• Cannabis & Hemp - Hot Off The 'Net

    Ingredient in cannabis restores taste for cancer patients

    Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

    PARIS – The ingredient that gives cannabis its “high” and famously whets the appetite can help cancer patients recover lost pleasure in food, according to a study published on Wednesday.

    Researchers in Canada enrolled 21 patients who had been treated with chemotherapy for advanced cancer, and gave them either capsules containing THC — delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive chemical in cannabis — or dummy lookalike pills.

    The volunteers took the tablets for 18 days, and were asked to fill in questionnaires.

    Seventy-three percent of those who took the THC reported an increased liking for food and 55 percent said the medication “made food taste better”. In the placebo group, these figures were only 30 percent and 10 percent.

    Both groups consumed roughly the same total of calories, but the THC patients said they ate more protein than before the start of the experiment and enjoyed savoury foods more.

    The THC-takers also reported better quality of sleep and relaxation than in the placebo group.

    The experiment is small scale but the first to explore the touted qualities of THC through random selection of volunteers and use of a “control” group by which to make a comparison.

    Lead investigator Wendy Wismer, an associate professor at the University of Alberta, said the findings were important because cancer, or its treatment, can cripple appetite and lead to dangerous weight loss.

    Many cancer patients, for instance, complain that meat smells and tastes unpleasant, so they eat less of it.

    “For a long time, everyone has thought that nothing could be done about this,” Wismer said in a press release.

    “Indeed, cancer patients are often told to ‘cope’ with chemosensory problems by eating bland, cold and colourless food. This may well have the result of reducing food intake and food enjoyment.”

    Wismer said that doctors should consider THC treatment for cancer patients suffering from loss of taste, smell and appetite.

    THC was well tolerated, and in terms of side effects there were no differences between the THC and placebo groups, which suggests that long-term therapy is also an option, she said.

    The study appears in the journal Annals of Oncology, published by the European Society for Medical Oncology.

  • Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net

    Anti-Stigma Week: Time to Reflect and Act

    It has been incredible to see a diverse group of people and organizations pool their skills and resources to mount Anti-Stigma Week, with activities that all have one goal – enhancing individual and community health and well-being by transforming stigma around drug use.

    This year’s Anti-Stigma Week theme is Drug Use, Dignity and Human Rights. Drug use, and especially illicit drug use, is associated with high degrees of stigma that hurt individuals’ health and access to health care and reduce community cohesion.

    Stigma is a societal process that marks people as outsiders. Those who are different -because of their behaviours or identities -are subject to disapproval and marginalization.

    They aren’t seen as people, as someone’s daughter or father, neighbours with their own stories and failings and hopes. This prejudice makes it easier for active discrimination to take hold, or to leave individuals fearing that others think them less worthy. The way systems are organized and accepted societal attitudes reinforce these tendencies.

  • Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net

    Drug War Anniversary a Time for Reflection and Action

    By Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director, Drug Policy Alliance

    Some anniversaries provide an occasion for celebration, others a time for reflection, still others a time for action. This June will mark forty years since President Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” identifying drug abuse as “public enemy No. 1.” As far as I know, no celebrations are planned. What’s needed, indeed essential, are reflection — and action.

  • Cannabis & Hemp - Hot Off The 'Net

    YouGov/Economist Poll Finds Most Americans Support Marijuana Legalization

    By Jacob Sullum

    A new YouGov poll commissioned by The Economist finds most Americans support marijuana legalization. Here is the question:

    Some people say marijuana should be treated like alcohol and tobacco. They say it should be regulated and taxed and made illegal for minors. Do you agree?

    Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they agreed, while only 23 percent disagreed. The remaining 19 percent had no opinion. This is the strongest support for legalization that I can recall seeing in a nationally representative poll. A Gallup poll in late October found that 46 percent of Americans favored legalization, a record for that organization’s surveys. (By comparison, support was under 30 percent in Gallup polls taken during the late 1970s, a time that today is remembered as relatively pot-tolerant.) As far as I know, the only other survey to find majority support for legalizing pot was a May 2009 Zogby poll in which 52 percent of respondents favored that position. The question in that survey was pretty slanted in favor of legalization, however.

  • Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net

    New Dialogue Report Calls For Alternative Approaches To Drug War

    Most Americans believe that the country’s forty-year “war on drugs” has failed. Yet, despite the costs and growing opposition to US anti-narcotics strategy across Latin America, the US debate on drug policy remains muted. According to Rethinking US Drug Policy, a report released in January by the Inter-American Dialogue, what is most needed now is a far-reaching debate on alternative approaches that could reduce the risks and damage from the trafficking and abuse of illegal drugs. The report proposes a series of US government initiatives to begin a thorough rethinking of US drug policy.

    On February 10, the Inter-American Dialogue will hold a public discussion on the findings and recommendations of the report at an event on Capitol Hill.

    Read the official press release.

    http://www.thedialogue.org/uploads/Drug_Policy/Press_Advisory.pdf

  • Drug Policy - Hot Off The 'Net

    The Obama Administration’s Public Health Approach to Drug Policy

    By R. Gil Kerlikowske, Director, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy

    President Obama’s comments during last week’s live YouTube interview about the need to approach our national drug problem from a public health perspective were timely, thoughtful, and well-grounded in what science tells us about drug use and its consequences. Like the president, I am opposed to the legalization of illegal drugs. At the same time, I understand, from firsthand experience as a police officer and police chief, that we cannot arrest or incarcerate our way out of a problem this complex, and that a “War on Drugs” mentality is too simplistic an approach to be effective.

    Before my confirmation as President Obama’s drug policy advisor, I’d spent thirty-seven years −- my entire professional career -− in law enforcement or working on law enforcement issues. Just one year before my career began, in 1971, President Nixon held a press conference declaring illicit drugs “public enemy number one.” It was a powerful metaphor — characterizing the Nation’s drug problem as fundamentally a criminal justice issue, and marking the beginning of a so-called “War on Drugs” that would last for most of the next four decades.

    While drug use was spreading across the country, especially after support for legalization reached a high point in the late 1970’s and the introduction of crack cocaine in the 1980’s, this era came to be defined with a heavily punitive emphasis, from mandatory minimum sentences to enhanced penalties for crack cocaine possession. Our Nation’s courageous law enforcement officers, prosecutors, courts and prisons system were asked to shoulder an ever-growing load, and to use the effective — but limited — tools at their disposal to arrest and prosecute dangerous drug traffickers that deserved severe sentences in addition to non-violent drug addicts.

  • Cannabis & Hemp - Hot Off The 'Net - International

    Amsterdam is done. Where will potheads turn now?

    By Agence France-Presse

    Sunday, January 30th, 2011

    MAASTRICHT, Netherlands — Learning to grow their own weed or finding a dealer: French and Belgian potheads are seeking alternatives to the famous Dutch coffee shop as The Hague plans to cut off drug tourists.

    Incensed by the “nuisance” caused by millions of people crossing its borders each year to visit one of 670 licensed coffee shops, the Netherlands plans to turn these cannabis-vending cafes into private clubs for card-carrying members — Dutch residents only.

    “We are busy learning about growing cannabis at home,” a 27-year-old Belgian visitor told AFP at “Mississippi”, a well-known coffee shop in Maastricht on the border with Germany and Belgium.

    “Smoking a joint, that is our recreation. We really enjoy smoking a joint with a cup of coffee,” said the woman, a regular of the smoky establishment in the hold of a barge moored on the Maas River.

    Though technically illegal, the Netherlands decriminalized the possession of less than five grams (0.18 ounce) of cannabis in 1976 under a so-called “tolerance” policy.

    Cannabis cultivation and wholesale remain illegal and are in the hands of criminal organizations in a black-market business worth an estimated two billion euros ($2.7 billion) per year.

    About 1.4 million foreigners visit Maastricht’s 14 coffee shops every year, more than half of them Belgian, followed in joint second place by French and Germans.

    The foreigners’ presence raises the hackles of local residents who blame them for traffic jams, nocturnal disturbances, and attracting the seedy underbelly of the illegal drug trade.

    “In the 200 yards between the parking garage and the entrance to Mississippi, I can be approached twice or three times by people trying to sell me cocaine,” said a 19-year-old French student on the street of Maastricht.

    The city proposed in 2005 to ban foreigners from its coffee shops, whose owners opposed the move and are contesting it before the Dutch Council of State — the country’s highest administrative court which also advises the government on legal issues.

    The court, set to make a ruling in the coming months, sought the input of the European Court of Justice, which ruled in December that banning foreigners was justified “by the objective of combating drug tourism and the accompanying public nuisance”.

    The new, rightist Dutch government inaugurated last October wants to extend the proposed ban to coffee shops countrywide and has mooted the introduction of a national “wietpas” (literally weed pass).

    Coffee shops are currently permitted to stock no more than 500 grams (a little over one pound) of the soft drug at any given time, but this limit is often flouted.

    “Nuisance and criminality related to … the trade in narcotics must be reduced,” states the governing coalition agreement signed in September.

    “Coffee shops must be private clubs for adult residents of the Netherlands on presentation of a pass,” it stipulates.

    “If they keep us out, we will find it (cannabis) at home, in France, but it is not the same,” said regular Maastricht visitor Kevin Armand, 22. “The quality of what we can buy on the street (in France) is not the same.”

    Armand was on a three-day visit to the Netherlands … “to smoke quality grass in peace,” as he explains.

    Adrian, a 25-year-old salesman from Luxembourg, insisted he would continue visiting the capital of the southern Limburg province and “try to find weed from dealers on the streets”.

    Maastricht’s coffee shop owners also dread the impact of the government’s hardened stance on soft drugs.

    “It will be an economic catastrophe for us, but also for tourism,” predicted Marc Josemans, owner of the “Easy Going” coffee shop and president of the Association of Coffee Shops of Maastricht.

    At least one Belgian has read the writing on the wall.

    “I have been coming to Maastricht for years to get my weed,” said the 57-year-old, who like most of the cannabis users approached by AFP, did not want to give his name.

    “This may be a good time to stop smoking joints.”