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 veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
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 Illegal Drugs, Part I Part II [OR] 
#9664319 - 01/23/09 09:04 AM (3 years, 4 months ago) |
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Illegal Drugs, Part One
January 14, 2009 - Salem-News.com
Illegal Drugs and Violence; Which is the Chicken and Which is the Egg?
One of the many negative stories coming out in 2008 was the escalation of violence in Mexico between the various Drug Cartels and against Mexican Law Enforcement Agencies.
Hundreds of people have been killed; traffickers, police, and innocent victims. Sometimes the perpetrators even have their acts of torture and murder posted briefly to You Tube. This horrific violence is threatening the very fabric of Mexican society.
Those problems have now spilled over into the United States. In addition to being the greatest consumers of the illegal drugs, the United States is seeing more and more of the violence.
Recently in an apartment outside of Birmingham, Alabama, five men were found tortured and murdered. In Phoenix, Arizona, a man was found killed in a nice neighborhood by a team of assassins posing as Phoenix police officers. The National Drug Threat Assessment 2009, issued recently by the United States Department of Justice, states that "Mexican DTO's [drug trafficking organizations] represent the greatest organized crime threat to the United States."
About 90% of the cocaine in the US is smuggled in by these Mexican drug cartels; in addition they are major suppliers of other illegal drugs like methamphetamine, heroin, and marijuana.
According to the DOJ's report, these cartels operate in every major city in the US, and also in many rural areas. It should come to no surprise that Portland makes the list. But many may be shocked to learn that Salem, Eugene, Medford, and even small Roseberg, Oregon, with a population of approximately 22,000, have the cartels operating in them.
Federal officials state that Mexican smugglers have taken over virtually all the street-level distribution in the United States. This multibillion-dollar business is well organized and extremely profitable because the drugs are illegal. Would there be the violence if the drugs were legal and inexpensive? The term War on Drugs was coined by President Richard Nixon in 1971, reputedly based upon the term War on Poverty which was used by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
The "War on Drugs" is a campaign undertaken by the United States government to curb supply and diminish demand for specific psychoactive substances deemed immoral, harmful or undesirable. It included a set of laws and policies that are intended to discourage the production, distribution, and consumption of the targeted substances.
The War on Drugs is supported by a substantial television propaganda effort, including anti-drug advertising spots from such organizations as the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, among others.
Writers and producers of popular, prime-time television shows have also reportedly been paid directly to write-in government approved anti-drug messages, themes, and occasionally entire episodes.
Just what is the history of illegal drug use, what are the real costs, and how successful has the War on Drugs been will be covered in coming articles.
Illegal Drugs: Part Two -- Some Marijuana History
January 23, 2009 - Salem-News.com
Evidence of the inhalation of cannabis smoke can be found as far back as the third millennium BC as indicated by charred cannabis seeds found in a ritual Brazier at a ancient burial site in south Asia.
 The history of cannabis products and their use has been long, colorful and varied. "To the agriculturist, cannabis is a fiber crop; to the physician, it is an enigma; to the user, a euphoriant; to the police, a menace; to the trafficker, a source of profitable danger; to the convict or parolee and his family, a source of sorrow".
The fact is that cannabis has been held simultaneously in high and low esteem at various times throughout recorded history, particularly in our own times.
Archaeologists discovered an ancient village in China, containing the earliest known record of the use of the cannabisplant. This village dates back over 10 000 years to the Stone Age.
Amongst the debris of this village, archaeologists found small pots with patterns of twisted hemp fibre decorating them. This use of the cannabis plant suggests men have been using the marijuana plant in some manner since the dawn of history.
Cannabis fibre (hemp) was not only used in China as decoration, but it was also used to make clothes, ropes, fishing nets and paper. It was also important as a food plant and was originally considered one of China’s five cereal grains. The cannabis plant took on such great importance in the Chinese culture that early priest doctors began using the cannabis plant’s stalk as a symbol of power to drive away evil.
Evidence of the inhalation of cannabis smoke can be found as far back as the third millennium BC as indicated by charred cannabis seeds found in a ritual Brazier at a ancient burial site in south Asia.
In 2003, a leather basket filled with cannabis leaf fragments and seeds were found next to a 2,500- to 2,800-year-old mummy in the northwestern Uygur Autonomous Region of China. The most famous early users of cannabis were the ancient Hindus of India and Nepal. The ancient drug Soma, mentioned in the Hindu religious text Veda as a sacred intoxicating hallucinogen, was sometimes associated with cannabis.
Cannabis was also known to the Assyrian people, who discovered its psychoactive properties through the Aryans. Using it in some religious ceremonies, they called it qunubu (meaning "way to produce smoke"), a possible origin of the modern word 'Cannabis'.
Cannabis was also introduced by the Aryans to the Scythians and Thracians, whose Shaman's burned cannabis flowers to induce a state of trance. Members of the cult of Dionysus, believed to have originated in Thrace, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, are also thought to have inhaled cannabis smoke.
The medical use of the cannabis plant goes back at least 5,000 years to ancient China, where the emperor Shen Nung listed it in his classic pharmacopeia, the Pen Ts'ao. It is also listed in the medical works of India including the famous Hindu surgeon Susruta, and the Roman physicians Pliny and Galen.
Most of the herbal guides of the Moslem and European cultures also gave frequent reference to its medical value, and cannabis has been one of the world's primary medicines for millenia on end.
Cannabis also has an ancient history of ritual use that has been found. Hemp seeds were discovered by archaeologists studying the Pazyryk, an ancient nomadic people who lived in the Altai Mountains lying in Siberian south of the modern city of Novosibirsk.
Early ceremonial practices like eating cannabis by the Scythians occurred during the 5th to 2nd century BCE, confirming previous historical reports by Herodotus. Some experts have claimed that cannabis was used as a religious sacrament by ancient Jews and early Christians due to the similarity between the Hebrew word qannabbos (cannabis) and the Hebrew phrase 'kana-besem' (aromatic cane). This is another possible origin of the name. It was used by Muslims in various Sufi orders, especially in South Asia, as early as the Mamluk period by Sufi Mystics called the Qualandar.
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veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 13,985
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Illegal Drugs, Part III Part IV Part V [OR] [Re: veggie]
#9763986 - 02/08/09 11:53 PM (3 years, 3 months ago) |
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Illegal Drugs: Part Three - Public Policy & Limited Research
January 25, 2009 - salem-news.com
Despite the ongoing political debate regarding the legality of medicinal marijuana, clinical investigations of the therapeutic use of cannabinoids are now more prevalent than at any time in history.
A search of the National Library of Medicine's PubMed website quantifies the fact. A keyword search using the terms "cannabis, 1996" (the year California voters became the first of 13 states to allow for the drug's medical use under state law) reveals just 258 scientific journal articles published on the subject during that year. Perform this same search for the year 2008, and one will find over 2,100 published scientific studies. There are 66 cannabinoids that have been identified in marijuana. The primary cannabinoids are the psychoactive THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), and the non-psychoactive CBD cannabitiol and CBN cannabinol.
While much of the renewed interest in cannabinoid therapeutics is a result of the discovery of the endocannabinoid regulatory system, some of this increased attention is also due to the growing body of testimonials from medicinal cannabis patients and their physicians.
Nevertheless, despite this influx of anecdotal reports, much of the modern investigation of medicinal cannabis remains limited to preclinical (animal) studies of individual cannabinoids (e.g. THC or cannabidoil) and/or synthetic cannabinoid agonists (e.g., dronabinol or WIN 55, 212-2), rather than clinical trial investigations involving whole plant material.
Predictably, because of the US government's strong public policy stance against any use of cannabis [classifying it as a Schedule 1 controlled substance with a high potential risk of abuse], the bulk of this modern cannabinoid research is taking place outside the United States.
As clinical research into the therapeutic value of cannabinoids has proliferated, there are now more than 17,000 published papers in the scientific literature analyzing marijuana and its constituents So too, has investigators' understanding of cannabis' remarkable capability to combat disease grown. Whereas researchers in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s primarily assessed cannabis' ability to temporarily alleviate various disease symptoms such as the nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy, scientists today are exploring the potential role of cannabinoids to actually modify disease.
Of particular interest, scientists are investigating cannabinoids' capacity to moderate autoimmune disorders such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, anti-inflammatory bowl disease, as well as their role in the treatment of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's disease).
Investigators are also studying the anticancer activities of cannabis, as a growing body of preclinical and clinical data concludes that cannabinoids can reduce the spread of specific cancer cells via apoptosis (programmed cell death) and by the inhibition of angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels). Arguably, these latter trends represent far broader and more significant applications for cannabinoid therapeutics than researchers could have imagined some thirty or even twenty years ago.
Illegal Drugs: Part 4
February 3, 2009 - salem-news.com
But just how safe is marijuana? Cannabinoids actually have a remarkable safety record, particularly when compared to other therapeutically active substances.
Most significantly, the consumption of marijuana regardless of quantity or potency--cannot induce a fatal overdose. According to a 1995 review prepared for the World Health Organization, there are no recorded cases of overdose fatalities attributed to cannabis, and the estimated lethal dose for humans extrapolated from animal studies is so high that it cannot be achieved by users.
In 2008, investigators at McGill University Health Centre and McGill University in Montreal and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, reviewed 23 clinical investigations of medicinal cannabinoid drugs (typically oral THC or Sativex and eight observational studies conducted between 1966 and 2007.
Investigators "did not find a higher incidence rate of serious adverse events associated with medical cannabinoid use" compared to non-using controls over these three decades.
Much of the medical marijuana discussion has focused on the safety of marijuana compared to the safety of FDA-approved drugs.
In 2005 ProCon.org, an organization whose mission statement is "Promoting critical thinking, education, and informed citizenship by presenting controversial issues in a straightforward, nonpartisan primarily Pro-Con Format," sent a Freedom of Information Request to the (FDA) to find the number of deaths caused by marijuana compared to the number of deaths caused by 17 FDA-approved drugs during a specified period of time.
Twelve of these FDA-approved drugs were chosen because they are commonly prescribed in place of medical marijuana, while the remaining five FDA-approved drugs were randomly selected because they are widely used and recognized by the general public.
The FDA reports rely on health professionals to detect an "adverse event" and attribute that event to the drug, and then to voluntarily report that effect to either the FDA or the drug manufacturer.
The drug firm, by law, must report that event to the FDA. The FDA states "ninety percent of the FDA's reports are received from drug manufacturers".
An adverse event is any incident where the use of a medication (drug or biologic) at any dose is suspected to have resulted in an adverse outcome in a patient.
The resulting report compiled by the organization provided whether the drug was the primary suspect in the death or secondary suspect of contributing to the death. Marijuana was not the primary suspect in any of the 11,687 deaths reported between January 1, 1997 and June 30, 2005. It was a secondary suspect in 279 deaths.
The FDA approved drugs were divided into four categories:
1) Anti--Emetics [Compazine, Reglan, Marinol, Zofran, Anzemet, Kytrill and Tigan] which were the primary suspect for 196 deaths and the secondary suspect for 429 deaths;
2) Anti-Spasmodics [Baclofen, Zanaflex] which were the primary suspect for 118 deaths and the secondary suspect for 56 deaths;
3) Anti-Psychotics [Haldol, Lithium, Neurotin] which were the primary suspect for 1593 deaths and the secondary suspect for 702 deaths; and
4) other popular drugs [Ritalin, Wellbutrin, Adderall, Viagra, Vioxx] which were the primary suspect for 8101 deaths and the secondary suspect for 492 deaths.
The final total on the 17 FDA drugs is 10,008 primary suspect of deaths and 1679 secondary suspect of death versus no deaths with marijuana as the primary suspect of death and 279 as secondary suspect.
Illegal Drugs: Part 5
February 8, 2009 - salem-news.com
 Research involving the active compounds of marijuana has been conducted on a number of diseases and medical conditions. They include but are not limited to; Alzheimer's disease, chronic pain, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, and rheumatoid arthritis, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), diabetes mellitus, dystonia, fibromyalgia, gastrointestinal disorders, gliomas (brain tumors), hepatitis C, human immunodeficiency virus, hypertension, in continents, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, pruritus, sleep apnea, Tourette's syndrome.
I will briefly cover the first five of those diseases and/or conditions listed. Because of space limitations, I have only listed part of the available materials/studies.
Alzheimer's Disease
Over 4.5 million Americans are estimated to be afflicted with this disease. The Journal of Neuroscience reported in its February 2005 issue that researchers at Complutense University and the Cajal Institute in Spain found administration of a cannabinoid prevented cognitive impairment and decreased neurotoxicity in rats injected with a protein believed to induce Alzheimer's. Additional cannabinoids were also found to reduce the inflammation associated with Alzheimer's disease in human brain tissue in culture. The researchers determined that cannabinoids succeed in preventing the neurodegenerative process occurring in Alzheimer's disease.
Researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in 2006 reported that THC inhibits the enzyme responsible for the aggregation of plaque that is the primary marker for Alzheimer's disease in a matter "considerably superior" to approved Alzheimer's drugs such as donepezil and tacrine. They concluded THC may provide an improved therapeutic option for Alzheimer's disease by simultaneously treating both the symptoms and progression of the disease. Writing in the Journal of neuroscience in 2007, researchers at the Ohio State University Department of psychology and neuroscience reported that rats treated with the artificial cannabinoid, Win 55, 212-2, experienced a 50% improvement in memory and a 40% to 50% reduction in inflammation compared to the non-treated control rats.
Chronic Pain
Survey data indicates that the use of cannabis is common in chronic pain populations, and several recent clinical trials indicate that inhaled marijuana can significantly alleviate neuropathic pain. A pair of clinical trials recently demonstrated that smoking cannabis reduces neuropathic pain in patients with HIV by more than 30 percent compared to placebo.
In 2008 investigators at the University of California at Davis assessed the efficacy of inhaled cannabis on pain intensity among 38 patients with central or peripheral neuropathic pain in a randomized, placebo-controlled, crossover trial. They reported: Cannabis reduced pain intensity and unpleasantness equally. Thus, as with opioids, cannabis does not rely on a relaxing or tranquilizing effect, but rather reduces both the core component of nociception (nerve pain) and the emotional aspect of the pain experience to an equal degree."
Preclinical data indicates that cannabinoids, when administered in concert with one another, are more effective at ameliorating neuropathic pain than the use of a single agent. Investigators at the University of Milan reported in 2008 that the administration of single cannabinoids such as THC or CBD produce limited relief compared to the administration of plant extracts containing multiple cannabinoids, terpenes (oils), and flavonoids (pigments).
Multiple Sclerosis
Clinical and anecdotal reports of cannabinoids' ability to reduce MS-related symptoms such as pain, spasticity, depression, fatigue, and incontinence are plentiful in the scientific literature. Patients with multiple sclerosis typically report engaging in cannabis therapy, with one survey indicating that nearly one in two MS patients use the drug therapeutically.
Recent clinical and preclinical studies also suggest that cannabinoids may inhibit MS progression. Researchers the University College of London's Institute of Neurology reported that administration of the synthetic cannabinoid agonist provided "significant neuroprotection" in an animal model of multiple sclerosis. "The results of this study are important because they suggest that in addition to symptom management ... cannabis may also slow the neurodegenerative processes that ultimately lead to chronic disability in multiple sclerosis and probably other disease," researchers concluded.
As a result of the scientific literature, the British government is now sponsoring a three-year clinical trial to assess the long-term effects of cannabinoids on both MS-associated symptom management as well as disease progression. Health Canada also recently approved the prescription use of cannabis abstracts for the treatment of MS-associated neuropathic pain. Similar approval of cannabis extracts is pending in Britain and Europe.
Osteoporosis
Initial references regarding the potential use of cannabinoids to protect against the onset of osteoporosis are available in the scientific literature beginning in the early 1990s. To date, however, no clinical work has taken place investigating the use of cannabis for this indication.
Writing in the January 2006 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigators at the Bone Laboratory of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem reported that the administration of the synthetic cannabinoid agonist slowed the development of osteoporosis, stimulated bone building, and reduced bone loss in animals. Follow up research published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in 2007 reported that the activation of the CB2 cannabinoid receptor reduced experimentally-induced bone loss and stimulated bone formation. Investigators have previously reported that mice deficient in the experienced age-accelerated bone loss reminiscent of human osteoporosis.
Rheumatoid Arthritis
In January 2006, investigators at the British Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Disease reported successful treatment of arthritis with cannabinoids in the first-ever controlled trial assessing the efficacy of natural cannabis extracts on RA. Investigators reported that administration of cannabis extracts over a five week period produced statistically significant improvements in pain on movement, pain at rest, quality of sleep, inflammation, and intensity of pain compared to placebo. No serious adverse effects were observed.
Preclinical data also indicates that cannabinoids can moderate the progression of RA. Writing in the August 2000 issue of the Journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, investigators at London's Kennedy Institute for Rheumatology reported that (CBD) administration suppressed progression of arthritis in vitro and in animals.
Summarizing the available literature in the September 2005 issue of the Journal of Neuroimmunology, researchers at Tokyo's National Institute for Neuroscience concluded, Cannabinoid therapy of RA could provide symptomatic relief of joint pain and swelling as well as suppressing joint destruction and disease progression.
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