Cannabis can affect teenagers so severely that they end up three years behind their classmates, study finds
- Results concluded from an investigation of 4,000 Canadian school children
- Researchers found cannabis more toxic for youngsters’ brains than alcohol
- Persistent use of the drug seriously affected basic reasoning skills
Regularly smoking cannabis can affect teenagers so severely that they end up three years behind their classmates in terms of brain development, a landmark study has found.
The results of the investigation, which involved almost 4,000 secondary school children in Canada, led researchers to conclude cannabis is more toxic for youngsters’ brains than alcohol.
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For complete article Canada Failing Their Children with Cannabis Chaos!
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\”It isn\’t your grandpa\’s weed,\” former addict says
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SPRINGFIELD – While the trendy emphasis may be on \”freeing\” people to legally use cannabis, one former addict says the whole \”legalize pot\” movement now expected to be embraced by Illinois\’ Democrat-controlled General Assembly is really all about selling THC.
\”This isn\’t your grandpa\’s weed,\” Ben Cort says in a TedTalk from Colorado.
In 2012, Colorado legalized cannabis and kickstarted a multibillion dollar industry with every product imaginable — brownies, gummy bears, granola bars, even lube! But to say that we’ve “legalized cannabis” is mistaken — we’ve commercialized THC.
\”The vast majority [of pot] being sold today really isn\’t cannabis,\” Cort says.
For more got to AINT YOUR GRANDPAS WEED
GETTING A PSYCHIATRIST AND BREAKING CYCLE OF HOMELESSNESS
By H. Swan
Part 3 of a 3-Part Series Read Part1 and Part 2. This entire story first appeared on the MomsStrong.org website.
After doing some research, I told K he should get psychologically evaluated for social security disability because— if he was mentally ill —he could get benefits and could afford a place to live. I reasoned he would cost the government a lot less by not being in jail or prison.
I’M NOT CRAZY!
I looked up all kinds of things about mental illness. We were warned by many people that getting benefits for mental illness was becoming harder and harder, and even the people who really deserved it weren’t getting it. But I was desperate. I was in LA and he was outside in Seattle, where it was cold and wet, living underneath a freeway and completely out of his mind. He needed psychiatric medication. But the law is that, unless he’s harmful to himself or other people, treatment is voluntary. I could not force him into anything. So I had to coax him.
Getting treatment when he didn’t think he needed it
After several common-sense arguments to try to get him to see the doctor–all of which he shot down–I realized that trying to reason with a crazy person was crazy. I finally had to trick him. I told him he could “scam” the government, that his “insanity” would just be a ruse so he could finally get his fair share from The Man. In his delusional mind, this made sense to him.
Months later, he showed up at his appointment with the psychiatrist. His doctor was a woman whom he trusted immediately. He said that he told her things he had never admitted to anyone in his whole life. Like he heard voices. And that he was under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. I never guessed this about him. Ever. Paranoid, I assumed. Out of touch with reality, of course. But his diagnosis of schizophrenia explained his years-long inability to see his own illness.
Anosognosia is essentially when a person doesn’t recognize they are sick. It is seen in stroke victims, persons with Alzheimer’s disease, and is present in some people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Luckily, he received his SSI benefits and, as I mentioned, continues to receive psychiatric treatment. He moved to California and lived with our mom for a few years.
Living in a sober group home
Currently, he is now in a sober group home where, as I also mentioned, they take good care of him. He goes to dual diagnosis meetings, twelve step meetings, and has made a lot of friends.
While he was living with our mom, I began to find studies and articles that showed a correlation between teen pot use and adult mental illness. I found Moms Strong, The Other Side of Cannabis & Smart Approaches to Marijuana. I was overwhelmed by what I was learning. The studies seemed to describe my brother’s life: from his inability to do well in his studies, to his addiction to pot which transferred seamlessly to cocaine, to his devastating mental illness. I asked K if he wanted to write something to warn other young people from making his same mistakes. He agreed. He said if he ever thought pot would make him go crazy he never would have tried it.
For more go to Stop the Insanity
Biden\’s fix for cannabis could become a big problem
On one hand, Biden\’s shift on pot could potentially alleviate a lot of concerns that businesses and investors had about the growth of cannabis in the United States were he to become the 46th president.
On the other hand, the former vice president\’s solution to the cannabis conundrum in the U.S. is worrisome, as it might create more problems than it solves. When questioned by CNN, Bates went on to add:
He [Biden] would allow states to continue to make their own choices regarding legalization and would seek to make it easier to conduct research on marijuana\’s positive and negative health impacts by rescheduling it as a schedule 2 drug.
While this probably seems like a harmless, if not positive, statement by the Biden campaign, rescheduling marijuana to Schedule II from Schedule I — which would acknowledge that the drug has recognized medical benefits — could be a nightmare.
For starters, moving the drug from Schedule I to Schedule II wouldn\’t alleviate the issues U.S. pot businesses have to contend with regarding Section 280E of the tax code. Section 280E disallows businesses that sell a controlled substance (either Schedule I or II) from taking normal corporate income tax deductions, save for cost of goods sold, which is often a small percentage of revenue. This usually leads to profitable marijuana companies paying exorbitant effective tax rates to Uncle Sam. Without the ability to take deductions available to so-called normal businesses, weed companies could struggle to hire new workers and expand.
However, the bigger issue at hand is that a Schedule II classification opens a new can of worms for the U.S. cannabis industry. Being recognized as having medical benefits would put the medical marijuana industry under the strict supervision of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA could tightly control the marketing and labeling of medical marijuana packaging (which is already being done in our neighbor to the north by Health Canada), and it may very well oversee the manufacture of cannabis crops, ensuring cannabinoid consistency.
For complete article go to Biden on Pot
EMISSIONS: Colorado struggles with marijuana\’s huge carbon footprint
John Fialka, E&E special correspondent ![\"man](\"https://www.eenews.net/image_assets/2016/04/image_asset_11407.jpg\")
Colorado, where recreational marijuana is legal, holds an annual marijuana \”holiday\” every April. But federal officials say the growing popularity of indoor grow houses in particular is compromising the state\’s ability to meet ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets. Photo courtesy of AP Images.
Second of a two-part series on the carbon and energy footprint of Colorado\’s marijuana industry. Click here to read the first part.
DENVER — Colorado, which gets 60 percent of its electricity from coal-burning power plants, has set some of the more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets in the United States. It wants to cut emissions from its power plants 38 percent by 2030. Denver, its largest city, has a plan to cut 80 percent of all of its emissions by midcentury.
One of the immediate problems of the target-setters, however, is that the state lacks plans from its fastest-growing, most energy-hungry users: owners of indoor marijuana farms.
This city has over 300 of them, from the licensed, cavernous warehouses downtown where workers wear sunglasses and sunblock to prevent damage from banks of 1,000-watt lightbulbs to an unknown number of clandestine \”grow houses\” in the suburbs, often rented homes whose tenants sometimes hide their massive electricity use by stealing it before it hits their meters.
What\’s worrisome about this to Colorado and other states planning to follow its pioneering example by legalizing both medical and recreational marijuana is that the power needs of the industry are helping to push electricity use up, not down.
Last year, Denver announced its plan to accelerate its timetable and cut electricity uses by 7 percent in three years. But then it was informed by the electric utility that serves it, Xcel Energy Inc., that the city\’s electricity use was rising by 1.2 percent a year and that 45 percent of that increase appeared to be coming from indoor pot-growing.
That led to the formation of the Cannabis Sustainability Work Group, composed of city officials and representatives from the marijuana-growing industry, to see if something can be done to keep Denver\’s greenhouse gas reduction goals from becoming unreachable. Emily Backus, a city Department of Environmental Health official, said the group has met monthly since January. She found the pot growers both interested and wary.
They are interested because electricity is a \”huge percentage of their operating costs,\” explained Backus. They are wary because private consultants who sell them various expensive \”energy-saving\” lamps for growing marijuana plants \”have put a lot of bad products on the market that didn\’t produce the yield or the potency that they need.\”
Moving indoors for higher THC
In the increasingly competitive pot industry that has blossomed here, more growers are moving inside to get the brilliant lighting and controlled temperatures needed to get multiple crops, production that helps them pay their huge electricity bills.
As for potency, Denver growers aim for a product that contains 17 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive drug that produces the high. Some members of Denver\’s city council are trying to cap the THC level at 15 percent, but growers of the city\’s exotic, genetically modified plants say they need the higher drug potency to remain competitive.
![\"Budding](\"https://www.eenews.net/image_assets/2016/04/image_asset_11406.jpg\")
Budding marijuana plants, some the size of small trees, sit under the blazing lights and elaborate ventilation and air conditioning systems in a Colorado grow house after a raid by federal, state and local law enforcement officers. Photo courtesy of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
\”Growers would be forced to destroy their strains and start over, something that\’s not economically or practically feasible,\” said Michael Elliott, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group, which functions as its trade association.
By contrast, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which worries about the addictive and mental health problems that stronger pot poses to children and teenagers, the THC content of pot-growing in the 1990s ran around 5 percent.
But producing more potent pot pushed the industry\’s electricity use to 2.2 percent of Denver\’s energy use in 2014, according to the city. Meanwhile, Denver is trying hard to meet its 2020 sustainability goal, which requires it to cut fossil fuel consumption by 50 percent from 2012 levels.
A commonly discussed energy-reduction remedy would be to require growers to use powerful light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs, but Backus, who is co-chair of the Cannabis Sustainability Work Group, said growers complain that the light from the bulbs doesn\’t \”produce the potency that the grower is looking for.\”
For complete article https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060036287
Marijuana’s Ecological Impact https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k6WO1diLrI&t=5s
The utterly staggering cost to environment (and on energy and water consumption) by Cannabis production (driven by demand just to get high??) is never raised by pro-weed lobby! No true environmentalist would promote pot!
Check out
Integral Ecology Research Centre, www.IERCecology.org and
Silent Poison https://silentpoison.com
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Britain\’s cocaine crisis: Use doubles in last seven years as one in 50 Londoners snorts the class A drug on a daily basis and purity soars
- Londoners are taking almost 200,000 doses of cocaine daily, worth £700,000
- Research by King\’s College London also found that class A drug\’s purity is rising
- London and Bristol are among the top cities in Europe for the use of cocaine
- Analysis of waste water also found some traces of cocaine in fish and shrimps
The use of cocaine in Britain has doubled in seven years, as one in 50 Londoners currently snorts the drug daily.
An analysis of Britain\’s waste water, carried out by forensic scientists at King\’s College London, has also proved that the purity of the class A drug has gone up, hitting a record high.
Tests of the drug in sewage show Londoners are taking almost 200,000 doses of cocaine every day, which amounts to about £700,000.
Concentrations in wastewater are 900 milligrams per 1,000 of the population per day, which rose from 392 milligrams per 1,000 in 2011.
The average cocaine dose through smoking or snorting is 40 milligrams, meaning that, in a population of nine million people, one in 50 is taking the class A drug on a daily basis.
The research also found out that the use of cocaine in London is almost as high during weekdays as it is at the weekend.
For complete story go to Nose Candy Clowns!
Ireland ‘sleepwalking’ into liberal cannabis regime, warn doctors
Campaigners say medicinal cannabis being used as ‘Trojan horse’ towards legalisation
May 2019 Paul Cullen
Plants at a medical cannabis company in Israel. Photograph: Amir Cohen/File Photo/Reuters
Ireland is “sleepwalking” into the legalisation of cannabis on the back of a campaign of misinformation about the drug, according to doctors who have set up a new group to campaign against liberalisation.
The initial 20 members of the Cannabis Risk Alliance include the head of the College of Psychiatrists, Dr John Hillery, and former president of the Irish Medical Organisation Dr Ray Walley.
Criticising the “one-sided debate” on cannabis, the doctors say society has “taken its eye off the ball” in relation to the harmful effects of the drug.
In their practice, they say they are treating ever-growing numbers of patients suffering a range of side effects from abusing the drug.
Suicides, epileptic seizures, psychosis and “wasted lives” are some of the cannabis-related complications Dr Walley, a GP in Dublin’s north inner city, says he comes across.
“I’m concerned about the dishonest debate out there. Society, politics, the medical fraternity, too — we’re sleepwalking into this. The only place you read about cannabis now is in the business sections,” he says.
The growing commercial interests behind cannabis internationally are “hijacking the truth” about the drug in the same way the cigarette industry did about its products in the mid-20th century, he says.
In a letter sent to the Irish Times, the group is critical of the “blurred boundaries” between debates on decriminalisation and legalisation of cannabis, and medicinal cannabis.
Decriminalisation
The Government said last year it was considering decriminalising possession of small quantities of cannabis and other drugs. Three countries, and many US states, have gone further and legalised it.
“Decriminalisation and ‘medicinal cannabis’ campaigns have proved to be effective Trojan horse strategies on the road to full legalisation and commercialisation elsewhere,” the doctors say in a letter published in The Irish Times today.
“These campaigns have convinced people we have a policy problem, not a drug problem,” says Dr Bobby Smyth, a child psychiatrist and addiction specialist who points to a 200 per cent increase in cannabis dependence among young people in the last decade.
For complete story https://www.irishtimes.com/news/health/ireland-sleepwalking-into-liberal-cannabis-regime-warn-doctors-1.3897656