Marijuana, Ecstasy Use Increases Among US Teens

The use of illicit drugs like marijuana and ecstasy among US teens has increased according to a government-sponsored survey, raising concerns about whether the current debates on drug legalization may be sending the wrong message to young Americans.

The survey found that due mostly to an increase in marijuana use, the proportion of eighth-graders (children around 13 and 14 years of age) who said they had used an illicit drug in the past year has risen from 14.5 per cent in 2009 to 16 per cent in 2010.

Aftermath of a decade of no prohibitions

"Harm reduction" advocates target addicts and critics  

Supervised injection site epitomizes warped philosophy in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside
  By Mark Hasiuk, Vancouver Courier, Sept. 15, 2010
In the year 2000, mayor Philip Owen introduced his Four Pillars drug strategy aimed at widespread drug addiction in the Downtown Eastside. The results have been disastrous. Addiction has flourished.

Homelessness has doubled. Blessed with official sanction, the drug culture grows.

Owen left office in 2002, leaving behind a broken neighbourhood. Now a "harm reduction" celebrity, he travels the world attending drug policy conferences in the United States, Europe and Asia. And in 2008, he was named to the Order of Canada, ending any speculation about that institution's relationship with reality.

Meanwhile, back in the Downtown Eastside, a small band of true believers took Owen's cue and mobilized forces--in plain view of a pathetic media--to experiment on neighbourhood residents. In 2003, Insite, the supervised injection site at 139 East Hastings, opened for business. In 2005, at nearby 84 West Hastings, the NAOMI study staged North America's first government-sponsored heroin giveaway. Sometime soon at the same location, hundreds of addicts will receive up to three daily doses of high-grade pharmaceutical heroin as part of the four-year SALOME study.

Use of opiate doda spreading in B.C.: experts

CBC News, August 26, 2010
Consumption of the opiate doda, an illegal and addictive concoction made from dried poppy pods, is out of control in Metro Vancouver's South Asian community, say experts in Surrey.

Dr. Gulzar Cheema said doda has been popular in the South Asian community for years and is currently sold under the counter in many pawnshops, video stores and other retail outlets.

Doda is a powder made by grinding the seed pods of opium poppies and is usually used to make a type of tea.

Police have ignored the problem for so long, it's now as common as marijuana in some circles, said Cheema.

He said recovery from doda addiction can be severe.

"Loss of appetite, tremors, panic, panic attacks," Cheema said. "You get stomach cramps; some people get diarrhea and vomiting."

George Michael gets 8 weeks jail for drug driving

By JILL LAWLESS (AP), 9/14/10
LONDON -- George Michael was sentenced to eight weeks in jail and lost his license for five years Tuesday for driving under the influence of drugs when he crashed his car into a London photo shop.

A British judge told the wayward star his addiction to marijuana put him and the public at risk.

The former Wham! singer pleaded guilty last month to driving under the influence and possession of cannabis following a July 4 collision between his Range Rover and a Snappy Snaps store in north London.

District Judge John Perkins told the singer he had taken a "dangerous and unpredictable mix" of prescription drugs and marijuana.

"It does not appear that you took proper steps to deal with what is clearly an addiction to cannabis," the judge said. "That's a mistake which puts you and, on this occasion, the public at risk."

A mayor's pre-emptive, enlightened war on homelessness

(Surrey's mayor Dianne Watt is determined to prevent the creation of a Vancouver-style, drug-infested "Downtown Eastside" skid row due to pro-drug liberalism)

Surrey homeless fight starts at the top

by Glenda Luymes, The Province: Friday, September 10, 2010

Erin Barber was running out of options.

After several hours trying to get a heroin addict into detox, the Surrey outreach worker had come up dry.

And as night came on, emergency room staff at Surrey Memorial Hospital said the sick man had to go.

“He’d gone through the worst part of withdrawal,” said Barber. “If he could get into detox, he might have a chance [at recovery]. If he was released on to the street, he’d find a way to use again.”

Barber scrolled through the numbers in her cellphone and decided to make one last call — to the mayor.

You might not expect a desperate outreach worker to call the mayor, but in Surrey, Dianne Watts has made the city’s social issues a personal — and council — priority.

The city was the first in B.C. to establish a homelessness and housing fund armed with $9.7 million for projects aimed at reducing homelessness. The mayor also established a task force of various government, business and community partners to find service gaps and increase communication between service providers.

“The last thing any of us wanted was a Downtown Eastside,” Watts said on a recent tour of the city’s homeless projects. “We made sure we were very hands on.”

And the strategy is working.

No level of smoking, or exposure to second-hand smoke, safe: researcher

(This report might as well be about pot, not tobacco--makes no difference. Smoke is smoke is toxic fume--there's no such thing as "harmless" toxic fume. Disagree? Then let your children smoke all the pot they want--poster )   
By Neil Haesler, Postmedia News, August 21, 2010
Casual smokers may think a few puffs a week are nothing to worry about, but new research in the United States claims having even an infrequent cigarette, or being exposed to second-hand smoke, could be doing more harm than people believe.

According to a study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, exposure to low levels of cigarette smoke may put people at risk for lung disease in the future.

"Even at the lowest detectable levels of exposure, we found direct effects on the functioning of genes within the cells lining the airways," said Dr. Ronald Crystal, senior author of the study and chief of the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at New York-Presbyterian/ Weill Cornell and chairman of the department of genetic medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City.

Grow-ops damage homes and lives

Seniors who bought grow-op home lose in court
Keith Fraser, Postmedia News, July 30, 2010
A retired couple who discovered what they believed was evidence of a former marijuana grow-op in their new home -- then sued the former owners and their real-estate agents -- have had their case tossed out of court.

Pauline Stone and Joe Brown bought the rural property in Quesnel, about 600 kilometres north of Vancouver, in September 2006 for $239,000.

They then found what they say was evidence of a grow-op. They claimed their health was adversely affected by residual chemical pollution and excessive mould and moisture, and said they'd suffered mental and emotional distress.

Fires after fires caused by marijuana grow-ops, legalized or not

Firefighters discover grow-op at East Van fire
Grow-op sparks massive blaze at Citadel
Drug cocktail causes fridge explosion

Another Mission Grow-Op Fire

Missisauga man faces charges after fire

Firefighters responding to Bellevue fire find marijuana grow operation

Grow-op found in 3-alarm Kensington Market blaze

Grow-op sparks T.O. apartment building fire

Prediction of legalized pot anarchies coming true in California

Another evidence of an Empire's fall
(While kids in developing countries are busy staying sober and busy studying hard to make their economies stronger, American kids, led by their adult enablers, are busy getting stoned on pot (and other drugs), and busy working hard to legalize mind-destructive drugs. Way to go, America!  
"Big Tobaccos" are already celebrating big future profits)
 
Oakland votes to permit large marijuana farms
By Evelyn Nieves, Associated Press Writer, Jul 21, 2010
SAN FRANCISCO - Oakland has moved closer to becoming the first city in the nation to authorize wholesale pot cultivation.

The Oakland City Council voted 5-2 with one abstention late Tuesday in favor of a plan to license four production plants where marijuana would be grown, packaged and processed.

The vote came after more than two hours of public comment, with speakers divided between those who opposed the measure largely on the grounds that it would put small medical marijuana growers out of business and those who said it would generate millions of dollars for Oakland in taxes and sales and create hundreds of jobs.

Marijuana can send a brain to pot

Drug use can trigger psychosis in vulnerable people, experts say

Nancy J. White, Living reporter, thestar.com, Jul 09 2010
At age 17, sitting in the basement with friends smoking pot, Don Corbeil first noticed all the cameras spying on him. Then he became convinced a radioactive chip had been planted in his head. “I thought I was being monitored like a lab rat,” he explains.

It never occurred to him that marijuana could be messing with his brain. Corbeil had been smoking pot since he was 14, a habit that escalated to about 10 joints a day.

He started hearing voices and, at one point, Corbeil thought he was the Messiah. Police found him one day talking incoherently, and brought him to hospital, where he was eventually diagnosed with drug-induced psychosis.  

Victim of Vancouver's drug liberalism speaks out

Readers call for tough love on E. Hastings (Downtown Eastside)
Vancouver Courier, June 25, 2010
(Below are 3 letters sent to the newspaper expressing angry frustrations at the city government's  pamperings to lawbreakers at the expense of law-abiding people---nbp)...
 
To the editor

Re: "E. Hastings jaywalkers get 65K study," June 16.

As a Strathcona resident and homeowner nestled snuggly into the armpit of East Hastings and Chinatown, I'm sick of seeing shattered window glass on my sidewalks, finding needle and drug use paraphernalia in my yard, and non-tax paying or self-accountable types sleeping where my dog or neighbour's kids might hope to play or enjoy a break from all the concrete.

I'm not thrilled with paying a mortgage, property taxes, hefty income taxes, and all the rest for the privilege of accommodating addicts and pariah that pander to them.

I have a baby due. As many things as I adore and appreciate about Vancouver, East Hastings and the city's inability to do anything about it except pour funds down drains like 40 oz. bottles of hooch for dead "homies" while I'm staring down the barrel of underfunded schools, insufficient daycare, and overcrowding versus a generally insufficient infrastructure leads me to consider relocation with my taxable income to a location where I see some return for my dollars invested. Like Stockholm perhaps. Tough love has reaped some excellent returns there.

My disdain over East Hastings is nothing I feel embarrassed over. My embarrassment is over paying taxes into a system that can't get its head straight, take action, and live with the fact that anyone refusing to be accountable for their own actions is not actually entitled to anything.

Ian Christy,
Vancouver               (Click here to read 2 more letters)

Pot gives great big hope to tobacco barons

Are potheads and their supporters stooges of Big Tobaccos or what? With more and more people quitting smoking or not starting, Big Tobaccos' smoke profits have been gradually going up in smoke. But now guess who are coming to the Big Rescue? Potheads and their supporters, in clamoring for legalization!  

  "Just in time to throw a lifeline to we, Big Tobaccos!  Thank you, guardian angels!  Maybe in the future, when we BT dominate and monopolize the pot industries (again), we'll give you some discount coupons to hook you to our products even more! -- best wishes from BT, your big, friendly cigarette/potarette makers."

The anarchy of a legalized pot world

Forget about buying "potarettes" from government/convenience stores.  Anyone and his dog could easily set up a mini or maxi pot grow-op in their house/condo/yard (impractical with tobacco) to make their own cheaper, more powerful joints, and sell the excess for profits.  Grow-ops damage houses, breed molds, cause fire hazards, and which criminals would exploit big time after legalization.

Besides above, read the following articles (or any cigarette article) and substitue the word "cigarettes" or "tobacco" with the word "pot"--revealing an anarchic, legalized pot world inevitably many times worst in many areas:

China tobacco firms accused of targeting children 

Big Tobacco's Next Target: Women and Children in Poorer Countries...

Tobacco companies target young women

Passive Smoking (secondhand Smoke) Linked To Psychiatric Distress And Illness

Illegal tobacco market growing

Supreme Court to hear tobacco liability appeals

U.S. gene study reveals toll of heavy smoking

Tobacco troubles: Law enforcement has not kept up with the illegal trade in cheap cigarettes 

Up in smoke: Indonesian child-teen smokers rising

"Give addicts hope, not drugs"

Copy Sweden's success, not Vancouver's failure

(The following letter was published in the Letters section of NP):
Give addicts hope, not drugs
National Post, Published: May 03, 2010

Re: Conservatives Should Get Weak On Drugs, Evan Wood, April 26.

Evan Wood appears to overlook the reality of the drug problem. He asserts that prohibitions against the nonmedical use of drugs are futile and only increase crime and violence. This has not been the experience of other countries such as Sweden. According to a 2006 report of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, Sweden has among Europe's lowest rates of crime, disease, medical and social problems stemming from drug addiction. This is due to the fact that Sweden employs a program of compulsory drug treatment for addicts. This success is similar to that achieved by drug courts in Canada. These courts ensure that addicts undergo treatment and rehabilitation as an alternative to a conviction and court record.

Giving an addict hope, rather than the despair offered by liberalized drug laws, is a far more humane and civilized approach to addiction. That is, instead of allowing the addict to deepen his/her addiction which leads to his inevitable and unenviable death, the addict is given an opportunity to regain health and well-being by being rid of the terrors of addiction.

C. Gwendolyn Landolt,

Drug Prevention Network of Canada, Richmond Hill, Ont.

A long observations of pot smokers

A letter in 24Hrs newspaper, 4/26/10:
I used to work at a drug and alcohol transitional house and we could always tell the people who had smoked pot from ones that used other drugs. Residents on the other drugs were fine after they withdrew . The pot smokers were not. They were disconnected, not coherent and would take about a year for the brains to think normally again. -- B. Hodgson

B.C. urged to adopt Surrey's successful anti-pot ways

More than 1,100 grow-ops shut down since 2005 by fire department checking on safety of wiring.   

Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts wants to take the city's grow-op-busting program provincewide -- and support for the move is growing. 

Welcome to Vancouver's "Slow Suicide Injection Site" -- free needles, no intervention

("Insite" is a Court-legalized/imposed site where drug addicts can go to shoot up drugs, free from interventions and laws--under the excuse of "health control". But, isn't suicide--even slow version--supposed to be illegal, and anyone has a right and duty to stop it? Isn't this just a modern version of the "Chinese opium dens" of the 19th century? "Insite" sites absolve pressure on governments to build treatment centers for addicts. The following is a column by Margaret Wente -- nbpost)...

A walk on the drug side
Insite's operations have been filmed many times, but never by a hidden camera
Margaret Wente, Published Mar. 15, 2010, Globe and Mail 
Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside is perhaps the most drug-ridden neighbourhood in North America. Misha Kleider is a young Vancouverite with curiosity. He decided to spend a month on the streets and make a film about it.

The result is a compelling documentary called Streets of Plenty, now available in seven parts on YouTube. The scenes of addled, self-destructive addicts are depressingly familiar. The scenes of social agencies eager to supply a homeless person's every need suggest that more social workers are not the answer to Vancouver's homeless problem. The most fascinating scene unfolds at Insite, the controversial supervised-injection facility that has become a flashpoint in the ideological drug wars.  Read full column at website or click below...

Dr. says MDs should not encourage pot use

(A letter from Dr. Meldon Kahan to the National Post on March 2, 2010)...

Re: How To Get Your Medicinal Pot, letter to the editor, Feb.  27.

Dr. David Saul implies that if patients request a Health Canada cannabis authorization form, physicians are obliged by the provincial medical college to sign the form or refer them to a physician who will.  This is incorrect and it is reckless to promote cannabis as a harmless medicine.  I have seen patients whose lives have been destroyed by cannabis addiction or cannabis-induced psychosis.  Smoked cannabis has been shown to cause precancerous changes in various tissues.  Also, THC serum levels rise rapidly when smoked, creating a risk for motor vehicle accidents.  The oral and inhaled versions of cannabis are far safer.

I would discourage physicians from authorizing smoked cannabis.  They should prescribe oral or inhaled cannabis only for patients with a medical condition for which cannabis has been shown to be effective, and who are at low risk for cannabis-related harms. 
Dr.  Meldon Kahan, medical director,
Addiction Medicine Service, St.  Joseph's Health Centre, Toronto

Prolonged Cannabis Use Linked To Psychosis

An Australian study found that prolonged use of cannabis or marijuana by young adults was linked to a higher risk of developing psychosis, with the highest risk affecting those who started using the substance in their teens, and continued using it for 6 years or more into adulthood: the risk of developing psychosis among these users was more than double that of never users.

Criminals exploit Dutch liberal pot laws big time; Government retreats from drug liberalism

Dutch court fines coffee (pot) shop owner 10 mln euros
The government mooted plans last year to transform coffee shops near the Belgian border into private clubs, to address what critics describe as the nuisance created by millions of drug tourists a year.

THE HAGUE, March 25, 2010 (AFP) - A Dutch court fined the owner of the Netherlands' biggest cannabis-vending coffee shop 10 million euros on Thursday after police seized more than 200 kilogrammes of the drug on its premises.

The 13-million-dollar penalty would have been larger, the district court of southwestern Middelburg said in a statement, had it not been for the authorities' apparently contradictory approach to soft drug vending and use.

While finding that coffee shop Checkpoint was a criminal organisation that had transgressed the Opium Act, the court said "the role of the authorities weighed heavily in the determination of the sentence".

This included the "facilitating role of the municipality, of which the prosecution service had been aware, and years of non-enforcement of the law", according to the judgment.

Cops: Imitation pot as bad as the real thing

By SARAH D. WIRE, Associated Press Writer Sarah D. Wire, feb. 17, 2010

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – There may be nothing like the real thing, but some industrious marijuana users have seized on an obscure but easily accessible substance that mimics the drug's effects on the brain — creating a popular trade in legal dope that has stymied law enforcement authorities.

Marijuana does nothing to help memory in Alzheimer's: study

Synthetic form of the drug shows a negative effect in high doses
By Pamela Fayerman, Vancouver Sun, February 9, 2010
Marijuana does not appear to improve memory or reverse effects of Alzheimer's disease, according to a University of B.C. study done on mice bred to have genetic mutations for the disease.

"We are a little surprised actually. Originally, we were hoping there would be a positive effect, based on previous research," said Dr. Weihong Song, the Canada Research Chair in Alzheimer's disease and a UBC psychiatry professor.

De facto drug-legalizations, liberalism fuel drug culture/entitlement in Vancouver (no "war on drugs" here)

'It's a frenzy out there'
Welfare Wednesday becomes Mardi Gras every month as drug dealers cash in [in Vancouver]
By Cheryl Chan, January 18, 2010

On "Welfare Wednesday" last month, Jodi Janzen had her budget all figured out.

After she received her $1,100 income-assistance cheque, she purchased the necessities first -- food, toiletries, cat food -- before buying her cocaine and heroin.  

Cocaine Causes Sudden Deaths, Heart Disease in Europe

January 13, 2010, 09:00 AM EST

By Michelle Fay Cortez

Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Cocaine was responsible for more than 3 percent of all sudden deaths in a Spanish study signaling that no amount of the recreational drug, however small, is safe.