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19 government officials and high level experts from around the world describe in great detail the misery, the ineptitude, the corruption and the many other horrors we inflict on ourselves and the whole world via an eternal belief in the policy of drug prohibition.
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“I was removed from my position as Chief Advisor of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) in October 2009. A decade later, UK drug policy has done nothing but go backwards. We are currently in a worse position now than we were 10 years ago. However, there is a path to a brave new world. Back in 2009, I was making it clear to the UK Government that the evidence that we had back then was that cannabis was less harmful than both alcohol or tobacco. ” – Professor David Nutt
https://drugscience.org.uk/groundhog-decade-not-brave-new-world/ -
Changing The Narrative is a network of reporters, researchers, academics, and advocates concerned about the way media represents drug use and addiction. Our mission is to help journalists and opinion leaders provide accurate, humane, and scientifically-grounded information in this contested terrain. We offer expert sources —including people with lived experience of the issues — and up-to-date, fact-checked, and evidence-based information on news and controversies.
https://www.changingthenarrative.news/ -
The founder of Drug Policy Alliance argues that the current laws are a waste of money and ultimately harmful
More and more Americans agree that people with drug problems “deserve treatment, not punishment,” that “we can’t incarcerate our way out of the drug problem,” and that it’s a waste of taxpayer resources to keep locking up people whose only offense is possessing drugs for their own use.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/united-states-decriminalize-drug-possession-nadelmann-760001/
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As we reported previously, scientists from the University of New Mexico have been studying how access to marijuana may help alleviate the opioid crisis, declared a national emergency by President Trump. Their study has now been published in the journal PLOS One, with the researchers concluding that there is “clinically and statistically significant evidence” that increased cannabis use led to patients cutting down on opioids and improved their quality of life.
The study analyzed the health data of 66 patients who were using opioids habitually to manage their severe chronic pain. 37 of the patients were enrolled in a medical marijuana program between 2010 and 2015 while 29 patients in the control group were not.
The scientists found that patients using cannabis were 17 times more likely to stop their prescribed opioids and five times more likely to lower their daily dosage of opioids. On average, they cut their doses in half. Comparatively, the patients not enrolled in the medical marijuana program actually increased their opioid usage by more than 10%.
http://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/how-legalizing-marijuana-may-end-the-opioid-crisis
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The clinically and statistically significant evidence of an association between MCP enrollment and opioid prescription cessation and reductions and improved quality of life warrants further investigations on cannabis as a potential alternative to prescription opioids for treating chronic pain.
Study: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0187795
