Seven Questions About Marijuana Legalization
RAND researcher nails it neatly.
I’ve been meaning to offer up the key points from an excellent column on marijuana legalization that appeared in April in USA Today. Beau Kilmer, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, lists the “new and tricky issues” that Colorado and Washington forgot to consider in depth before passing broad legalization statutes.
Both states are works in progress. What they have passed so far will undoubtedly be revisited. Without further ado, here are Kilmer’s “Seven Ps,” as I call them:
Production. Who gets to grow it, where do they get to grow it, and how much do they ...
Source: Addiction Inbox - June 10, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
What We Talk About When We Talk About Drugs
Some number crunching at bluelight.ru.
A fantastic set of interactive graphics tracking conversational trends in drugs at the chat board bluelight.ru reveals some surprises, to the delight of data journalists everywhere. Virostatiq, a software package authored by Marko Plahuta, was put to the task of analyzing traffic at the drug discussion site. Various kinds of plots are available, with endless variables to permutate. Bear in mind that the data that got crunched dealt with the subject of messages, and cannot be directly correlated with drug use, trends, distributions, etc. But it is a fascinating glimpse at what ille...
Source: Addiction Inbox - June 6, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Will Marijuana “Dabbing” Harm the Legalization Movement?
“Relax, bro—it’s just a blowtorch.”
It is called dabbing, and it is something the marijuana legalization movement would rather you didn’t know about. As crack is to powdered cocaine, so a dab is to a joint of marijuana: the same drug, in a much more concentrated form. But butane hash oil, or BHO, the end product of dabbing, is seen by many in the movement as a potential public relations disaster.
It’s easy to find instructions on the Internet for making butane hash oil. (Not to be confused with the hash oil of the 1970s produced, most commonly, using sieves, ice, naphtha, or acetone to separate the THC-ri...
Source: Addiction Inbox - June 2, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Big Tobacco Hasn't Given Up On Smoking. Have You?
World No Smoking Day. (Source: Addiction Inbox)
Source: Addiction Inbox - May 31, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Women, Cigarettes, and Meth
More bad news for young female addicts.
A blizzard of research findings this year continues to demonstrate that women have gender-specific issues to deal with when it comes to cigarettes and speed. None of the findings have anything to do with the old canard that women cannot “hold their liquor,” or do drugs like men do. Women hold their liquor fine, on a pound for pound basis. And women are well represented, presently, among the ranks of alcoholics. That is unfortunate, since a great deal of research has shown that alcohol causes neurological damage in women more quickly than in men. And now comes more evidence that ...
Source: Addiction Inbox - May 28, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Marijuana and Diabetes: Does Pot Make You Thin?
Teasing out the insulin effect.
On the face of it, the study seems to come out of left field: A group of researchers claimed that marijuana smokers showed 16 per cent lower fasting insulin levels than non-smokers. The study, called “The Impact of Marijuana Use on Glucose, Insulin, and Insulin Resistance among US Adults,” is in press for The American Journal of Medicine. The authors are a diverse group of medical researchers from Harvard, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and the University of Nebraska College of Medicine. The study concluded: “We found that marijuana use was associated with lower levels...
Source: Addiction Inbox - May 22, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
From the Archives: Have Americans Become Afraid of Their Doctors?
Noncompliance and the paranoid style.
[Originally published June 27, 2007]
Note: In the everlasting battle between consumers and Big Pharma, amid a string of recent exposes concerning whose doctor took what payment under which table, I am republishing an essay I wrote several years ago, in which I attempt to view the doctor/Pharma/patient interaction from a different angle.
Once upon a time, Americans went to their doctors to get pills. Doctors complained that patients believed competent medical care consisted of being handed a prescription. In the absence of that piece of paper with the unintelligible signature, a p...
Source: Addiction Inbox - May 19, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Six Arguments For the Elimination of Cigarettes
Prohibition and the “tobacco control endgame.”
Despite all our efforts in recent years to reduce the percentage of Americans who smoke cigarettes—currently about one in five—the idea of full-blown cigarette prohibition has not gained much traction. That may be changing, as prominent nicotine researchers and public police officials start thinking about what is widely referred to as the “tobacco control endgame.”
Considering the new regulatory powers given the FDA under the terms of the Tobacco Control Act of 2009, as a commentary in Tobacco Control framed it, “will the government be a facilitator or barrie...
Source: Addiction Inbox - May 14, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
The Pot President
Hendrik Hertzberg on the hypocrisy of the hip.
In a blog post at the New Yorker last week, Hendrik Hertzberg spotlighted a recent joke made by the President of the United States at the White House Correspondents dinner. In reference to the rapidly changing media landscape, Obama said: “You can’t keep up with it. I mean, I remember when BuzzFeed was just something I did in college around two A.M. (Laughter.) It’s true! (Laughter.)”
The days of expressing a cringing contrition for your “youthful experimentation,” or claiming that you didn’t inhale, or clearly over.
But of course, the president’s joke wa...
Source: Addiction Inbox - May 11, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Orexin and Insomnia
If Valium makes you groggy, and Ambien makes you sleepwalk…
A compound that blocks a brain receptor you probably have never heard of may hold the key to the next generation of sleeping pills—and there is always a next generation of sleeping pills.
A new class of hypnotic compounds that serve as antagonists for the neurotransmitter orexin may combat insomnia without the “confusional arousals” that have come to plague some users of zolpidem, otherwise known as Ambien. Sleepwalking, sleep driving, and sleep sex are common among the reports. Orexin is involved in central nervous system arousal. So-called DORAs, or...
Source: Addiction Inbox - May 7, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Clock Ticking On Colorado’s Marijuana Repeal Bill
Proposal to revote on pot legalization is losing steam.
While the rest of the nation argues over Colorado’s recent decision to legalize limited amounts of marijuana, a small but determined group of legislators in that state have been promoting a bill that would allow a “conditional repeal” of the pot amendment.
The proposal to resubmit the question of retail marijuana sales to Colorado voters is supported by Senate President John Morse (D-Colorado Springs) and Senate Minority Leader Bill Cadman (R-Colorado Springs). The proposed ballot measure would first ask voters to approve previously promised higher tax rat...
Source: Addiction Inbox - May 6, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Where Are All the New Anti-Craving Drugs?
The dilemma of dwindling drug development.
Drugs for the treatment of addiction are now a fact of life. For alcoholism alone, the medications legally available by prescription include disulfiram (Antabuse), naltrexone (Revia and Vivitrol)—and acamprosate (Campral), the most recent FDA-approved entry. A fourth entry, topiramate (Topamax), is currently only approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for other uses. But none of these are miracle medications, and more to the point, no bright new stars have come through the FDA pipeline for a long time.
New approvals for drugs in this category, like psychiatric d...
Source: Addiction Inbox - April 30, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Addiction Inbox (D)Evolves Into Paperback
A curated collection of blog posts in print.
Online is where journalism is happening now, but it is a truism that most of the world’s repository of knowledge is still found in books. It is also true that Addiction Inbox now comes in paperback, from Amazon. For cheap. Also available in Kindle, for unbelievably cheap.
I have selected and arranged a “best of the blog” collection, meant to serve as a handy off-the-shelf compendium of science-based information on drugs and addiction. Is shoplifting the opiate of the masses? Does menthol really matter? Can ketamine and other party drugs cause permanent blad...
Source: Addiction Inbox - April 28, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Nature, Nurture, and Me
Which came first, the addiction or the trauma?
About a year ago, Jonathan Taylor, a professor at California State University in Fullerton, assigned his students some reading from my book, The Chemical Carousel, for his “Drugs, Politics, and Cultural Change” course. At the same time, the class watched an interview with Dr. Gabor Maté, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. In a letter written for his readers, Dr. Mate´ insists that addiction “is very close to the core of the human experience. That is why almost anything can become addictive, from seemingly healthy activities suc...
Source: Addiction Inbox - April 25, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Let the Light Shine In: Addiction and Optogenetics
Study says laser light can turn cocaine addiction on and off in rats.
Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), had one word for it: “Wow.”
Writing in the director’s blog at the online NIH site, Collins said that a team of researchers from NIH and UC San Francisco had succeeded in delivering “harmless pulses of laser light to the brains of cocaine-addicted rats, blocking their desire for the narcotic.”
Wow, indeed. It didn’t take long for the science fiction technology of optogenetics to make itself felt in addiction studies. The idea of using targeted laser light to streng...
Source: Addiction Inbox - April 22, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
