Legalise some drugs, outlaw others?

[Knobby22]

Julia

Just wondering, alcohol is classified as a depressant but it is true that some people get all happy with it.
Personally it just relaxes me a little.

Do you know why it is so variable in effect and why it seems to lift some people? I know this is a little bit medical but I thought you might know.

 

[Ves]

You're confusing depressant with depression.

A depressant slows the activity or signals going to the brain from the central nervous system (CMS) and other areas of activity that affect the brain, which means that it will depress or reduce arousal or stimulation. Hence why you probably feel more relaxed.

However, it also increases the level of "feel good" chemicals in your brain, which, like other drugs, often convince you that you are feeling great (often despite other external circumstances). With greater levels of intake, over sustained periods, this effect can and usually does diminish, and all that you are left with is the addiction.

DYOR, but that's my understanding of the science.

 

[Julia]

Julia

Just wondering, alcohol is classified as a depressant but it is true that some people get all happy with it.
Personally it just relaxes me a little.

Do you know why it is so variable in effect and why it seems to lift some people? I know this is a little bit medical but I thought you might know.

No idea, Knobby, sorry.

You're confusing depressant with depression.

I'm not confusing anything.
I said

Many people will experience relief from depression if they have some alcohol, but overall it's a depressant and obviously cannot be considered a suitable drug as long term treatment for depression.

That is not in any way saying that because alcohol is a CNS depressant it therefore causes depression so you're making a quite silly suggestion.

My point is that, even though it often makes some people feel happier temporarily, (as undoubtedly a whack of ketamine in your vein would), that doesn't necessarily make it suitable as ongoing antidepressant medication, any more than morphine or heroin would simply because they induce a similar sense of euphoria.

Apart from potential addiction problems there would be a substantial overdose risk with ketamine. It is commonly and efficiently used to euthanase animals.

 

[Ves]

I'm not confusing anything.

My whole post was a reply to Knobby's post. I was referring in particular to:

Just wondering, alcohol is classified as a depressant but it is true that some people get all happy with it.

What silly suggestions?? Are you talking to me, Julia?

 

[Julia]

Ves, I don't see any basis for assuming either Knobby or I were confusing the action of alcohol.
I'm sure everyone is familiar with the fact that it is a CNS depressant and that that has no particular relevance to depression in a clinical sense.

Less than relevant to the discussion anyway which is about the role of ketamine.

 

[Ves]

So what exactly is his question then?

Knobby, would you mind clarifying?

Edit: Knobby, if what you are asking is along the lines of my original answer, then the "happy feeling" stuff comes from the increased levels of dopamine in the brain that drinking alcohol can produce.

 

[Julia]

This was Knobby's question re alcohol:

Do you know why it is so variable in effect and why it seems to lift some people?

 

[Knobby22]

Yea, I wasn't confused about the meaning of depressant. As Julia said I was more interested in why its effect is so variable. No big deal.

 

[DB008]

Scotland and London

‘Medical marijuana’ trial for epilepsy

A drug extracted from cannabis plants is to be used to treat children with severe epilepsy at hospitals in Edinburgh, London and Liverpool.

Doctors are cautiously optimistic about “medical marijuana” following American trials of the drug Epidiolex. Studies showed a marked improvement in about 70 per cent of young patients who suffered multiple seizures, and for about 10 per cent their seizures stopped altogether. However, for another tenth the drug appeared to worsen their condition.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/scotland/article4299653.ece

 

[DB008]

Israeli medical marijuana creates buzz but no high”” will it go global?

Israel first approved medical cannabis for a patient in 1992, for severe asthma. In 2007, the Health Ministry implemented a comprehensive medical cannabis program, and now 20,000 patients are permitted to use cannabis ”” a number expected to rise to 30,000 by 2016.

Israeli doctors use it to treat ailments including Crohn’s disease, basal cell carcinoma, psoriasis, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and PTSD in Israeli military veterans, and the pain of cancer patients and the elderly. Its doses are available in cookies, caramels, chocolates, oils, and leaf form for smoking or vaporizing.

MedReleaf now produces strains including the non-intoxicating varieties, with high concentrations of cannabidiol, or CBD ”” a powerful anti-inflammatory with no narcotic effect ”” and low tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which creates the “high” typically associated with marijuana.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israeli-medical-marijuana-creates-buzz-but-no-high-will-it-go-global/2015/01/31/558fe072-a19a-11e4-9f89-561284a573f8_story.html

 

[DB008]

Medicinal cannabis: study finds Australians suffering chronic pain get more relief from cannabis than conventional medicines

Australians suffering from chronic pain may get more relief from their symptoms using cannabis than they do from some conventional medications, researchers have found.

A large study of people suffering from chronic problems such as back pain, migraine and arthritis has discovered many are turning to cannabis to relieve their symptoms, despite already being prescribed heavy-duty opioid medications such as morphine and oxycodone.

In a finding that is likely to further intensify the debate about medical marijuana use, the National Drug and Alcohol Centre researchers found people who used the illegal drug said it was more helpful than the highly addictive and potentially dangerous opioid medications.

Millions of Australians suffer from chronic pain - a problem set to increase as the population ages. Yet there are few effective and safe long-term treatments, and accidental overdose deaths from prescribed pain drugs are now more common than deaths from heroin.

Study leader Louisa Degenhardt found nearly 13 per cent of 1500 chronic pain patients, who were mainly aged in their late 40s and early 50s, had used cannabis in the past year despite being prescribed opioids. This compared to only 4.7 per cent of the rest of the population, she wrote in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/nsw/medicinal-cannabis-study-finds-australians-suffering-chronic-pain-get-more-relief-from-cannabis-than-conventional-medicines-20150126-12y52e.html

 

[Julia]

The following is transcript from yesterday's "Health Report" on Radio National
------------

Norman Swan: Hello and welcome to the Health Report with me, Norman Swan.
And before you get too excited about the medicinal uses of cannabis, we bust some myths and call a spade a spade, including the issue of cannabis addiction.

Professor Jan Copeland has just co-authored a book on quitting cannabis. Jan is director and founder of the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre at the University of New South Wales.

Jan Copeland: The myths are rife, and unfortunately as my time has gone on in this field (it's now over 25 years) the mythology around cannabis has grown rather than diminished. I think the strongest myth is that it's not addictive. Certainly that is well addressed in the book. But there's a number of health effects that are promulgated that are really poorly evidenced based, things such as 'it's good for asthma', 'it cures cancer' is now something I regularly hear in the media, which is very distressing and disturbing because of its implications for people abandoning conventional healthcare and taking up cannabis smoking as an alternative. Driving is a big myth that has persisted for many years. We have a much better idea of what the relationship is and we know that, yes, you do drive more slowly but…

Norman Swan: You don't necessarily drive more safely.

Jan Copeland: Absolutely not, no. And unfortunately that has translated into accidents and deaths.

Norman Swan: And we've covered this before on the Health Report, that even though there is a bit of a bandwagon now about the medical uses of marijuana, the evidence-base for that is pretty thin too.

Jan Copeland: It is, and we don't review that in this book but it's available on our website if people are interested. We have done a review of that literature, and most of it is actually based on synthetic THC. The literature on whole smoked plant material is almost non-existent and there is no human clinical trials of the plant.

Norman Swan: And THC is tetrahydrocannabinol, which is one of the active ingredients of cannabis.

Jan Copeland: Yes, that's the part of cannabis that gets one stoned, but there is another very important cannabinoid, cannabidiol, CBD, and we are doing some research with that at the moment. It doesn't get you stoned and it has the opposite effects to THC, so it reduces anxiety, reduces symptoms of psychosis, and we are looking to see if it helps cannabis withdrawal.

Norman Swan: What are the known health and psychological effects of cannabis at what sort of dose and what sort of frequency and what sort of age of onset of use?

Jan Copeland: There's a number of things that affect whether or not people go on to develop dependence, the level of exposure to the drug is pretty obviously one of the most important ones, the more frequently people use…

Norman Swan: But age of exposure is important too.

Jan Copeland: Absolutely, and that was my next point, that the other very important point is when your brain is first exposed to the drug. And there's something about the developing brain in adolescents that exposure, particularly before the age of 17, is much more likely to lead to a whole range of problems, including dependence. That's the addiction potential of cannabis. Of anyone who has ever smoked it's about one in 10, for alcohol it's about one in eight for example, nicotine about one in three. But when people start smoking early, that more than doubles that risk of developing an addiction. People who are smoking daily, they've got about a 50% risk of meeting criteria for dependence. So daily smoking is a very big red flag, and that's something that we see in our treatment populations, they've almost always been at least six-plus times a week smokers, and they've been doing that for a long time by the time they get into treatment.

Norman Swan: And what about the dose at each sitting, or lying as the case may be?

Jan Copeland: Couching! There's just not the studies to know that because we don't know what the potency is of the cannabis, but we do know that the potency of cannabis has dramatically increased over the last few years, and particularly in the US where the very, very high potency products are now available through the medicinal cannabis legislation.

Norman Swan: And what about psychosis and other psychological effects?

Jan Copeland: What we know about cannabis is it about doubles the rate of developing schizophrenia. The timing is right, they smoke cannabis typically before they develop schizophrenia…it's dose-related…

Norman Swan: And the prevalence of schizophrenia in high cannabis use populations such as Brixton in London is much higher, it's more than 1%.

Jan Copeland: Yes, as you rightly point out, in South London and other places where cannabis use has gone up, the rates of schizophrenia have also gone up.

Norman Swan: And what about the heart and lung?

Jan Copeland: Yes, we are learning much more about that, and it's more concerning as the population ages. The 50-pluses are the fastest growing group of cannabis smokers in the population…

Norman Swan: Ageing hippies, or ageing normal people because it's almost normal to be smoking cannabis.

Jan Copeland: Well, that's another myth; 90% of the population didn't smoke cannabis in the previous year, but yes, certainly people have that impression, but of course it's within certain groups. But yes, when you talk about heart and lung and stroke we are seeing cases of young cannabis users experiencing strokes and heart disease…

Norman Swan: Independent of the tobacco that they mix the cannabis with?

Jan Copeland: Yes. There is now a series in the pathology reports of cannabis associated deaths. And when they've put a halter monitor on a young man as he inhaled…

Norman Swan: It measures your heart rate, your heart rhythm I should say.

Jan Copeland: Yes, to monitor his heart over 24 hours, as he inhaled cannabis his heart stopped for over six seconds. So that was an indicator of what might be the cause of death in some of these people. But the risk of having a heart attack in the first hour of smoking is seven-fold that of periods where you are not smoking.

Norman Swan: Years ago they used to talk gently about cannabis dependence, and you are unreservedly using the word 'addiction'. First of all, what is the difference between dependence and addiction?

Jan Copeland: There is no difference. The American Psychological Association changed it to 'dependence' because of this notion that addiction was moralising or judgemental a term, but now the DSM-5, which is the bible for the mental health field, has gone back to using the term 'addiction'. And I think it resonates much more clearly with the general public, they understand that term, and it has led to misunderstandings where the cannabis lobby group has said, 'Oh well, it might cause dependence but that's not addiction,' and that's false.

------------------

More at http://www.abc.net.au/radionational...th-risks-of-using-cannabis/6057934#transcript

(Bolding is mine.)

 

[DB008]

Fastest growing industry in the USA at the moment.

U.S. Surgeon General warms to medical marijuana

In an interview, the country’s top doctor said preliminary research shows “marijuana can be helpful.”

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy expressed optimism about the medical benefits of marijuana use in a Wednesday television interview.

Speaking on CBS This Morning, Murthy said there is some promising research about medical uses of the drug, which is legal in some states but still banned on the federal level. “We have some preliminary data showing that for certain medical conditions and symptoms, that marijuana can be helpful,” Murthy told CBS. “I think that we have to use that data to drive policymaking.”

Murthy added that more research is needed “to see what the science tells us about the efficacy of marijuana,” but he said more data should be on the way thanks to the growing list of states passing laws to legalize medical marijuana.

The Surgeon General’s statements follow what seems to be growing acceptance in the federal government of medical marijuana. In December, Congress passed a spending measure that included a provision to effectively end the federal ban on medical marijuana in states where it is legal.

At the moment, 23 states allow the use of medical marijuana, despite the fact that federal laws still classify marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug ”” the most dangerous level, which also includes heroin and ecstasy. Four states have passed laws legalizing recreational pot along with Washington, D.C.

http://fortune.com/2015/02/04/surgeon-general-medical-marijuana/

 

[Tink]

Heroin turns suburb into ‘zombie town’

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/vi...s-not-the-answer/story-fni0fit3-1227219987366

Makes you think of what is happening in Indonesia

https://www.aussiestockforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29490

I still say, zero tolerance.

 

[prawn_86]

I still say, zero tolerance.

So how do you propose it is dealt with? The current system obviously doesnt work. Would you just keep throwing more and more money at the current system and hope that one day something would change?

As the 'war on drugs' budget has increased year on year, prison rates have gone up, yet prices and purity have improved and usage rates have remained at a stable percentage.

 

[DB008]

So how do you propose it is dealt with? The current system obviously doesnt work. Would you just keep throwing more and more money at the current system and hope that one day something would change?

As the 'war on drugs' budget has increased year on year, prison rates have gone up, yet prices and purity have improved and usage rates have remained at a stable percentage.

Exactly!

I think we will have to have a moment of the 'changing of the guards' (ie, people over the age of 50'ish bugger off), before laws get changed. They are stuck in their old ways and don't like change - even if it is for the better.

Colorado’s legal weed market: $700 million in sales last year, $1 billion by 2016

Legal marijuana was a $700 million dollar industry in Colorado last year, according to a Washington Post analysis of recently-released tax data from the state's Department of Revenue. In 2014, Colorado retailers sold $386 million of medical marijuana and $313 million for purely recreational purposes. The two segments of the market generated $63 million in tax revenue, with an additional $13 million collected in licenses and fees.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/12/colorados-legal-weed-market-700-million-in-sales-last-year-1-billion-by-2016/?tid=sm_fb

 

[DB008]

I guess that they can now see the dollar signs and common sense over in the USA....

Two Bills To Federally Legalize Marijuana Were Just Introduced In Congress
​

On Friday, February 20, U.S. Representatives Jared Polis (D-CO) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) introduced two separate bills in Congress to legalize adult-use marijuana at the federal level.

Polis’ bill, the Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act, would let states choose to legalize cannabis without any fear of federal intervention. The bill would put a federal regulatory structure into place to accommodate the new law. Blumenaur’s bill, the Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act, would tax cannabis sales at the federal level, in addition to any state and local taxes.

Four states have already legalized marijuana use for adults over 21 (Colorado, Washington, Alaska and Oregon), and 23 states (and Washington DC) allow medical marijuana use. Eleven more states have restrictive medical marijuana laws in place allowing the use of low-THC forms of marijuana (usually high in CBD)to treat certain medical conditions.

http://reset.me/story/two-bills-legalize-marijuana-federally-just-introduced-congress/

 

[Tink]

DB, the USA health system is different to ours, are you advocating for that change too?

I have already given my views on drugs, Prawn
https://www.aussiestockforums.com/f...=21580&page=18&p=849866&viewfull=1#post849866

The last I saw, both possession and use of drugs are illegal in Victoria.
Violate the law and you deserve the appropriate punishment.

If the Government provides a facility in which addicts can inject heroin, we would be telling people that society’s rules and laws no longer matter. Spending public funds on establishing and maintaining a facility that will encourage drug taking, which is criminal, for drug users, dealers etc, and then watching the crime in the neighbourhood skyrocket --- who would want that?

I think we have gone soft on drugs and crime in general, imo.
The law abiding citizens are no longer being heard -

Another view.
The difference between now and then is that there was co-operation from Magistrates at the local courts.
They understood the situation and instead of handing out, suspended sentences and warnings, actually handed down heavy fines, jail time and most importantly Convictions!

Law and order is a machine that has 3 mechanisms. The Govt, The Police and Judiciary.
When all the mechanisms are working, as they are supposed to, the machine does its job.
If one of those mechanisms breaks or is faulty. the machine stops working.
At the moment none of the 3 mechanisms are working properly.

 

[prawn_86]

I have already given my views on drugs, Prawn
https://www.aussiestockforums.com/f...=21580&page=18&p=849866&viewfull=1#post849866

The last I saw, both possession and use of drugs are illegal in Victoria.
Violate the law and you deserve the appropriate punishment.

If the Government provides a facility in which addicts can inject heroin, we would be telling people that society’s rules and laws no longer matter. Spending public funds on establishing and maintaining a facility that will encourage drug taking, which is criminal, for drug users, dealers etc, and then watching the crime in the neighbourhood skyrocket --- who would want that?

In answer to your 3 points:

1. I don't really see your view, just a link to an article, or did you write that?

2. So just because something is law now means it should never be violated, debated or overturned? If that is the case shouldnt we all go back to hundreds of years ago with no womens or minorities rights also? Who gets to decide the law? I certainly didnt vote for drugs to be illegal or many of the other pointless laws...

3. If drug taking was not illegal then "dealers" etc would not exist and therefore the crime rates would not go up.

If you are serious in educating yourself look at the example Portugal has set over the past 5 years. If you want to blindly believe that politicians know best and should be able to set every law (on top of the tens of thousands of them already) then i feel sorry for you

I will ask the same questions:
How do you propose it is dealt with? The current system obviously doesnt work. Would you just keep throwing more and more money at the current system and hope that one day something would change?

As the 'war on drugs' budget has increased year on year, prison rates have gone up, yet prices and purity have improved and usage rates have remained at a stable percentage.

By your reply i assume you are happy for goverments to keep throwing money at something that is proven not to work?

 

[Tink]

If you read the article, it had my answer -

“The only way we are going to fix this is with zero tolerance … drug education without law enforcement is an absolute waste of money.”

But you can bet the Bartter’s tragedy will be twisted into a propaganda tool for drug liberalisers.

They claim we have lost the so-called war on drugs, but no one ever claimed it was a war that could be won.

What we have done before and can do again is make drugs harder to procure.

That starts with zero tolerance