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17 Dec 09

Pot Pulls Ahead - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • More high school seniors report smoking marijuana in the past 30 day
    than smoked cigarettes: 20.6 percent vs. 20.1 percent. And marijuana
    use is up (albeit in the same general range it’s been in for several
    years) while teen cigarette smoking continues to decline, and has
    dropped markedly since the early ‘90s.
  • To put the recent upward trend in perspective, past-month
    marijuana use by high school seniors is still only about half as
    common as it was in
    1979    . Still, federal officials lament that "the percentage of
    eighth-graders who saw a 'great risk' in occasionally smoking
    marijuana fell from 50.5 percent in 2004 to 48.1 percent in 2008
    and 44.8 percent this year." It speaks volumes about the scientific
    basis of our current drug policy that the people charged with
    implementing it openly pin their hopes for success on their ability
    to trick 13-year-olds into believing something that is patently
    false.

Matthew Yglesias » Pharmaceutical Advertising

  • The Congressional Budget Office has an interesting look at pharmaceutical marketing.


    For one thing, all those ads you see on TV are only a small portion of the marketing that takes place:

  • pharma1
  • 4 more annotations...
02 Dec 09

Drugs: Virtually legal | The Economist

  • Take America, where 13 states let people smoke marijuana for medical reasons. Most set somewhat stricter terms than California—where insomnia, migraines and post-traumatic stress can all be reasons for a spliff, if you see the right doctor. “There’s never been a person born who couldn’t qualify,” says Keith Stroup, the founder of the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, a lobby group that has been around since 1970. “In California, the system of medical use they have adopted is in fact a version of legalisation.”
  • Elsewhere in the United States, there are many signs of prohibition ebbing away. Some 14 states have decriminalised the possession of marijuana for personal use (medical or otherwise), though most keep the option of a $100 civil penalty. Three states—New Mexico, Rhode Island and Massachusetts—license non-profit corporations to grow medical marijuana. Most radically, some states are considering legalising the drug completely. California and Massachusetts are holding committee hearings on bills to legalise pot outright; Oregon is expected to introduce such a bill within the next couple of weeks.
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18 Nov 09

The U.S. needs to end drug trade and corruption to win in Afghanistan - By Tom Ricks | The Best Defense

  • David Kilcullen

  • Corruption

    Leads to

    Rapacious behavior of government officials

    Leads to

    Rage and alienation of the people

    Leads to

    Operating space for the Taliban

    Leads to

    Growing Taliban strength

    Leads to

    Taliban encouragement of poppy cultivation

    Leads to

    Poppies producing funds that corrupt government officials

    Leads to

    More corruption

    And so on

  • 2 more annotations...
13 Nov 09

Reefer Sanity, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • I never quite processed the fact until I read this article,
    on the AMA recommending renewed study of the medical utility of
    cannabis, that the federal government actually restricts marijuana more
    severely than cocaine or morphine. Marijuana is a Schedule I drug,
    meaning it's illegal and has no medical uses. Cocaine and morphine are
    controlled substances that do have some medical uses and can be
    prescribed. So even though coke is physically addictive while marijuana
    isn't, and morphine can kill you while marijuana can't, they're
    Schedule II. That's kind of nuts, and it puts into perspective the
    reason why people want to get it scientifically established that
    marijuana really does have some medical applications, particularly in
    fighting pain and nausea for cancer patients; the medical-marijuana
    movement is not purely a stalking horse for people who want to legalise
    and tax it like alcohol.
12 Nov 09

Reefer Sanity - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to
    reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no
    accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious
    group behind calls for more research.
  • "Despite more than 30 years of clinical research, only a small number
    of randomized, controlled trials have been conducted on smoked
    cannabis," said Dr. Edward Langston, an AMA board member, noting that
    the limited number of studies was "insufficient to satisfy the current
    standards for a prescription drug product."

Medical Marijuana: The Drug Czar is Wrong (Again) — MPP Blog

  • First, there is absolutely no reason that plant medicines can’t be standardized and controlled for purity and potency. Indeed, the Netherlands has been doing just that for years, with medical marijuana distributed in Dutch pharmacies that is “of pharmaceutical quality and complies with the strictest requirements,” according to the Dutch government.
  • Second, the FDA has never said that a natural plant product can’t be a medicine. Indeed the agency has a lengthy “Guidance for Industry: Botanical Drug Products,” specifically designed to aid developers of plant medicines. The document not only doesn’t rule out plants as medicines, it even states, “In the initial stage of clinical studies of a botanical drug, it is generally not necessary to identify the active constituents or other biological markers or to have a chemical identification and assay for a particular constituent or marker.”
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05 Nov 09

Mexican Pot Gangs Infiltrate Indian Reservations in U.S. - WSJ.com

  • The area where Mexican gangs seem to be expanding the fastest is on Indian reservations. In Washington state, tribal police seized more than 233,000 pot plants on Indian land last year, almost 10 times the 2006 figure. Pot seized on Washington's reservations accounted for about half of all pot seized on both private and public land last year. Police are finding pot farms on reservations stretching from California to South Dakota.
  • The area where Mexican gangs seem to be expanding the fastest is on Indian reservations. In Washington state, tribal police seized more than 233,000 pot plants on Indian land last year, almost 10 times the 2006 figure. Pot seized on Washington's reservations accounted for about half of all pot seized on both private and public land last year. Police are finding pot farms on reservations stretching from California to South Dakota.
  • 1 more annotations...
29 Oct 09

The Brothers Karzai and the CIA | Foreign Policy

  • Ahmed Wali Karzai, who
    controls the drug trade and much else in the bellwether province of Kandahar
    where he is president of the provincial council, is clearly his own man.
  • The resemblance is indeed so striking that, without prompting last
    month, a former top NATO official in Afghanistan described Wali Karzai to me as
    "a Tip O'Neill, a ward heeler," to whom all outsiders paid tribute.
  • 6 more annotations...
26 Oct 09

Bong Water Can Be Illegal Drug, Minnesota Court Rules - Local News | News Articles | National News | US News - FOXNews.com

  • Bong water can count as a controlled substance, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a decision that raises the threat of longer sentences for drug smokers who fail to dump the water out of their pipes.
22 Oct 09

Daily brief: senior Pakistani military officer assassinated in Islamabad | The AfPak Channel

  • A
    high-ranking Pakistani military official was assassinated
  • believed
    to be the first targeted attack on a senior military officer in the
    capital
  • 3 more annotations...

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

  • ately to the smallish conservative crowd, notably once led by
    anti-prohibitionist William F. Buckley, is Jessica Corry of Colorado, a
    married, pro-life Republican mom, soon to be "freedom fighter of the
    month" in High Times magazine.
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