The years we spent dealing with the tired “What about the children?!?” arguments.
Of course, we pointed out that teens may actually not be as eager to rebel with marijuana when grandma is taking it for her glaucoma. And we noted that illegal drug dealers don’t generally check I.D.s for age, while legalized dealers must. And every legitimate study consistently found that legal access to marijuana did not result in increases in teen use.
National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Director Nora Volkow finally agrees.
Volkow said on Drug Policy Alliance founder Ethan Nadelmann’s show that she was “expecting the use of marijuana among adolescents would go up†when states moved to legalize cannabis, but admitted that “overall, it hasn’t.†It was reform advocates like Nadelmann who were “right†about the impact of the policy change on youth, she said.
Yep.
Soon, they’ll let cannabis users work in Saftey Sensitive Jobs because of all the prescription Junkies, people working with an oxygen machine attached to them, drunks, and overweight people showing their hypocrisy with picking a choosing how to treat their symptoms.
I just lost a horrible job that had really good benefits but wound up tearing my soul to shreds and causing major pain on the body. With this Afghanistan debacle messing with me, after all these years of warning people about the War on Drugs has made me bolder to start toking up at work and since the Oklahoma Vet Center I work at has gone out of their way to make sure a college-educated vet with a history of never missing work or being late cannot move up. So, they gave me an emergency drug and alcohol test after I was working with heavy machinery for over an hour. Humiliating. And where I work is a veterans nursing home and the Admin has gone out of their way to make sure vets with a State Medical Card cannot have their medicine. During the covid crisis, we lost almost half our residence in one year which was well over 50. They forced these old people to play musical chairs with their rooms and roommates, which did a number for their health and wellbeing. Lots of their stuff got lost or destroyed when disinfecting them.
The hypocrisy of the Oklahoma Department of Veterans Affairs is so horrible, I feel like maybe if we all went to work dressed up as clowns, with large squeaky shoes and big round noses and flowers that squirt water at folks–then we might have won the War on Terror.
The Claremore Oklahoma Vet Center has a history of refusing to hire veterans and they have a history of such abuse and neglect and stupidity that every 2-3yrs, we get a new Head Admi. The problem also rests in the Admin under her, all civilians and not all of them have college degrees for a job that requires college degrees. And the bosses won’t wear their masks but feel that they should write you up for not wearing yours. Hypocrisy like this shouldn’t exist when taxpayers pay.
Congratulations are due Dr. Nora Volkow for joining the right side of history in the drug war. Others in government should follow her excellent example.
Some of the most effective opponents of drug wars have been outraged academics and scientists whose job is to penetrate confusion, craziness, and fraud in ways that can be quantified and analyzed, making drug wars the perfect topic for study.
Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead reminded the country’s leadership that the choice of which mind altering drugs to use was often a culturally biased decision. She was pummeled by prohibitionist propaganda for speaking truth to power. Her mistake was that she refused to paint the illicit drug consumer as evil, or not of the tribe. Then there was Tim Leary who tried but failed to explain to a cabal of 14th century-minded bureaucrats the wonders of magic mushrooms. Anecdotal revelations of the effectiveness of marijuana as a treatment for glaucoma, or even cancer, were met with neglect, derision or ridicule.
More recently, the physical and biological sciences moved in to do battle. Researchers from all over the world exposed drug war hype and demonstrated that the big lie always has a time limit. Chemists, biochemists, biophysicists, neurologists, geneticists, and molecular psychiatrists yanked the sheets off the government’s drug war propaganda machine to discover an overabundance of successful medical treatments using cannabinoids and psilocybin. The chemicals worked wonders, and the positive effects were immediately visible using high end scientific instrumentation.
That should have been the end of the argument were it not for a few groups of crazed sadomoralists who appear to prefer disease, death or damaged communities to a lengthier and better life.
The United Kingdom’s drug war problem resembles that of the United States:
Southern Chinese consumed beer 9000 years ago:
Corrected link:
PLOS ONE: Early evidence for beer drinking in a 9000-year-old platform mound in southern China
Researchers at the University of Turku discover the triggers of appetite as it relates to the opioid and endocannabinoid receptors:
Cocaine addiction explained by scientists in a mouse study—no thanks whatsoever to US or UK prohibitionists:
Health care in the UK is grappling with cannabis as a treatment and the hurdles it creates for health care providers. UK research goes so far as to educate the medical profession about cannabis therapies:
Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology: 08 September 2021 — Epilepsy and cannabis: so near, yet so far–Martin Kirkpatrick, Finbar O’callaghan
Using an accelerometer-based sensor in a smartphone, researchers are claiming they can detect marijuana use by young adults:
There are so many things wrong with the idea of trying to sense marijuana use with a smartphone it’s hard to know where to begin. For one, a new invention is supposed to eliminate irritations, not create them. It will fail for this reason alone.
For another, the phone would need to be carried by the individual at all times to detect relative differences in motor acceleration, something that can be easily avoided by not carrying it at all—unless it’s intended to be strapped on like an ankle-bracelet.
Even if the data could be accurately collected, based on likely similar problems to facial recognition software that claimed a better accuracy than that which occurred in the field, there is no indication that the data could be made more decipherable. There are too many variables, meaning five or more. When that happens, not even AI (artificial intelligence) is applicable.
And there are 4th Amendment objections to collecting information about people without a search warrant. Of course, prohibitionists have never once in their miserable and pitiful lives ever cared about the citizens’ right to privacy. They always stretch the boundaries in legal proceedings. The lengths they will go to are clearly indicated in this latest, intrusive smartphone concept.