Category Archives: Drugs

Canada’s Corporate Cannabis Takeover Continues As Pharmacies Look Poised To Distribute

AlternativeFreePress.com

The future of legalized Cannabis in Canada is bleak if the Liberals continue the Harper regime’s push to corporatize Cannabis. Based on the vague rhetoric promised by Justin Trudeau and the Liberal party platform, that is exactly what we should expect.

The Canadian Pharmacists Association (CPhA) is preparing for further corporatization by “reviewing its existing policies to ensure its policy position regarding pharmacist dispensing of medical marijuana reflects patient safety in this evolving area”.

The CPhA has no business distributing Cannabis. If Cannabis is removed from the Controlled Drugs & Substances Act (CDSA), there is no legal justification to restricting distribution to pharmacies. Cannabis is a benign plant with many uses, which gardeners and farmers should be allowed to grow and sell at farmer’s markets freely. Of course, it seems unlikely that Cannabis will be removed from the CDSA, the Liberal version of legalization sounds a lot like prohibition with increased penalties for unlicensed distribution.

Cannabis is medicine, it can be very expensive medicine, so calls for insurance coverage are understandable… but Cannabis is only expensive because of prohibition. Cannabis can be grown for less than $1/gram, but invested MMPR interests want to keep the cost high to cash in on the corporate welfare windfall of health insurance covering medical marijuana.

If Trudeau and the Liberals are serious about “real change” and evidence-based policy then they need to regulate Cannabis based on the potential harm caused by the plant. Cannabis is safer than coffee and energy drinks. Teens have died consuming energy drinks, but they are sold in convenience stores without age restrictions. Nobody has ever died from consuming Cannabis.

Dana Larsen details 7 key things needed before we can consider Cannabis prohibition to be truly over. (here is a brief summary:)

#7. Don’t increase penalties

In some of their campaign literature, the Liberals were promising to create “new, stronger laws, to punish more severely” people who sell cannabis to minors, or to anyone operating outside of their undefined new system.

Considering we already have Harper’s strict mandatory minimums for cannabis offences, we do not need to be punishing anyone “more severely” for anything related to cannabis.

#6. Allow personal growing

Any model of legalization must include the right to grow some cannabis for personal use. People with a doctor’s recommendation for cannabis should be allowed to grow whatever quantity they need for medical purposes. The Conservatives tried to shut down the current home-garden program for patients, but were stopped by a court injunction. That injunction needs to remain, and be expanded to make it easier for patients to grow their own when needed.

If home cultivation is not allowed, then cannabis is not truly legalized in Canada. Canadians must have at least as much right to grow their own cannabis as they do to brew their own beer and wine.

#5. Allow dispensaries

The Liberals need to recognize the important role that community-based dispensaries are playing, and to incorporate them into any legal access system.

Any system of legalization that tries to shut down the existing network of cannabis dispensaries will face strong opposition from Canada’s cannabis community.

#4. License more producers

Whatever the details of the system, it is important that there is equal access to the cannabis market, and that anyone who meets the quality standards can legally grow and sell cannabis.

Ultimately, the federal government should get out of licensing large-scale production and leave that to the provinces. But whoever the regulating and licensing authority is, the system needs to be fair and equal. Any attempt to limit production to a few major companies or create some kind of monopoly or cartel will be met with resistance, and will ultimately fail.

#3. Ditch the medical program

Cannabis is a wonderful medicine with a wide range of therapeutic benefits, but we don’t need a specialized medical cannabis system in Canada. Cannabis extracts should be available as non-prescription drugs for all Canadians to access.

When cannabis or a cannabis extracts is prescribed by a doctor then it should be exempt from GST, like other prescription drugs. But we don’t need the current complex system of restricted access for medical patients once all Canadians have access to legal cannabis.

Doctors should become more knowledgable about cannabis medicines, and legalization should mean that all sorts of new cannabis extracts are readily available for research and medicine. But since cannabis is generally safer than products like aspirin, most cannabis medicines should be sold over the counter, without a need for a prescription.

#2. Amnesty for past convictions

Legalization of cannabis must also include an amnesty for past cannabis convictions, so that those criminal records are erased from the system.

#1. Don’t overtax it

Legal cannabis needs to be cheaper and better than what is currently available, or else no-one is going to buy it. The only way to extinguish the black market is to substantially reduce the price of cannabis.

Any plan for legalization must not include extremely high or punitive taxes, as the result will be a thriving black market and no real change to the status quo.

If Trudeau’s Liberals stick to these 7 principles then legalization will be a success.

But if they try to legalize cannabis in the form of a highly taxed product grown only by big corporations, while banning home gardens and increasing penalties for underground dealers, then legalization will not succeed, and we will still have to keep fighting for a better system.

Jonathan Page is the co-founder of Anandia Labs and an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia. He co-led the Canadian team that reported the first sequence of the cannabis genome and his work has helped elucidate the biochemical pathway leading to the major cannabinoids. Mr Page wrote an article at Lift, here is a very brief summary of a few of his points:

Like Liberal governments before him, Justin Trudeau practiced Big Tent politics to obtain a majority. Similarly, legalization has to offer a Big Tent so that the disparate parts of the existing industry – Licensed Producers (LPs), dispensaries and MMAR growers – are included. Health Canada and the 25+ LPs can be justifiably proud they have created a system to grow and distribute pharmaceutical-grade cannabis. But the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR) are viewed as a failure by many for their inability to create a system that both serves patients and creates a viable industry. The Allard injunction, the proliferation of Vancouver dispensaries, the logjam of LP applicants and the slow patient growth for LPs are indicators of systemic problems.
It is possible to safely grow cannabis at many scales from small outdoor gardens to massive indoor factories.The 2013 Liberal Party draft marijuana policy paper (PDF) suggested that production encompass “very small farms to medium size and large-scale operations”. Jamie Shaw of the Canadian Association of Medical Cannabis Dispensaries (CAMCD) wrote a blog post proposing that the cannabis production could resemble Canada’s brewing industry where industrial behemoths like Molson Coors co-exist with craft breweries.

It is difficult to contemplate a system that allows purchase of cannabis but not personal growing. I favour six plants (in flowering stage) with a cap on total plants in a household. The judge’s decision on the Allard case, which revolves around the right of patients to grow their own medical cannabis, now has added importance as legalization is contemplated.

In my opinion cannabis sits somewhere between a controlled substance and an NHP in the regulatory landscape but I don’t think it is productive to treat cannabis as either. Nor is it useful for it to be lumped with alcohol or tobacco. It is simply and uniquely cannabis. Amending laws created for prohibition is not likely to work as they were created to demonize cannabis. Let’s give cannabis its own laws and regulations that allow it to exist simultaneously as a medicine and a social (recreational) drug. Is the solution a pragmatic federal Cannabis Act or even a Psychoactive Substances Act for a new, post-prohibition era?

Written by Alternative Free Press
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Mexican Supreme Court Rules Prohibition of Cannabis Unconstitutional

Claire Bernish
theAntiMedia.org : November 4, 2015

The Mexican Supreme Court just paved the way for nationwide cannabis legalization after voting 4 to 1 that prohibition of personal consumption and cultivation of the plant violates constitutional rights.

In fact, the highest court in the land concluded that cannabis prohibition “violates the right to free development of one’s personality,” as the Drug Policy Alliance stated Wednesday in a press release.

“This vote by Mexico’s Supreme Court is extraordinary for two reasons: it is being argued on human rights grounds and it is taking place in one of the countries that has suffered the most from the war on drugs,” explained Hannah Hetzer, Senior Policy Manager of the Americas for the Alliance. “Uruguay became the first country to legalize marijuana, Canada is expected soon to follow suit, medical marijuana initiatives are spreading throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and marijuana is legal in a number of U.S. states. Now with this landmark decision out of Mexico, it is clear that the Americas are leading the world in marijuana reform.”

Mexico’s first legal medical marijuana patient made headlines around the world in September when her parents were granted the right to treat her Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome with cannabidiol medication. Eight-year-old “Grace” had suffered nearly 400 epileptic seizures daily — preventing her from walking, attending school, or even speaking.

This ruling by the highest Mexican court further weakens the brutal and notorious drug cartels that have plagued the country with violence, paves the way for legal recreational use, and — hopefully — sets the example for its northern neighbor, the United States.

Source: theantimedia.org(cc)

Our laws and policies are more racist than the officers who enforce them

Police Killings of Blacks: Here Is What the Data Say

By SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN
NY Times : October 16, 2015

Tamir Rice. Eric Garner. Walter Scott. Michael Brown. Each killing raises a disturbing question: Would any of these people have been killed by police officers if they had been white?

I have no special insight into the psychology of police officers or into the complicated forensics involved in such cases. Answering this question in any single situation can be difficult and divisive. Two outside experts this month concluded, for example, that the shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland who was carrying a toy gun, was a “reasonable” if tragic response. That will hardly be the last word on the subject.As an economist who has studied racial discrimination, I’ve begun to look at these deaths from a different angle. There is ample statistical evidence of large and persistent racial bias in other areas — from labor markets to online retail markets. So I expected that police prejudice would be a major factor in accounting for the killings of African-Americans. But when I looked at the numbers, that’s not exactly what I found.

I’m not saying that the police in these specific cases are free of racial bias. I can’t answer that question. But what the data does suggest is that eliminating the biases of all police officers would do little to materially reduce the total number of African-American killings. Police bias may well be a significant problem, but in accounting for why some of these encounters turn into killings, it is swamped by other, bigger problems that plague our society, our economy and our criminal justice system.

To understand how this can be, let us start with the statistics on police killings. According to the F.B.I.’s Supplementary Homicide Report, 31.8 percent of people shot by the police were African-American, a proportion more than two and a half times the 13.2 percent of African-Americans in the general population. While this data may be imperfect, other sources in individual states or cities, such as in California or New York City, show very similar patterns.

The data is unequivocal. Police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin. And police bias may be responsible. But this data does not prove that biased police officers are more likely to shoot blacks in any given encounter.

Instead, there is another possibility: It is simply that — for reasons that may well include police bias — African-Americans have a very large number of encounters with police officers. Every police encounter contains a risk: The officer might be poorly trained, might act with malice or simply make a mistake, and civilians might do something that is perceived as a threat. The omnipresence of guns exaggerates all these risks.

Such risks exist for people of any race — after all, many people killed by police officers were not black. But having more encounters with police officers, even with officers entirely free of racial bias, can create a greater risk of a fatal shooting.

Arrest data lets us measure this possibility. For the entire country, 28.9 percent of arrestees were African-American. This number is not very different from the 31.8 percent of police-shooting victims who were African-Americans. If police discrimination were a big factor in the actual killings, we would have expected a larger gap between the arrest rate and the police-killing rate.

This in turn suggests that removing police racial bias will have little effect on the killing rate. Suppose each arrest creates an equal risk of shooting for both African-Americans and whites. In that case, with the current arrest rate, 28.9 percent of all those killed by police officers would still be African-American. This is only slightly smaller than the 31.8 percent of killings we actually see, and it is much greater than the 13.2 percent level of African-Americans in the overall population.

If the major problem is then that African-Americans have so many more encounters with police, we must ask why. Of course, with this as well, police prejudice may be playing a role. After all, police officers decide whom to stop or arrest.

But this is too large a problem to pin on individual officers.

First, the police are at least in part guided by suspect descriptions. And the descriptions provided by victims already show a large racial gap: Nearly 30 percent of reported offenders were black. So if the police simply stopped suspects at a rate matching these descriptions, African-Americans would be encountering police at a rate close to both the arrest and the killing rates.

Second, the choice of where to police is mostly not up to individual officers. And police officers tend to be most active in poor neighborhoods, and African-Americans disproportionately live in poverty.

In fact, the deeper you look, the more it appears that the race problem revealed by the statistics reflects a larger problem: the structure of our society, our laws and policies.

The war on drugs illustrates this kind of racial bias. African-Americans are only slightly more likely to use drugs than whites. Yet, they are more than twice as likely to be arrested on drug-related charges. One reason is that drug sellers are being targeted more heavily than users. With fewer job options, low-income African-Americans have been disproportionately represented in the ranks of drug sellers. In addition, the drug laws penalize crack cocaine — a drug more likely to be used by African-Americans — far more harshly than powder cocaine.

Laws and policies need not explicitly discriminate to effectively discriminate. As Anatole France wrote centuries ago, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.”

(read the full article at NY Times)

Let’s admit that the war on drugs has been a failure

Rob Breakenridge
Calgary Herald : August 18, 2015

It was a striking contrast last week as Conservative leader Stephen Harper denounced the concept of harm reduction just as Alberta Health Services deployed a version of it.

Harper had a lot to say about drug policy, and it only served to underscore just how irrational and counterproductive our approach is. That didn’t begin with the Tories, obviously, but they have very decidedly and proudly embraced a much harsher brand of prohibitionism.

Harper’s remarks last week didn’t actually touch on the fentanyl crisis — perhaps because it might raise some uncomfortable questions about the unintended consequences of government policy. Fentanyl use has surged following Ottawa’s crackdown on Oxycodone. In 2011, for example, Calgary saw six fatal fentanyl overdoses. We’re at 45 already this year.

[…]

Harper’s target, rather, was Insite, Vancouver’s remarkably successful supervised injection site. Insite’s very existence, though, is at odds with Tory doctrine, and they spent years trying to shut it down.

Now the Conservatives are warning that the Liberals and/or NDP would allow more such facilities to open — maybe even in your neighbourhood. In fact, the warning on the Conservative website was accompanied by an ominous photograph of a playground, as though the next Insite might be plunked down right next to it.

Mind you, if you’re not dodging passed-out junkies or used needles when you leave your home, then your neighbourhood is probably a lousy candidate for such a facility. On the other hand, if your neighbourhood is plagued by the grim spectre of heroin addiction, Insite might be a godsend.

Insite’s successes are very much relevant in the context of our struggle to contain fentanyl-related deaths. Fentanyl-laced heroin has been turning up on Vancouver streets, and despite the several overdoses that have occurred at Insite, no one has died there. When one considers the success Insite has had in reducing deaths, reducing injection drug use, reducing drug-related crime, and reducing HIV rates, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. The only surprise has been the government’s strident opposition.

A similar dearth of evidence exists around the government’s approach to marijuana. While one federal leader seems to have come to grips with the failure of prohibition, Harper remains completely oblivious to it. He claimed last week that a majority of Canadians in fact support his position on pot, though several recent surveys on the matter would disagree.

Harper made claims about how legalization would lead to greater availability and reduced health outcomes, claims that were thoroughly debunked in a report that was coincidentally released last week by the Toronto-based International Centre for Science in Drug Policy.

Harper also floated the apparently horrifying prospect of marijuana being sold like alcohol and tobacco. Yet, alcohol and tobacco are sold like alcohol and tobacco and presumably Harper also frowns on young people using either of these drugs.

However, Harper himself inadvertently made the case for regulation over prohibition. He talked about the success Canada has had in reducing rates of teen tobacco use, which are now in fact among the lowest in the developed world. He failed to mention, though, that our rates of teenage marijuana use are among the highest in the world. How curious that we’re able do a better job of keeping the legal drug away from kids than the illegal one.

While many of the claims about the Conservatives’ disdain for evidence have been exaggerated or invented, when it comes to our war on drugs, evidence is one of many casualties. It is on this issue where the worst impulses of this government are on full display. More of the same is clearly not the answer.

(read the full article at Calgary Herald

US Military Uses IMF and World Bank to Launder 85% of Its Black Budget

Jake Anderson
The Anti Media: August 13, 2015

[…]
The CIA and and NSA alone garnered $52.6 billion in funding in 2013 while the Department of Defense black ops budget for secret military projects exceeds this number. It is estimated to be $58.7 billion for the fiscal year 2015.

What is the black budget? Officially, it is the military’s appropriations for “spy satellites, stealth bombers, next-missile-spotting radars, next-gen drones, and ultra-powerful eavesdropping gear.

However, of greater interest to some may be the clandestine nature and full scope of the black budget, which, according to analyst Catherine Austin Fitts, goes far beyond classified appropriations. Based on her research, some of which can be found in her piece “What’s Up With the Black Budget?,” Fitts concludes that the during the last decade, global financial elites have configured an elaborate system that makes most of the military budget unauditable. This is because the real black budget includes money acquired by intelligence groups via narcotics trafficking, predatory lending, and various kinds of other financial fraud.

The result of this vast, geopolitically-sanctioned money laundering scheme is that Housing and Urban Devopment and other agencies are used for drug trafficking and securities fraud. According to Fitts, the scheme allows for at least 85 percent of the U.S. federal budget to remain unaudited.

Fitts has been researching this issue since 2001, when she began to believe that a financial coup d’etat was underway. Specifically, she suspected that the banks, corporations, and investors acting in each global region were part of a “global heist,” whereby capital was being sucked out of each country. She was right.

As Fitts asserts,

“[She] served as Assistant Secretary of Housing at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the United States where I oversaw billions of government investment in US communities…..I later found out that the government contractor leading the War on Drugs strategy for U.S. aid to Peru, Colombia and Bolivia was the same contractor in charge of knowledge management for HUD enforcement. This Washington-Wall Street game was a global game. The peasant women of Latin America were up against the same financial pirates and business model as the people in South Central Los Angeles, West Philadelphia, Baltimore and the South Bronx.”

This is part of an even larger financial scheme. It is fairly well-established by now that international financial institutions like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund operate primarily as instruments of corporate power and nation-controlling infrastructure investment mechanisms. For example, the primary purpose of the World Bank is to bully developing countries into borrowing money for infrastructure investments that will fleece trillions of dollars while permanently indebting these “debtor” nations to West. But how exactly does the World Bank go about doing this?

John Perkins wrote about this paradigm in his book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. During the 1970s, Perkins worked for the international engineering consulting firm, Chas T. Main, as an “economic hitman.” He says the operations of the World Bank are nothing less than “pure economic colonization on behalf of powerful corporations and banks that use the United States government as their tool.”

In his book, Perkins discusses Joseph Stiglitz, the Chief Economist for the World Bank from 1997-2000, at length. Stiglitz described the four-step plan for bamboozling developing countries into becoming debtor nations:

Step One, according to Stiglitz, is to convince a nation to privatize its state industries.

 

Step Two utilizes “capital market liberalization,” which refers to the sudden influx of speculative investment money that depletes national reserves and property values while triggering a large interest bump by the IMF.

 

Step Three, Stiglitz says, is “Market-Based Pricing,” which means raising the prices on food, water and cooking gas. This leads to “Step Three and a Half: The IMF Riot.” Examples of this can be seen in Indonesia, Bolivia, Ecuador and many other countries where the IMF’s actions have caused financial turmoil and social strife.

 

Step Four, of course, is “free trade,” where all barriers to the exploitation of local produce are eliminated.

[…]

(read the full article at The Anti Media)

Johann Hari: Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong


Johann Hari
TED: July 9, 2015

Transcript:

One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was just a little kid, so I didn’t really understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, including later cocaine addiction.

I’d been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it’s now exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. It’s a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter them; it would give them an incentive to stop.

And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help them. And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic questions I just didn’t know the answer to, like, what really causes addiction? Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn’t seem to be working, and is there a better way out there that we could try instead?

So I read loads of stuff about it, and I couldn’t really find the answers I was looking for, so I thought, okay, I’ll go and sit with different people around the world who lived this and studied this and talk to them and see if I could learn from them. And I didn’t realize I would end up going over 30,000 miles at the start, but I ended up going and meeting loads of different people, from a transgender crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them — it turns out they do, but only in very specific circumstances — to the only country that’s ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to crack, Portugal. And the thing I realized that really blew my mind is, almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong, and if we start to absorb the new evidence about addiction, I think we’re going to have to change a lot more than our drug policies.

But let’s start with what we think we know, what I thought I knew. Let’s think about this middle row here.Imagine all of you, for 20 days now, went off and used heroin three times a day. Some of you look a little more enthusiastic than others at this prospect. (Laughter) Don’t worry, it’s just a thought experiment.Imagine you did that, right? What would happen? Now, we have a story about what would happen that we’ve been told for a century. We think, because there are chemical hooks in heroin, as you took it for a while, your body would become dependent on those hooks, you’d start to physically need them, and at the end of those 20 days, you’d all be heroin addicts. Right? That’s what I thought.

First thing that alerted me to the fact that something’s not right with this story is when it was explained to me. If I step out of this TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I’ll be taken to hospital and I’ll be given loads of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It’s actually much better heroin than you’re going to buy on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is contaminated. Actually, very little of it is heroin, whereas the stuff you get from the doctor is medically pure. And you’ll be given it for quite a long period of time. There are loads of people in this room, you may not realize it, you’ve taken quite a lot of heroin. And anyone who is watching this anywhere in the world, this is happening. And if what we believe about addiction is right — those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks — What should happen? They should become addicts. This has been studied really carefully. It doesn’t happen; you will have noticed if your grandmother had a hip replacement, she didn’t come out as a junkie. (Laughter)

And when I learned this, it seemed so weird to me, so contrary to everything I’d been told, everything I thought I knew, I just thought it couldn’t be right, until I met a man called Bruce Alexander. He’s a professor of psychology in Vancouver who carried out an incredible experiment I think really helps us to understand this issue. Professor Alexander explained to me, the idea of addiction we’ve all got in our heads, that story, comes partly from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century.They’re really simple experiments. You can do them tonight at home if you feel a little bit sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite quickly. So there you go, right? That’s how we think it works. In the ’70s, Professor Alexander comes along and he looks at this experiment and he noticed something. He said ah, we’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let’s try something a bit different. So Professor Alexander built a cage that he called “Rat Park,” which is basically heaven for rats. They’ve got loads of cheese, they’ve got loads of colored balls, they’ve got loads of tunnels.Crucially, they’ve got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex. And they’ve got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. But here’s the fascinating thing: In Rat Park, they don’t like the drug water. They almost never use it. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. You go from almost 100 percent overdose when they’re isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives.

Now, when he first saw this, Professor Alexander thought, maybe this is just a thing about rats, they’re quite different to us. Maybe not as different as we’d like, but, you know — But fortunately, there was a human experiment into the exact same principle happening at the exact same time. It was called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, 20 percent of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they thought, my God, we’re going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends; it made total sense. Now, those soldiers who were using loads of heroin were followed home. The Archives of General Psychiatry did a really detailed study, and what happened to them? It turns out they didn’t go to rehab. They didn’t go into withdrawal. Ninety-five percent of them just stopped. Now, if you believe the story about chemical hooks, that makes absolutely no sense, but Professor Alexander began to thinkthere might be a different story about addiction. He said, what if addiction isn’t about your chemical hooks? What if addiction is about your cage? What if addiction is an adaptation to your environment?

Looking at this, there was another professor called Peter Cohen in the Netherlands who said, maybe we shouldn’t even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we’re happy and healthy, we’ll bond and connect with each other, but if you can’t do that, because you’re traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that’s our nature. That’s what we want as human beings.

And at first, I found this quite a difficult thing to get my head around, but one way that helped me to think about it is, I can see, I’ve got over by my seat a bottle of water, right? I’m looking at lots of you, and lots of you have bottles of water with you. Forget the drugs. Forget the drug war. Totally legally, all of those bottles of water could be bottles of vodka, right? We could all be getting drunk — I am right after this — (Laughter) — but we’re not. Now, because you’ve been able to afford the approximately gazillion poundsthat it costs to get into a TED Talk, I’m guessing you guys could afford to be drinking vodka for the next six months. You wouldn’t end up homeless. You’re not going to do that, and the reason you’re not going to do that is not because anyone’s stopping you. It’s because you’ve got bonds and connections that you want to be present for. You’ve got work you love. You’ve got people you love. You’ve got healthy relationships. And a core part of addiction, I came to think, and I believe the evidence suggests, is about not being able to bear to be present in your life.

Now, this has really significant implications. The most obvious implications are for the War on Drugs. In Arizona, I went out with a group of women who were made to wear t-shirts saying, “I was a drug addict,”and go out on chain gangs and dig graves while members of the public jeer at them, and when those women get out of prison, they’re going to have criminal records that mean they’ll never work in the legal economy again. Now, that’s a very extreme example, obviously, in the case of the chain gang, but actually almost everywhere in the world we treat addicts to some degree like that. We punish them. We shame them. We give them criminal records. We put barriers between them reconnecting. There was a doctor in Canada, Dr. Gabor Maté, an amazing man, who said to me, if you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system.

Now, there’s a place that decided to do the exact opposite, and I went there to see how it worked. In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, and every year, they tried the American way more and more. They punished people and stigmatized them and shamed them more, and every year, the problem got worse. And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together, and basically said, look, we can’t go on with a country where we’re having ever more people becoming heroin addicts.Let’s set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out what would genuinely solve the problem. And they set up a panel led by an amazing man called Dr. João Goulão, to look at all this new evidence, and they came back and they said, “Decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack, but” — and this is the crucial next step — “take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on disconnecting them,and spend it instead on reconnecting them with society.” And that’s not really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States and Britain. So they do do residential rehab, they do psychological therapy, that does have some value. But the biggest thing they did was the complete opposite of what we do: a massive program of job creation for addicts, and microloans for addicts to set up small businesses. So say you used to be a mechanic. When you’re ready, they’ll go to a garage, and they’ll say,if you employ this guy for a year, we’ll pay half his wages. The goal was to make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. And when I went and met the addicts in Portugal, what they said is, as they rediscovered purpose, they rediscovered bonds and relationships with the wider society.

It’ll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the results are in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent. Overdose is massively down, HIV is massively down among addicts. Addiction in every study is significantly down.One of the ways you know it’s worked so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old system.

(read the full transcript at Alternet)

DEA asset “El Chapo” Guzman escapes from prison

Alternative Free Press

Yesterday, Sinaloa Cartel drug-lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped from prison in Mexico.

In 2014 it was reported that Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and other federal agents had forged a secret alliance with top level Sinaloa drug cartel members by permitting the narco gangsters to traffic drugs into the U.S., and in a reverse sting, the DEA is accused of allegedly allowing the dealers to ship U.S. made weapons into Mexico without facing prosecution.

Anabel Hernández has received numerous awards for her work, including the 2012 Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. Last year she told Nick Alexandrov:

There is no “drug war.” I have been investigating the drug cartels for almost 10 years. I have access to a great deal of information—documents, court files, testimonies of members of the Mexican and US governments—and I can tell you that in Mexico there has never, never been a “war on drugs.” The government, from the mid-1970s until today, has been involved with the drug cartels.

Hernández says she has documents showing that prior to Guzman’s arrest, the authorities always knew where he was, and they consistently protected him. Considering that, it is reasonable to question whether Guzman was allowed to escape.

“I was an informant for U.S. Federal Agents, and the agents cut a deal with (me), and members of the Sinaloa Cartel that allowed us to traffic tons of narcotics into the U.S., and to traffic illegal guns across the Mexico-U.S. Border without fear of prosecution under an immunity agreement,” said Vicente Zambada-Niebla in a bombshell court filing in federal court in Chicago Illinois.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said in 2009 that he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

Michael Ruppert exposed government drug-dealing in Los Angeles during the 1990s, he explains that “with 250 billion dollars a year in illegal drug money moved, laundered through the American economy, that money benefits Wall Street. That’s the point of having the prohibitive drug trade, which the CIA effectively manages for the benefit of Wall Street. So the purpose of the Agency being involved in the drug trade has been to generate illegal cash, fluid liquid capital, which gives those who can get their hands on it an unfair advantage in the marketplace…. The drug money is always going through Wall Street. Wall Street smells money and doesn’t care where the money comes from; they’ll go for the drug money.”

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Cigarettes & alcohol each more likely to cause psychosis than marijuana

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Cannabis does not cause schizophrenia, but new research suggests smoking cigarettes can.

The BBC reports:

Published in the Lancet Psychiatry, their analysis of 61 separate studies suggests nicotine in cigarette smoke may be altering the brain.

Experts said it was a “pretty strong case” but needed more research.

Smoking has long been associated with psychosis, but it has often been believed that schizophrenia patients are more likely to smoke because they use cigarettes as a form of self-medication to ease the distress of hearing voices or having hallucinations.

The team at King’s looked at data involving 14,555 smokers and 273,162 non-smokers.

It indicated:

– 57% of people with psychosis were already smokers when they had their first psychotic episode
– Daily smokers were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as non-smokers
– Smokers developed schizophrenia a year earlier on average

The argument is that if there is a higher rate of smoking before schizophrenia is diagnosed, then smoking is not simply a case of self-medication.

In 2014 we wrote about a University of Calgary four-year study entitled “Impact of substance use on conversion to psychosis in youth at clinical high risk of psychosis” which determined that cannabis did not increase the likelihood of psychosis. On the other hand, the study suggests that alcohol use could increase the likelihood of psychosis. The Abstract reads: “Results revealed that low use of alcohol, but neither cannabis use nor tobacco use at baseline, contributed to the prediction of psychosis in the CHR sample.”

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RELATED: Claims of marijuana psychosis in teens are asinine

Vancouver’s Gangster Government Creates Legal Extortion Racket: Demands $30K From Each Pot Shop

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Today, The City of Vancouver Council voted in favor of new regulations for the growing number of medical Cannabis dispensaries in the city. The new bylaws demand $30,000 from each dispensary. The new rules also restrict the location such businesses may operate within, which means dozens are now already in violation.

Councillor Kerry Jang has threatened that the city and/or their police force will shut down dispensaries which do not pay or violate other rules.

City Council claims it is the asinine position of Canada’s Health Minister Rona Ambrose which is forcing the hand of Vancouver’s Councillors. While her portfolio includes legal responsibility for medical marijuana access in Canada, she ridiculously claims cannabis does not have medical value and has failed to provide Canadians with access to their medicine as dictated by the Supreme Court. Now, this blame of failing to provide access is valid, but it does not justify demanding $30,000 with the threat of a police raid. The city could and should regulate dispensaries similarly to other businesses, but $30,000 is ridiculous. That $30,000 cost will of course be passed on to patients who are already paying too much.

The City of Vancouver charges liquor-serving establishments from $858.00 to a maximum $4,637.00 to process their licenses, while alcohol is more dangerous, more addictive, and significantly more damaging to health than Cannabis. A $5000 licensing fee might be reasonable, but $30,000 to dispense medicine to sick people is essentially extortion.

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SOURCES:
Vancouver.ca
CannabisCulture.com
CBC.ca

Claims of marijuana psychosis in teens are asinine

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By now you may have seen a headline “Pot can pose psychosis risk for teens with developing brains: researchers” or “Marijuana research says psychosis in teens who smoke pot way up”. Notice that the headlines are careful to include words such as “can”, “researchers”, or “says” because it’s just 2 people giving their opinion, it’s not a proven fact. If these media outlets had published a headline which read “Pot poses psychosis risk for teens with developing brains” or “psychosis in teens who smoke pot way up” they would likely be sued by several medical marijuana corporations and forced to print retractions, because there is a lack of science to prove these claims.

We are told there is “a growing body of research” but are provided ZERO specific examples.

These two researchers just give their opinions and cite examples they claim to have witnessed… but appear to not even be questioning whether this “marijuana” was organic cannabis, or if it was sprayed with something or if it was a synthetic substitute. As long as cannabis is illegal and teens are buying their pot from illegal sources, we can’t know what they are smoking. Especially with the many new research chemicals being sold in response to prohibition, teens are often unknowingly consuming cocktails of dangerous chemicals. Without a legal source of organic cannabis, teens will continue to be at risk of consuming unknown chemicals causing unknown damage to their bodies.

One of these asinine articles cites a discredited study regarding IQ being affected by cannabis. The Washington Post can clear that up for us:

Then, a follow-up study published 6 months later in the same journal found that the Duke paper failed to account for a number of confounding factors: “Although it would be too strong to say that the results have been discredited, the methodology is flawed and the causal inference drawn from the results premature,” it concluded.

Now, a new study out from the University College of London provides even stronger evidence that the Duke findings were flawed. The study draws on a considerably larger sample of adolescents than the Duke research – 2,612 children born in the Bristol area of the U.K. in 1991 and 1992. Researchers examined children’s IQ scores at age 8 and again at age 15, and found “no relationship between cannabis use and lower IQ at age 15,” when confounding factors – alcohol use, cigarette use, maternal education, and others – were taken into account. Even heavy marijuana use wasn’t associated with IQ.

UPDATED June 15, 2015:
(This article was written hastily, and should have originally included a link to our previous related article) :
Study says alcohol can lead to psychosis, but not cannabis

The University of Calgary 4-year study entitled “Impact of substance use on conversion to psychosis in youth at clinical high risk of psychosis” determined that cannabis did not increase the likelihood of psychosis. On the other hand, the study suggests that alcohol use could increase the likelihood of psychosis. The Abstract reads: “Results revealed that low use of alcohol, but neither cannabis use nor tobacco use at baseline, contributed to the prediction of psychosis in the CHR sample.”

Written by Alternative Free Press
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Claims pot causes “psychosis in teens” are asinine by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

RELATED:
Study says alcohol can lead to psychosis, but not cannabis