Progressives love "harm reduction" which usually means "We will not prohibit drug abuse." 10/7/25 National Post:
Supporters say the word “marijuana” has a long history of racism."
2/7/22 Business Insider reports on NYC Mayor Eric Adams promoting a vegan diet:
While preparing a bowl of vegan chili in front of City Hall's press corps, Adams veered into a tangent about the addictiveness of certain foods, particularly cheese.
"Food is like a drug," Adams said. "And in fact, the studies show the same level of brain that encourages you to use drugs also addicts you to food.
"Food is addictive," the mayor continued. "You take someone on heroin, put them in one room, and someone hooked on cheese, put 'em in another room, and you take it away, I challenge you to tell me the person who's hooked on heroin and who's hooked on cheese."
There is a bit of published work on crime and heroin addiction. Hint: intoxicated people do things while stoned that they would never do straight, such as beating to death with a hammer two teens who walked in on a burglary. It happened to a classmate of my wife.
When was the last time cheeseheads committed murder while under the influence of Norwegian Brown? Green Bay Packers' games must be riots.
Regular marijuana use in adolescence, but not adulthood, may permanently impair brain function and cognition, and may increase the risk of developing serious psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, according to a recent study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Researchers hope that the study, published in Neuropsychopharmacology — a publication of the journal Nature – will help to shed light on the potential long-term effects of marijuana use, particularly as lawmakers in Maryland and elsewhere contemplate legalizing the drug.
"Over the past 20 years, there has been a major controversy about the long-term effects of marijuana, with some evidence that use in adolescence could be damaging," says the study's senior author Asaf Keller, Ph.D., Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "Previous research has shown that children who started using marijuana before the age of 16 are at greater risk of permanent cognitive deficits, and have a significantly higher incidence of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. There likely is a genetic susceptibility, and then you add marijuana during adolescence and it becomes the trigger."
"Adolescence is the critical period during which marijuana use can be damaging," says the study's lead author, Sylvina Mullins Raver, a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in Neuroscience in the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "We wanted to identify the biological underpinnings and determine whether there is a real, permanent health risk to marijuana use."
The scientists — including co-author Sarah Paige Haughwout, a research technician in Dr. Keller's laboratory — began by examining cortical oscillations in mice. Cortical oscillations are patterns of the activity of neurons in the brain and are believed to underlie the brain's various functions. These oscillations are very abnormal in schizophrenia and in other psychiatric disorders. The scientists exposed young mice to very low doses of the active ingredient in marijuana for 20 days, and then allowed them to return to their siblings and develop normally.
"In the adult mice exposed to marijuana ingredients in adolescence, we found that cortical oscillations were grossly altered, and they exhibited impaired cognitive abilities," says Ms. Raver. "We also found impaired cognitive behavioral performance in those mice. The striking finding is that, even though the mice were exposed to very low drug doses, and only for a brief period during adolescence, their brain abnormalities persisted into adulthood."
The persistent, dependent use of marijuana before age 18 has been shown to cause lasting harm to a person's intelligence, attention and memory, according to an international research team.
Among a long-range study cohort of more than 1,000 New Zealanders, individuals who started using cannabis in adolescence and used it for years afterward showed an average decline in IQ of 8 points when their age 13 and age 38 IQ tests were compared. Quitting pot did not appear to reverse the loss either, said lead researcher Madeline Meier, a post-doctoral researcher at Duke University. The results appear online Aug. 27 in PNAS.
The key variable in this is the age of onset for marijuana use and the brain's development, Meier said. Study subjects who didn't take up pot until they were adults with fully-formed brains did not show similar mental declines. Before age 18, however, the brain is still being organized and remodeled to become more efficient, she said, and may be more vulnerable to damage from drugs.
Do you wonder why George Soros pushes marijuana legalization?
(CNN) — The proportion of schizophrenia cases linked with problematic use of marijuana has increased over the past 25 years, according to a new study from Denmark.
In 1995, 2% of schizophrenia diagnoses in the country were associated with cannabis use disorder. In 2000, it increased to around 4%. Since 2010, that figure increased to 8%, the study found.
“I think it is highly important to use both our study and other studies to highlight and emphasize that cannabis use is not harmless,” said Carsten Hjorthøj, an associate professor at the Copenhagen Research Center for Mental Health and an author of the study published in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry, via email.
“There is, unfortunately, evidence to suggest that cannabis is increasingly seen as a somewhat harmless substance. This is unfortunate since we see links with schizophrenia, poorer cognitive function, substance use disorders, etc,” Hjorthøj wrote.
Previous research has suggested that the risk of schizophrenia is heightened for people who use cannabis, and the association is particularly driven by heavy use of the drug. Many researchers hypothesize that cannabis use may be a “component cause,” which interacts with other risk factors, to cause the condition.
I know many of you will insist marijuana is natural and perfectly safe--you have not gone mad. But just because 98% of pot smokers come through unscathed does not mean that it is safe.
Conclusions and Relevance Low-strength evidence suggests that smoking marijuana is associated with developing TGCT; its association with other cancers and the consequences of higher levels of use are unclear. Long-term studies in marijuana-only smokers would improve understanding of marijuana’s association with lung, oral, and other cancers.TGCT: testicular germ cell tumor.
Recreational marijuana is now legal in 10 states and Washington, D.C., and it's bringing in billions in revenue. But when it comes to science about its safety, medicinal properties or even its benefits, we're still largely in the dark, says New Yorker writer and author Malcolm Gladwell.
Here & Now's Robin Young talks with Gladwell (@Gladwell) about his new article on the subject, which explores what's known about the drug and why he thinks it's critical to spend some time and money on learning more.
"For years and years and years, people who were advocating for the decriminalization of marijuana correctly pointed out that you can't study the drug, you can't understand it, unless you make it legal," Gladwell says. "We're now making it legal, and we have the opportunity to study it properly. But it strikes me that in some cases, we're not doing that. We're kind of jumping ahead of ourselves."
BOISE -- Two people are in custody after investigators linked them to a home invasion robbery and a series of car burglaries Sunday night.
Terry Plew, 28, and a 17-year-old boy are now facing charges in connection to the crime spree.
According to Boise Police, officers were called out to a business near Franklin and Curtis roads at 11:20 p.m. for a report of an injured man.
When they arrived, the victim told police he had been attacked and knocked unconscious during a break-in at his home in the 5500 block of Franklin Road.
The man said he answered a knock on his door to find two men standing on his doorstep. The pair asked for someone who was not at that address, then hit the victim in the face with a large piece of wood or other blunt object, the resident said.
The blow knocked him out, the victim said, and he awoke to find the burglars rummaging through the house. The victim was able to run away down the street and call 911, he said....
As officers were investigating the home invasion, they received another call about suspicious people possibly breaking into cars about a mile away near Alpine and Latah streets.
Police responded and found the car burglary suspects - later identified as Plew and the teenage boy - who matched the description of the pair involved in the home invasion. Investigators determined that Plew is an acquaintance of one of the victim's friends.Officers found some of the property stolen during the home robbery in the suspects' possession, as well as several items taken from three unlocked cars nearby.
Plew also was in possession of drug paraphernalia, and was wanted on warrants for burglary and grand theft charges, police say. Both suspects were arrested at the scene.It is an article of faith for some that drug abuse has no destructive side effects except because it is illegal. But addicts are also weak on inhibitions when high, and do stupid things to those who stand between them and their drugs.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Dennis Peron, an activist who was among the first people to argue for the benefits of marijuana for AIDS patients and helped legalize medical pot in California, died Saturday at 72....
San Francisco's Board of Supervisors recognized Peron, suffering with late-stage lung cancer, with a certificate of honor last year.It's natural; how bad can it be?
Legislative powers are the power to make and repeal laws. Those powers are not vested in the executive branch, which includes the president and, more relevant to this discussion, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recently announced that he will no longer follow an Obama-era policy of not enforcing federal laws against marijuana. Some states have repealed their own laws against marijuana, but marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and will stay that way unless Congress legislates otherwise.Unlike Instapundit, I no longer support decriminalization because of the increased risk it creates for schizophrenia, which most young people know nothing about. But this is the right answer. If Congress does not like the law, repeal it, do not administratively ignore it, or find a previously unknown constitutional right to get stoned.
PARKLAND, Wash. -- A 55-year-old Eatonville man armed himself with an AK-47 and a pistol over the weekend to battle "the lizard people," the Pierce County Sheriff's Office said.
The man told law enforcement that President Trump had called to warn him.
The man ended up being sent to a hospital for treatment and a mental health evaluation....
The Sheriff's Department says the man told a deputy that he had "snorted methamphetamine to lose weight" and that he was taking prescribed morphine.
"The meth doesn't make me crazy, man," the Sheriff's Department says the man told the deputy. "The lizard people are real!"
He said President Trump had called his house in Eatonville, warned about the lizard people and said the "alpha dragon" had taken his family hostage.
The man explained that he stopped at the Parkland intersection because the lizard people had surrounded him and because he needed to follow the president's directions to fight them.
Smoking marijuana causes fertility problems because it makes men's sperm 'lazily swim in circles' say expertsI suppose in enough generations, marijuana smoking might remove the pothead gene from the pool.
Researchers reveal cannabis leaves sperm 'mellow' causing it to 'swim in circles'
Regular use of the drug cuts sperm counts, the Canadian scientists discovered
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4846328/Marijuana-makes-men-s-sperm-lazily-swim-circles.html#ixzz4recxsJiC Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
