Articles

12/03/2015

According to Kevin Merill, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officer in charge in Denver, "more and more criminals are moving to Colorado to exploit our drug laws, sell marijuana through the U.S. and line their pockets with drug money."
The Colorado experience is certainly troubling and has not been the panacea purported by legalization advocates.
In 2010, medical marijuana was legalized in Colorado.  In 2012, it legalized marijuana and in 2014 retail businesses began selling it to anyone 21 years or older. The consequences? In 2014, there was a 32 percent increase in marijuana related traffic deaths and since 2010 the number has increased by 92 percent. 

11/28/2015

Recent federally funded reports show that: 
▪ The majority of DUI drug arrests involve marijuana.
▪ Youth consumption has increased.
▪ Drug-related suspensions/expulsions (mostly for marijuana) increased 32 percent over a five-year period.
▪ The number of college users has increased.
▪ Almost 50 percent of Denver arrestees tested positive for marijuana.
▪ Marijuana-related emergency room visits increased 57 percent from 2011 to 2013.
▪ Marijuana-related hospitalizations increased 82 percent since 2008.
Yet despite Big Pot’s $25 million cash infusion into the effort, voters rejected the spin that marijuana legalization is safe or in the best interests of citizens.

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/article43481448.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/opinion/article43481448.html#storylink=cpy
 

11/28/2015

Arizona Families F.I.R.S.T., a statewide recovery program, found that 84 percent of program participants in 2014 struggled with substance abuse, 54 percent of which said they used marijuana

11/23/2015

And yes, my friends, there are many problems associated with use of marijuana, such as the risk of addiction, risk for vehicle crashes, emergency department visits, psychiatric symptoms, poor quality of life, cognitive decline, and the use of other drugs.
Marijuana’s immediate effects include distorted perception, difficulty with thinking and problems solving, and loss of motor coordination. Marijuana use can also cause space and time distortion, delusional thinking, and even hallucinations.
Long–term use of the drug can contribute to respiratory infection, impaired memory, and exposure to cancer-causing compounds. Of major importance among youth who are heavy users of the drug is that its use is linked to increased risk for developing mental illness and poorer cognitive functioning.

11/13/2015

By the end of 2014, the number of total crimes was 24 percent higher than in 2012. Property crimes increased 14 percent from 2012 to 2013, and the 2014 data was 26 percent higher than the pre-pot legalization period.

11/08/2015

Children whose mothers use marijuana during pregnancy have a higher risk of stunted growth and of developing ADHD, anxiety, and depression later in life.
When THC enters the body, it interferes with endocannabinoid’s actions, competing with it for binding sites on target cells and generally getting its way.

11/06/2015

 “It is important to know that legalizing marijuana would not mean greater access to potentially effective treatment for children and adults with a medical illness such as epilepsy. Cannabidiol, or CBD, is not at all marijuana.”

CBD is not medical marijuana. CBD does not get anyone high nor does it increase appetite. It may be beneficial in treating children with rare forms of epilepsy, often difficult to control with medication or other available treatments, but it does not work for everyone with seizures.

“The stories of kids having fewer seizures described in the media are heartwarming and can possibly be of some benefit – just like many other medications available to treat seizures,” Dr. Patel adds.

What are the possible side effects?
CBD can cause nausea, diarrhea, or worse, affect the liver.

Dr. Patel states, “There is nothing natural about marijuana and its components. It is broken down in a person’s liver, similar to many other medications. It has interactions with other medications and is still not fully understood. If further studies show that CBD is safe and effective, it will be sent to the FDA for official approval. If the FDA approves this medication, it will be available in the form of a prescription and no laws will need to be changed.”

“Legalization would make our jobs as medical providers more difficult as we will not know what changing, non-tested preparations a child may be getting. I understand that parents are desperate and want to help their children, however, it is dangerous to give a child or patient a product unless it has been studied properly and is the same consistent product each time.” If the ongoing trials show that Epidiolex is safe and effective, then all people can have access to it through a prescription and know that it has been properly tested and is consistent each month. Medical providers will know how to dose it and it will be regulated by the FDA.

11/05/2015

The project is intended to treat 50 children from ages 2 to 16 living with epilepsy that have exhausted most of their treatment options, Carney said.
Every step of the three-year study will be meticulously tracked. Patients will check-in at regular intervals and the researchers will examine how the children are responding, Carney said.
All subjects will be clinically evaluated and seizure frequency will be recorded in a diary given to patients, according to the ClinicalTrials.gov website.
“Through this research, we want to learn about what type of children respond, if they can tolerate the medication and if there are any side effects we need to worry about,” Carney said.
The study will begin later this summer and participants are still being accepted, Carney said.The project is intended to treat 50 children from ages 2 to 16 living with epilepsy that have exhausted most of their treatment options, Carney said.
Every step of the three-year study will be meticulously tracked. Patients will check-in at regular intervals and the researchers will examine how the children are responding, Carney said.
All subjects will be clinically evaluated and seizure frequency will be recorded in a diary given to patients, according to the ClinicalTrials.gov website.
“Through this research, we want to learn about what type of children respond, if they can tolerate the medication and if there are any side effects we need to worry about,” Carney said.
The study will begin later this summer and participants are still being accepted, Carney said.

11/04/2015

Most of the deaths occurred in the spring, when fishers come out to mate and raise their kits, and all of the poisoned animals were found in remote areas but within the vicinity of illegal marijuana farms.

11/03/2015

More Positive Results With Cannabidiol in Epilepsy (You will need to google this title in order to get the article to avoid creating an account)
They found a reduction of the total number of seizures by a median of 38% at 3 months and 31% at 6 months.
These patients started on a cannabidiol (CBD) dose of 2 mg/kg per day, which was increased to a maximum tolerated dose or to 25 mg/kg per day.
Of the 25 patients enrolled in the study, two discontinued treatment before 6 months. One boy stopped medication after a few months because of intolerable diarrhea, and another patient discontinued the drug because of persistent nausea/vomiting. One patient didn't report 6-month data at the time of the analysis.
More than three quarters (77%) of the 22 remaining patients experienced fewer seizures after 6 months.
However, he stressed that the study was uncontrolled, symptoms were self-reported by families, and there has been a lot of news coverage of medical marijuana for the treatment of epilepsy. "Many parents had been avidly desirous of their child going on this cannabidiol because of what they had read in the lay press, so they were primed to believe this cannabidiol might be beneficial." On the other hand, he said, it's important to keep in mind that these children have "horrible epilepsy" and most have been on more than 10 medications for seizure without success. "Any improvement to that degree in this population that is sustained is a pretty dramatic response."

11/01/2015

Adolescent cannabis use increased the odds of non-progression with formal education.

• •Associations for adolescent alcohol use were inconsistent and weaker.
• •Cannabis use accounted for a greater proportion of the overall rate of educational underachievement than alcohol use.
• •Findings inform the debate about the relative harms of cannabis and alcohol use.

10/27/2015

§Puff for puff, smoking marijuana is more dangerous than smoking cigarettes.  http://162.99.3.213/products/manuals/matrix/ppt/marijuana.ppt

• 22.2 million (8.4%) people were current (past month) users of marijuana in 2014, making it the most used illicit drug.
• Marijuana use was most prevalent among people age 18 to 25 (with 19.6% using it in the past month).
• 7.4% of people aged 12 to 17 reported using marijuana.
• A higher percentage of males (10.9%) used marijuana in the past month than females (6%).

10/19/2015

The overstuffed vehicles parked outside Pueblo’s Posada, a nonprofit organization that helps homeless families, have license plates from as far away as South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida and Texas.
Those families have come in what social service agencies here see as a perfect storm: legal marijuana, Colorado’s Medicaid expansion (which extends coverage to all qualified adults under the 2010 Affordable Care Act), and Pueblo’s ranking as one of the least expensive cities to live in the US.
Is this what we want in Florida?

10/16/2015

10/16/2015

10/14/2015

Is legal 'medical' marijuana linked to high youth substance abuse rates?

Let's look at Colorado's substance abuse rates in 2011- 2012 when medical marijuana was legal but recreational pot was not, Colorado youth ages 12- 17 and 18- 25 ranked in the top percentiles for most substance abuse rates: illicit drugs, marijuana, cocaine, non-medical use of painkillers and ranked the lowest for perception of great risk of smoking marijuana.

10/12/2015

Kembel's is the highest-profile death associated with cannabis since it became legal for adults to purchase recreational marijuana in Oregon last week. Police said Tuesday it was unclear to what extent marijuana impairment had been a factor in the crash.

10/11/2015

At the moment, there simply isn’t enough evidence to prove that cannabinoids – whether natural or synthetic – works to treat cancer in patients, although research is ongoing. And there’s certainly no evidence that ‘street’ cannabis can treat cancer.

10/09/2015

Levy says. “We are simply not prepared for the fallout of marijuana legalization.”
Each hit of THC rewires the function of this critical cognitive system: Early evidence in mice has shown that repeated exposure to THC causes these receptors to disappear altogether, blunting the natural response to positive behaviors and requiring higher doses to achieve the same effect. Marijuana exploits essential pathways we’ve evolved to retrieve a memory, to delicately regulate our metabolism, and to derive happiness from everyday life.

10/07/2015

“I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of similar lawsuits in other states,” Malsbury said, pointing out that the nation’s largest marijuana producer, California, has no pot regulations at all. Medical marijuana is grown and sold in California but recreational sales remain against state law.

09/30/2015

There has not been an overall change in the amount of pain that Americans report,1,2 yet the amount of prescription painkillers dispensed in the U.S. quadrupled since 1999.3 Changes in how providers prescribe painkillers has helped fuel this epidemic. There is wide variation in painkiller prescribing between states which can't be explained by differences in health issues from state to state.

Deaths from prescription painkillers have also quadrupled since 1999, killing more than 16,000 people in the U.S. in 2013.4Nearly two million Americans, aged 12 or older, either abused or were dependent on opioids in 2013.5

09/30/2015

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) is the primary source of information on the prevalence, patterns, and consequences of alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drug use and abuse and mental disorders in the U.S. civilian, non-institutionalized population, age 12 and older. The survey generates estimates at the National, state, and substate levels.

09/30/2015

“Every state must take steps to reduce drug-impaired driving, regardless of the legal status of marijuana,” said Jonathan Adkins, Executive Director of GHSA. “This is the first report to provide states and other stakeholders with the information they need. And we encourage NHTSA to issue guidance on best practices to prevent marijuana-impaired driving. We look to the federal government to take a leadership role in this issue similar to that of drunk driving and seat belt use.”

09/24/2015

Olympia, WA – Newly released data from the Washington Traffic Safety Commission (WTSC) shows that marijuana is increasing as a factor in deadly crashes. The number of drivers involved in deadly crashes who tested positive for marijuana increased 48 percent from 2013 to 2014. 
“This study is a step towards answering the myriad of questions we have about the impact of legalized marijuana on driving.

09/21/2015

Given these statistics.... is legalization worth the consequences....
Cannabis has been found to be the most frequently used drug in the U.S. after alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. 
The risk of developing addiction associated with cannabis use has been reported to increase to about 17% among those who start using marijuana in adolescence, and to 25-50% among those who smoke marijuana daily.
The long-term effects of marijuana use include altered brain development and cognitive impairment, including impaired neural connectivity in specific brain regions, decreased activity in prefrontal regions, and reduced volumes in the hippocampus.
Cannabis is most commonly consumed through smoking, a route of drug delivery that predictably has a variety of negative effects on pulmonary function. Smoke from marijuana combustion has been shown to contain a number of carcinogens and cocarcinogens, as well as many of the toxins, irritants, and carcinogens as tobacco smoke.  Additionally, marijuana smokers tend to inhale more deeply and hold their breath longer than cigarette smokers, which leads to a greater exposure per breath to “tar” (the carcinogenic solids in smoke). Regular smoking of marijuana, in the absence of tobacco, produces visible and microscopic injury to the large airways
http://www.asam.org/docs/default-source/publicy-policy-statements/mariju...

09/18/2015

The commonly heard expression that “no one ever died from a marijuana overdose” minimizes the cost of unmet potential and inability to fully engage in the challenges of daily life. Scientific research cites multiple impacts of the recreational misuse of marijuana.

09/15/2015

"We found support for the synergistic effect on an individual level; people who tend to use more marijuana also tend to use more opioids," said Scott Novak, PhD, senior research scientist at RTI International, a leading research institute in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
What's worrisome is that the positive association between cannabis and opioid use is growing stronger. The study found that over time, people were using these drugs more often; there were more opioids days and more cannabis days.

09/15/2015

Positive top-line results have been reported from an exploratory phase 2a placebo-controlled clinical trial of cannabidiol (CBD, GW Pharmaceuticals) in patients with schizophrenia who had failed to respond adequately to first-line antipsychotic medications.  DOES NOT CONTAIN THC.

09/14/2015

State medical marijuana legislation.

09/12/2015

In 2014, Gilman published research on 18-to-25-year-olds that showed differences in the brain’s reward system between users and nonusers. Teens who smoked marijuana had significant abnormalities in the areas of the brain linked to emotion, motivation, and decision-making (see diagram above). “I got a lot of hate mail after that,” she says.

09/09/2015

About 27% of high school students who have used both marijuana and e-cigarettes reported using the devices to vaporize cannabis. Those most likely to vaporize pot with e-cigarettes included males and younger students.

09/09/2015

There are difficulties in researching the effects of cannabis.

1. Many people who smoke cannabis also smoke tobacco. And users of cannabis often mix it with tobacco. This can make it difficult to know whether it is the tobacco, the cannabis, or both that has caused a cancer.
2. The amount of THC in cannabis also varies. Some of the cannabis available today is much stronger than it was 20 years ago. These versions contain more THC.
3. Another difficulty researchers have is in recruiting people who smoke cannabis into studies. Because cannabis is an illegal drug in many countries, people may be reluctant to take part in research. And if they do agree to take part, they may not say how much cannabis they actually smoke.

09/02/2015

09/02/2015

09/01/2015

In summary, marijuana use is harmful to children and adolescents.  For this reason, the American College of Pediatricians opposes its legalization for recreational use and urges extreme caution in legalizing it for medicinal use.  Likewise, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) recently offered their own policy statement opposing efforts to legalize marijuana. They similarly pointed out that “marijuana’s deleterious effects on adolescent brain development, cognition, and social functioning may have immediate and long-term implications, including increased risk of motor vehicle accidents, sexual victimization, academic failure, lasting decline in intelligence measures, psychopathology, addiction, and psychosocial and occupational impairment.” 

09/01/2015

"There is some more welcome news for parents as they send their children off to college this fall. Perhaps the most important is that 5 out of every 10 college students have not used any illicit drug in the past year, and more than three-quarters have not used any in the prior month."
Alongside regular users, the number of occasional marijuana users has also increased. Between 2006 and 2014, the percentage of students who reported using marijuana once or more in the prior 30 days increased from 17% to 21%. During the same period, the percentage reporting use in the past year increased from 30% to 34%.

08/31/2015

Does this sound like someone concerned about sick people?  What is he really compassionate about?  

08/28/2015

Moreover, in the men in the study who smoked marijuana and used other recreational drugs, the sperm counts were reduced by 55 percent, and the sperm concentrations were reduced by 52 percent, compared with men who hadn't used the drugs.

08/25/2015

08/21/2015

Data released Tuesday indicate that the number of Washington drivers involved in deadly crashes who tested positive for active marijuana doubled from 2013 to 2014 - the first year of legal marijuana sales in the state.

08/19/2015

Twenty-eight studies were undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness of cannabinoids for chronic pain. Of these, only 2 were found to be at low risk of bias. 

Overall, these studies seem to indicate that cannabinoids have a significant role to play in the management of chronic pain. However, there are important issues that limit the validity of this conclusion. First and most important is how the improvement in pain was evaluated. In many of the studies, only instruments to measure the level of pain, most notably the Visual Analogue Scale, were used. This is fine when one is measuring acute pain. But when it comes to chronic pain—which is what the studies were looking at—the most important measures of the impact of any treatment are improvement in functioning and other objective measures, such as reduction in use of analgesic medications. 

08/15/2015

08/15/2015

Pharmacokinetics encompasses the absorption of cannabinoids following diverse routes of administration and from different drug formulations, the distribution of analytes throughout the body, the metabolism of cannabinoids by different tissues and organs, the elimination of cannabinoids from the body in the feces, urine, sweaty oral fluid, and hair, and how these processes change over time. Cannabinoid pharmacokinetic research has been especially challenging because of low analyte concentrations, rapid and extensive metabolism, and physio-chemicaI characteristics that hinder the separation of drugs of interest from biological matrices and from each other, and that lower drug recovery because of adsorption of compounds of interest to multiple surfaces. Mass spectrometric developments now permit highly sensitive and specific measurement of cannabinoids in a wide variety of biological matrices.

08/13/2015

THC is a large, fat-soluble molecule whose concentration in the blood rapidly drops as it is sequestered into the body’s fat stores, including the brain.  Immediately after smoking a joint, the THC level will be very high in the blood and very low in the brain.  The THC level in the brain climbs rapidly at the same time that as it is declining in the blood.  At some point, the concentrations cross, and the concentration continues to rise in the brain while it is still declining in the blood, since the brain acts like a sponge, soaking up the partially insoluble THC from the blood.  

08/09/2015

People who drive within three hours of smoking marijuana are at nearly twice the risk of being in an accident that leads to serious injury or death, compared with sober drivers, according to a new review of the research.
While driving stoned is clearly risky — and combining marijuana with alcohol is even more dangerous — drunk driving remains a bigger hazard on the road. Driving with a blood alcohol concentration of .08 — the legal limit — nearly triples the risk of crashing; a blood alcohol concentration of .10 almost quintuples it. Although drunk driving deaths have dropped by more than half since 1982, they still represent about one-third of all auto fatalities and kill about 11,000 people annually.

08/03/2015

Here is why there is confusion: the only time someone is sentenced to jail for smoking pot is if there is a more serious crime they are clearly guilty of, and the prosecutor or judge wants to give them a lighter sentence. Theft or burglary were the most common crimes I came across. Instead of being required to sentence a defendant to a year imprisonment for stealing, a defendant could plead guilty to marijuana possession instead and get a much lesser sentence. So on paper, it looks like they are serving time for drug possession, but in reality, they were let off the hook for a serious crime.

08/02/2015

07/31/2015

07/29/2015

Mr. Wright was confident that a new anticancer drug called Krebiozen would cure him. Mr. Wright’s tumors had shrunk by half, and after 10 more days of treatment he was discharged from the hospital. And yet the other patients in the hospital who had received Krebiozen showed no improvement.