Articles

08/26/2019

In the study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers surveyed almost 50,000 adolescents in Arizona. The researchers found that among teens who used any form of cannabis, 72 percent had experience with the more potent products.

Overall, the researchers found that 33 percent of the teens had tried some form of pot and 24 percent said they had used concentrated forms. The likelihood of a student using cannabis rose with age: 20 percent of the eighth graders said they’d used the drug, compared to 35 percent of the 10th graders and 46 percent of the 12th graders.

Similarly, 15 percent of the eighth graders, 25 percent of the 10th graders and 33 percent of 12th graders said they had used cannabis concentrates. Concentrate users had the highest rates of having tried other drugs.

08/15/2019

Just last year, the Parents Opposed to Pot lobby group tried to sound the alarm on the link between marijuana and mass shootings, compiling a list of mass killers it claims were heavy users of marijuana from a young age, from Aurora, Colo., shooter James Holmes and Tucson, Ariz., shooter Jared Loughner to Chattanooga, Tenn., shooter Mohammad Abdulazeez.
You can’t address the youth mental health crisis without considering the effect of rising teen marijuana use.
Among American teenagers, the drug’s “daily use has become as, or more, popular than daily cigarette smoking” according to the National Institute of Health’s 2017 Monitoring the Future study.
Another BMJ study estimated that “13 percent of cases of schizophrenia could be averted if all cannabis use were prevented.” That’s more than 400,000 Americans who could be saved from a fate worse than death.

08/15/2019

Toxicologist Peter Stout, CEO and president of the Houston Forensic Science Center, said the toxicology report showed low levels of anti-anxiety drugs and marijuana in Kelley's system.

08/08/2019

08/01/2019

Their observations and initial research show that marijuana use may affect patients’ responses to anesthesia on the operating table — and, depending on the patient’s history of using the drug, either help or hinder their symptoms afterward in the recovery room.
If pot users indeed need more anesthesia, are there increased risks for breathing problems during minor procedures? Are there higher costs with the use of more medication, if a second or third bottle of anesthesia must be routinely opened? And what does regular cannabis use mean for recovery post-surgery?

08/01/2019

Conclusions: RWID and DUI are significantly associated with greater alcohol and marijuanause over time. This study highlights that teens may be at higher risk for problem substance use in the future even if they ride with someone who is impaired. Prevention and intervention efforts for adolescents need to address both driving under the influence and riding with an impaired driver to prevent downstream consequences.

07/29/2019

FDA has determined that your “CBD Lotion,” “CBD Pain-Relief Patch,” “CBD Tincture,” and “CBD Disposable Vape Pen” products are unapproved new drugs sold in violation of sections 505(a) and 301(d) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (the FD&C Act), 21 U.S.C. 355(a) and 331(d). Furthermore, these products are misbranded drugs under section 502(f)(1) of the FD&C Act, 21 U.S.C. 352(f)(1). FDA has also determined that your “Bido CBD for Pets” products are unapproved new animal drugs that are unsafe under section 512(a) of the FD&C Act, 21 U.S.C. 360b(a), and adulterated under section 501(a)(5) of the FD&C Act, 21 U.S.C. 351(a)(5)

07/24/2019

Cannabis legalization has led to significant health consequences, particularly to patients in emergency departments and hospitals in Colorado. The most concerning include psychosis, suicide, and other substance abuse. Deleterious effects on the brain include decrements in complex decision-making, which may not be reversible with abstinence.

ED and urgent care (UC) visits with cannabis-associated International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes or positive urine drug screens for teenagers and young adults have increased since legalization, and the majority require behavioral health evaluation. A subsequent retrospective review by Wang et al. from 2005–2015 identified 4202 such visits for patients 13 to <21 years old to a tertiary-care children’s hospital system. Behavioral health evaluation was obtained for 2813 (67%) and a psychiatric diagnosis was made for the majority (71%) of the visits. 

07/17/2019

Cannabis is known to induce DNA damage by several mechanisms including damage to chromosomes at the time of cell division, dramatic reductions in histone formation which form the core of the nucleosomes around which DNA is twined and are crucially involved in signalling to the transcription and epigenetic machinery to regulate gene expression, alteration of DNA methylation and many other processes 2-6. And genotoxic stress of many types is known to trigger DNA checkpoints and interfere with the normal process of meiotic and mitotic cell division; and are also known to trigger ageing and cellular senescence pathways.
That it has been linked with all four areas, in the context of its many other known harms – respiratory, driving, impaired developmental trajectory, reduction in IQ, hippocampal shrinkage, brain disconnection and immunopathies - implies directly that the cannabis legalization debate itself is non-viable and profoundly and inherently misleading.

07/11/2019

It makes no sense at a time when American youth is suffering from an unprecedented mental health crisis.
And, in all honesty, we cannot rule out a connection between increasing marijuana use, mental illness and the recent spate of mass shootings by disturbed young males.
You can’t address the youth mental health crisis without considering the effect of rising teen marijuana use.
Among American teenagers, the drug’s “daily use has become as, or more, popular than daily cigarette smoking” according to the National Institute of Health’s 2017 Monitoring the Future study.

07/08/2019

• Thousands of businesses, as well as local governments earning tax money off of sales, are now literally invested in that lie.
• “The mantra about how this is a harmless, natural, and non-addictive substance—it’s now known by everybody. And it’s a lie.”
• As for new risks: In many stores, budtenders are providing medical advice with no licensing or training whatsoever. “I’m most scared of the advice to smoke marijuana during pregnancy for cramps,” said Humphreys, arguing that sellers were providing recommendations with no scientific backing, good or bad, at all.
• “The reckless way that we are legalizing marijuana so far is mind-boggling from a public-health perspective,” Kevin Sabet, an Obama administration official and a founder of the nonprofit Smart Approaches to Marijuana, told me. 

06/24/2019

In the four states that were among the first to legalize pot – Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington – crashes were up by as much as 6% compared with neighboring states without legalized recreational weed, according to analysis of collision loss data from January 2012 through October 2017 by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and an October 2018 report done by the Highway Loss Data Institute.

06/23/2019

An alarming finding shows that an estimated 14.8 million drivers report getting behind the wheel within one hour after using marijuana in the past 30 days. The impairing effects of marijuana are usually experienced within the first one to four hours after using the drug.1 And marijuana users who drive high are up to twice as likely to be involved in a crash.2

06/16/2019

Then he started asking them, “do youJUUL?" and their answers changed.

“I wasn’t even asking the right questions, and I think a lot of clinicians still don’t ask the right questions,” Winickoff said. “Once I found out that kids were using, many of them thought that what they were using was not a big deal, that maybe they could stop any time they wanted. Some of them thought that vaping was just water vapor plus some flavor.”

05/31/2019

"If it's not USDA Organic certified, and it's not full panel lab tested, you have no way of knowing what you're getting," said Cranford, who's been producing CBD long before it was en vogue.

"Overseas they use hemp to do cover crops. They use it to purposely suck out the pesticides and heavy metals on soil there so they can plant food crops next," Cranford said. "These crops are being imported into the US and people are making CBD out of it. The really scary part is when you have these contaminants in your plant material, and you make this oil, you're concentrating it."

After thousands of tests, 70 percent of products were found "highly contaminated" with heavy metals like lead and arsenic, herbicides like glyphosate (the active ingredient in RoundUp) and a host of other contaminants including pesticides, BPA and toxic mold.

Virginia Commonwealth University, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and other medical journals have published studies that reflect similar outcomes to the hundreds of tests done by Ellipse Analytics, citing contamination, false labeling and false claims.

05/20/2019

Contrary to what you've been told over and over, it is not a preposterous assertion that marijuana is a gateway drug to cocaine, heroin, meth and such. Not everybody who smokes marijuana graduates to harder narcotics, true. But most of those who do go on to the harder stuff start off with weed.
Video on Snake Oil

05/05/2019

A Paulding County student collapsed and nearly died after taking a hit off a vape pen. The dramatic scene unfolded in front of a class when the South Paulding High School student collapsed and stopped breathing.
 
*** This is exactly why we need to raise the age for purchasing these products to 21... give our youth a chance.

05/01/2019

The study found that a number of brain disorders and behaviors predicted accelerated aging, especially schizophrenia, which showed an average of 4 years of premature aging, cannabis abuse (2.8 years of accelerated aging), bipolar disorder (1.6 years accelerated aging), ADHD (1.4 years accelerated aging) and alcohol abuse (0.6 years accelerated aging). Interestingly, the researchers did not observe accelerated aging in depression and aging, which they hypothesize may be due to different types of brain patterns for these disorders.

04/23/2019

In 2011, just over 5,500 reports were logged by the San Francisco Department of Public Works; in 2018, the number increased to more than 28,000.

03/24/2019

03/19/2019

In conclusion, our findings confirm previous evidence of the harmful effect on mental health of daily use of cannabis, especially of high-potency types. Importantly, they indicate for the first time how cannabis use affects the incidence of psychotic disorder. Therefore, it is of public health importance to acknowledge alongside the potential medicinal properties of some cannabis constituents the potential adverse effects that are associated with daily cannabis use, especially of high-potency varieties.

03/10/2019

• cannabis is safe and helpful for PTSD are limited by either anecdotal or poor quality evidence, are offset by studies reporting opposite conclusions, and the well-demonstrated potential harms of cannabis addiction and risk for psychosis are not adequately weighed in the decision to recommend medical cannabis treatment of chronic PTSD
• There is a consensus that multiple social harms associated with cannabis legalization are not being adequately addressed. These include concerns about youth exposure under age 25 (a time of highly active brain development) and youth-marketing of edible cannabis products (eg, gummy bears and other confections) and cannabis concentrates that are easily obtained and “vaped”; unintentional in utero exposure prior to a woman’s knowledge of pregnancy; increased rates of intentional cannabis use during pregnancy; driving impairment and the absence of appropriate technological and legal systems to detect and deter this (equivalent to the breathalyzer for alcohol impairment); and cannabis use in sensitive occupations such as public transportation, public protection, and health services. While the voting public and industry is moving cannabis expansion forward, state proceedings have not yet involved public health, neurodevelopmental experts, and experts in addiction psychiatry and medicine equally with industry and economy experts. This is anything but reassuring for all who keep in mind that the United States is by far the greatest demand population for psychoactive substances, worldwide.4

02/23/2019

• The reality is that the medical marijuana argument is meant mostly to protect recreational users from legal problems.
• One in every 15 alcohol drinkers  drink every day while one in every five marijuana users do so daily.
• America is the Western country that uses the most marijuana and has the worst problem with opioids.

02/09/2019

02/06/2019

Is the solution to the opioid epidemic as simple as the legalization of medical cannabis? Commenting on the Bachhuber et al. analysis (1), Finney et al. (4) cautioned that an ecological fallacy may be present—individuals using medical marijuana could have elevated overdose mortality rates even though there is a state-level reduction. They contended that a prospective study of individual pain patients was necessary to assess relationships between cannabis use, use of opioid medications, and other substance use (4).
 

02/05/2019

Two cases of sudden death are reported in patients whose self-determined seizure management primarily relied on artisanal cannabis therapies. Risks of morbidity, mortality and SUDEP in SDTC users need to be further studied. Providers should be aware of the absence of morbidity and mortality data for SDTC in patients with epilepsy may only be due to a failure of reporting.

01/28/2019

I was surprised, to say the least. I tended to be a libertarian on drugs. Years before, I’d covered the pharmaceutical industry for The New York Times. I was aware of the claims about marijuana as medicine, and I’d watched the slow spread of legalized cannabis without much interest.
Jackie would have been within her rights to say, I know what I’m talking about, unlike you. Instead she offered something neutral like, I think that’s what the big studies say. You should read them.....

01/20/2019

In 2017 Colorado had a record number of opioid overdose deaths from any opioid, including heroin and Colorado has had a medical marijuana program since 2001.6
There are several reasons as to why any reported benefit will be outstripped by lack of benefit and increased risk of harm, and why cannabis is contributing to ongoing opioid use, and subsequently, the opioid epidemic.

1. There is evidence in animal models showing adolescent rats exposed to THC will develop enhanced heroin self administration as adults11 which may be due to activation of mesolimbic transmission of dopamine by a common mu opioid receptor mechanism.11,12
2. More than 90% of heroin users report a prior history of marijuana use compared to a prior history of painkiller use (47%).13
3. Prospective twin studies demonstrated that early cannabis use was associated with an increased risk of other drug abuse.14 This particular study was conducted when the THC content was much lower than todays products which can reach 95% THC.
4. Currently there is no widely available or accepted medical literature showing any benefit for pain with dispensary cannabis in common pain conditions.17 

There is currently a large and growing body of evidence showing that cannabis use increases, rather than decreases non-medical prescription opioid use and opioid use disorder, based on followup of more than 33,000 people.19 Concurrent use of cannabis and opioids by patients with chronic pain appears to indicate a higher risk of opioid misuse.20 Closer monitoring for opioid-related aberrant behaviors is indicated in this group of patients and it suggests that cannabis use is a predictor of aberrant drug behaviors in patients receiving chronic opioid therapy.
There is sufficient and expanding evidence demonstrating that medical marijuana use will not curb the opioid epidemic. There is further evidence that marijuana is a companion drug rather than substitution drug and that marijuana use may be contributing to the opioid epidemic rather than improving it.

01/16/2019

Large-scale, longitudinal studies of humans whose mothers smoked marijuana once or more per week and experimental work on rodents exposed to cannabinoids in utero have yielded remarkably consistent intellectual and behavioral correlates of fetal exposure to this drug. Some exposed individuals exhibit deficits in memory, cognition, and measures of sociability. These aberrations appear during infancy and persist through adulthood and are tied to changes in the expression of multiple gene families, as well as more global measures of brain responsiveness and plasticity. Researchers currently consider these perturbations to be mediated by changes to the endocannabinoid system caused by the active compounds in cannabis. 

01/14/2019

Whether intentional or not, mixing drugs is never safe because the effects from combining drugs may be stronger and more unpredictable than one drug alone, and even deadly.

11/01/2018

The seven most frequently occurring drugs found in decedents were ethyl alcohol (5,258), benzodiazepines (5,064, including 1,889 alprazolam occurrences), cocaine (3,129), cannabinoids (2,367), fentanyl (2,088), morphine (1,992), and fentanyl analogs (1,685). Since heroin is rapidly metabolized to morphine, this may lead to a substantial over-reporting of morphine-related deaths as well as significant under-reporting of heroin-related deaths.
Cannabinoids 7 (cause of death)   2,360 (present)  2,367 (total)
 
 

09/30/2018

As state lawmakers continue hashing out a marijuana legalization bill, the list of towns in New Jersey saying no to legal weed just keeps growing.
There are now nearly 40 municipalities across the state that have either banned marijuana businesses or officially voiced opposition to legal weed.

09/28/2018

09/25/2018

RESULTS:
In acute settings, marijuana's effects peaked at approximately 1 hour post initiation, lasting 2-4 hours. Marijuana increased cardiac workload, myocardial infarctions and strokes in young, chronic users. Cannabis caused similar pulmonary complications to those of a tobacco smoker. Marijuana caused airway obstruction and increased anesthetic dosages needed to place laryngeal airways. Use within 72 hours of general anesthesia was advised against. In vitro and in vivo studies were contradictory regarding prothrombic or antithrombotic effects.

CONCLUSIONS:
Marijuana use is problematic to surgeons, left without evidence-based approaches. In emergency settings, marijuana use may be unavoidable. However, further research would provide much needed information to guide elective procedures.

09/22/2018

“Painful cramping, vomiting occurring. It can happen every few weeks, every few months, last a few days and be incredibly uncomfortable,” said Dr. Michael Lynch of the Pittsburgh Poison Control Center at UPMC.

09/16/2018

There was more alarming news. Use of illegal drugs, including cocaine, marijuana, and opioids by pregnant women increased significantly between 2015 and 2017. About 7 percent of pregnant women reported using marijuana. Three percent said they used it daily. 

McCance-Katz says marijuana use is linked to fetal growth problems, preterm births, stillbirths, hyperactivity and impaired cognition in newborns. 

09/13/2018

New research suggests that marijuana users may be more likely than nonusers to misuse prescription opioids and develop prescription opioid use disorder. The study was conducted by researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health, and Columbia University.

09/12/2018

Executive Summary

09/04/2018

CBD oil may potentially interact in a negative way with anti-epilepsy drugs. As of now, only in vitro (test tube) observations exist with no living organism testing proving safety. Drugs that may interact include: 

• carbamazepine (Tegretol)
• phenytoin (Dilantin)
• phenobarbital (Luminal, Solfoton, Tedral)
• primidone (anti-seizure)

08/01/2018

07/16/2018

07/03/2018

The preliminary figures show that 959 people died in Colorado last year from drug poisoning, a figure that includes both intentional and unintentional overdoses. In 2016, 912 people died. In 2000, for comparison, drug poisonings claimed fewer than 400 lives.

07/02/2018

06/13/2018

• Medical marijuana (also called medical cannabis) is whole plant marijuana or chemicals in the plant used for medical purposes.
• Cannabinoids are substances in medical cannabis that act on cells in the body, including the brain. The two main cannabinoids used in medicine are tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD).
• The FDA recently approved the use of Epidiolex (a plant-based formulation of CBD) to treat seizures for people 2 years of age and older with Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS).
• Medical cannabis, CBD, and THC all have possible side effects. The most common side effects of CBD included sleepiness, diarrhea, fatigue, and decreased appetite. CBD also interacts with some other seizure medicines.
• Careful monitoring of CBD is needed.

05/28/2018

Click on link for updated list of drug paraphernalia

05/22/2018

The treatment, which GW Pharma hopes to market under the name Epidiolex, is produced in the U.K. from a plant that has been bred to have a high cannabidiol, or CBD, content, Chief Executive Officer Justin Gover said in an interview earlier this month. The chemical is purified and made into a strawberry-flavored oral solution, he said.

05/16/2018

This report finds that legalization in Illinois, however, would cost at least $670 million, outweighing the projected tax revenue.

05/16/2018

The Netherland’s attempt to divide markets into soft vs. hard drugs by allowing coffee shops to sell cannabis did not result in lower consumption of hard drugs. Overall it has been a social disaster.
The cannabis grown and sold today is not same drug as was available in the 1970s. The average THC has increased to more than 15%. Cannabis issue can clearly lead to addiction. The damage to the brain from chronic use is worse compared with chronic use of heroin. Among the negative effects of long-term cannabis use in adolescence include neuropsychological dysfunction, decline in IQ, short memory, among others.
Professor Madras focused on how cannabis smoking can affect the behavior and brains of children. Preclinical tests studies show that the use of cannabis before pregnancy may have adverse effects on future children.

05/13/2018

Note:  If you look at the blue bar you will see that opioid deaths have more than quadrupled since medical marijuana was legalized in Colorado (in 2000). And deaths rose from 377 in 2012 (year mj legalized) to 504 in 2016. No evidence that legal marijuana is helping in Colorado- if anything it could be contributing to making the opioid epidemic worse!

But the conclusion is not supported by data. This study and others that conclude marijuana helps fight the opioid crisis do not consider the many other strategies that have been implemented to fight opioid abuse, including the PDMP, treatment and Narcan. Nor is there any proof people are substituting marijuana for opioids. And this particular CO research (below) flies in the face of the actual data/ facts!

Opioid deaths in Colorado have increased based on the data from Colorado Public Health and Environment Dept.

Study's conclusion does not seem to match data.