CLICKHEREx

http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads/725140-Drugs-Twenty-NI-deaths-likened-to-serial-killer-(para-methyl-4-methylaminorex) edgarshade View Profile View Forum Posts Private Message View Blog Entries View Articles Add as Contact Bluelighter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Join Date Aug 2010 Location UK Posts 2,364 Yesterday 13:36 BBC News 5 June 2014 Twenty deaths have now been linked to a new unregulated drug that was introduced in Northern Ireland last year. A coroner has likened the deaths to having a serial killer on the loose. John Leckey made his comments at one of several inquests in Belfast which is looking at the drug-related deaths of six people in NI. The drug has a number of street names including speckled cherries and speckled crosses. The inquests are examining the deaths of five men in Northern Ireland between May and September last year. They were aged between 27 and 41. The PSNI said a senior detective had been co-ordinating the investigations into drug-related deaths. Det Supt Andrea McMullan said: "The substance is para-methyl-4-methylaminorex and is not confined to one particular brand of tablet. It has been identified in a number of tablets and in a number of deaths. People should not lull themselves into a false sense of security by thinking if they avoid tablet X and only take tablet Y or Z they'll be OK. The tragic reality is they will not. Anyone who takes illegal drugs runs a serious risk of causing themselves serious harm or killing themselves. There is no safe illegal drug." Police investigations into the drugs-related deaths last summer resulted in a total of 11 arrests. One person has appeared in court. Three others were awaiting court proceedings but one has since died. The inquests this week looked at six deaths: James Owens, 33, found outside a leisure centre in west Belfast in June Alan McKenzie, 27, found dead at home in east Belfast in June Neill Reeves, 29, who died after taking drugs with friends at home in July Brian Mills, 41, found unconscious at home in Kircubbin, County Down, in August Kevin Doherty, 29, who died after a house party in Divis in west Belfast in September Health Minister Edwin Poots said he had been "greatly concerned" about the number of new substances appearing on "our streets" and the harm they could cause. "Over the past couple of years there has been growing concern about what have been inaccurately labelled as legal highs," he said. "They are marked 'not for human consumption' for a reason, as the sellers are trying to get around our existing drug laws and medicines regulations. This is a reserved matter, I have written directly to the home secretary on this matter, and subsequently they have announced a review of how the UK's legislative response can be enhanced beyond the existing measures of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-27713966 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #2 edgarshade View Profile View Forum Posts Private Message View Blog Entries View Articles Add as Contact Bluelighter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Join Date Aug 2010 Location UK Posts 2,364 Yesterday 13:37 I have written directly to the home secretary on this matter, and subsequently they have announced a review of how the UK's legislative response can be enhanced beyond the existing measures of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Problem : Prohibition results in a relatively safe drug such as MDMA being substituted by much more dangerous and unpredictable drugs. Solution: MORE prohibition! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #3 ... View Profile View Forum Posts Private Message View Blog Entries View Articles Add as Contact Bluelighter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Join Date Dec 2010 Posts 221 Yesterday 22:52 Probably an MAOI. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #4 MindlessBilly View Profile View Forum Posts Private Message View Blog Entries View Articles Add as Contact Send Email Bluelighter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Join Date Dec 2008 Location Australia Posts 99 Yesterday 23:06 Looks like its a stimulant & is also known as 4,4'-DMAR, or "Serotoni" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- #5 Jackeh View Profile View Forum Posts Private Message View Blog Entries View Articles Add as Contact Bluelighter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Join Date Nov 2012 Location Londonderry, Northern Ireland Posts 639 Today 05:53 It apparently acts as a reuptake inhibitor (not sure for what though) and has an extremely long half life - far longer than the subjective effects. Definitely dangerous to take too much of and to mix with other substances.

________________________________________________________________ http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20140606-25631.html * Felicity Nelson Friday, 06 June 2014 Cannabis use changes the size and shape of sperm, potentially affecting male fertility. Image: Gabriel Sancho [cartoon onsite*] The world's largest study on sperm shape and size has identified cannabis as a major predictor of sperm abnormality. Season and frequency of sexual activity were also major lifestyle factors affecting sperm but, surprisingly, cigarette and alcohol consumption had little effect. The study included a sample of sperm from almost 2,000 men across the UK. The lifestyles of men with less than 4% normal sperm (defined as sperm with a typical shape and size) were compared against men with sperm samples with greater than 4% normality. The University of Sheffield reported in a press release, "Men who produced ejaculates with less than 4% normal sperm were nearly twice as likely to have produced the sample in the summer months, or if they were younger than 30 years old, to have used cannabis in the three month period prior to ejaculation." The researchers advise that men aiming to start a family should probably stop using cannabis as previous research has shown that good sperm morphology is crucial to successful conception. The research was published in the journal Human Reproduction last week. __________________________________________________________________________________________ It should be noted that cultures which have been using cannabis for thousands of years seem to have no problem maintaining fertility levels, and only the fittest, and luckiest of the many millions of spermatozoa in each ejaculation get the chance to fertilise the ovum, so any abnormal / defective ones get weeded out in the race.

http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads/725239-Aus-Poor-pensioners-sell-prescription-drugs #1 poledriver View Profile View Forum Posts Private Message View Blog Entries View Articles Add as Contact Bluelighter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Join Date Jul 2005 Posts 8,097 Today 10:26 Aus - Poor pensioners 'sell prescription drugs' AUSSIE pensioners struggling to make ends meet are selling their prescription medication to junkies and drug dealers, with some painkillers fetching up to $4000 a box. Queensland doctors have warned that dealers are also targeting vulnerable seniors, some who survive off a $766 fortnightly pension, and have been approaching them outside pharmacies, the Courier-Mail reports. The most sought-after drugs are opioid pills MS Contin and OxyContin, and Fentanyl patches, commonly prescribed for chronic pain and cancer care. Hervey Bay GP Dr Ken Treichel says he's banned six elderly patients from his surgery in the past year for selling their medication. "It's absolutely rampant," he told the newspaper. "I actually see people (selling). I've seen people walk up to them, bring the money out and do the deal, standing in the car park." Drug and Serious Crime Group Sergeant Adam Frost said people of all ages had been busted buying and selling prescription drugs, including the elderly. "It's not an excuse - a 78-year-old on the pension and finding it tough might resort to that sort of supplementary income," he told the newspaper. http://www.news.com.au/national/brea...-1226946604731

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2014/06/warning-carrying-garden-seeds-around-could-get-you-drug-searched/#comment-1622617 Chris Jager Yesterday 4:30 PM Share 74 Discuss 24 Bookmark Last night, I was subjected to an extensive drug search at Sydney’s central station after a sniffer dog plucked me out of the crowd. Over the next 20 minutes, I was made to answer questions, hand over my licence, take off my shoes, empty the contents of my bag and stand spreadeagled against a wall while a police officer patted me down; all in full view of the public. Eventually, they found what had set the dog off — a bag of novelty garden seeds. No really. For some reason, NSW Police thought that Wednesday evening was the perfect time to launch a drug operation on random train commuters wearily heading home from work. I was unlucky enough to be strolling past in the midst of the crackdown. As I passed the above sniffer dog, I knew something was up: it took a whiff at me and then kind of zeroed its snout towards my jeans pocket (worryingly close to my crotch, I might add). Before I could say anything, a second police officer sprang out of nowhere and informed me that they had reason to believe I was carrying an illicit drug. They corralled me into a corner near the CityLink staircase and proceeded to ask me about my drug habits: did I have any drugs on my person? Had I recently smoked cannabis? Had I been around people who had been smoking cannabis? Obviously, I answered in the negative each time. Meanwhile, my train was due to arrive any minute, which caused me to repeatedly glance at my phone’s clock until they told me to place it on the floor. I was then made to remove my shoes and splay myself against a wall while one of the police officers patted me down. They also wrote down my name, address and mobile phone number. These photos were taken after I’d been searched, incidentally. Now, I have no idea whether any of the above treatment was a violation of my civil rights — but you tend to just go with the flow when multiple police officers are telling you to do stuff. Short of being ordered to strip and bend over for a cavity search, I was going to agree to whatever they wanted. Meanwhile, hundreds of fellow commuters were gawping at me as they walked past, just as I’ve often done myself. Until that moment, I’d always assumed the guy getting patted down probably had something to hide. After making me empty my pockets and fiddling about with the waistband of my jeans, the police decided to go through my bag. This was the most traumatic part; and not because I was worried they’d find anything illegal. Y’see, my bag is like a Doctor Who Tardis specifically designed for refuse — it’s filled to bursting with all manner of weird junk, some of which dates back decades. Among the items they wordlessly pulled out were an old Amiga Power magazine from 1994, an Avengers Vs. X-Men graphic novel, a Leap Motion controller, old bills, old socks, a macaron stuffed inside a muesli bar box and a Loreal face cream for men (look, it was just a phase I was going through. Shut up.) There was also, inexplicably, a black cape. I have no idea where this came from or how it got in there. Finally, one of the police officers found something that gave him pause. “What’s this?”, he asked as his partner stepped closer, presumably to block off my escape. At first, I had no idea what I was looking at. Then I remembered what it was. Around eight months ago, Electronic Arts sent out a bag of novelty garden seeds to promote the video game Plants vs. Zombies 2. Like everything that comes across my desk, I stuffed it in my bag and swiftly forgot about it. Now they had come back to haunt me. “Er, they’re seeds,” I replied weakly. “…Normal seeds. Not drug seeds.” I quickly added. The police officers both carefully examined the contents. After a few nail-biting moments, they agreed to let me go. The moral to the story is that sniffer dogs are idiots. Also, you might want to leave your horticulture gear at home during drug crackdowns. Tch. __________________________________________________________________________________ 24 Comments | Reply northerndoubt @northerndoubt June 5, 2014 4:51 pm Regardless of guilt/innocence. Always hand them your licence ID and say once "I use my rights to remain silent". Your job is done until they let you go. You are innocent until proven otherwise. Reply 3 Dman @dman June 5, 2014 5:38 pm This kind of pretentious nonsense annoys me. Do you also refuse breath tests if you go through a booze bus? If you've got nothing to hide, then just go along with it, answer their questions, and it'll all be over once they've established your innocence. By getting your social activist hat on and remaining silent all you're doing is wasting both the police's and your time. Imagine how the situation would've escalated if the cops asked Chris if he had any drugs on him and he refused to answer. tl;dr: Don't be a dickhead. Reply 3 northerndoubt @northerndoubt June 5, 2014 5:46 pm Nope, cant refuse breath tests unfortunately. Reply 0 transientmind @transientmind June 5, 2014 6:04 pm I get stopped by cops a lot. I have one of those faces, one of those stances. Walking down the street from my home, doing a lap around the block for some exercise, several times when waiting for cabs. Hell, once I was questioned twice in ten minutes, waiting at a cab rank... Profiling is obviously in use, and I obviously fit a shady profile. Which is ironic, given that the only official file they have on me probably only lists two speeding tickets and several instances of turning in money I've found on the street. I've been asked what I'm doing, where I'm going, where I live, pretty frequently. And out of consideration for their thankless job, I'm helpful and cooperative right off the bat. That's usually enough - I'm articulate and can speak well, my eyes are rarely bloodshot or reddened. Certainly lucid, never on drugs. But I draw the line at invasion of privacy or being made into a public spectacle. So no, I think @northerndoubt has the right idea in that situation. They want to try to humiliate me in public for no good reason, then they've earned a waste of their fucking time. I won't put up with it without making my objection well-known, and I wouldn't expect anyone else to, either. Emptying your bag into the street in a busy public thoroughfare? That's nothing like driving through a breath-test checkpoint from the anonymity of your car and without the suspicions cast by having a dog in your balls. Nope. That sort of situation, they're going to find me as uncooperative as my legal rights will allow. It's simply one of those 'prices' we're told we have to pay for security, and I'm unwilling to pay it. Reply 4 homer5677 @homer5677 June 5, 2014 7:33 pm Totally agree with not saying anything at all but I think as a member of the public we are often put between 'a rock and a hard place' when we are put on the spot accused of something that we didn't do. There is no doubt that police are intimidating (when you are being searched etc), which is how they should be, because if they weren't intimidating they wouldn't be doing their job correctly. Although many of us would like to think that we would 'declare silence' in a situation like this, the majority of the time when we are put on the spot, the intimidation and pressure from the officers often causes us to totally forget or 'not have the balls' to tell them that you are remaining silent. This is just a natural reaction by the body in high pressure situations. In saying this, sometimes remaining silent may not be the best plan. For instance in Chris' situation, if had of remained silent, the police most likely would have had more suspicion that the seeds in the bag were not actually what they looked like but rather something illicit. Forgive me on my law knowledge (not a lawyer), but with an indication from the dog, and a search finding the above (I can't really determine the thickness and texture from the picture but look like they could contain whatever), there is a reasonable chance that it LOOKS like it is illegal to the officers. This gives them probable cause to take it further. Which in this situation, would have made the whole night a lot longer with a trip to the police station blah blah etc. Whereas because Chris, cooperated fully and told them what they actually were, it gives him some credibility in a sense (from human to human anyway). BUT my personal opinion and what I think everyone should at least 'plan' to do is to remain silent. As they say when being arrested, "Anything you do or say WILL BE USED AGAINST YOU in a court". Note: They do not say 'used for you', only against. So in that case it is better to remain silent altogether. (That is if you don't crumble under the pressure!) Last edited June 5, 2014 7:40 pm Reply 2 darren @darren June 6, 2014 12:24 am Unfortunately, being truthful and having done nothing wrong can still screw you over. If you were and say you were at home last night, but someone *mistakenly* thought they saw you at some other location, suddenly you are lying, have something to hide. Just don't answer anything. Reply 1 g-man @g-man June 5, 2014 8:01 pm You have no right to silence. We are in Australia not America, we have no fifth amendment Reply 0 darren @darren June 6, 2014 12:27 am WRONG Reply 0 Tim. Guest June 6, 2014 9:04 am http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/oppn-slammed-over-nsw-right-to-silence-law/story-e6frfku9-1226601328430 Reply 0 Grayda @grayda June 6, 2014 9:21 am CITATION (please) Reply 0 thecog @thecog June 5, 2014 5:05 pm What a waste of tax payer's money and humiliation for you. I hope 20 people walking past while they holed you up were carrying. Meanwhile genuine complaints that get called in for real crimes go un-investigated. Interesting fact: crime rate is down in Colorado since legalising recreational marijuana. Reply 0 Aucix @aucix June 5, 2014 6:11 pm Of course it is down. Possession is no longer a crime. Every other crime rate could remain the same or even have gone up slightly. Reply 2 transientmind @transientmind June 5, 2014 6:23 pm "Breathing now no longer illegal. Crime rate plummets!" Although, I think your point may have also subtly been @thecog's point. Reply 0 gregorvorbarra @gregorvorbarra June 5, 2014 7:07 pm "Between January 1 and April 30, violent crime and property crime in Denver — the most populated city in Colorado, in terms of both people and weed dispensaries — dropped 10.6 percent compared to that same span one year earlier, official statistics reveal. Homicides have dropped to less than half of last year’s levels, and motor vehicle theft has shrunk by over one-third. " http://rt.com/usa/163644-colorado-marijuana-crime-drop/ So *other* crimes have also dropped, quite noticeably. Basically, because marijuana possession was illegal, (1) people using it became criminals and therefore lost one incentive for not committing other crimes; (2) prices for marijuana were artificially inflated because it could only be obtained illegally, and the increased prices resulted in more criminal activity as people committed crimes to finance their habit. Most drug laws are ironically intended to "protect" the drug users, in much the same manner as high taxes on smoking and alcohol. While the number of people affected goes down, the effects on the lives of those who continue to take drugs are made radically worse. IMO it's not a particularly sensible tradeoff. I speak here as a teetotalling nonsmoker who has never taken an illegal drug. Most anti-drug laws do much more harm than good. Last edited June 5, 2014 7:21 pm Reply 2 thecog @thecog June 5, 2014 9:47 pm I would hardly call giving users a criminal record "protecting" them. As for the downsides of Colorado's legalisation, only time will tell. Alcohol causes untold harm to families and kills one person every ten seconds globally, but we've learnt to live with it through sensible use of legislation. No one really suggests outlawing it again. Yet there's never been a recorded death attributed directly to marijuana use. In fact, there's no known lethal dose. As for the cops going after commuters carrying small amounts? It's such a waste of time and money. No large quantities are going to be carried through a train station, so you're left with users who are being targeted. There's good evidence that marijuana use doesn't cause the harm we've been brought up to believe. For instance, two studies in to the risk of lung cancer from smoking marijuana suggest that marijuana smokers may have a marginally lower risk compared to non-smokers (of any substance) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22235088 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19004418 long term uses also doesn't kill brain cells. In fact, it may be neuroprotective and actually promote brain cell growth http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1253627/ All-in-all, I support the jobs the cops do, but it's a misuse of resources. Reply 0 hellboy1975 @hellboy1975 June 5, 2014 5:57 pm This article was presented to you by EA Games! Reply 0 WeLiveInTheDumbWorld Guest June 5, 2014 10:02 pm You basically got bullied, if you didnt comply youd get your ass served to you. Alcohol is legal yet they harass people about weed or other drugs. People are forced to buy poor quality shit of the street cause of some retartdes in power. Reply 0 taylormemer @taylormemer June 5, 2014 10:25 pm "The moral to the story is that sniffer dogs are idiots." Ummmmm? Reply 0 Chris Jager @chrisjager June 5, 2014 10:28 pm That was a joke there. But seriously, the dog clearly didn't know its nose from its arse! Reply 0 robb @robb June 6, 2014 11:29 am Reminds me of Clover Moore calling for a ban on sniffer dogs because they picked out two people with drugs on them who claimed "it wasn't mine" http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/09/1089000328462.html?from=storylhs Reply 0 Awnshegh @awnshegh June 6, 2014 11:30 am We have to remember that working with dogs has 2 "issues" 1 - their nose is something like 10,000 times better than ours so they can pick up even trace amounts 2 - they're not smart enough to discriminate between someone carrying an ounce of weed and someone who has accidentally stepped on a joint. So I don't think it's the dog that is the issue. I think it's a typical government solution - go after the smallest fish in the pond in the hope of using that to catch a bigger one later on. Reply 0 jamie_parris @jamie_parris June 6, 2014 8:36 am From the picture they do not look at all like seeds, more like some form of LSD. I'm surprised the cops let you go so easily, despite your known innocence. Despite the comments above about them wasting time, and "using your right to remain silent". At the end of the day they are doing their job, just like you go into the lifehacker office and post articles about the police searching you for a job. Reply 0 duzz @duzz June 6, 2014 9:27 am No, a lot of those cops are young and it is a power trip. Getting stopped, and then a cop taking their time for triple check your train ticket and student ID isn't "doing a job" its "I've got a position of authority and you can't do anything until I say so". Reply 1 Cameron @moonhead June 6, 2014 8:37 am But don't you feel safer now? Because you are. It's about public safety, and keeping evil people off the street. SAFE! Reply 0 NotoriousNorton Guest June 6, 2014 1:05 pm The smart thing for drug dealers to do would be to lace the train & bus seats with cannabis & meth, etc. (then dispose of any they were carrying) so the sniffer dogs made so many false positives as to prove useless as an aid to detection.

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/heroin-dealers-in-switch-to-legal-highs-165591n.24357668 DESPERATE heroin dealers are topping up drugs with so-called legal highs. Rebecca Gray Crime Reporter Saturday 31/05/2014 Following a crackdown by elite drug squad officers the heroin market has been ­severely disrupted across Glasgow. This has forced dealers to add legal highs, some of which are as deadly as hard drugs, to their supplies. Graeme Pearson MSP, founder of the Scottish Drug Enforcement Agency, said mixing ­illegal drugs and legal highs is a "dangerous development". He said: "Any new ­development is not good, but this is particularly worrying. "Polypharmacy, as they call it in the trade, kills people. "Abusing a number of different drugs - including alcohol - at the same time is very dangerous." The heroin market has been severely disrupted after police made a series of high-value seizures. We told last month how police smashed a £250,000 drugs ring suspected of selling heroin on city centre streets. The Evening Times understands the drug is increasingly difficult to come by on the streets of Glasgow - forcing ­addicts to look for alternatives to feed their habit. Our investigation ­reveals drug busts are up and Statement of Opinion Unit (STOP Unit) officers have seized heroin worth more than £3million in the past six months. Seven men and three women - aged between 21 and 47 - were arrested last month in connection with alleged drugs offences during Operation Futa. Detective Inspector Frank Clarke, who lead Futa, said: "Through this operation, we are targeting those who bring misery to our communities." But deadly legal highs are becoming as dangerous as hard drugs, according to drug experts. A series of intelligence-led ­operations has made it more difficult for ­addicts to buy, and harder to find heroin of high purity, on sale from dealers. Last month, drugs worth more than £1m were seized by police in Drumchapel. Officers raided a property where they recovered the haul, thought to be heroin, cocaine, amphetamine and cannabis. Two men, aged 46 and 47, were arrested in connection with the find. In March, two men were arrested after £250,000 of heroin was recovered in Maryhill. Just days earlier, another two men were arrested after drugs with a street value of £25,000 were found in a car in Glasgow's West End. However, Scottish Drugs Forum (SDF) chiefs cast doubt over the impact of high-­value drug seizures. An SDF spokesman said: "Large, or high profile, police seizures do not necessarily lead to a change in the purity or composition of street heroin. "Any such effect is likely to be very short-lived. "Polydrug use - using more than one substance at a time - is a significant risk factor for overdose and death."

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/holiday-scam-lures-elderly-australians-as-unwitting-drug-mules/story-fni0fee2-1226944750805 Keith Moor Herald Sun June 05, 2014 The 7kg of ice unwittingly smuggled into Australia by two elderly and unwitting drug mules who were conned in a scam to carry the drugs home. Source: Supplied RETIREES off to see the world are in the sights of an international crime gang bent on fooling them into becoming unwitting drug mules. The elaborate scam involves awarding elderly Australians a prize in a web-based competition: an overseas holiday, accommodation - and new luggage. The tourists bring the new luggage home from their overseas holiday, unaware that gang members have hidden drugs worth millions of dollars in secret compartments. Local heavies then retrieve the drugs, frightening the retirees into not going to police. Or they try to swap the drug-filled suitcases for identical bags without the retirees ever realising a switch has been done.

http://www.bluelight.org/vb/threads/724954-Drugs-like-ice-have-Australia-hooked poledriver View Profile View Forum Posts Private Message View Blog Entries View Articles Add as Contact Bluelighter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Join Date Jul 2005 Posts 8,076 Today 11:33 Drugs like ice have Australia hooked AUSTRALIA is in the midst of an ice epidemic, with the drug being linked to a growing number of crimes, and higher quantities of the amphetamine seized at our borders. And there is no end in sight to our addiction. Experts say the popularity of the drug caught Australia unawares, with the usage on par with the crack cocaine epidemic in the United States. In recent months even the Prime Minister has admitted the war on drugs may be unwinnable. Evidence showing the extent of the problem emerged last week with an Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) survey showing large numbers of people who had been arrested had amphetamines in their system, with ice being one of the most common varieties. Even worse the survey showed the drug was of good quality and easy to obtain. Drug researcher Associate Professor John Fitzgerald told news.com.au that he didn’t think Australia was prepared for the amphetamine epidemic and it was impossible to say when it would end. Professor Fitzgerald, who is the head of criminology at the University of Melbourne said the tragedy of drugs like amphetamines was they spread easily through the community to beyond areas where “street drug crime” was prevalent. Regional Victoria was one example. The previous drug of choice — heroin — did not have as much reach, so in that respect the amphetamine epidemic was unprecedented. “Except for cannabis it is (the most popular drug) … Cocaine use isn’t as high as amphetamines.” Police and addiction experts warned of the dangers of amphetamines from the late 1990s but it is possible the country didn’t understand extent of it until it was too late. “It’s hard to tell where it’s going to go … We weren’t well prepared for this change.” Drug trends were difficult to predict but Professor Fitzgerald thinks the epidemic is going to be a difficult problem to solve. “It’s not going to go away quickly.” However drug trends usually went in waves so it would be over at some point. The AIC figures revealed how high availability of amphetamines was. High rates of amphetamine use were detected in police detainees in Kings Cross, Sydney, (61 per cent), East Perth (43 per cent) and Brisbane (41 per cent) with respondents saying the drug was easy to obtain. Nearly half of all drug offenders tested positive for amphetamine use and nearly a third of violent offenders had it in their system. The survey has shown increasing use of the drug since 2009. Jamie Pitts, chief executive of Odyssey House, which offers drug and alcohol programs for addicts, told news.com.au he had heard reports in recent months of a women’s refuge in Sydney being filled with people beaten by partners who were high, or in withdrawal from amphetamines. “The thing with people who use amphetamines is you can’t communicate with them. They’re off in another world.” He agrees Australia wasn’t ready for its collision with amphetamines. “You see drug trends all of the time. But it is now staring us in the face — I don’t think we were really ready.’’ Seizures of ice have been steadily increasing. Source: Supplied About a third of the people being treated at Odyssey House now suffered from amphetamine addictions, a 10 per cent increase in a year. Last month the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) released its report into illicit drugs which indicated the number of ice seizures was up more than 300 per cent in one year. Methamphetamines have been linked with a number of brutal crimes in Australia and the acting chief of the ACC Paul Jevtovic likened it to the crack cocaine epidemic wreaking havoc in the United States. The report said the long-term use of ice can lead to aggressive and violent behaviour, depression, cardiovascular problems, and kidney failure. The Australian Federal Police say seizures of amphetamines at the border had increased significantly — and were the highest in a decade — after being buoyed by local drug syndicates trying to source precursor drugs needed to cook methamphetamine. http://www.news.com.au/national/drug...-1226942341808

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v14/n484/a07.html?397 1 Jun 2014 Source: Sunday Telegraph, The (Australia) Website: http://www.sundaytelegraph.news.com.au/ Author: Jane Hansen JOYCE: LET THE SICK USE POT THE campaign to ease the suffering of terminally ill patients by legalising medicinal cannabis is gaining momentum, with high-profile Nationals minister Barnaby Joyce adding his voice to the groundswell of support for cancer sufferer Dan Haslam. Mr Joyce revealed he has had a change of heart from his usual tough stance on drugs after meeting 24-year-old Mr Haslam and his family, who are forced to break the law so that he can use cannabis to treat his severe pain and nausea from chemotherapy. "You're always moved by someone who has cancer and they are looking for whatever opportunity may exist to deal with it," the federal minister for agriculture said. Mr Haslam has incurable bowel cancer and fortnightly chemotherapy treatments had left him in hospital with severe nausea and weight loss. Since trying cannabis late last year he has not suffered nausea and has been able to remain at home and eat normally. His father, Lou, a former drug squad detective, and his mother Lucy, are forced to break the law to help their son obtain the "miraculous" drug. The family's plight has also moved senior police to come out in support of legalising cannabis for medical reasons. Mr Joyce, the member for New England, said: "I am against cannabis for recreational use, but just as people grow opium for therapeutic use in palliative care and pain control, if there is a capacity for the active constituents in cannabis to be prescribed to assist with conditions such as terminal cancer, this should be considered if it is under strict control and prescribed by a doctor." Last year the recommendations of a NSW parliamentary committee unanimously supported the use of cannabis for the terminally ill, but it was knocked back by Heath Minister Jillian Skinner over concerns about supply. On Thursday, a private members' bill was announced to address the legality and supply issues of medicinal cannabis. Mr Haslam said he was grateful for the move and prayed for its success. "It would be absolutely great and lift a huge stress off my family. Knowing we could be prosecuted has been stressful," he said. Requests for a response from the ministers of the Baird government regarding the issue brought only five replies out of 22. Premier Mike Baird said he would consider the upcoming bill. "We will give careful consideration to the bill and I have nothing but sympathy for the Haslam family as they struggle with their son's illness," he said. A spokesman for the Minister for the Ageing and Disability, John Ajaka, referred us to the Minister for Health, as did a spokesman for the Minister for Natural Resources, Kevin Humphries. Jillian Skinner reiterated her concerns about supply as the "quality and safety of these products cannot be guaranteed". However, she did support the use of "prescription pharmaceutical cannabis products that are approved and regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration".

http://www.tripme.co.nz/forums/showthread.php?11580-Drug-Craving-or-How-to-Be-Your-Own-Worst-Enemy 23-01-2014, 05:46 AM #1 Neo's Avatar Neo Neo is online now Administrator Join Date Oct 2006 Posts 5,186 Thanks 3,222 Thanked 2,911 Times in 1,061 Posts Default Drug Craving, or How to Be Your Own Worst Enemy Plus the disease model, warts and all. Bielefeld, Germany— The second in an irregular series of posts about a recent conference, Neuroplasticity in Substance Addiction and Recovery: From Genes to Culture and Back Again. The conference, held at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University, drew neuroscientists, historians, psychologists, philosophers, and even a freelance science journalist or two, coming in from Germany, the U.S., The Netherlands, the UK, Finland, France, Italy, Australia, and elsewhere. The organizing idea was to focus on how changes in the brain impact addiction and recovery, and what that says about the interaction of genes and culture. The conference co-organizers were Jason Clark and Saskia Nagel of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. Part One is here. Marc Lewis, a developmental neuroscientist who is currently professor of human development and applied psychology at Radboud University in The Netherlands, and who spent five days discussing addiction with the Dalai Lama and a small group of scientists, scholars, and addiction specialists in Dharamsala, India, last year, was a late but welcome addition to the speaker list at the conference. Author of Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, and a self-confessed “drug addict turned neuroscientist,” Dr. Lewis always brings a thought-provoking dual perspective to his work on addiction. (See my review of his book here.) He also blogs here. In Bielefeld, Dr. Lewis offered up a wide-ranging view of what addiction is and is not, linking neuroscience, psychology, and Buddhism in the process. Craving is “the one condition all addicts agree is their worst enemy,” Lewis said. “This is one place where science and subjectivity have to come together. Scientists need to focus on this, because addicts are completely unanimous about it. This is the enemy. It’s not physical withdrawal symptoms, it’s not relief. It is craving.” Buddhism teaches that “craving is the fundamental engine of personality development,” Lewis said. “It’s what keeps us going around and around.” But if you don’t much like the notion of the wheel of reincarnation, Lewis suggested, then you can contemplate “the cyclical nature of how we repeat patterns in life that lead to suffering.” “Craving is such an unpleasant state, that after a while, you end up doing it, you get the drugs. I did opiates, and I would spend hours and hours trying to sit on my hands, trying to watch something on TV, trying to go for a walk, and finally, there’s this thing that keeps rising in the background, and it doesn’t go away. It was a constantly growing tension, an anxiety and discomfort, that came from very deep down. You spend most of your energy trying to hold this thing at bay, and according to the ego depletion literature, you can’t do that for very long. These cognitive control centers just give up. They are limited resources.” Craving is not a steady state. It grows. “Neuroscience helps us understanding why craving is so nasty.” Enter “delay discounting,” a term from behavioral economics used by several speakers during the conference. Delay discounting is the proposition that the perceived value of something rises steeply as the reward gets closer in time. A variation of this idea is seen in the classic marshmallow test for children: One marshmallow now, or two if you wait until later? “Craving traps you in delay discounting,” said Lewis. “Immediate reward is worth more than imagined future happiness. The job of dopamine in the striatum is to increase the attractiveness or value of one goal, and to reduce the attractiveness and value of all the other goals. This is a brain that is well designed for addiction. You get tons of dopamine rising up in anticipation of reward. So you’re really stuck in the immediate. At which point you’ve effectively lost contact with the rest of your life. In the narrative of who you are, you can’t even include next week, or the next morning.” Nonetheless, Lewis finds serious problems with the standard disease model of addiction, as championed by NIDA’s Nora Volkow and other in the NIH, however brain-based he may be. As a developmental neuroscientist, Lewis is predisposed to viewing the brain as a locus of change by definition. “The disease model uses brain change as a foundational premise. But brains change with development, anyway. And in fact, brains are designed to change.” Any proper model of addiction, he insisted, has to correspond with what we know about brain change. “But it also has to correspond with addicts’ experiences. I was a drug addict from about age 25 to 30. I was in really bad shape. And now I talk with a lot of drug addicts, and one of the things that I keep hearing is that scientists and clinicians don’t really know what they’re doing—they don’t know where to go with it. They know that addiction is really nasty, but they don’t know what it’s like, unless they’ve been there.” Lewis offered a view of addiction that shifts the semantic focus from disease to development. The drug is not the culprit. By reconceptualizing addiction as a developmental disorder, he suggested, we can move the debate forward into the world, where the action is: Addiction results from accelerated learning, the acquisition of thought patterns that rapidly self-perpetuate because of the brain’s tendency to become sensitized to highly attractive rewards. This is a developmental process, accelerated by a neurochemical feedback loop that is particular to strong attractions. Like other developmental outcomes, addiction isn’t easy to reverse, because it’s based on synaptic restructuring. Like other developmental outcomes, it arises from neural plasticity, and uses it up at the same time. And the mechanisms responsible are the same ones responsible for many things that involve desire, learning, reward seeking, and compulsive behavior—including the so-called behavioral addictions like overeating and compulsive sex. However, “the severe consequences of addiction don’t make it a disease, any more than the consequences of violence make violence a disease.” In an email exchange after the conference, I followed up with Dr. Lewis on some of these matters, and he sent me the following additional thoughts on the “diseasing” of addiction: Proponents of the disease model argue that addiction changes the brain. And they're right: it does. But the brain changes anyway, at every level, from gene expression, to cell density, to the size and shape of the cortex itself. Of course, neuroscientists who subscribe to the disease model must know that brains change over development. Their take on pathological brain change would have to be very specific in order to be convincing. For example, they would have to show that the kind (or extent or location) of brain change characteristic of addiction is nothing like that observed in normal learning and development. But this they cannot do. The kind of brain changes seen in addiction also show up when people take up rock collecting, fall in love, learn how to cook, or become obsessed with their appearance. The brain contains only a few major traffic routes for learning and goal seeking. And, like the main streets of a busy city, they are often under construction. Brain disease may be a useful metaphor for how addiction seems, but it's not a valid explanation for how it actually works. http://addiction-dirkh.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/drug-craving-or-how-to-be-your-own.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+AddictionInbox+%28Addiction+Inbox%29

http://www.interaksyon.com/infotech/one-in-10-australians-turning-to-internet-for-cheaper-drugs-research Agence France-Presse · Tuesday, June 3, 2014 · 3:53 pm AFP file photo CANBERRA, Australia — More than one in 10 Australians aged between 18 and 34 had bought prescription drugs online in a bid to save money, a new health report launched Monday showed. The Consumer Health Management Trends Report indicated the worrying number of people risking their health by purchasing over- the-counter medicine through the Internet. The research, commissioned by Good Price Pharmacy Warehouse, also showed almost half (46 percent) of Australians had used the Internet to self-diagnose as it was quicker and cheaper than visiting a general practitioner (GP). According to the new budget from the coalition government last month, patients should pay 7 AU dollars (so-called “co-payment”) for per GP visit in the future. The measure, described by the government as “a modest price signal,” is designed to dissuade patients from claiming medicare benefits for unnecessary consultations, local media said. However, more and more people said this measure may become a burden of their life. Anthony Yap, Good Price Pharmacy Warehouse director, said the findings were a clear indicator of negative consumer attitudes towards high prescription charges and GP fees. According to him, in this weakened economic climate, consumers are increasingly seeking out cheaper alternatives for what they perceive as over-priced treatments and services. “The seven dollar GP fee and increased script surcharge announced in last week’s budget are likely to drive even more people to seek health advice and cheaper medication online,” he said. “Unfortunately, the prospect of budget cuts and lower disposable incomes cause people to overlook the risks associated with buying online such as counterfeit products which could make them ill,” he added. While the majority of people had opted for the Internet over a GP for health advice, doctors and pharmacists still topped the list when it came to the most trusted sources of health information. According to the findings, more than three-quarters of Australians said they trusted their GP above anything else for health advice and information compared to just five percent who named the Internet as their preferred source. The report also explored consumer attitudes and behaviors towards herbal medicine and revealed a growing preference for natural remedies as an alternative to over-the-counter medications. Some 54 percent had used a natural remedy to treat their condition with more than eight in 10 (83 percent) claiming it worked as well as or better than prescription or over-the-counter medicine.

http://puffthemutantdragon.wordpress.com/2013/12/27/what-psychedelic-drugs-illustrate-about-religion-death-and-consciousness/ [older] Posted on December 27, 2013 The last sixty years have witnessed what may well be the greatest unplanned mass experiment in the history of neuroscience. Thousands of people have deliberately experimented on themselves by taking chemicals that altered their experience of reality — chemicals like LSD, mescaline, psilocybin and DMT. I’ve never experimented with these myself and don’t plan on it; I value my brain’s unimpaired function, thank you very much. But I find this mass experiment fascinating because of the chemistry of these chemicals (see previous posts) and what they reveal about consciousness. There are several things we can learn about life, consciousness and our religious beliefs from the reported effects of these drugs. Please note that these are not scientific conclusions; I’m not claiming they are because they aren’t. These are just my personal opinions, a chemist musing about life and consciousness if you will. But they’re also what seem to me like obvious if unscientific conclusions we can draw from our mass experiment with drugs. Note: I apologize for the speculative, unscientific and perhaps (to some) offensive nature of some of the conclusions in this post. But these are interesting questions to think and/or argue about. So if you disagree with me — that’s what the comments box is for! 1) Brain biochemistry IS consciousness. Briefly glance at the structure of some neurotransmitters and some popular drugs and you’ll notice something interesting. DMT DMT MDMA MDMA Mescaline Mescaline Psilocin Psilocin Serotonin Serotonin Dopamine Dopamine You don’t have to be a chemist to see the resemblance between the drugs and the neurotransmitters. The drugs are similar and yet different. Those differences are crucial to the way they work and how they get processed inside your body. But even without knowing anything else about their chemistry, you can make a guess about how these drugs work based on their structures: they mimic or interfere with the activity of neurotransmitters in your brain. If you talk to anyone who’s used DMT or psilocin/psilocybin (aka magic mushrooms) at one time or another they’ll tell you they experienced some very vivid hallucinations — and an almost completely altered perception of reality. This clearly implies that brain biochemistry is consciousness. If consciousness resided in some kind of soul or spirit as the ancients believed, then taking chemicals would have no effect on your consciousness. If you can alter your consciousness by taking a chemical to interfere with or mimics neurotransmitters, on the other hand, then consciousness must be biochemical in nature. 2) There is probably no afterlife. This follows from (1). Psychedelic drugs like shrooms demonstrate that consciousness is a property of the brain, and the brain is a biochemical engine in the same way that the engine in your car is a mechanical one. When your car’s engine dies, does another car nearby immediately start up as the “spirit of the car” transfers from one automobile to another? Of course not. You intuitively know that makes no sense. So if consciousness is a property of the brain (which is a biochemical engine), why would it transfer from one vehicle to another when the brain dies? that doesn’t make any sense. The counter-argument in favor of an afterlife would be near-death experiences. I don’t honestly know very much about these beyond the occasional news story; psychedelic drugs, however, illuminate a possible explanation for these too. We know from users’ experiences with LSD and other drugs that altering brain biochemistry can induce vivid hallucinations where the brain takes things you see or have experienced (colors, shapes, voices, etc.) and reassembles them into something you’ve never seen or experienced, a little like cutting up ugly photos to make them into a beautiful collage. NDEs are typically people who are hospitalized, anesthetized and on the verge of death — undergoing experiences, in other words, that are likely to alter brain biochemistry in ways that might generate vivid hallucinations of the kind that have been reported. Please take note that I’m speculating here — I don’t know this for sure — but it would make sense. The probable non-existence of an afterlife is definitely kind of disappointing — I’m sure all of us would like to live forever if that were possible. But to me anyway (and please contradict me if you disagree) it seems like a logical conclusion that follows from (1). 3) Traditional religions are probably false. This follows from (1) and (2). Most religions claim that consciousness resides in some sort of non-material entity called a soul that persists after death. Experiments with psychedelic drugs, however, demonstrate that brain biochemistry is consciousness which probably doesn’t persist after death. So our experience with psychedelic drugs suggests the two main claims made by most religions may be false. Indeed, psychedelic drugs like psilocin/psilocybin tend to induce spiritual sensations similar to those reported by devotees of traditional religions during fasting and prayer, which suggests that spiritual sensations during prayer and meditation are also a kind of hallucination that has its roots in brain biochemistry. This doesn’t mean there is no God or higher power necessarily; it just means that if the universe was created by a God, it’s not any of the ones from the religions we know, but rather an unknown agent or agents who started the show then left it to run on its own without intervening further in observable ways. The usual name for this belief is Deism. Just like the non-existence of an afterlife, this may sound like a fairly bleak and disappointing conclusion. But in many ways, it’s a much brighter prospect than the one offered by most religious traditions. Consider, for example, the story that is Christianity: 1395028_399987793468257_911918116_n-1 Don’t tell me that isn’t what Christians believe; it is. I used to be one, I ought to know. This IS the Bible story neatly summarized in one paragraph, and frankly it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, at least not to me anyway. Back in ancient times, however, it probably made more sense. People back then were used to serving kings who often behaved like arbitrary lunatics. They knew that kings were different from ordinary folk; kings were whimsical and cruel and powerful and beyond reproach like a force of nature or something. So when our ancestors invented the Bible/Koran/Talmud/Roman mythology etc. they imagined God(s) who acted much like the kings they served. Hence the strangely inconsistent behavior that God displays throughout the Bible. But again — and I want to emphasize this because people in our modern religion-vs.-atheism debate seem to forget this — atheism and traditional religions aren’t the only two alternatives out there. It’s entirely possible the universe was created by an entity beyond our imagining or experience, something akin to George Lucas’ “The Force” (and yeah, I know, I’m indulging in some very unscientific speculation right now). This belief as I said before is usually called Deism, and if true it would mean the universe and possibly even our lives are part of some kind of plan we cannot alter (albeit one we know nothing about). Nowadays I think a growing number of us incline to this view, which is why you run into so many people who say they are “spiritual but not religious”; they agree that traditional religions are pretty crazy but aren’t willing to say the universe is an unplanned accident (because that seems pretty crazy too). And even if the universe IS an outright accident that doesn’t make life purposeless either; we can all find meaning in doing the best we can to make life better and more livable for each other while we’re here. I think this quote sums it up nicely: x 4) Perception is not necessarily reality. Like optical illusions, psychedelic drugs demonstrate that the biochemical engine called the brain is easily fooled. Our perceptions are clouded by our emotions, our experience, the drugs we take (e.g. caffeine or alcohol or THC), our desires and the limitations of our biology (bees, for example, can see some wavelengths of ultraviolet light as a color invisible to us). This is one of the reasons why we invented science as a way to figure out how our world works. We need controlled experiments that can be repeated because we’re all too liable to believing what we want to believe and seeing only what we want to see. 5) Who you are is more malleable than you imagine. There are two ingredients in the recipe that determines your personality: genes and experience, aka “nature” and “nurture”. Clearly your genes play a critical role; identical twins tend to have many more similarities in terms of personality and behavior than unrelated strangers. But so too does experience. Bear in mind that when you learn or form memories there are actual physical changes taking place in your brain; connections between neurons are being formed or strengthened or weakened. So the things that happen to you cause physical changes in your brain that in turn become part of who you are. Which means that your identity and personality may be both more and less malleable than you probably imagine. Psychedelic drugs demonstrate just how malleable these things truly are in an alarming and direct kind of way. If taking a drug like DMT can alter the way you interact with reality so briefly and so completely, what does that imply about “who you are”? You’ve probably wondered at some point what life would have been like or who you would have become if you’d lived in another time period, i.e. who would you have been if you’d lived in the Middle Ages? This is actually a meaningless question, because if you’d been born in any other time period your childhood experiences would have been different and so you would be a completely different person. Just like your genes, your experience is part of who you are, because it caused physical changes in your brain that became part of the way you think. Out of the five conclusions I draw from humankind’s experience with psychedelics, this is possibly the most profound. I think at some point in the future it will change how we think about criminal justice. Your personality and inclinations are shaped by your genes and your experience, and you chose neither of these. So perhaps we should see criminals not as perpetrators but as people who thanks to a particular combination of genes and experience have ended up with antisocial tendencies. Perhaps these antisocial tendencies can be reliably corrected. Perhaps someday in the distant future, criminal justice may cease to focus on punishment and turn instead to treatment, curing prisoners of their antisocial tendencies rather than punishing them. At this point in time it’s tough to imagine what such a world would look like; “an eye for an eye” is built into our culture. But surely culture is also more malleable than our ancestors believed. Perhaps a world where criminal treatment and criminal justice become synonymous is closer than we imagine.

13 May 2014 Source: Seattle Weekly (WA) Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/410 Author: Tom James LEGAL MARIJUANA IS DRIVING CARTELS OUT OF THE BUSINESS... SORT OF Chalk one up to the law of unintended consequences. Since well before I-502, Washington's legal marijuana initiative, one of the major arguments for legalizing pot has been that driving down prices would dry up the violent black market for marijuana. Dan Savage, among others, was especially vocal in touting this not only as a justification, but as an obligation - that our drug prohibition was creating a black market so lucrative that Central American drug cartels could use the profits to take over entire countries. They were right. Mostly. According to WaPo, that drying up is exactly half of what's happening. The price of export pot in Mexico has dropped by a whopping 75 percent - - from about $100 to about $25 per kilo - and farmers there are indeed not bothering to plant pot. One farmer apparently said, "it's not worth it anymore. I wish the Americans would stop it with this legalization." The other half is the reality, that as usual, we failed to predict. Those farmers have bills to pay, and legalization or not, Spring came as usual this year. They needed something to put in the ground, and you can imagine that the profit margin on corn hasn't gotten any more attractive. So they planted heroin poppies. Remember those stories about the heroin epidemic gripping towns big and small over the last few months? Apparently, it's coming overwhelmingly from Central America, where it opium poppies have replaced marijuana as the cash crop for those already in the business of supplying the cartels. That the people producing one thing made absurdly valuable by our drug prohibition have now switched to another, using all the infrastructure already in place, shouldn't come as a surprise. If anything, it validates the original argument - the pot market really does appear to be drying up. http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v14/n433/a07.html?1045

http://www.naturalnews.com/045369_World_Bank_food_riots_emergency_preparedness.html Friday, May 30, 2014 by Mike Adams (NaturalNews) A new report issued by the World Bank (1) warns that food prices are skyrocketing globally, with wheat up 18 percent and corn up 12 percent this quarter. Ukraine, one of the largest wheat exporters in the world, has suffered a 73 percent increase in domestic wheat costs. Argentina has seen wheat prices skyrocket 70 percent. According to the World Bank, these price increases have been caused primarily by three factors: 1) Sharply higher demand for food in China, 2) U.S. drought conditions that hammered wheat production, and 3) unrest in Ukraine due to the near state of war with Russia. Rising food prices lead to food riots According to the World Bank, rising food prices have caused 51 food riots in 37 countries since 2007. These include Tunisia, South Africa, Cameroon and India, among other nations. "Food price shocks can both spark and exacerbate conflict and political instability," warns the report. A World Bank blog entry by Senior Economist Jose Cuesta entitled "No Food, No Peace" (2) warns that "It is quite likely that we will experience more food riots in the foreseeable future... food price shocks have repeatedly led to spontaneous -- typically urban -- sociopolitical instability." The following chart shows from the World Bank shows the sharp trend toward increased food prices worldwide: Hunger leads to revolution What the World Bank is leading to (but not quite saying) is that hunger leads to revolution. When the People are starving in the streets, there is political unrest that can easily turn violent. Because this is a fundamental human reaction, it is just as true in the United States, UK and other first-world nations as it is in Cameroon or India. American investigative journalist Alfred Henry Lewis (1855-1914) famously said, "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy." He went on to explain, "It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen." What he means is that hunger dispels the illusions of a polite society and unleashes the desperate animal-like nature that lurks inside all human beings. A starving man trying to feed his starving children will at some point abandon all law and order, doing anything necessary to keep himself and his children alive, including engaging in robbery, assault and murder. Stated another way, the only reason most people obey laws and agree to live in a socially polite manner is because their bellies are full. Take away the food and all illusions of social friendliness vanish in about nine meals (three days). No local police force can hope to control the actions of the starving masses, regardless of how obedient the population once was when food was abundant. The coming food collapse is now inevitable Many are now warning about the coming collapse in the food supply. These warnings include all the following factors: * EBT CARDS are the federal government's "food stamp" system that distributes money to over 47 million Americans who use that money on debit cards to buy food. The EBT system depends entirely on the financial solvency of the federal government, an empire steeped in over $17 trillion in debt and constantly on the verge of a financial wipeout. When the day comes that the feds stop funding the EBT cards, food riots are imminent. EBT cardholders have already ransacked a Wal-Mart store, even in good times! (Once the EBT entitlements are cut off, EBT card holders will simply ransack the same stores they used to visit as customers. Once those stores run out of food, U.S. cities will devolve into all-out street warfare.) * HYDROLOGIC CYCLE SCIENTISTS are warning that much of the food production taking place in the world today -- across the USA, India, China, etc. -- depends entirely on fossil water extraction from underground aquifers. Those aquifers are being rapidly depleted, some dropping more than a foot each year. Once this fossil water is used up, it's gone for hundreds or thousands of years. Entire breadbasket regions of the world (such as the U.S. Midwest) will be turned into agricultural deserts. Already, much of Texas and Oklahoma is returning to Dust Bowl conditions. * ENVIRONMENTALISTS warn that climate change will cause radical weather patterns (droughts, floods, freezes) that devastate the food supply. It is undeniable that radical weather has already caused unprecedented destruction of U.S. food production over the last 18 months. (The underlying causes of such weather patterns, however, remain hotly debated.) * GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS are genetically vulnerable to disease because they are mono-culture crops with little genetic diversity. Nearly all corn grown in the USA, for example, is genetically modified corn with a near-identical genetic makeup. The situation is obviously ripe for precisely the kind of disease wipeout we're already witnessing with global banana crops. * ECONOMISTS are warning that the global money supply is on the verge of collapse. Once it collapses, banking would go down with it, destroying the infrastructure that people use to buy food. If grocery stores can't conduct financial transactions, they can't buy inventory to retail to the public, for starters. To stay informed on this subject, read up at www.TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com or www.SHTFplan.com or www.SteveQuayle.com * PERMACULTURE advocates are warning that the global seed supply has been deliberately collapsed by biotech companies which routinely buy up small seed companies and shut them down. The intention is to create seed monopolies and eliminate competing alternatives to patented, corporate-controlled seeds. The answer to all this, by the way, is found in the wisdom of people like Geoff Lawton who teaches decentralized, abundant food production based on permaculture design science. (Really, Geoff's wisdom can save our world if embraced as a replacement for corporate agriculture...) Temporary illusions of cheap food will soon be shattered In other words, there are economic, hydrologic and genetic reasons why today's abundant food supply will come to an abrupt end. The cheap, easy food you buy at the grocery store right now is a temporary illusion of cheap food based on unsustainable agricultural practices that use up fossil water, destroy topsoil and poison the environment. Even the U.S. government's subsidizing of food through its runaway food stamp program is a temporary artifact of a nation headed for an inevitable debt collapse. Learn more from www.TrendsResearch.com It is therefore a mathematical and physical certainty that this illusion of cheap, plentiful food will soon be shattered. And in its wake, we will be left with a starving, desperate population with nothing to lose by marching in the streets or staging a violent revolt. America has abandoned food security in favor of corporate monopolies Everywhere that this happens will see cities turned into death traps. Because of the centralized corporate farming model that now dominates first-world economies, food production (and even farm land) is controlled by very small number of corporate operations. This is the opposite of food security. A nation practicing food security would encourage home gardens and support decentralized food production that includes urban food production. Interestingly, nations like Cuba and Russia have encouraged precisely these practices, which is why they are more resistant to a food supply collapse. In the United States, however, home gardeners have been threatened with arrest. People who produce real food are often raided at gunpoint by government authorities. Farmers who try to produce clean, non-GMO crops are sued by companies like Monsanto whose seeds pollute their farm land. Government and corporate entities have colluded in the United States to monopolize food production, thereby centralizing it in a way that compromises food security. The day of Americans being told to "plant Victory Gardens" during World War II are long gone. Today, we're told to obediently line up and eat genetically modified soybeans or drink hormone-contaminated cow's milk. Government now demands our food obedience and actively works against individuals who try to produce their own food at the local level. Why the food supply is America's tactical vulnerability This makes America wildly vulnerable to disruptions in the food supply. While many nations can manage to get by thanks to home gardens and decentralize food production, the United States of America has allowed government and corporations to structure the national food supply system into a precarious, non-fault-tolerant configuration that's practically begging for collapse. Just one disruption in the system -- a failed power grid, failed fuel refineries or a failed financial transaction infrastructure -- would collapse food availability nationwide, sending the population into a near-immediate state of desperate starvation. Martial Law would no doubt quickly follow, after which Americans would be ordered to starve to death at the hands of FEMA instead of starving to death on their own. On March 16, 2012, Obama declared federal control over all farms, food, livestock and seeds The federal government already knows everything I'm telling you here. That's why on march 16, 2012, President Obama issued an executive order entitled, "NATIONAL DEFENSE RESOURCES PREPAREDNESS." You can read the official White House press release admitting this right here. This executive order states that the President alone has the authority to take over all resources in the nation (labor, food, industry, etc.) as long as it is done "to promote the national defense." The proclamation gives the Secretary of Agriculture full authority to seize all "food resources, food resource facilities, livestock resources, veterinary resources, plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment and commercial fertilizer." The Secretary of Defense is given control over all "water resources," and the Secretary of Commerce is given control over "all other materials, services, and facilities, including construction materials." The federal government sees what's coming, in other words, and has already laid claim to all YOUR food, farm land, livestock, fertilizer and farm equipment, among other food-related assets. If, after reading this, you aren't double-checking your secret storable food stockpiles, you're crazy. As a small plug if you want to help support Natural News, we offer the world's only certified organic long-term storable non-GMO freeze-dried fruits (plus some FD organic veggies) at the Natural News Store. Sources for this article include: (1) http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/pu... (2) http://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/no-food-no... ____________________________________________________________________________ In Australia we should be very concerned about prime agricultural farmland being sold to overseas interests, such as the Chinese. With other countries growing their food here, and exporting it to feed their huge populations, what do you think will happen as global warming, desertification and salination of our farmland and water supplies begins to bite? Our politicians will find out, too late, that if they try to compulsorily purchase that much needed land, they will be met with forceful action, such as blockades of the shipping we rely on for the trade which supports our standard of living. And who would protect us? The Yanks? They will be too busy with their own problems, and are already massively in debt to China. It's high time for not only a national register of land ownership, but also strict limitations put in place over this vital resource. I strongly urge you to contact your federal MP, and senator about this issue. It's your children's future, and yours that's at stake!

http://www.examiner.com/article/10-recreational-drugs-before-they-became-illegal June 1, 2014 Okay, so maybe "created" isn't always the right word. Many of these drugs are naturally occurring and were simply extracted or synthesized by the scientist; hence the scare quotes. In any case, below we give you the original creators of some of the recreational drugs which have come to exert such a large influence on our culture. More Photos View all 5 photos 1) LSD - A swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann, an employee of the Swiss company Sandoz Pharmaceutical, first synthesized LSD on November 16, 1938. He derived the chemical from ergot while looking for a blood stimulant, and accidentally ingested some of it, reporting that it caused him to experience "an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopelike play of colors." Three days after this experience, he deliberately ingested 250 of LSD, making April 19, 1943, the first day any human deliberately "tripped" on the drug. Werner Stoll was the first writer to publish a paper on the psychoactive effects of LSD in the Swiss Archives of Neurology in 1947. Max Rinkel, a Boston psychiatrist, began research on it in 1949, leading to an explosion of research on LSD in America during the 1950s-1960s; some more noble than others. During this time, researchers began numerous studies on the potential of LSD to treat alcoholism. Meanwhile, the CIA research the potential of the drug to work as a mind-control agent. LSD began to appear as a street drug as liquid on sugar cubes around 1963, and was first synthesized as a crystal by Owsley Bear Stanley in 1965. The drug was criminalized in California in 1966, and federally banned in America in 1968, under the Staggers-Dodd Bill (Public Law 90-639). 2) Cocaine - this drug has quite a long history. Coca leaves were consumed throughout South America for thousands of years, and in the 15th century, it was discovered by Europeans that coca plantations were cultivated in Peru by the Incas. Amerigo Vespucci was among the first to report its use to Europe in 1505. These plantations were taken over by Spanish land grant holders, and the Spanish allowed these owners to make tax payments in coca leaves instead of money, with the Bishop of Cuzco accepting tithes in coca leaves. In the late 1500s, Nicolas Monardes wrote a work on the leaf and brought some leaves to Europe. We get our first mention of coca in English literature from a poem by Abraham Cowly, called "A Legend of Coca," and a sketch of the leaf appears in the 1835 Companion to the Botanical Magazine. In 1850, coca was used in throat surgery. It was not until 1855, however, that cocaine itself was first extracted from coca. It was identified as the active ingredient of the leaf's stimulant effects by Albert Niemann of the University of Gottigen in 1859. 3 years later, Merck produced 1/4 pound of the drug, and the following year, Angelo Mariani would patent a mix of wine and coca extract known as Vin Mariani. This wine contained 6 mg of cocaine per ounce. In 1870, variants of the wine contained 7.2 mg per ounce in order to compete with its American competitors, who put higher amounts in their wine. It was during this decade that Parke & David manufactured a fluid extract of the drug. English race walkers began chewing the leaves to enhance their performance, making cocaine one of the first modern performance-enhancing drugs. Extracted cocaine was administered by a German physician, Theodor Aschenbrandt, in 1883, to improve the performance of their soldiers. The drug was popularized as a topical anaesthetic for eye surgery in 1884, and in this same year, Sigmund Freud published his work On Coca, in which he describes the potential usefulness of the drug to treat numerous medical problems. Between 1884 and 1886, Merck would produce hundreds and thousands of pounds of cocaine. It was in 1886 that Coca-Cola was first introduced by John Pemberton. It contained both cocaine and caffeine, making it probably the most intense energy drink ever. [The "Pause that Refreshes"] The drug was first technically synthesized in 1898. It was not until 1901 that cocaine was removed from Coca-Cola, and a few years later, snorting cocaine was popularized (1905). Cocaine first became regulated in 1906, under the Pure Food and Drug Act. Concerns began to rise in 1910, when the first medical reports of nasal damage from snorting cocaine were published. Thousands died in 1912 from cocaine overdose, and in 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Acts was passed, regulating and taxing its sale. During the 1930s, Japan was the the world's leading producer of cocaine, wiwth the U.S. following shortly behind, followed by Germany, the U.K. and France. It was not until 1970, under The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, that cocaine became an illegal drug in America. 3) Heroin - Heroin was first synthesized from morphine in 1874 by the chemist C.R. Alder Wright in London, at St. Mary's hospital, but its use was not yet recognized. Felix Hoffman of none other than Bayer Pharmeceutical synthesized the drug in 1897, and began marketing it as a treatment for respiratory diseases. You heard right; Bayer (as in, "Bayer Aspirin") discovered heroin. They began exporting it in 1898 to 23 countries. Heroin was present in cough remedies, and pharmacists became concerned during the 1900s that unusually large amounts of it were being consumed (imagine that!). The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, and went into effect in 1907, regulating its usage. In 1911, the British Pharmaceutical Codex realized that heroin was as addictive as the morphine from which it had originally been synthesized, and in 1913, Bayer stopped producing it. In 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed, once again regulating and taxing opiates (and also cocaine). It was in 1924 that heroin officially became an illegal drug in the U.S. 4) DMT - Despite its status as very much a modern drug, DMT use was first reported in 1496, in the form of a snuff by the Taino; an indigenous peoples who inhabited an island near the Dominican republic. Colombian natives were reported as using the snuff in 1560. A drink containing A. colubrina was used by Incans to make prophecies, according to a 1571 report, and in 1741, a Jesuit writer again writes a report on the use of cohoba; the same snuff mentioned before, which was likely made from Anadenanthera peregrina, a plant containing DMT and other hallucinogenic compounds (the plant was first identified as such in 1801, by Baron Alexander Humboldt). DMT was not synthesized, however, until 1931, by Richard Manske, a British chemist. He referred to it as "nigerine." In 1939, the virola genus was identified as the genus of the plants used in the aforementioned psychoactive snuff. It was not until 1955, however, that DMT was identified as the primary active ingredient in the A. peregrina seeds used int he snuff. The first scholarly publication describing its effects was published the following year, by Stephen Szara. In 1968, The U.S. Bureau of Drug Abuse Control noted its availability as a street drug. 3 years later, in 1971, DMT became an illegal drug, thanks to the passing of the Convention on Psychotropic Substances. 5) Ketamine - The anaesthetic ketamine was first synthesized by the American pharmacist Calvin Stevens in 1962 under the name "CI581," in an attempt to replace the similarly dissociative drug PCP. Ketamine was patented the following year in 1963 in Belgium, and was determined to be useful as an anaesthetic in 1965. It was this year that Professor Edward Domino was among the first to use it recreationally, coining the term "dissociative anaesthetic" in reference to it. The following year, it was patented by Parke-Davis as an anaesthetic, and during the 1960s in general, it was used as a field anaesthetic in the U.S. during the Vietnam war. In 1969, ketamine became available under prescription as "Ketalar." Ketamine use exploded during the 1970s, and the DEA attempted to criminalize it, but decided that the rate of its abuse was inadequate to warrant such a criminalization. In 1995, however, the DEA added ketamine to its "emerging drugs list" and declared its intent, 4 years later, to criminalized it. On August 12, 1999, ketamine became an illegal drug in the U.S. 6) Ecstasy - MDMA, more commonly known as "ecstasy," was first synthesized by Anton Köllisch in 1912. It was patented by Merck Pharmaceuticals in Germany. Max Oberlin began testing it on animals in 1927. In 1953, The Army Chemical Center attempted to determine its toxicity by testing it on various animals, determining that it was not as toxic as a related chemical, MDA. During almost a decade of Alexander Shulgin's synthesis of the chemical in 1965, underground chemists began manufacturing the chemical, and the first recorded recreational use of ecstasy was published in 1970. Two years later, Chicago police seize it from a drug user. Shulgin, who had synthesized it about a decade earlier, began introducing others to the drug in 1976, and a year later, it became readily available on the streets, leading to its criminalization in the U.K. the same year. In 1978, the first mainstream paper was published on ecstasy. The first MDMA Conference was held in 1985, and it was during this year that it was criminalized as a Schedule I substance by the DEA in America. 7) Mescaline - mescaline, found in the cactus known as "peyote," was first identified by Arthur Heffter, a German chemist, in 1897. It was not synthesized, however, until 1919, by Ernst Spath. A comprehensive look at its effects were published in 1927, until the title Der Meskalinerausch (The Mescaline High), and in 1945, the U.S. Navy reported that mescaline experiments had been conducted at the Nazi Dauchau concentration camp. The U.S. Navy itself began experiments with the drug under "Project Chatter." In 1952, Dr. Humphry Osmond noted its similarity to the adrenaline molecule, and a year later, he supervised Aldous Huxley's first experiment with the drug, another year after which Huxley published The Doors of Perception, in which he described the experience. The drug was criminalized on October 27, 1970, under The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. 8) Psilocybin - The compound found in "shrooms" or "magic mushrooms." Central American and Mexican natives are reported as having used the mushrooms between 100 and 500 BCE. In the 12th century, the medieval writer and theologian Albertus Magnus warned against eating them in his "De Vegetabilibus" on the grounds that they cause insanity. A 15th century Vienna Codex likewise portrays the use of mushrooms by indigenous peoples. Psilocybin use was banned quite early. In 1521, Catholic priests banned their use in Mexico. The 16th century Dutch physician PIeter van Foreest, in that same century, described its psychoactive effects. Bernardino de Sahagún, a 16th century Spanish priest, likewise described the use of both mescaline (in the form of peyote) and psilocybin mushrooms by Aztec natives. In 1799, a concerned English physician named Dr. Everard Brande attended a family whose members had consumed the mushrooms and were experiencing hallucinations. It was not until 1904, however, that Franklin Sumner Earle, an American expert on fungus, identified Psilocybe cubensis and set out to deliberately collect them. A decade later, in 1914, accounts of mushroom ingestion were recorded in Science magazine. In 1936, Blas Pablo Reko identifies the psilocybin mushroom as what had been known to the Aztecs as teonanacatl, in order to dispel the illusion that the accounts of their effects by the Aztecs were mescaline-containing peyote. The first academic paper confirming this was published in 1939 by Richard Evans Schultes. In 1955, R. Gordon Wasson, an American mycologist, participated in a ceremony in Oaxaca Mexico involving the mushrooms, publishing an article on its usage in 1957. Psilocybin is first isolated in 1958 by Albert Hofmann in 1958; the same man who first synthesized LSD. Hofmann published his findings a year later. In 1960, Sandoz Pharmaceutical, the company for which Hofmann had been working, began producing 2 mg psilocybin pills. The drug was popularized by Timothy Leary, who conducted experiments on Harvard grad students with the drug. Following experimentation with the drug, Leary was dismissed from his position at Harvard, and his behavior was publicly denounced by other researchers. It was not until 1968 that Psilocybin was federally banned under the Staggers-Dodd Bill, and classified as a Schedule I substance in 1970 under The Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. 9) Marijuana and THC - The marijuana has long been used for both its hemp and its psychoactive ingredient THC. Its seeds were used by the Chinese around 6000 BCE, and textiles were produced from hemp 2000 years later in the same place. The Chinese recorded its first medicinal use in 2727 BCE, and continued using it as both fiber and food in the 1500. The Scythians used it for its plant material in the same century. The Hindu text Atharva veda mentions "Bhang" as one of India's 5 sacred plants, commonly used medicinally in 1200-800 BCE. The Persian religious text, the Zend-Avesta, likewise mentions its usage. Cannabis was popularized in Europe upon its introduction by the Scythians in 500 BCE. Its usage by the Scythians was mentioned by Herodotus in 430 BCE, and the psychoactive properties of the plant are first discussed at length in the herbal Pen Ts'ao Ching. Galen likewise briefly mentioned its use as a psychoactive in 170 A.D., and it finds a mention in the Jewish Talmud a few hundred years later. The question of the wisdom of consuming hash was widely discussed by scholars throughout Arabia during 900-1,000 A.D., and its consumption for its psychoactive effects was quite popular throughout the 12th century. One of the first occasions of the criminalization of cannabis takes place because of an edict by Emir Soudoun Scheikhouni, who forbade its consumption. Its popularization resumed in Europe in the 17th century, when the British and French began cultivating it for hemp. Napoleon discovered that it was commonly used by the Egyptians and outlawed it. In 1840, medicine with cannabis base were readily available. In 1890, hash[ish] was criminalized by both Greece and Turkey. The plant became regulated in 1907, with the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act. Its recreational use of banned in England in 1928. While still technically legal in America, "Refer Madness" was released in 1936. A year later, The Marihuana Tax Act was passed in the U.S., making it illegal to transfer between people without paying a transfer tax, making it the first federal law to regulate its sale and possession. This act was declared unconstitutional in 1969, in the U.S. vs. Timothy Leary. In 1975, the FDA established the Compassionate Use program. This allowed the use of marijuana for medical purposes. In 1986, the synthetic cannabinoid Dronabinol became a Schedule II substance. In 1996, California passed Proposition 215. This officially legalized its usage for medical purposes. Colorado and Washington became the first U.S. states to legalize its usage, thanks to Colorado Amendment 64, and Washington Initiative 502, respectively, although possession of a small amount had been legal in Alaska since 1975. 10) Methamphetamine - Amphetamine itself was first synthesized on January 18, 1887, by Lazar Edeleanu, a Romanian chemist working at Universität Berlin. The drug now known as methamphetamine, however, was first synthesized by A. Ogata, a Japanese scientist. The effects of amphetamine as a stimulant were not appreciated until the 1930s, during which time it was marketed as "benzedrine" and sold over the counter as a treatment for congestion and narcolepsy. Later in this decade, it was approved by the American Medical Association for the treatment of both narclolepsy and "hyperactivity" (now known as ADHD). Methamphetamine was used during World War 2 by both the Allied and Axis Powers as performance-enhancing drugs, and later, the U.S. provided amphetamines to its soldiers in Korea. Methamphetamine use became epidemic in the 1960s in the U.S. and it was criminalized on October 27, 1970. All information obtained here was retrieved from the "Timeline" sections of http://www.erowid.org/.

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/silk-road-study/ By Andy Greenberg 06.02.14 | A member of an anti-drug police unit stands guard next to seized marijuana packages displayed to the press in Colombia. Photo: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images The dark web may have a silver lining, according to a pair of academics: A new class of geekier, less violent drug dealers. A law professor and a professor of criminal science argue, in a paper released online, that by reducing physical contact between drug dealers—particularly between dealers and their suppliers—the Silk Road’s bustling Web-based narcotics trade may have prevented bloodshed that would have occurred in the street-level illegal drug market. The Silk Road, after all, became a bustling online drug bazaar by giving users a new way to deal in contraband anonymously. On the site and dozens of copycats that followed its takedown by law enforcement in October, users’ physical locations were obscured by tools like bitcoin and the anonymity software Tor. Those crypto protections are designed to prevent anyone–including cops and competitors–from knowing where users are. According to University of Lausanne criminologist David Decary-Hetu and University of Manchester law professor Judith Aldridge, that layer of anonymity made technical know-how and online customer service, not a propensity for violence, the barrier to entry for dealers on the Silk Road. “This new breed of drug dealer is… likely to be relatively free from the violence typically associated with traditional drug markets,” reads the paper, the title of which calls Silk Road “a paradigm-shifting criminal innovation.” “Whereas violence [in the traditional drug trade] was commonly used to gain market share, protect turfs and resolve conflicts , the virtual location and anonymity that the cryptomarket provides reduces or eliminates the need – or even the ability – to resort to violence. “In the drugs cryptomarket era,” the paper adds, “having good customer service and writing skills…may be more important than muscles and face-to-face connections.” Aldridge and Decary-Hetu’s study, still being reviewed for publication by a journal they declined to name, doesn’t offer crime statistics to back up that argument. Instead, it uses slightly convoluted logic based on assumptions about the source of violence in the drug world. The Silk Road’s role in reducing bloodshed, they say, is a “very clear inference” from an analysis of the size of transactions made on the market. Using a custom web crawler, they scraped Silk Road in September of 2013–just before its shutdown by the FBI–to collect a snapshot of all feedback and review data from the site’s vendor profiles. Those posts provided a catalog of past deals on the site, including their frequency and size. They found that the high average price of those deals, along with other clues, implies a surprisingly large number of Silk Road buyers were not consumers, but dealers buying wholesale. That’s a different take than previous studies, which have described Silk Road as an eBay for drugs. Instead, Aldridge and Decary-Hetu say their data shows a vast portion of the Silk Road’s sales were “business-to-business.” That finding moves the market’s role farther up the drug market supply chain than was previously thought, they argue, placing it closer to the cartel-controlled drug producers behind much of the trade’s violence. And since the study argues the traders on both sides of a Silk Road deal were often drug dealers, the researchers claim Silk Road’s business-to-business deals mean twice as many opportunities for violence were prevented. All of that assumes, without much hard evidence, that transactions between drug dealers and their suppliers lead to dangerous conflicts more often than transactions between dealers and their customers. But Aldridge argues you don’t have to swallow that premise to take her larger point about how the Silk Road model reduces violence: Virtual drug deals don’t allow for physical attacks. “People who don’t meet face to face can’t hit each other or shoot each other,” she says. According to the study’s measurements, the top 20 percent of Silk Road deals were for more than $1,000–$1,475 for cannabis and $3,494 for ecstasy, for instance. Those amounts, which Decary-Hetu and Aldridge compared with previous studies on real-world drug dealers, sound like far larger purchases than those intended for personal consumption. And in terms of revenue, those high-priced deals were much more important to the site’s sellers’ livelihoods, bringing in between 31 percent and 45 percent of their total revenue versus just 3 percent or 4 percent for deals in the cheapest 20 percent. The presence of products like “precursor” ingredient for synthesizing drugs and lab notes also implies that drug dealers, not just consumers, were shopping on the site. The study also notes that the Silk Road trade focused far more on less addictive and harmful drugs than might have been previously assumed. “Drugs typically associated with drug dependence, harmful use and chaotic lifestyles (heroin, methamphetamine and crack cocaine) do not much appear on Silk Road, and generate very little revenue,” the study reads. It explains that skew by pointing to the waiting period between a Silk Road drug buy and the product’s arrival, vacuum-sealed, in the mail. “The site may therefore have suited purchases by recreational users with the resources and time to place orders and wait for deliveries; dependent users with chaotic lifestyles, in contrast, were likely to have had neither.” If the Silk Road did in fact reduce violence, that’s in part by design. The site’s founder, who called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts and is alleged to be 30-year-old Ross Ulbricht, wrote that his creation was intended to enable non-violent, small-time dealers and to take power away from bloody cartels. “For the first time I saw the drug cartels and the dealers, and every person in the whole damn supply chain in a different light,” he wrote on the site’s now-defunct user forums in 2012. “Some, especially the cartels, are basically a de facto violent power hungry state, and surely would love nothing more than to take control of a national government, but your average joe pot dealer, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, that guy became my hero…It wasn’t long, maybe a year or two after this realization that the pieces started coming together for the Silk Road.” The notion of the Silk Road as a peace-loving innovation, of course, is tarnished by prosecutors’ accusations that Ulbricht paid would-be assassins to kill six people, including a blackmailer and an employee he worried might act as an informant. But Aldridge counters that those murder-for-hire attempts took place outside the Silk Road’s market, and have little to do with its interactions. “Our argument about situational violence doesn’t mean people can’t be violent in other aspects of their lives,” she says. “They can engage in domestic violence or fight when they’re drunk, but none of those things are facilitated by a crypto market.” She also notes that despite the prosecution’s claims, the killings Ulbricht allegedly commissioned don’t appear to have occurred; they may well have all been law enforcement stings or scams by con artists posing as assassins. The same anonymous, bitcoin-based transactions that worked so well for facilitating drug deals, Aldridge argues, haven’t turned out to be as convenient a system for paid murder. “We haven’t seen any, to our knowledge, murder-for-hires happening on crypto markets,” she says. “In fact, it may be much harder by virtue of the markets’ anonymity.” Even if they do reward nonviolence, Aldridge and Decary-Hetu admit the Silk Road and the sites it’s inspired still account for just a tiny portion of the overall drug trade. Zeta drug cartel enforcers won’t need to trade their AK-47s and briefcases of cash for Tor and bitcoin just yet.

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/2014-06-02/drugtesting-for-welfare-recipients-ruled-out-by-social-services-minister-kevin-andrews/1320102 Updated 2 June 2014, 11:20 AEST By political reporters Latika Bourke and Andrew Greene Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews has finally ruled out drug testing dole recipients, after initially repeatedly refusing to rule in or rule out the idea. Video: Drug testing 'unlikely': Kevin Andrews Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews has finally ruled out drug testing dole recipients, after initially repeatedly refusing to rule in or rule out the idea. Prime Minister Tony Abbott ruled out the proposal on the weekend but Government backbencher George Christensen says random drug tests should be rolled out for those on benefits and also applied to politicians. Reports emerged on the weekend that a wide-ranging review of Australia's welfare system could propose following New Zealand's example and introduce drug testing for welfare recipients. But Mr Abbott quickly ruled out the suggestion, saying: "It's not something that we're planning. Simple as that." The speculation was sparked by Mr Andrews, who told News Corp the Government was examining international options for welfare reform, including New Zealand. "While Australia's welfare system is different from New Zealand, its reforms provide a guide as to the Government's thinking on simplifying our welfare system," he said. Speaking to the ABC's AM program this morning, Mr Andrews on five occasions refused to rule out random drug tests for dole recipients before eventually declaring it not an option. Audio: Kevin Andrews speaks to Chris Uhlmann on AM (AM) "The reports on the weekend were basically some premature speculation about what might, or might not be, in the McClure welfare review," he said. "It's premature of me to be getting into what might or might not be in that report when we haven’t even got the issues paper out." When pressed Mr Andrews described it as "a peripheral issue", adding: "I don't think we're going to go down that track". "We're unlikely to go down that track for this reason: drug testing largely involves state jurisdictional responsibilities," he said. When asked if he would consider negotiating with the states on drug testing, Mr Andrews said that was not on his agenda. "If I get into the job of ruling in or out everything that might or might not be in the welfare review, then we're just getting into premature speculation," he said. When it was pointed out to him that the Prime Minister was prepared to rule out the idea on the weekend, Mr Andrews conceded: "Well its out". Coalition backbencher Christensen wants politicians drug tested But the idea has found some support from within the Parliament, and from a Senator-elect who joins the Upper House in a month's time. Liberal-National Party MP George Christensen says those in receipt of taxpayer benefits should be able to demonstrate they are drug-free. Video: George Christensen speaks to ABC News Breakfast (ABC News) "There is the ethical and moral issue of whether or not taxpayer dollars should be going into funding people's drug habits and this drug-testing-for-the-dole suggestion would actually weed these people out of the system," Mr Christensen said. "If mine workers in my electorate have to undertake random drug testing, why shouldn't those on the dole? They need to be work ready," Mr Christensen wrote on Twitter. The Queensland MP says as a public official he would also be prepared to be tested and believes his parliamentary colleagues should too. "Sure - go and get the swab. I'll do it. I've got no problems," Mr Christensen said. "I'd be happy to support that. I would have no problem with that at all. It might make a few Greens MPs nervous but it wouldn't make me worry at all." Greens MP Adam Bandt says he does not support testing dole recipients or parliamentarians for use of illegal drugs and asked whether MPs would agree to their alcohol consumption be monitored. "I wonder whether the same people who are proposing these harsh measures for young people would be prepared to have every MP breathalysed before they go into the chamber," he said. Tasmanian Palmer United Party Senator-elect Jacqui Lambie says drug testing politicians might help explain some of the policy decisions made in Canberra. "Well we're going to see why we are getting all these sort of awful decisions coming out one way or the other, aren't we?" she said. "Fair go ... you've got to practice what you preach - lead by example." In 2007, Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan challenged other federal politicians to set an example to the sporting and wider community and also submit to random drug testing. Palmer United senator-elect Jacqui Lambi says the results of politicians' drug tests might help explain some of the policy decisions made in Canberra. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ "Fair go ... you've got to practice what you preach - lead by example." - It's a shame he wasn't around to tell this to Malcolm Fraser, when he refused to increase social security payments, and in the next breath, approved increases to members of parliament! ____________________________________________________________________________________________ http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/06/02/government-rules-out-drug-testing-dole Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews says a proposal to drug test people on the dole is off the table. Source AAP 2 Jun 2014 - 8:32 AM UPDATED YESTERDAY 5:33 PM The Abbott government won't be forcing people on unemployment benefits to submit to random drugs tests. Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews sparked speculation about a potential "drug-testing for the dole" scheme by refusing to rule it out at the weekend. But after Prime Minister Tony Abbott made it clear he was cool on the proposal, Mr Andrews now says it is off the table. "It's out," he told ABC radio on Monday. Government rules out drug testing for the dole, reports Peggy Giakoumelos The decision will disappoint coalition backbencher George Christensen, who believes the measure would help prevent taxpayer dollars being used to fund people's drug habits. "It could be a simple random drug testing process done with swabs at the local Centrelink office," Mr Christensen told the ABC on Monday. It wouldn't necessarily be an overly onerous system, he says. "If you're doing it in a random way it doesn't have to be costly." He says it's about more than just saving money - it's also about ensuring the integrity of the welfare system and making people more job ready. And he says he'd be happy to set an example by undergoing tests himself. "I'd be happy to support that. "I wouldn't have a problem with that at all. It might make a few Greens MPs nervous, but it wouldn't make me worried at all." Former Mission Australia chief executive Patrick McClure is currently conducting a major review of the welfare system for the government.

http://www.ladybud.com/2014/06/02/inside-the-issue-synthetic-marijuana-aka-herbal-incense/ Jun 2, 2014 Synthetic Marijuana aka “Herbal Incense”: A Legal High That’s Nothing Like Cannabis Vera Verde / Culture, News & Editorial, The War Isn't Over / a-bomb, armed forces, banned, bath salts, cannabinoids, cannabis, dangers of, drug testing, drugs, dubious business, fake weed, fda, harm reduction, herbal incense, HU-210, illegal, industry, john w. huffman, JWH, JWH-018, k2, legal high, legalize, marijuana, marijuana is safer, marinol, medical cannabis, medical marijuana, national institute on drug abuse, negative side effects, nida, pfizer, pharmaceuticals, physically addictive, prohibition, spice, synthetic, synthetic cannabinoids, synthetic cannabis, synthetic marijuana, urine testing, us armed services, vera verde, weed alternatives / 1 Comment People often call it by brand names: K2, Spice, or A-Bomb. It’s generically referred to as herbal incense, or sometimes, sythentic marijuana or synthetic cannabis. While it is true that the demand for these products arises from the demand for a legal alternative to cannabis, these technically illegal smoking blends (and they are illegal under the Federal Analog Act, even if their specific chemical constituents aren’t prohibited) are very different from cannabis in their effect. John W. Huffman Image: ABC News John W. Huffman Image: ABC News Let’s start at the beginning. Synthetic cannabis really has its basis in big pharma, with the creation and use of Marinol in the 1980s. (Some herbal incense companies actually used an analog of CP47,497, a synthetic cannabinoid created by Pfizer in the 1980s ). This encouraged other chemists to attempt to create similar synthetic cannabinoids. And one of them, John W. Huffman, was particularly successful. He worked for the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and he and his staff created over 450 synthetic cannabinoid compounds over the years. One of the largest and most popular families of synthetic cannabinoids is essentially named for him (JWH). Herbal incense sales began slowly and quietly online in the early 2000s, and began increasing rapidly with the 2004 establishment of the now-infamous brand of herbal incense, Spice. By 2009, the herbal incense industry was in a major boom period, and some people were making a lot of money. The packaging and components of herbal incense were incredibly cheap and demanded a massive markup on the legal market, leading plenty of unscrupulous people to start herbal incense companies as a “get rich quick” scheme. If you are wondering how herbal incense is made, it’s far from standardized and scientific. The research chemicals, which are typically sourced from Chinese factories, are dissolved in a solvent and sprayed onto bulk amounts of dried, smokable plant matter. Some companies use a blend of herbs, others use a single type of plant. This plant material is then weighed out and packaged. Some companies made so much of it at one time that they mixed it up in old cement mixers. Any one package of herbal incense could have far more or less of its active research chemical present than any other of the same brand, even if they were from the same batch of product. Some of these blends were sprayed with flavoring agents, others were left with their “natural” odor. All of them were definitely more dangerous for the average consumer than actual cannabis. By late 2010, news reports were beginning to trickle in from across the country and around the world, showing that herbal incense posed a far greater threat to society and individual health that the prohibited substance it was meant to replace. As local, state, and federal agencies moved to respond to what they perceived as a new threat (when in reality it was the same old demand, repackaged), popular research chemicals were identified as common and banned. Original generation herbal incense blends typically contained JWH-018. When JWH-018 was banned, manufacturers upgraded to a slightly different compound, JWH-073. And yes, in case you’re wondering, people did get sick and have reactions when new formulas were released under the same brand names without any notice. JWHWhen JWH-073 and most similar chemicals like HU-210 were banned federally in the initial response to herbal incense, the herbal incense manufacturers simply upgraded to a new family of synthetic cannabinoids, such as UR-144 XLR-11, and AKB48, which were also subsequently banned. Each of these cycles has taken roughly a year, with the incense companies ready to roll out new lines before old chemicals were even banned. The problem with these synthetic cannabinoids is twofold. The first issue is that there are essentially infinite variations on this chemical theme, meaning that banning specific chemicals (the only form of chemical prohibition that tends to hold up in courts) is ineffective, at best. Once a chemical is banned, only a little tweaking is needed to created a chemically different but effectively similar compound. The second major issue with synthetic cannabinoids is that they are much better at what they do than naturally occurring THC and other natural-state cannabinoids. These compounds are meant to bind to specific receptors in your brain. Natural state cannabinoids only bind to a portion of available receptors, but synthetic cannabinoids bind to a significantly higher portion than the chemical they are replacing. This means that synthetic cannabinoids not only present a much higher risk of negative side effects and dangerous overdoses, they can also be physically addictive in a way cannabis itself is not. The demand for herbal incense was always driven by the drug testing industry. The biggest appeal of herbal incense was that it was an intoxicating smoking blend that wouldn’t make you drop dirty; these days, that’s not necessarily the case. Drug tests have since evolved, and most of the common synthetic drugs can be detected, though some of the more obscure chemical variations manage to slip through the cracks. Thus, despite the expansion of prohibition to include a number of compounds considered to be synthetic cannabinoids, some blends of herbal incense are still being marketed for sale as legal (and not detectable by traditional screening). Synthetic cannabis also achieved its strongest toehold, tellingly, in states with the most vehement anti-cannabis policies. Among the most affected are Alabama and Florida, though issues with these smoking blends exist globally at this point. No studies have been done on the more addictive qualities of synthetic cannabinoids, but searching online yields many, many posts by those desperate to find a new source, another fix, or worse, some treatment that will be effective for lingering psychological effects many months later. Terrifyingly, a significant portion of the demand for herbal incense (and its stimulant cousins, bath salts) comes from people actively involved in the United States armed services. Conversations with insiders at one of the biggest international synthetic drug retailers revealed that one of the most common complaints they deal with is the fact that they do not ship to APOs (offshore military addresses for active service people). Although the individual branches of the military have officially stated they do not condone synthetic drug abuse, very little is being done to cull synthetic drug users from the ranks or prevent them from joining the armed forces. Standard drug tests do not show synthetic abuse; only specialized tests can detect synthetic cannabinoids, making them an easy way for some people to slip under the drug-testing radar. Although prohibiting these research chemicals has done nothing except force manufacturers to use less well-known and less-tested alternative chemical compounds, ignoring them isn’t helping either. The only way for the government to effectively combat the demand for and supply of herbal incense is to legalize cannabis. When natural-state cannabis is legal for all adults to use, demand for synthetic versions fueled by fear of drug tests will drop precipitously. Until that time, the profit margin possible in herbal incense production will remain high enough (as prices of incense rival or exceed those of cannabis in states with legalized markets) to ensure that the flow of “Spice” will never stop.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10858203/Drug-users-begin-injecting-legal-highs.html By David Barrett, Home Affairs Correspondent 27 May 2014 Novice drug users are injecting so-called legal highs in a “worrying” new trend which could have serious health implications, a European Union drugs agency has warned. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) said there was “emerging new evidence” of drugs such as mephedrone - also known as 'miaow miaow' - being injected with a needle rather than being smoked or swallowed. The number of legal highs has expanded rapidly since they first began to emerge in 2005, with 81 new designer drugs identified last year compared with 73 in the previous 12 months, the report said. A trend towards injecting the drugs will be seen as damaging because of the high risk of blood-borne infections such as HIV and hepatitis associated with needle sharing. Users are also injecting methamphetamine - a type of drug classed as a "synthetic cathinone", which is better known as crystal meth or “ice” - often mixed in a “speedball” with Class A drugs such as heroin, the report said. “Bearing in mind the serious potential impact of new patterns of injection being identified, the close monitoring of synthetic cathinones use in Europe is clearly an important public health priority,” it said. “While most cathinone use involves either snorting the drugs as a powder or oral use, a recent worrying phenomenon has emerged of synthetic cathinones being injected by some groups of drug users “On the whole, reports suggest that injecting cathinone users are primarily injectors of other drugs ... who, for a variety of reasons, switch to cathinone injection or include cathinones in their drug-using repertoire. “In addition, there are reports of long-term abstinent ex-opiate users who have started to inject cathinones and limited reports of young people beginning their injecting career with cathinones.” The annual report said there had been reports of mephedrone injection in Britain. “These included both experienced users of other drugs switching to mephedrone, and novice users who have never injected other drugs before,” it warned. “Mephedrone users were reportedly younger than other groups of high-risk drug users seen by drug services.” It added there was “increasing concern” about a new trend in the gay community to inject the drugs at “chem sex” parties, in a practice know as “slamming”. “Parties can last from around eight hours up to three days with the participants frequently engaging in risky sexual practices such as not using condoms and sharing multiple partners,” it said. “To date in Europe, this new practice has primarily been documented among restricted sub-groups of gay men in London and a small number of French cities; however, the potential exists, in this highly mobile population, for it to become more widespread.” The report also contained results of a new study which analysed waste water from the sewage system of a number of European cities for the residue of illegal drugs. It found London had the second-highest results in Europe for cocaine with 711 milligrams per 1,000 population overall. Only Antwerp had a higher result, with 837 milligrams. Samples were taken from the waste water system during a single week in March last year and analysed for the "markers" in urine which indicate use of cocaine, as well as ecstasy, cannabis and amphetamine. London's result peaked in the sample taken on the Tuesday (979 milligrams), which was even higher than results at the weekend, with the second highest figure (904 milligrams) detected on the Saturday. Elsewhere in its European Drug Report 2013, the agency said average mortality rate due to overdose of all drugs in Britain was 38.3 per million population, more than twice the average for Europe at 17 per million. However drug deaths in this country are in decline, with the total falling from 2,569 in 2008 to 2,250 in 2011. “Most overdoses occur among individuals who have consumed multiple substances, and attributing causality is often problematic,” the report said. “With the continuing release of new psychoactive substances on the drug market, there is concern that new or obscure substances that have contributed to deaths may escape detection.” Steve Rolles of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation said: "The UK's high incidence of drug deaths is most simply a reflection of our high levels of drug use - particularly of injected heroin, and to a lesser extent crack cocaine - which are the drugs associated with the greatest mortality risks. ​"It is important to acknowledge UK deaths have in fact been coming down for the last few years. ​"​This reflects both the recent fall in injected heroin use and crack use, as well as better provision of harm reduction and treatment services, particularly provision of methadone, and more recently​ ​the overdose antidote​,​ naloxone. ​"The fact that our death rates aren​'​t even lower is probably an artifact of our historically high rates of heroin use. ​"​Whilst death rates are falling amongst younger heroin users, they are infact rising amongst older users who have often accumulated a range of health problems, such as hepatit​i​s, HIV, and general ill health, that increases their vulnerability to overdose​-​related death.​"​ The Home Office launched a review of legal highs last year to look at how laws can be improved. The Government banned two groups of psychoactive substances in December, the NBOMe and Benzofuran compounds.

http://omnifeed.com/article/time.com/106109/iphone-weed-pot-game/ Tech Smartphones An iPhone Game That’s Basically ‘Weed Tycoon’ Is Smoking the Competition Sam Frizell May 20, 2014 Weed Firm Manitoba Games / iTunes Music Store An iPhone game that puts you in the shoes of a pot entrepreneur is blazing past the competition. Weed Firm lets players follow a marijuana seller’s career through potscapades ranging from smoky hangouts with models to close shaves with the police. The goal of the game, which is rated 17+, is to grow and sell cannabis in order fulfill tasks and amass a large amount of wealth. Weed Firm is at the number two spot on the iTunes Music Store’s Free Games best-seller list as of Tuesday morning. It briefly hit the number one spot Monday, The Cannabist reports, burning other mobile gaming favorites like Candy Crush and Angry Birds. It also has more than 4,600 five-star reviews and counting. The game’s popularity, perhaps, speaks to heady modern times of marijuana legalization and relaxing attitudes towards pot.

drugs-forum.com 31/5/14 The "Nice Guy" (Spice) junkies: It gained its status as a 'legal high' - a cheap buzz, a dirty habit of soldiers and teenagers who don't have the money for Hash. But it's an illusion: in the last year it became clear that "Nice Guy" is a life wrecking drug which traps ordinary youth in a rough and violent addiction. Caregivers report a dramatic increase in the teenage use of Nice Guy and claim: "They don't know what they're getting into". Meet the most dangerous substance in Israel. It's 9pm in a public park in Tel Aviv, and a few youngsters settle on a bench with a bong. They are heavy addicts, but not the heavy addicts you know. Yoav, for example, looks like your next door neighbour: Elegant pants, buttoned shirt, looking like someone who got lost on his way back from the office. "I must take Nice Guy in the morning and in the evening. Without it I don't have the energy or abillity to work", says Yoav (fake name). He lives in south Tel Aviv, works as a stairs cleaner in buildings. He does not have a criminal record. "I work between 8 to 10 hours a day cleaning, it's very tiring, I didn't have the power to get out of bed in the morning. I started smoking with my friends and we smoke together in the evening. In the morning I take a dose before work and without it I can't start the day. He who starts with it can't stop. You sink deep into the drug, into your high, you have a few minutes of fun and then you become angry". Ido, a veteran soldier, takes the bong from Yoav and inhales several times. "I came to Israel by myself, my parents stayed in Turkmenistan", he tells sadly. "In the army I somehow managed to survive over a year, but it was rough and eventually I was released for not fitting in. I roam the streets, I don't have a home and I smoke Nice Guy for the mood. I'm trying to stop using, start a new life, but Nice Guy makes you forget about the trouble for a few minutes, about the hard life. For the time being I'm engulfed in it. Oleg, 40, worked as a weilder. He turned to drugs due to injury, became homeless and lives on a bench in the park. "You become a violent person", he says. "It blows my mind for a few minutes, and when it wears off I feel like dying. I could kill someone for not giving me Nice Guy. People kill for a fix here. It's a drug that causes you to become violent, you can murder someone to get it. It's a terrible drug but what can I do, it's the cheapest. There were days when I couldn't wake up in the morning, when after using I'd feel like my lungs are punctured and bleeding, that I'm about to die. I'm afraid of dying, but if it happens as a result of my use then I can't control it. There is constant demand for this stuff. Kids come here and smoke like crazy, they don't understand they are ruining their lives. They overdo it. There were people who died next to me from Nice Guy, smoked 5-6 bags a day. People have convulsed to their death next to me under its influence." Last monday, a 30 year old man arrived at Ichilov hospital after injecting Nice Guy - something which untill recently caregivers were not even aware was a possibility. His body temprature went up, his systems shut down entirely and a few hours later doctors had to pronounce him dead. 3 people died recently after injecting Nice Guy, and Ichilov hospital reports dozens more have been hospitalized for this reason. Two years ago a soldier died from cardiac arrest after using Nice Guy and drinking alcohol. 10 months ago 4 young adults aged 18-25 were hospitalized in acute condition after excessive use of Nice Guy. They suffered from increased body temprature which peaked at 43c, breathing problems and muscle spasms. Four other, from Dimona, were recently hospitalized in a mental institute. Now it is clear to everyone that Nice Guy is not just another legal high: it is the most severe and deadly drug problem in Israel today. "We're gonna miss having kids who just drink alcohol" Nice Guy is a worrying mutation in the world of legal highs. What started as a relatively light party drug has been replaced in the last year by an extremely addictive and agressive substance. Nice Guy looks like weed and has the connotation of huffing gas - something sketchy, dirty, but not life wrecking. Another legal high. But this image is wrong. Teenagers become addicted to it, and today's junkies are Nice Guy junkies, and the consequences are as destructive as with Heroin, even more so. "The teenagers who use Nice Guy are not aware of the dangers of this drug". says Roi ben-menahem, head of a charity which assists street junkies. His organization has been for years helping youth with all sorts of trouble - and Nice Guy, they say, is a whole new kind of problem. "It's not alcohol or Hash. I worry we're going to miss the kids who only use alcohol. We can deal with the use of cannabis and alcohol by youth. Dealing with Nice Guy is very difficult. Unlike Heroin, which everyone knows is dangerous, they think Nice Guy won't harm them. They don't know it later causes lack of control and violent reactions. The consequences after using it come as a surprise to them, giving them severe anxiety and paranoia", he explains. "It's a drug that is very hard to detect in those who use it, and this allows its use to expand". According to him, some teenagers later become carriers for dealers. A combination of several factors makes Nice Guy an especially dangerous phenomenon compared to other drugs. "Unlike Heroin and Cocaine, which are expansive and not as available as they used to be, Nice guy is always available, accessible, and most importantly super cheap" explains Dor Cohen, the head of a drug support group patroling the drug ridden area of the central bus station in Tel Aviv. "The backyard of Nice Guy is social networks, not on the streets. Facebook vendors and online retailers are hidden from the public eye, nobody knows what's going on there, they are available to anyone, and that's the scary part. It is without a doubt the most dangerous drug in the country today. And here's another factor in this equation: The users of Nice Guy sucssesfully pass drug tests. "I know a lot of soldiers that switched to smoking Nice Guy because it can't be deteced by urine analysis", said a soldier in the Airforce. "During training me and a few friends went out of the base for a few hours to buy hundreds of bags for other soldiers. We took a cab to Tel Aviv and an hour later we were already back at the base selling it to the guys. The adnvantage of it is that it can't be detected by a military police drug test". A Billion Shekels a Year Legal Highs are a very old trick: you cook up a blend of novel psychoactive substances which are not yet banned, market it at convenience stores and parties, and by the time the authorities ban the substance you've already made your profit. The new generation of drugs, those sold in convenience stores in the last decade, are mostly based on two substances: Cathinone, which is the active chemical in Khat, and Synthetic Cannabinoids, which mimic the effect of THC, the active ingredient in Marijuana, but are much, much stronger. Synthetic Cannabinoids were first synthesized in research labs in the late 80s, while researching natural Cannabinoids, substances which are naturally produced in the human body and tied to mechanisms of nausea, apetite, pain relief, muscle tone and and overall feeling of well being. Synthetic Cannabinoids mimic these actions, some are used in medicine, others cause a harmless high, but some are extremely potent, hundereds of times more so than the Cannabinoids found in Hashish, for example, and clinical tests using these compounds have been aborted because of the harms found. This type of substances is present in Nice Guy, and the package doesn't state which compound it includes. High amounts of toxic adulterants such as Triclosan, which is found in toothpaste and pesticides are added to the mix, and often just straight up pesticides. The effect is about 40 times stronger than smoking Hash: Nice Guy smokers describe a fun 15 minutes trip followed by a weekend of suicidal thoughts and depression. When it wears off it causes anxiety, restlessness, hallucinations, night terrors, dehydration, oversweating, nausea, dizziness, increased heart rate, severe decrease of sexual desire, memory problems, attention deficits, headaches and body tremors. This is also one of the reasons it's easy to get addicted: to stop this nightmare and return to being high. Aside from smoking, the latest trend is injecting: Addicts mix the substance in water and inject in, usually sharing a cork with fellow users. This method of injection has also caused an HIV outbreak in recent years. "Injecting Nice Guy is much more dangerous than the previous trend of injecting "Hagigat" (Bath salts), the substances in Nice Guy are much more lethal and addictive", says a narcotics pollice officer. "My concern is that in the near future we'll start seing teenagers drop dead like flies from injecting Nice Guy". The Nice Guy market in Israel is huge: a month ago police in Beer-Sheva uncovered a huge warehouse with 3.5 tons of Nice Guy, packaged in thousands of bags and ready to be distrubuted, the amount of which could make 1.3 million bags of product. Overall in the last year police has seized 5 tons of Nice Guy, police estimates that about 10 huge clandestine labs operate in Israel, and are in possession of 20 tons of Nice Guy at the moment. The industry has an estimated profit of 1 Billion shekels a year, and this number is only expected to rise in the future. The reason for the dramatic increase in use is simple supply and demand: bulding the new border fence with Egypet has caused a dramatic price increase of drugs in Israel. 120 thousand shekels for a kilo of Hash, 100 thousand shekels for a kilo of Marijuana, 800 thousand shekels for a kilo of Cocaine and 700 thousand shekels for a kilo of Heroin. As opposed to the closed smuggling routes, the Nice Guy industry is local, based in Israel. The price for a bag of 30-50g of Nice Guy has recently gone up from 25 Shekels to 50, capitalizing on the increased demand while still being much cheaper compared to any other country in the world. Due to the low prices and high availabillity, Nice Guy has already replaced everything - Both alcohol and Marijuana for the light users, as well as Heroin for the heavily addicted. "I tell you without a doubt it is a much worse drug than Heroin or Crystal, it's a killer drug, lethal in levels we have yet to encounter", says a police intelligence officer. "I came across many young fellows who were freaked out by the destructive consequences of Nice Guy and returned to using Hash". Tamir (fake name), 32, was a Heroin addict. He injected Nice Guy for the first time a year ago, at a party with friends, who all shared a needle. "I felt like I had to break my withdrawal so I IV'd the Nice Guy" he says. "I felt so shitty I wanted to die. It punctured my lungs and caused breathing difficulties. You feel high for 15 minutes but afterwards you just want to jump from a building. After a few months I felt very bad and did some blood tests, which showed I have HIV. I wanted to hang myself. Now I'm addicted to Nice Guy, I can't stop. I inject it twice a day and I can't function without it. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I literally can't breath. I plead with the youth not to get near it, you'll end up in the grave, cherish your lives. One time is all it takes. All of the people we talked to are utterly convinced: The police is not doing enough. A senior officer explained the police can only work towards minimizing the phenomenon: "The chance of uprooting this is small. We need hundreds of cops who only deal with this issue, and nothing else". Shimon Ifergan Mako Magazine 29\05\2014 http://www.mako.co.il/weekend-articl...facebook_share Read more: http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=246061#ixzz33Gw2Ef24

http://www.stripes.com/news/us/in-historic-vote-house-backs-medical-marijuana-1.286323 By Rob Hotakainen McClatchy Washington Bureau Published: May 31, 2014 WASHINGTON — For the first time, the House of Representatives voted early Friday to block the federal government from enforcing its marijuana laws in states that have approved use of the drug for medical purposes. Marijuana advocates called the vote historic. “This is a game changer that paves the way for much more policy change to come,” said Steph Sherer, executive director of Americans For Safe Access, a group that has lobbied to end federal penalties for marijuana use. The plan passed 219-189, with 49 Republicans teaming up with 170 Democrats to approve the measure shortly after midnight. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., attached the language as an amendment to a bill that would fund the U.S. Justice Department. It attracted votes from conservative Republicans such as Doc Hastings of Washington state and Don Young of Alaska. In Washington state, which along with Colorado approved marijuana for recreational use in 2012, Hastings was the only Republican who voted for the measure, joining all six Democrats in the state’s delegation. “I think it says we’re finally getting through to the Republican Party,” said Dan Riffle, director of federal policies for the Marijuana Policy Project, a pro-legalization group. “It has always confused me when people refer to this as a liberal issue. William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman were supporters of marijuana reform, and medical marijuana in particular. It’s about reducing the size and scope of government, getting government out of the doctor-patient relationship, and letting states be laboratories of democracy rather than a one-size-fits-all federal mandate.” As a result of the vote, “Congress is officially pulling out of the war on medical marijuana patients and providers,” he said. Tom Angell, chairman of the pro-legalization group Marijuana Majority, said the vote shows how quickly marijuana reform “has become a mainstream issue.” He said it reflected the fact that members of Congress are hearing more stories about medical uses of marijuana, including by children who suffer from seizures. “If any political observers weren’t aware that the end of the war on marijuana is nearing, they just found out,” he said. While Congress’ official position is that marijuana is a drug with no medical value, 22 states now allow medical marijuana, with Minnesota the latest to approve it this week when Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill into law. While marijuana advocates celebrated, the measure still faces an uncertain fate in the current Congress. No similar legislation has been introduced in the Senate.

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/charges-against-homeless-men-of-assaulting-police-dropped-magistrate-finds-officers-used-unnecessary-force/story-fni6uo1m-1226935782975 Police baton arrest 'didn't look good': SA's Attorney General John Rau Charges against homeless men of assaulting police dropped, magistrate finds officers used ‘unnecessary’ force Court Reporter Tessa Akerman The Advertiser May 29, 2014 2:21PM Police beat suspects in Whitmore Square 1:19 Play video Homeless men arrested by South Australian police are struck with a baton and sprayed with capsicum spray. Vision: Channel Seven, 5 December 2012 Constable ‘feared baton wasn’t working’ Homeless men charged with assaulting police ASSAULT charges against two homeless men have been thrown out by a magistrate after he found a police officer acted unlawfully and struck them unnecessarily with a baton. The incident caused a furore after it was filmed by a Channel 7 news crew and shown on television and advertiser.com.au. Magistrate Stefan Metanomski today dismissed charges all charges against Shaun Robert Jones and Christopher John Mackie, saying police had “exceeded their authority” in dealing with them. He also condemned Constable Matthew Schwarz’s evidence about the incident, saying there was a “real possibility” he had embellished his account “to justify his action”. Mr Jones was charged with aggravated assault and resisting police while Mr Mackie was charged with assault police and resisting police at Whitmore Square in December 2012. A court photo of injuries sustained by homeless man Christopher Mackie, after he was beaten by police. In his judgment today, Mr Metanomski said Constables Schwarz and Jennifer Clark approached Shaun Robert Jones and Christopher John Mackie at Whitmore Square in December 2012. He found Mr Jones and Mr Mackie walked away when the police arrived and Const Schwarz said “Hey dudes, I just want to have a chat to you”. In his written judgment, Mr Metanomski said the two men kept walking away and Const Schwarz again requested they stop and chat. He said Mr Jones then swung around and “clenched his fist to his chest in a boxing stance” and said “I f**king don’t want to have anything to do with you”. Officers Jennifer Clark and Matthew Schwarz outside court. Picture: Greg Higgs Mr Metanomski found that the police or public would not be offended by the swearing. The torrent of abuse continued, and when Const Schwarz told Mr Jones he was acting disorderly, pushing between Mr Mackie and Const Schwarz began, leading to the officer to first warn them of and then use capsicum spray. With the two men on the ground, Const Schwarz drew his baton, and the situation seemed to be under control when Mr Mackie stood up. Concerned for his partner’s safety, and Mr Mackie not backing down, Const Schwarz hit him in the face with his elbow and then his fist. Channel Seven footage of the police officers arresting the two homeless men in Whitmore Square. Picture: Channel Seven News Mr Metanomski found that while Const Schwarz was watching Const Clark handcuff Mr Mackie, the officer “felt a force to his left calf” and realised that Mr Jones, on the ground, had kicked him. It was then that the Const Schwarz used his baton and struck Mr Jones three times and Mr Mackie once, some of which was caught on video. Mr Metanomski found the officers, particularly Const Schwarz, “acted unlawfully” and exceeded his powers by continuing to pursue Mr Mackie and Mr Jones when they had made it “very clear” that they did not wish to speak to the police. He found Const Schwarz had no cause to pursue the men. Shaun Robert Jones outside court at an earlier appearance. Charges against him have been thrown out of court. “There was no suspicion that either man had committed an offence,” Mr Metanomski said. “The police should have realised that it was obvious the man (Jones) did not want to speak to them.” He said Jones’ swearing was “purely a robust, perhaps colourful means” of communicating to the officers “quite unequivocally” that they did not want to talk to them. Mr Metanomski said there was a “significant escalation” of events following the unlawful behaviour of the police which led to alleged further offending by Mr Jones and Mr Mackie. Christopher Mackie was charged with assaulting a police officer in Whitmore Square. A magistrate dismissed the charges. He referred to a video of the incident, saying what it depicted did not match Const Schwarz’s evidence. “In my view the three strikes with the baton upon Jones were totally unnecessary,” he said. “The evidence of Schwarz I find to be generally unsatisfactory and unreliable ... there is a real possibility of embellishment of the events to justify his actions. “The following behaviour and alleged offences, regardless of whether they would have been found proved, are tainted by the illegality of the unlawful behaviour of the police but for which they would not have occurred.” He exercised his discretion to exclude all evidence in relation to the charges. SA Police released this statement: “Police will review the findings and comments made by the magistrate in this matter. The incident was lodged with the Ombudsman and as such SAPOL are precluded by law from making any comment.”

23 Apr 2014 Source: Arizona Republic (Phoenix, AZ) Website: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/24 Author: Yvonne Wingett Sanchez Page: A10 Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?224 (Cannabis and Driving) POT METABOLITE CAN'T BE BASIS OF DUI State Supreme Court Says Inactive Marijuana Traces Do Not Prove Impairment. Motorists who have used marijuana cannot be charged with driving under the influence on that basis alone, even if some traces of the drug are detected in their blood, the state's top court ruled Tuesday. Arizona Supreme Court justices disagreed with the Maricopa County Attorney Office, which argued before the court in November, that drivers whose blood tests reveal the presence of an inactive marijuana metabolite known as Carboxy-THC can be prosecuted for driving while impaired. [Remainder snipped] -------------------------------------------------------- It is manifestly unjust that people who may have ingested cannabis days ago, and are perfectly sober, can, and are currently being charged with DUI cannabis in Australian states, such as South Australia, and it needs to change, and soon, so that the law is similar to that of Colorado, where only people who exceed the prescribed level of THC in their system are charged with that offence.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/patients-put-at-risk-of-addiction-20140531-39b6i.html June 1, 2014 Julia Medew Health Editor 'Drugs unused are like guns in the broom cupboard' says Dr Myles Conroy. Too many Australians are being sent home from hospital with large amounts of powerful painkillers, putting them and others at risk of addiction and unintentional overdose, doctors say. There are also fears careless prescribing by hospital staff is fuelling the thriving black market for prescription opioids in Victoria, where about 300 people die from medication overdoses each year - more than the state's road toll. Myles Conroy, a pain clinician at Geelong Hospital, said a study of 334 patients' at his hospital in 2011 revealed scores were being sent home after surgery with either too much or too little pain medication, and in some cases an inappropriate drug for their pain. He said the analysis, which looked at the painkillers people were being given on the day before their discharge and then to take home, showed about one in four of the 178 patients who were given opioids on discharge did not require them. In most cases, they were being given boxes containing 20 to 28 Oxycodone and Oxycontin tablets - opioids dubbed ''hillbilly heroin'' because of their desirability among drug abusers who will pay $10 to $50 for a tablet. Dr Conroy said this meant patients were at risk of taking the drugs unnecessarily and developing an addiction or passing the drugs on to others who may already have a dependency or could develop one. The drugs were also a major risk for people with children who could accidentally swallow them. ''They are not drugs we want to be spraying around when they are not required,'' he said. ''We think that drugs that are unused are like guns in the broom cupboard. They are just a danger you don't need.'' Dr Conroy said the analysis also revealed that about one third of people requiring opioids for their pain on the day before their discharge had them ceased when they went home. This also occurred for three-quarters of the patients on anti-inflammatory drugs such as Voltaren and Celebrex in hospital, meaning many patients were likely to have untreated pain at home and require another visit to a doctor for a script. In most cases, junior doctors with little experience in pain medicine were making the prescription decisions. ''There is evidence of under treatment and over treatment just through not taking enough care and individualising the treatment for patients,'' he said. ''Education is the key. We need to get junior doctors to understand the gravity of the situation.'' Brendan Moore, the immediate past dean of the faculty of pain medicine at the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists, said the study suggested many Australian hospitals would be sending opioid drugs ''out by the truckload into society''. He said more work should be done to understand people's needs, and in some cases, doctors should consider giving patients a smaller number of tablets to take home. ''If you present someone with 20 tablets, there's almost an implied expectation that they might get at least a third or halfway through the box. '' A spokesman for the Victorian department of health said the government was working on strategies to improve opioid prescribing in hospitals, but did not provide further detail. Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/patients-put-at-risk-of-addiction-20140531-39b6i.html#ixzz33N1qLPy8

http://www.thefix.com/content/reasons-you-are-or-about-hit-bottom How low will you go before you hit bottom? This list can help, or at least guide you, before it happens. crying on the outside Shutterstock By Dillon Murphy 05/30/14 Share on facebook Share on twitter | More Sharing ServicesShare Addicted to Suboxone How I Quit Suboxone Do You Have to Bottom Out? My Bottom Was Lower Than Yours The Twelve Steps for Zombies Hitting bottom is about as funny as Hitler. I spent three long years falling and smashing into the cracked concrete repeatedly until I got sober. I am doing my best to learn to laugh again otherwise I just cry all the fucking time. I hope none of these has happened to you because all of them in one way or another happened to me. Enjoy the hilarity of getting as low as it gets. My own personal "Springtime for . . ." I'll bet you can relate to one or two. 1. Your friends have put you at the top of their dead pool. 2. You have friends that have a dead pool. 3. You try and justify being angry all the time as being "passionate." 4. You think that "it's just business, not personal" when you start selling your mother's jewelry at pawn shops. 5. You keep telling people that you just "took a shower" when they ask why the hell you're sweating so much in 10 degree weather. 6. Everyone is an asshole, except of course you. 7. You tell yourself that if you rob that little old lady you will, one day, "pay it forward". 8. You start to understand that lying is just fucking lying and not "improvising." 9. You convince yourself that instead of a sandwich, three King Cobras will give you the same nourishment. 10. You are convinced that your partner won't even notice their ring is missing. 11. You'd rather use than fuck. 12. You'd rather use than eat. 13. Your dealer stops taking your calls. 14. You strongly consider doing gay porn. 15. You drink in between the vomiting. 16. You tell yourself that blacking out is okay because your great grand-dad was an Irishman. 17. You think Denzel should have just friggin' lied at the end of Flight. 18. You have been 86'ed from every bar in Manhattan and two in Queens. 19. You still blame 9/11 for making you use. 20. You think that "Gentlemen Jack" will actually make you a nicer drunk. 21. You tell your son that a DUI is a "rite of passage." 22. When you cut yourself on the crackpipe you take the hit before you tend to the wound. 23. You tell yourself that going to jail for a few days was your bottom. You have no idea how much lower it's gonna get. 24. When your partner lends you money for groceries, you tell them you were mugged. 25. You still blame Lou Reed for making you use. 26. You tell yourself that if Keith Richards can get away with it then, hey, so can you. You tell this to yourself while homeless and 40. 27. You see an old colleague's face plastered on the side of the bus you couldn't afford to get on. 28. You see not one but three old colleagues' faces plastered on subway posters while you beg for a "swipe." 29. You had a really great career and now you're just hoping to get published in The Fix. 30. You allow total psychos to talk you into going into business with them. Despite the fact that upon meeting them every fiber in your being is screaming "PSYCHO!!!" 31. You get so desperate to perform that you do a gig for no money, no audience, and the material has absolutely no funny. 32. You have to call former students that respected the hell out of you and ask them if you can crash on their couch. Goodbye respect. 33. You know that the only way to avoid a certain overdose is to get out of NYC and into a cabin in the woods, because you sure as shit can't afford rehab. 34. Rehabs actually reject you because you take suboxone. 35. No matter how much you want to blame your being an asshole on being an "artist" you start to realize that you were just a drug addled asshole. Dillon Murphy is a pseudonym for a comedian who has written about being addicted to suboxone, and, a year later, how he finally kicked suboxone.