, director of the think-tank Civitas, said: ‘These figures provide even stronger evidence that the police have unofficially legalised cannabis in many parts of the country. Many police leaders want to legalise cannabis. Some are openly in favour of changing the law, while others turn a blind eye.

‘The tragedy is that they are doing so at a time when doctors are increasingly worried about the impact on the mental health of cannabis users, and especially our young people. Modern forms of cannabis, such as skunk, are at least twice as potent as varieties that were available in the 1970s.’

Mary Brett, of charity Cannabis Skunk Sense, said: ‘There’s a law there and it’s the police’s job to enforce it. It’s counter-productive and kids know they will be let off with a caution or a warning.’

David Raynes, of the National Drug Prevention Alliance, added: ‘It’s just stupid and irresponsible — an encouragement to break the law.’

For complete story https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7147651/Cannabis-laws-smoke-Campaigners-fear-drug-unofficially-legalised.html