Archive for the 'Drugs' Category

Why so sober, Heath?

Shortly before his death, Heath Ledger stopped doing illegal drugs:

Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, who worked with Ledger on his last film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, says Ledger “used to smoke marijuana on a regular basis, like probably 50 percent of Americans.” But after it became an issue, Ledger “went clean as a whistle.”

But Ledger suffered chronic insomnia, so he took prescription sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication. He died at age 29 when he overdosed on a cocktail of prescription medication.

If Ledger had just smoked a joint to get to sleep like millions of Americans often do, he would probably still be alive.

***

A recent study shows that during the 1990s, alcohol was a factor in about half of the deaths of Russians aged 15-54. Obviously, alcohol and prescription drugs are far more dangerous than marijuana.

I can understand why many say that legalizing marijuana outright would do more harm than good. But given the fact that it’s a safer alternative to alcohol and many prescription drugs, it makes no sense to have a mandatory sentence of 1-6 years for first time possession of an ounce of marijuana. Nor does it make sense to deny federal student aid to people who have a single marijuana conviction.

Go ahead and fine first and second time marijuana offenders, and deny federal benefits to people who have recent convictions. But don’t ruin people’s lives over a commonly-used drug that’s relatively harmless.

From ABC News:

For the last four decades, the laws of the land were all about dropping the hammer on crime by locking away criminals for a very long time. Some carried scary names like “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” as in cast out of society. The harshest penalties for drug offenders, the Rockefeller laws, were named after a New York governor battling a 1970s heroin epidemic. Nearly half the country and the federal government have adopted some kind of hardcore laws, while “get tough on crime” became the mantra of politicians running for everything from the local city council to the president of the United States.

But after cracking down and incarcerating hundreds of thousands, cash-strapped states including New York, Kentucky and Kansas are pulling back. They face an uncommon confluence of dire economics and prisons bursting at the seams and several have changed, in whole or in part, their stances on hard punishment.

Their reasons: the get-tough laws didn’t always work, especially when it came to slowing recidivism, the revolving door of prisoners who get out, mess up again, and come back. There were legal challenges, and questions about whether the punishment always fit the crime.

And of course, there’s the money. In tough economic times, the expensive laws are increasingly being deemed expendable.

So the failed get-tough approach to illegal drugs is falling out of favor, partly because it didn’t work, and partly because Bush metaphorically flew Air Force One into World Trade. And partly, I think, because people are starting to reassess all of the policies that they associate with Bush and his failed presidency.

So now it appears that we may be seeing an end to the War on Drugs, which means that we might be able to start a new era: the Rational Approach to Drugs. Now if we could just get started on the Rational Approach to Terrorism…

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Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of residual insanity left over from the drug war. The dire rhetoric of the drug warriors and their insistence that one drug is as bad as another has led many institutions and organizations to adopt “zero tolerance policies” for drugs. Including prescription drugs:

When a Fairfax County mother got an urgent call from school last month reporting that her teenage daughter was caught popping a pill at lunchtime, she did not panic. “It was probably her birth-control pill,” she thought. She was right.

Her heart dropped that afternoon in the assistant principal’s office at Oakton High School when she and her daughter heard the mandatory punishment: A two-week suspension and recommendation for expulsion.

What does Olympic hero Michael Phelps have in common with President Clinton? They both smoked pot. And Clinton isn’t the only president who indulged:

“Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere.”
– George Washington, U.S. President

“We shall, by and by, want a world of hemp more for our own consumption.”
- John Adams, U.S. President

“Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country.”
– Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President

“Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica.”
– Abraham Lincoln

“I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”
– Barack Obama, U.S. President

Maybe it’s time to stop locking people up for possession of marijuana.

From the Reuters:

The leader of Canada’s Green Party, unveiling an election platform that includes a proposal to legalize marijuana, apologised on Wednesday for not having smoked pot.

“I am not a fan of marijuana use. I have to confess this — I know all politicians are asked. I’ve never used marijuana. I apologise,” said Elizabeth May, who won extra attention this year by being allowed to join the televised national leaders’ debates.

By the way, here’s the photo I really wanted to use to illustrate this story.

From Physorg:

Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, Johns Hopkins researchers note that most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.

“Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives,” says lead investigator Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., a professor in the Johns Hopkins departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Neuroscience.

Hi. How are you today?

Keeping well, we trust.

(snip)

America is, I think, the only country in the world which permits advertising of drugs which are available only through your doctor.

Prescription drugs are commonly advertised on television in the US

The insidious message is simple; if your doctor is not offering you this drug, maybe you should be asking for it.

Americans do accept advertising in areas where it does not tend to appear elsewhere.

(snip)

Prescription drugs though are surely different. After all, the whole point of them is that it is not considered safe to let us simply buy them over the counter.

They are so strong or so habit forming that it is up to the doctor to decide that we really need them.

Advertising subtly changes that relationship by sending us in to see the doctor filled with nameless dreads about the symptoms of diseases we might have, and a detailed knowledge of the drugs that might help us.

The TV spots in other words insidiously furnish us with the tools to torture ourselves.

(snip)

I sleep well enough too, but I certainly do not start the day with the radiant lustre of the woman in the sleeping pill advert.

She is perhaps the jolliest person in TV advert land’s world of impotence, flatulence and obesity.

(snip)

They are a daily reminder of the many ways in which America - superficially so similar to Western Europe - is really profoundly different.

Those adverts with their sure sense of how to play on our doubts and insecurities are a symptom of the restless energy of American capitalism and of the belief that it can apply to issues of health and happiness just as readily as it can apply to polish or pet food.

Read the rest of this US based BBC newsman’s observations on this subject.

When we read it we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

( Original illustration with kind permission of Dr Aubrey Blumsohn of *Scientific Misconduct*)

Wow.

We wonder where we’d be without our bestest, of best big buddies at ‘Big Pharma‘, eh?

(Cross posted at How This Old Brit Sees It)

Now the cartels are sending out kids on bikes to warn police against confrontation.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Speaking both as a parent of a school-age child and as someone who has lost a dear family member to prescription drug abuse way before his time, these ads just rub me the wrong way. I mean, I usually think anti-drug PSAs are annoying and patronizing, but these ads are something else entirely.

This has been bothering me for a while now, ever since the drug dealer one started airing. The guy says, “Half my customers don’t even need me; they get high for free, out of the medicine cabinets!” Then the narrator repeats it: “Kids don’t need a drug dealer to get high.”

I just recently started seeing the one with the kid bragging about all his pills. “Getting drugs can be as easy as opening your medicine cabinet.” Is that really the message we want kids hearing on government-funded ads?

I get that these commercials are aimed at parents, but how many parents are unaware of the existence of recreational pill abuse? Everyone sees these ads, not just parents. Maybe it’s just me, but when I see these ads, I get this awful gut feeling that they’re probably more likely to encourage younger kids to experiment with pills than to inform parents. Neither of these ads warn about the dangers of taking pills (which actually ARE real and serious, unlike the silly stereotypes I see in so many anti-marijuana ads); they just talk about how easy and free it is to get high on pills. Am I the only one who thinks this is NUTS?

Cross-posted.

Talk about bad timing:

Former cycling champion Tammy Thomas seemed to be in the midst of shaving her face when an Olympic drug tester paid her an unannounced visit in 2002, according to testimony Wednesday in her trial on perjury charges.