Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 5:11 pm | By: Radical Russ
Via Twitter I received the plea from a reader named “LindseyDiane” that pointed to this newly released article in the Chicago Tribune entitled “What Parents Need to Know About Pot”. She wrote “This article is full of blatant lies. Please email to set them straight!”
Marijuana packs a bigger wallop now than it did in the ’70s.
Parents may just want to listen up: The most recent National Survey on Drug Use and Health found that among marijuana users over age 12, almost 35 percent used marijuana 20 or more days in the past month.
Ah, statistics. What stood out to you in that sentence? Did you get “age 12″, “35%”, and “20 days a month”? Preceded by a call to parents, right? Oh my god, one third of our kids are getting stoned two-thirds of the time!
But here’s the thing – that’s all marijuana users over age 12, even the ones age 18 to 100 who are long past needing their parents’ guidance on adult decisions.
Now, indeed, the statistic is true. Nice thing about the intertubes is you can check their math. Visit the Substance Abuse Mental Health Data Archive (SAMHDA) and you can run something called Quick Tables. You can choose four different “Measures of Marijuana Use”, like “Number of Days Used Marijuana in the Past Twelve Months”. You can choose eight different “Respondent Characteristics”, like “Age Group”. Then it will build you the table and even a bar graph if you like.
There are about 248 million Americans aged 12 and older. For the 25 million people age 12 and older who will smoke marijuana this year, it is true that 35.6% will smoke 100 days or more in the past year (so, not exactly “20 or more days a month”, more like “8 or more days a month”). But for the 12-17 age group, the number is actually 28%.
Now, that still sounds scary, huh? But this is just the numbers of the kids who do smoke pot. There are 25 million kids aged 12-17 and 880,000 of them are smoking pot “8 or more times a month”. That’s 3.5% of all kids. Think of it as 7 out of 200 getting stoned one-fourth of the time; not 1 out of three getting stoned two-thirds of the time.
Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 7:32 pm | By: Radical Russ
NORML’s Paul Armentano has already done a stellar job taking on the latest reefer madess on ABC News. This is another one of what seem to be an increasing number of stories (NY Times, Dr. Drew, The Tenneseean, CNN, TransWorldNews, Christian Science Monitor) that bring up the idea of “marijuana addiction” by telling the personal stories of people whose lives became full of turmoil and regret when they just couldn’t give up the doobies.
Many years ago the former head of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Alan Leshner made this statement when forced to confront the fact that tens of thousands of patients were successfully using cannabis as a medicine:“The plural of anecdote is not evidence.”
Someone ought to pass on Lesnher’s cop out to ABC News, whose recent feature, “Reefer Madness Redux: Is Pot Addictive?“, is little more than a series of anecdotes from folks claiming that it’s becoming harder and harder for some individuals to quit weed.
Yes, if 10,000 people say that using marijuana helped them medicinally, that’s just anecdotes and no basis for medicine. But if a dozen people say that they were daily tokers, it ruined their lives, and they had a hard time quitting the bong, that’s enough for the mainstream media to question “Is Pot Addictive?”. Which, by the way, is one of those sneaky ways the media tries to push a narrative by just asking the question and not declaring the fact. “Is President Obama a Kenyan-born Illegal President?” or “Has Former President Bush Returned to His Hard Drinking Ways?” would be similar examples of the technique.
Ask yourself, do marijuana users, who can be found in the wee hours of the morning, staring at the “white noise” of a blank TV screen – off the air for hours, be competent drivers? Every druggie has laughed about having found themselves in that position.
What is this television channel in the 21st century that goes “off the air”? John, it’s called the digital transition – your old Magnavox console with the built in 8-track and turntable won’t pick up our fancy-schmancy hi-def 24-hour digital channels, dagnabbit!
John provides a cut-n-paste of a study that says pot smokers are 3 to 7 times more likely to cause an accident. He’s kind enough to provide footnotes to these esteemed scientist’s work. But John’s been hammered in his comments section, by me and quite a few well-educated people, pointing out every flaw in his argument and every deficit in his scientific claims. There is a simple explanation: John’s scientists are pure as the driven snow and our scientists are “druggies” with a self-serving agenda bankrolled by evil world dominating billionaires.
[I]n fact, those who leave comments, claim it’s just the opposite.Of course they’re users, trying to tell you that they’re fine to drive, … and they’ll refer to “studies”, proving just the opposite of what is only common sense, that using marijuana doesn’t impair drivers … so where’s the truth? [T]here are seemingly competent scientists who are also users, and will evidently produce ‘studies’ to further their agendas, and/or those who pay them, and don’t forget; behind the scenes, there are also wealthy men and organizations willing to bankroll anything to further their goal of legalization.
And the next claim will make Dr. Earleywine and every other scientist who’s ever tried to get a grant to study the medicinal properties of cannabis fall out of their chair:
These scientists, … they’re also a concern, for those attempting to find the truth. Truth is, they’re under pressure: 1) if academics - they need to be a published author, (being published in the scientific and research field means more respect and impacts tenure issues) … 2) how better to get more grant money than to produce something controversial?
Oh, yeah, the money is just flowing for controversial marijuana studies. Can’t you just stick to the standard reefer madness lines like “This ain’t your father’s Woodstock Weed”?
Understand also that the marijuana of this generation is not the same as their parents smoked!
Pot then, had a THC content of 1 – 3%. Now, the THC content is surging up to 25%. (That too will be covered in future articles.) One can expect an increase of physiological and psychological problems with higher dosages.
Sure, the flower children were all smoking barely-above industrial hemp ditchweed. That explains Laugh In, “be-ins”, massive afros, bellbottoms, and the Grateful Dead. all that lousy weak pot our parents were smoking.
I could cite the studies that show heavily-stoned drivers drive no worse than a .05 BAC driver, or that we tend to drive slower and leave more room, but also tend to wander a bit in the lane. John would just say those are druggie scientists. It doesn’t matter because nobody’s advocating for people to be allowed to drive stoned. Making marijuana legal is not going to increase any smoking and driving, because the idiots who would do that are doing that now. When marijuana is legal, police will still be able to bust drivers who demonstate impairment or poor driving.
So many of these prohibitionist fears are based on the notion that making marijuana legal will mean suddenly people will start smoking it. Out of nowhere we’ll have increased healthcare costs, lost productivity, impaired drivers, psychotic teenagers, and rampant crime. You can only buy into that if you don’t know that 22 million people are smoking pot this year, 14 million monthly, 3 million weekly. If the projected harms of legalized marijuana exist, we would have seen them by now because so many people have been smoking marijuana for so long!
Don’t smoke and drive, don’t drive impaired. It’s all we ask of beer drinkers and they are far more dangerous drivers.
Monday, July 20th, 2009 at 3:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
Joyce, 52 and a writer in Manhattan, started smoking pot when she was 15, and for years it was a pleasant escape, a calming protective cloud. Then it became an obsession, something she needed to get through the day. She found herself hiding her addiction from her family, friends and co-workers.
“I would come home from work, close my door, have my bong, my food, my music and my dog, and I wouldn’t see another person until I went to work the next day,” said Joyce, who like most others in this article asked that her full name not be published, because she does not want people to know about her past drug use.
“What kind of life is that? I did that for 20 years.”
She tried to stop, but was anxious, irritable, sleepless and lost. At one point, to soothe her cravings, she took morphine that she found at her dying father’s bedside. She almost overdosed.
Two years ago, she checked into the Caron Foundation, a treatment center in Wernersville, Pa. Even there, she said, some other addicts — cocaine and heroin users or alcoholics — downplayed her dependence on marijuana.
“The reality is, I was as sick as them,” Joyce said. She now attends Alcoholics Anonymous, which is also open to drug addicts, and recently married.
Smoking pot, she said, “was a slow form of suicide.”
Uh, sure, in the sense that if you smoke pot for sixty to eighty years, you’ll die.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: a few people do have an identifiable dependence on marijuana, but calling it an “addiction” demeans the truly physically addicted. Those alcoholics, cocaine and heroin users can die when they quit using their drug. You got “anxious, irritable, sleepless and lost”. You are experiencing the same kind of life and same kind of withdrawal as a problem gambler, the “shop-a-holic”, the sexually compulsive, and World of Warcraft players.
The article goes on to sound the alarm about the new “Super Pot 2.0: Not Your Father’s Woodstock Weed!” that allegedly makes people more “addicted”, as if somehow alcoholics who drink cocktails all night are somehow more addicted than the case-of-beer drinker because liquor is a higher proof alcohol.
“It’s like drinking beer versus drinking whiskey,” said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a government agency and a strong opponent of legalizing marijuana. “If you only have access to whiskey, your risk is going to be higher for addiction. Now that people have access to very high potency marijuana, the game is different.”
No, it’s not. My dad was a beer-drinking alcoholic; he had plenty of access to whiskey, but preferred beer, and became addicted anyway. People who become dependent on pot smoke it to get high. If it is low-potency, they smoke the whole joint, if it is high-potency, they take a puff or two. The potency is irrelevant to the nature of the dependence.
I’m happy to see people who truly have an issue with marijuana finding support to help them recover. It’s not for everyone. Some people can drink a glass of wine every day, but for some that would be a problem. If you really need help quitting pot, I wish you all the luck in the world… because then there is more for the rest of us.
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 2:20 pm | By: Radical Russ
One of my common one-liners in response to the claim across the pond that smoking the dreaded “skunk” will lead to psychosis and schizophrenia is to sarcastically say, “Yes, that’s why there was such a spike in schizophrenia around 1979 in the US… oh, no, wait, there wasn’t; schizophrenia remains a relatively stable phenomenon that affects less than 1% of the population worldwide.”
Looks like some scientists in the United Kingdom decided to look for just such a correlation:
A recent systematic review concluded that cannabis use increases risk of psychotic outcomes independently of confounding and transient intoxication effects. Furthermore, a model of the association between cannabis use and schizophrenia indicated that the incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia would increase from 1990 onwards.
The model is based on three factors:
a) increased relative risk of psychotic outcomes for frequent cannabis users compared to those who have never used cannabis between 1.8 and 3.1,
b) a substantial rise in UK cannabis use from the mid-1970s and
c) elevated risk of 20 years from first use of cannabis.
This paper investigates whether this has occurred in the UK by examining trends in the annual prevalence and incidence of schizophrenia and psychoses, as measured by diagnosed cases from 1996 to 2005. Retrospective analysis of the General Practice Research Database (GPRD) was conducted for 183 practices in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The study cohort comprised almost 600,000 patients each year, representing approximately 2.3% of the UK population aged 16 to 44.
Between 1996 and 2005 the incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia and psychoses were either stable or declining. Explanations other than a genuine stability or decline were considered, but appeared less plausible. In conclusion, this study did not find any evidence of increasing schizophrenia or psychoses in the general population from 1996 to 2005.
It’s bull, of course. 1970s cannabis was every bit as strong as what you’ll find today. Those who were consuming cannabis regularly – the ones you’d expect to “go schizo” – were always finding or growing the good stuff. This “Woodstock Weed” idea of low-THC joints is what the casual smoker with no connections would smoke, and not very often.
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 8:20 am | By: Radical Russ
Police say some of the dumbest things about marijuana, but this official “Fact Sheet” on cannabis from the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics & Dangerous Drugs Control (the dreaded OBNDDC – could you have a clumsier name?) wins the award for Exceptional Lies, Ignorance, and Propaganda in Service of Prohibition (”Exceptional LIP Service” – see, cool acronyms are easy!):
Cannabis Sativa L. is a species of tall annual woody shrub with male or female flowers borne on separate plants. [Good so far...]Cannabis grows wild in most of the temperate and tropic regions of the world. [Still OK...]Hemp, as marijuana was earlier known, was grown in the News England colonies and used in making cloth and cordage. [Hear that, my News England friends?]
The cannabis sativa plant material, marijuana, has been used as a drug for centuries. [Uh, if the plant material is the drug "marijuana", what is all that hemp, an animal or a mineral?]It originally was used for the treatment of various mental and physical ailments. But after close examination, the Food and Drug Administration in 1937 declared it to be without medical utility and removed it from the market place. [Not even close; Congress prohibited marijuana in 1937 with the Marihuana Tax Act, over the objections of the AMA, who knew its medical utility. The FDA had never regulated cannabis and had nothing to do with its prohibition.]
The new marijuana in the market place is not the 1 percent to 2 percent THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), which is the psychoactive ingredient that produces the “high”. [Right, because 1%-2% THC marijuana is called "hemp" and smoking it will only give you a headache.] Today’s new cultivation methods are producing a drug with up to 30 percent THC, or 3,000 percent higher than the old 1960’s-1980’s available marijuana. [Wow. That's my first "Super Pot is 3000x stronger than Woodstock Weed" reference. My previous best was 400x. But at least the math is correct: if you compare 1% industrial hemp that nobody smoked in the 1960s to the 30% THC hash oil that makes up a tiny sub-percentage of the cannabis seized, then 3000% is correct. It's also as meaningful as noting that Pabst Blue Ribbon beer is 3000% more potent than O'Doul's "near-beer".]
Some people argue marijuana should be legalized for both medical and recreational use. But medical studies show how dangerous this idea would be. New data has shown that marijuana smoke has a higher concentration of carcinogenic substances than tobacco smoke. [This is somehwat true, but ignores that THC mitigates these carcinogens with an anti-tumoral effect.]It is linked as a cause of lung problems such as bronchitis [Yes, but not if you vaporize it]and emphysema [no, not true], and studies confirm damage to brain cells [not true, and may actually protect alcoholic's brains and may be a treatment for brain cancer], nerve cells [no, and may actually stimulate nerve cell growth in the brain] and reproductive organs which have lead to still births and birth defects[not at all true, and don't you think we'd see more hippie kids with birth defects if it were true?]. In addition, acute memory loss [no long term memory problems and only short term memory problems while high]and lowered immune systems [right, that's why doctors give medical marijuana to HIV/AIDS patients]also have been traced to marijuana smoking.
Plus, surveys indicate that about 33 percent of all patients in emergency rooms test positive for either alcohol or marijuana in their systems. [Which just means the ones who tested for marijuana had used some in the past few days, and not that marijuana caused the visit.]
Nearly half of today’s teenagers try marijuana before graduating from high school, and by their senior year more than 20 percent are regular users, Science Daily reported in May.
But according to the same figures that describe 19.8% (not over 20%) of the Class of 2005 used marijuana last month, for the Class of 1975 (baby boomers), that figure was 27.1%. In fact, in 1979, lifetime use peaked at 60.4% and in 1978, monthly use peaked at 37.1%
More teens use marijuana than all other illegal drugs combined, and they are at greater risk than teens who smoked pot a couple of decades ago.
“It’s much more potent than what they smoked at Woodstock,” echoed Jim Cowser, a chemical dependency therapist in the Center for Behavioral Health at Baptist Hospital East.
RevRayGreen: MASS TWEET THIS -@ChuckGrassley Truth is Chuck you follow Nixon's CSA full of reefer sadness. btw Chuck, Marijuana is not a drug.
RevRayGreen: @ChuckGrassley http://bit.ly/55Ejsi Truth is Chuck you follow Nixon's CSA full of reefer madness. btw Chuck, Marijuana is not a drug.
SneakerPimp: one last thing Puff puff pass to any one who wants it
SneakerPimp: i wanna here about the imminent MiniSpof sounds like time for some
SneakerPimp: im estatic and excited for NSL today.
SneakerPimp: mountain time wake n bake
SneakerPimp: oh yea also wake n bake
SneakerPimp: its central im high as a kite everybody
SneakerPimp: ill grab that WUD
WakeUpDead: @Russ, I dont think that wireless is going to work out for the show, it was choppy and studdered just like last week. Hardline may be the only way. Puff [...]
WakeUpDead: A MINI Spof, Lock up your Weed, in 18 years that is. Really Man congrats! Greatest days of my life when my kids were born, hell yeh, great news [...]
BenJaMin: Late night Stash!!!
SneakerPimp: heres a bong rip for spof
RevRayGreen: errr test over....
RevRayGreen: on hold..
RevRayGreen: @RR I'll try and lob a call to you.....
SneakerPimp: where is the first field of cannabis gonna be?
SneakerPimp: !
Radical Russ: Breaking News: MrSpof's wife's water just broke! A MiniSpof is imminent!
SneakerPimp: oh russ its not my fault that i dont understand choppy word:stoned:
SneakerPimp: @Mrspof congratulations tell us all about it tommrow
Radical Russ: OK, test over. Sorry. Only needed a half hour. Be back tomorrow afternoon.
slash5city: don't forget to watch CCS live on u-stream 8 pm west
thaistik: Local Crime Stoppers notice.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Pot shop burglars sought
Crime Stoppers is looking for information on the suspects who police say burglarized a medical marijuana dispensary and stole cash, drugs [...]
Marijuana-Related Health Costs Minimal Compared To Those Of Alcohol, Tobacco; California Medical Association Says Pot Prohibition Is A "Failed Public Health Policy"; Oregon: State NORML Affiliate Opens First 'Cannabis Café'. […]
American Medical Association Calls For Scientific Review Of Marijuana's Prohibitive Status; Dutch Marijuana Use Lower Than European Average, Study Says […]
"Truth In Trials Act" Reintroduced In Congress; Maine: Voters Approve Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Measure; Colorado: Breckenridge Voters Overwhelmingly Decide To End Pot Penalties. […]
Some of the nation’s top athletes discuss why today's pros are turning to cannabis — and away from alcohol and painkillers — off the field, and question why pro sports leagues are continuing to sanction those who do. Moderator: Steve Bloom, Author, Pot Culture; editor, celebstoner.com * Toby Grear, MMA fighter * Sean Neumann, Documentary Filmm […]
Cannabis Law Reform's Missing Link: Law Enforcement Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper; LEAP and NORML Advisory Board; Author of Breaking Rank Putting the Mexican Cartels Out of Business Mexican drug cartels now employ over 100,000 soldiers and are responsible for nearly ten thousand deaths per year. Their largest source of income is marijuana. […]
What Parents Need to Know About Pot (Truth Edition)
sounds like time for some 
mountain time wake n bake 
don't forget to watch CCS live on u-stream 8 pm west 
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