So, we were right all along?

The years we spent dealing with the tired “What about the children?!?” arguments.

Of course, we pointed out that teens may actually not be as eager to rebel with marijuana when grandma is taking it for her glaucoma. And we noted that illegal drug dealers don’t generally check I.D.s for age, while legalized dealers must. And every legitimate study consistently found that legal access to marijuana did not result in increases in teen use.

National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Director Nora Volkow finally agrees.

Top Federal Drug Official Admits Legalizers Were ‘Right’ About Teen Marijuana Use And Touts Psychedelics’ Therapeutic Potential

Volkow said on Drug Policy Alliance founder Ethan Nadelmann’s show that she was “expecting the use of marijuana among adolescents would go up” when states moved to legalize cannabis, but admitted that “overall, it hasn’t.” It was reform advocates like Nadelmann who were “right” about the impact of the policy change on youth, she said.

Yep.

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9 Responses to So, we were right all along?

  1. Son of Sam Walton says:

    Soon, they’ll let cannabis users work in Saftey Sensitive Jobs because of all the prescription Junkies, people working with an oxygen machine attached to them, drunks, and overweight people showing their hypocrisy with picking a choosing how to treat their symptoms.

    I just lost a horrible job that had really good benefits but wound up tearing my soul to shreds and causing major pain on the body. With this Afghanistan debacle messing with me, after all these years of warning people about the War on Drugs has made me bolder to start toking up at work and since the Oklahoma Vet Center I work at has gone out of their way to make sure a college-educated vet with a history of never missing work or being late cannot move up. So, they gave me an emergency drug and alcohol test after I was working with heavy machinery for over an hour. Humiliating. And where I work is a veterans nursing home and the Admin has gone out of their way to make sure vets with a State Medical Card cannot have their medicine. During the covid crisis, we lost almost half our residence in one year which was well over 50. They forced these old people to play musical chairs with their rooms and roommates, which did a number for their health and wellbeing. Lots of their stuff got lost or destroyed when disinfecting them.

    The hypocrisy of the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs is so horrible, I feel like maybe if we all went to work dressed up as clowns, with large squeaky shoes and big round noses and flowers that squirt water at folks–then we might have won the War on Terror.

    The Claremore Oklahoma Vet Center has a history of refusing to hire veterans and they have a history of such abuse and neglect and stupidity that every 2-3yrs, we get a new Head Admi. The problem also rests in the Admin under her, all civilians and not all of them have college degrees for a job that requires college degrees. And the bosses won’t wear their masks but feel that they should write you up for not wearing yours. Hypocrisy like this shouldn’t exist when taxpayers pay.

  2. Servetus says:

    Congratulations are due Dr. Nora Volkow for joining the right side of history in the drug war. Others in government should follow her excellent example.

    Some of the most effective opponents of drug wars have been outraged academics and scientists whose job is to penetrate confusion, craziness, and fraud in ways that can be quantified and analyzed, making drug wars the perfect topic for study.

    Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead reminded the country’s leadership that the choice of which mind altering drugs to use was often a culturally biased decision. She was pummeled by prohibitionist propaganda for speaking truth to power. Her mistake was that she refused to paint the illicit drug consumer as evil, or not of the tribe. Then there was Tim Leary who tried but failed to explain to a cabal of 14th century-minded bureaucrats the wonders of magic mushrooms. Anecdotal revelations of the effectiveness of marijuana as a treatment for glaucoma, or even cancer, were met with neglect, derision or ridicule.

    More recently, the physical and biological sciences moved in to do battle. Researchers from all over the world exposed drug war hype and demonstrated that the big lie always has a time limit. Chemists, biochemists, biophysicists, neurologists, geneticists, and molecular psychiatrists yanked the sheets off the government’s drug war propaganda machine to discover an overabundance of successful medical treatments using cannabinoids and psilocybin. The chemicals worked wonders, and the positive effects were immediately visible using high end scientific instrumentation.

    That should have been the end of the argument were it not for a few groups of crazed sadomoralists who appear to prefer disease, death or damaged communities to a lengthier and better life.

  3. Servetus says:

    The United Kingdom’s drug war problem resembles that of the United States:

    25-AUG-2021–The main piece of legislation used to combat illegal drug use in the UK is no longer fit for purpose, according to a leading criminologist, [Dr Tammy Ayres, Associate Professor in Criminology] at the University of Leicester.

    The Misuse of Drugs Act was introduced in 1971 to control the consumption and supply of psychoactive substances, with the 50th anniversary of the Act’s Royal Assent marked earlier in 2021. […]

    …in the UK, Black people were stopped and searched for drugs at more than six times the rate of white people, while Asian people were stopped and searched at two-and-a-half times the rate. Those identifying as mixed race were stopped and searched for drugs at twice the rate of white people.

    Black people caught in possession of cannabis by the Metropolitan Police are less likely to receive a cannabis warning than white people, and are five times more likely to be charged with an offence. […]

    AAAS Public Science News Release: Drugs legislation requires review, says academic

    Publication republished from 2016: Prohibition, privilege and the drug apartheid: The failure of drug policy reform to address the underlying fallacies of drug prohibition–Stuart Taylor, Julian Buchanan, Tammy Ayres

  4. Servetus says:

    Southern Chinese consumed beer 9000 years ago:

    31-AUG-2021–A new study finds evidence of beer drinking 9,000 years ago in southern China, which was likely part of a ritual to honor the dead. The findings are based on an analysis of ancient pots found at a burial site at Qiaotou, making the site among the oldest in the world for early beer drinking. […]

    No residential structures were found at the site. The mound contained two human skeletons and multiple pottery pits with high-quality pottery vessels, many of which were complete vessels. The pottery was painted with white slip and some of the vessels were decorated with abstract designs. As the study reports, these artifacts are probably some of “the earliest known painted pottery in the world.” No pottery of this kind has been found at any other sites dating to this time period. […]

    The team identified microbotanical (starch granules and phytoliths) and microbial (mold and yeast) residues in the pots that were consistent with residues from beer fermentation and are not found naturally in soil or in other artifacts unless they had contained alcohol.

    “Through a residue analysis of pots from Qiaotou, our results revealed that the pottery vessels were used to hold beer, in its most general sense— a fermented beverage made of rice (Oryza sp.), a grain called Job’s tears (Coix lacryma-jobi), and unidentified tubers,” says co-author Jiajing Wang, an assistant professor of anthropology at Dartmouth. “This ancient beer though would not have been like the IPA that we have today. Instead, it was likely a slightly fermented and sweet beverage, which was probably cloudy in color.”

    AAAS Public Science News: Study shows evidence of beer drinking 9,000 years ago in Southern China: Pottery vessels which had contained beer, found with human remains in platform mound

    PLOS ONE: “https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0255833”>Early evidence for beer drinking in a 9000-year-old platform mound in southern China

  5. Servetus says:

    Researchers at the University of Turku discover the triggers of appetite as it relates to the opioid and endocannabinoid receptors:

    2-SEP-2021…researchers at the Turku PET Centre, Finland, discovered a connection between the function of the opioid system and food craving triggered by appetitive external stimuli.

    Animal studies have established that the brain’s opioid and endocannabinoid systems are important in regulating eating behavior and mediate the food reward experience…alterations in these systems’ signaling have been associated with obesity…both internal signals of the body, such as fluctuation in blood sugar levels, and external stimuli, such as food advertisements, can spark an appetite in humans.

    …researchers at the University of Turku, Finland, investigated the connection between the brain’s opioid and endocannabinoid signaling and different types of eating behavior. They discovered that the function of the opioid system is connected to eating triggered by external stimuli.

    “The less binding sites there were for the opioids, the greater was the tendency to eat in response to external stimuli, such as seeing appetizing food. Moreover, the number of binding sites for endocannabinoids was connected to several different types of eating behavior, describes first author,” Doctoral Candidate Tatu Kantonen from the University of Turku. […]

    AAAS Public Science News Release: Researchers discover connection between brain’s opioid system and eating behavior

    Translational Psychiatry Publication: Cerebral μ-opioid and CB1 receptor systems have distinct roles in human feeding behavior: Tatu Kantonen, Tomi Karjalainen, Laura Pekkarinen, Janne Isojärvi, Kari Kalliokoski, Valtteri Kaasinen, Jussi Hirvonen, Pirjo Nuutila & Lauri Nummenmaa

  6. Servetus says:

    Cocaine addiction explained by scientists in a mouse study—no thanks whatsoever to US or UK prohibitionists:

    9-SEP-2021—Contrary to common thinking, cocaine triggers an addiction only in 20% of the consumers. But what happens in their brains when they lose control of their consumption? Thanks to a recent experimental method, neuroscientists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have revealed a brain mechanism specific to cocaine, which has the particularity of triggering a massive increase in serotonin in addition to the increase in dopamine common to all drugs. Indeed, serotonin acts as an intrinsic brake on the overexcitement of the reward system elicited by dopamine, the neurotransmitter that causes addiction.

    …Addiction is defined as the compulsive search for a substance despite the negative consequences, whereas dependence is characterised as the occurrence of a withdrawal symptom — the physical effects of which vary greatly from one substance to another — when consumption is stopped abruptly. It thus affects everyone, whereas addiction affects only a minority of users, even after prolonged exposure. For example, it is estimated that 20% of cocaine users and 30% of opiate users are addicted. “The same principle applies to all potentially addictive products”, says Christian Lüscher, a professor in the Department of Basic Neurosciences at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, who led the research. “Here in Switzerland, for instance, almost all adults consume alcohol from time to time, which is a strong stimulator of the reward system. However, only a small proportion of us will become alcoholics.” […]

    When cocaine is consumed, two forces are at work in the brain: dopamine on the one hand, whose sudden increase leads to compulsion, and serotonin on the other, which acts as a brake on compulsion. Addiction therefore occurs when an imbalance is created between these two neuroregulators and dopamine overtakes serotonin.

    “Actually, dopamine triggers a phenomenon of synaptic plasticity, through the strengthening of connections between synapses in the cortex and those in the dorsal striatum. This intense stimulation of the reward system then triggers compulsion. Serotonin has the opposite effect by inhibiting the reinforcement induced by dopamine to keep the reward system under control”, explains Christian Lüscher. […]

    AAAS Public Science News Release: How serotonin curbs cocaine addiction—By identifying the role of serotonin during cocaine use, UNIGE scientists explain why only one in five persons becomes addicted to this drug.

    UNIVERSITÉ DE GENÈVE press release: Synaptic mechanism underlying serotonin modulation of transition to cocaine addiction

  7. Servetus says:

    Health care in the UK is grappling with cannabis as a treatment and the hurdles it creates for health care providers. UK research goes so far as to educate the medical profession about cannabis therapies:

    Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology: 08 September 2021 — Epilepsy and cannabis: so near, yet so far–Martin Kirkpatrick, Finbar O’callaghan

  8. Servetus says:

    Using an accelerometer-based sensor in a smartphone, researchers are claiming they can detect marijuana use by young adults:

    Highlights

    • Time features plus phone sensor data had 90 % accuracy in detecting cannabis “high”.

    • Top ranked features to detect subjective cannabis “high” included time and travel.

    • Detection model has potential implications for triggering just-in-time intervention. […]

    Young adults (ages 18–25) in Pittsburgh, PA, who reported cannabis use at least twice per week, completed up to 30 days of daily data collection: phone surveys (3 times/day), self-initiated reports of cannabis use (start/stop time, subjective cannabis intoxication rating: 0–10, 10 = very high), and continuous phone sensor data. We tested multiple models with Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM) in distinguishing “not intoxicated” (rating = 0) vs subjective cannabis “low-intoxication” (rating = 1–3) vs “moderate-intensive intoxication” (rating = 4–10). We tested the importance of time features (i.e., day of the week, time of day) relative to smartphone sensor data only on model performance, since time features alone might predict “routines” in cannabis intoxication. […]

    Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Volume 228, In progress, 1 November 2021: Mobile phone sensor-based detection of subjective cannabis intoxication in young adults: A feasibility study in real-world settings

    There are so many things wrong with the idea of trying to sense marijuana use with a smartphone it’s hard to know where to begin. For one, a new invention is supposed to eliminate irritations, not create them. It will fail for this reason alone.

    For another, the phone would need to be carried by the individual at all times to detect relative differences in motor acceleration, something that can be easily avoided by not carrying it at all—unless it’s intended to be strapped on like an ankle-bracelet.

    Even if the data could be accurately collected, based on likely similar problems to facial recognition software that claimed a better accuracy than that which occurred in the field, there is no indication that the data could be made more decipherable. There are too many variables, meaning five or more. When that happens, not even AI (artificial intelligence) is applicable.

    And there are 4th Amendment objections to collecting information about people without a search warrant. Of course, prohibitionists have never once in their miserable and pitiful lives ever cared about the citizens’ right to privacy. They always stretch the boundaries in legal proceedings. The lengths they will go to are clearly indicated in this latest, intrusive smartphone concept.

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