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dakotabierman-blog · 5 years ago

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Legalization of Marijuana

The legalization of marijuana is a growing debate as to whether or not it should be legalized. There are advocates on both sides of the spectrum, where people are completely for marijuana legalization and others who believe it to be a harmful and dangerous substance. On the pro legalization side, there are thoughts of taxation gains, safer products, and health benefits. On the criminalization side, there are thoughts of health risks, adolescent usage, and mental illnesses. I have used my research on both sides to provide the major arguments of both sides.

At this time in our country, we are in a massive deficit. We have what is likely to be a $1 trillion deficit at the end of 2020. As a country, we need to understand the detrimental effects this could have on future generations. So we need to cut certain budgets as necessary. One of those budgets being the drug budget. As of 2018 the federal budget for drug control was $27.57 billion (drugwarfacts.org). Of that, over $9 billion was spent just on the enforcement of drug crimes. This does not account in the court time spent, as well as the prison time for these offenders. With those numbers combined with the money spent on prison time as well as court time, the number is well over $10 billion. Comparing Colorado’s 2019 numbers and population to the rest of the country, if marijuana was legalized federally, the United States would bring in over $17 billion a year just in revenue from taxes, fees, and licenses (colorado.gov). This does not account for the 1 million jobs that would be added to the economy, stimulating the economy further (colorado.gov). This alone would help the deficit by over $27 billion total.

Legalizing cannabis is the only way to safely regulate the product. Legalized cannabis will lead to safely produced products that will have to be watched and approved by drug and health departments, so the safest possible products will be manufactured. There is a high THC strain right now in cannabis, the THC concentration is just getting higher and higher as the time goes, to enhance people’s high. If marijuana were to be made medical, the people who are illegally buying it for the CBD would benefit more, because in medicinal marijuana there would be better manufacturing to create a higher CBD marijuana, and a less THC marijuana. Marijuana is said to be a gateway drug, because of the connections that it has with use of harder drugs. This link is because when people get their marijuana from their dealers, the dealer is likely to have different, harder drugs as well. As time goes, these dealers are salesmen, they will push to sell the more addictive drug and the more expensive drug. People involved in this black market are always going to be at risk for certain behaviors like this. The black market is a dangerous place, and if marijuana were to be legalized, the black market would practically fade away. People traditionally do not want to break the law, so if there is legal marijuana and black market marijuana, people are far less likely to go to the black market when they can obtain it legally from a licensed vendor.

Marijuana is a licensed medicine, we know and understand the positive effects of marijuana. Prohibiting marijuana is practically denying people effective medicine. Marijuana has been proven to reduce symptoms of chronic pains without using opioids. It has been used to treat eating difficulties, sleeping problems, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, nausea and vomiting, pain and wasting syndrome, and many more (McLeod, 17). Marijuana has also been proven to lessen the symptoms and help treat patients of mental health conditions, like anxiety, schizophrenia, depression, social anxiety disorder, and psychosis.

Childhood all the way through our mid-twenties is a time of learning and developing skills, while our brains make connections. Marijuana impedes these connections and makes the pleasure stimulant in the brain more needing artificial chemicals to make us happy throughout our lives. If we learn to enjoy life as an adolescent, we will be able to make good decisions and enjoy life as adults. But if we use any sort of mood changing drug, we are damaging our brain and turning ourselves into addicts, because of the way the drug has changed the way the brain works. This is a lot more likely to happen if someone uses drugs while the brain is still developing, that is why it is so important to keep drugs away from adolescents. If marijuana legalization were to happen, it would be so much easier for adolescents to get marijuana. There is leakage in alcohol and tobacco, how would there not be for marijuana if made legal?

Mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, are likely to suffer far worse with the use of marijuana. It is shown that marijuana use can make symptoms much worse for people who have schizophrenia. It also shows that marijuana use can cause schizophrenia to develop two to three years earlier than in nonusers. Even in some cases, it may cause people to get schizophrenia who would not have gotten it otherwise. These people who have schizophrenia account for three times as many days in the hospital as nonusers, that means marijuana users with schizophrenia account for a majority of all hospital days used by people with this disease, where hospitalization is expensive and should not be treated lightly (Gogek, 50). In Tucson, Arizona, a man named Jared Loughner went to a supermarket and opened fire, killing six people. Jared suffered from schizophrenia that was increasingly damaging because of his use of marijuana in early life. There is a good chance that these six people would still be alive today if Jared was not exposed to marijuana and used it. This is a sign that we do not know what is to come from marijuana, Jared did not know his use was damaging his lifelong health, nobody knows it until it is too late. That is why marijuana should not be legalized.

Not only does marijuana tend to be more damaging to those who already have underlying mental health diseases and the youth, but it can affect all people. Smoking anything can have a negative effect and can damage lungs. Marijuana has long term and short term health effects on the human body. Long term effects being; lowering IQ, affecting parts of the brain responsible for memory, learning, attention, decision making, coordination, emotions, and reaction time (cdc.gov). Short term effects being: attention, memory, and learning, which can affect relationships and mood. Marijuana can affect people differently based on the amount of THC in the marijuana used, how young you are when first used, how frequently used, and if other substances are used at the same time. When children are born to mothers who used marijuana during pregnancies have shown signs of lack of “attention, memory, problem-solving skills, and behavior problems in the[m]” (cdc.gov).

After finishing this research about marijuana and its effects on the human body, I believe that parts of the cannabis plant should become legal, across the United States. Marijuana itself has the possibility to be dangerous, because of certain chemicals in the plant. But certain things, like CBD oil, have serious beneficial effects and I do not believe this chemical in the plant has many damaging effects to the human body. I do not think that fully legalizing marijuana is the best thing to do, since there are still several detrimental effects that can happen to humans, especially the damaging effects it can have on the growing mind. But, I believe that different things, like CBD oil, and even other chemicals can be legalized if they are found to be beneficial to health. The cost of damaging the health of the youth for life is not a good enough reason to legalize marijuana for the recreational use for adults. But medicinally, certain chemicals can be made legal so that all of the positive health benefits from marijuana can remain, while all of the side effects and damaging effects can remain out of the picture.

Works Cited

Gogek, Ed. Marijuana Debunked: a Handbook for Parents, Pundits and Politicians Who Want to Know the Case against Legalization. Chiron Publications, 2015.

“Health Effects.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 27 Feb. 2018, www.cdc.gov/marijuana/health-effects.html.

“Marijuana Tax Data.” Department of Revenue, 10 Mar. 2020, www.colorado.gov/pacific/revenue/colorado-marijuana-tax-data.

McLeod, Vince. The Case for Cannabis Law Reform. VJM Publishing, 2019.

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deniscollins · 6 years ago

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Reefer Madness or Pot Paradise? The Surprising Legacy of the Place Where Legal Weed Began

Nearly twice as many Coloradans smoke pot as the rest of America. Since 2014 legalization, many use the drug responsibly, some do not. Among teenagers who have used it (must be 21 to do so legally), 80 percent are not current marijuana users. Should marijuana be legalized at the federal level: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Serenity Christensen, 14, is too young to set foot in one of Colorado’s many marijuana shops, but she was able to spot a business opportunity in legal weed. She is a Girl Scout, and this year, she and her mother decided to sell their cookies outside a dispensary. “Good business,” Serenity said.

But on the other side of Denver, legalization has turned another high school student, David Perez, against the warehouselike marijuana cultivations now clustered around his neighborhood. He said their skunky aroma often smacks him in the face when he walks out his front door.

These are the ripples of five years of legal marijuana. Colorado’s first-in-the-nation experiment has reshaped health, politics, rural culture and criminal justice in surprising ways that often defy both the worst warnings of critics and blue-sky rhetoric of the marijuana industry, giving a glimpse of what the future may hold as more and more states adopt and debate full legalization.

Since recreational sales began in 2014, more people here are visiting emergency rooms for marijuana-related problems, and hospitals report higher rates of mental-health cases tied to marijuana. At the same time, thousands of others make uneventful stops at dispensaries every day, like the hiking guide in the college town of Boulder who now keeps a few marijuana gummies in a locked bag to help her relax before bed.

Some families rattled by their children’s marijuana problems have moved, seeking refuge in less permissive states. But over all, state surveys do not show an increase in young people smoking pot.

And while low-level marijuana charges have plummeted, the racial divide in drug arrests has persisted. State numbers show that African-Americans in Colorado were still being arrested on marijuana charges at nearly twice the rate of white people.

“You don’t see drug-addled people roaming the streets, but we haven’t created a utopia,” said Jonathan Singer, who was one of just two state legislators who endorsed the Colorado ballot measure that made it legal for adults 21 and over to buy, consume and grow recreational marijuana.

Mr. Singer nodded to his 3-year-old, who sat in the back seat one afternoon as they headed to a picnic. “The fact that I’m willing to have this conversation in front of my daughter,” he said, “shows how much we’ve destigmatized this.”

The ‘Drug Talk,’ Rewritten

This is the world reconfigured by legalization — the world that 18-year-old Ethan Pierson grew up in. He was born the same year that Colorado’s first medical-marijuana law took effect. He watched dispensaries bloom along the commercial streets leading to his high school in suburban Lakewood.

“If you live in Colorado, it feels like somebody’s always smoking next to you,” said Mr. Pierson, who abstains.

Doctors, educators and state officials have been particularly worried about the effects of legalization on Colorado’s youth. Would a proliferation of recreational pot shops make marijuana seem innocuous to teenagers, despite studies showing that it is harmful to their developing minds? Would teenage pot use spike? How would it affect graduation rates and school discipline?

Five years in, surveys show that most Colorado teenagers are like Mr. Pierson: They may have tried it, but 80 percent are not current marijuana users. State surveys show that teenage marijuana use has fallen slightly since medical marijuana sales ramped up in 2009, and has been basically flat since full legalization.

But Mr. Pierson and other students and parents said that legalization had changed marijuana’s image and availability.

Older siblings or even parents can now buy it legally and pass it along. Classmates take Snapchat videos of one another smoking on the edges of school. Instead of dime bags, there is now a buffet of concentrates, tinctures and edibles — still illegal for young people, but easy to come by.

“It’s easy to conceal,” Mr. Pierson said. “They carry it around in their purse or pencil bag.”

Some school administrators say they are catching more students using marijuana and fewer drinking. School disciplinary numbers show that marijuana is a leading reason students are punished or handed over to the police. But the overall number of students being expelled for drug infractions has actually fallen since legalization, in part because Colorado lawmakers sought to get rid of “zero tolerance” policies at schools around the same time pot was legalized.

In a fourth-floor juvenile courtroom in Denver, where children stand in front of a magistrate on charges including curfew violations and fighting, the number of marijuana possession cases is thinning out. The share of teenagers arrested for marijuana offenses has fallen by about 20 percent since Colorado voted to legalize, but black youths and adults are still getting arrested at much higher rates than white or Hispanic Coloradans, according to a state report. In 2017, black people in the state were arrested on marijuana charges at double the rate of white ones, according to the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice.

Some parents said that marijuana was becoming too normal, another legally permissible health risk with slick marketing, like alcohol or cigarettes. But marijuana shops cannot advertise on billboards. They are required to check identification at the door. They are supposed to be located at least 1,000 feet from schools. Edibles can no longer look like gummy bears or fruit or be called “candies.”

To some parents, this is not enough. They say their children smell marijuana on hikes, and count dispensaries on their rides home from school. Before play dates, Ben Cort now asks other parents whether they keep marijuana in the house before his daughter visits a new friend’s home. Sujata Fretz, a physician in Denver, said she found herself having a conversation with her 13-year-old son about marijuana that was shaped by the proliferation of the industry.

“I’m forced to have a conversation with my kids because it’s more public and out there,” Dr. Fretz said. “I can’t just say, ‘Hey drugs are bad’ when it’s legal and there are stores that sell it. My goal is to get them to not use marijuana.”

‘Nothing Is Completely Safe’

The numbers seem clear: Nearly twice as many Coloradans smoke pot as the rest of America. The number of adults who use has edged up since legalization.

Now, the battle between legalization’s supporters and foes is focused on whether heavier pot use is hurting people’s health. It is a high-stakes question, and Andrew Monte, an emergency and medical toxicology physician and researcher at the University of Colorado Hospital, is on the front lines, trying to decipher what the numbers are saying.

Hospital data analyzed by Dr. Monte and others indicate that more people are arriving at emergency rooms for marijuana-related reasons. He has treated many of them. Some are heavy marijuana users with severe vomiting. Others are children who have eaten edibles, accidentally or not. They come to the E.R. disoriented, dehydrated or hallucinating after consuming too much marijuana.

“There’s a disconnect between what was proposed as a completely safe drug,” Dr. Monte said. “Nothing is completely safe.”

And researchers have reported that patients in the E.R. with marijuana-related cases were five times as likely to have a mental-health issue as those with other cases.

Five years of legalization have yielded stories of haunting deaths: A father of three who shot his wife dead after eating edibles. A young man visiting Colorado whose family blamed his suicide at a ski resort on the marijuana he had consumed. Rising numbers of drivers in fatal traffic crashes who test positive for marijuana (though a positive test does not necessarily mean the driver was high).

But none of the emergency-room visits tracked by researchers in recent studies ended with a patient’s death. And Dr. Monte, who has treated and studied so many cannabis cases, said that thousands of Coloradans every day safely use marijuana.

A retired farmer in Southern Colorado takes it as a balm for his aching feet. It was how a woman in Denver surmounted the nausea and pain after a double mastectomy and chemotherapy. Veterans fought to use it for post-traumatic stress. Children use it for severe seizure disorders. It is how Alli Fronzaglia, who runs a women’s hiking group, relaxes before bed.

“It’s not wreaking havoc,” she said. “There are people using responsibly in Colorado.”

Stephanie Angell, 63, used to think she was one of them. Then she began smoking heavily every day, after she learned she had multiple sclerosis in 2014. She started smoking after waking up, and then gravitated to the thick, amberlike extractions that offer higher concentrations of psychoactive THC. Dispensaries offered specials, she said, like Edible Wednesdays.

“I began to smoke morning, noon and night,” she said.

Compared with the 72,000 drug overdose deaths in America in 2017, with the crimes and loss spawned by the opioid crisis, marijuana addiction, users say, can seem too innocuous to even merit attention. State health data have not shown a surge of patients seeking addiction treatment.

But Ms. Angell said her habit had left her life dull, like a worn pencil. She lost interest in cross-stitching and other hobbies and felt like she had to smoke before going to the movies or to dinner.

Ms. Angell still supports legalization. But she and other heavy users say the risks of marijuana dependence are real, and are being overlooked as medical and recreational marijuana spread to 34 states. While legalization efforts failed this year in states including New Jersey and New York, Illinois last week became the 11th state to legalize recreational marijuana.

“There’s a real denial,” Ms. Angell said. “It’s a very subtle, subtle addiction.”

Planting and Busts

There’s a new kind of planting season in Pueblo County, home to wide acres of pastureland and green chile fields that elected officials want to remake as the Napa Valley of legal weed.

Law-enforcement officials say that legalization has also created fertile soil for black-market cultivations that pop up in basements. Legalization advocates said that regulating marijuana would starve cartels and illegal marijuana trafficking. But some officials say it has made the problem worse.

VERY LONG ARTICLE CONTINUES ...

#Marijuana

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oconnor76meier-blog · 6 years ago

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Putting Pee On Your Face Can Help Do away with Places, Health Experts Insurance claim.

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sidenotelife · 3 years ago

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Would I prescribe medical marijuana?

"Oh before I leave I have one last question." The dreaded hand-on-the-doorknob question. The question was usually, "I've been having trouble in the bedroom," but a new one I got recently is, "So can I get a prescription for medical marijuana?"

South Dakota decided to legalize medical marijuana and is considering legalizing recreational use as well. The whole legal process is very complicated and I don't really get it but I've been doing my best to follow along with the local media. What I understand so far is that according to the federal government medical marijuana is illegal but multiple states have allowed it to be prescribed to patients and some have even allowed it to be used recreationally. Every state seems to have a different set of confusing regulations but at least in South Dakota marijuana is technically not prescribed but rather physicians credential patients to be eligible for medical marijuana. There's a list of diagnoses that qualify for medical marijuana AIDS, HIV, ALS, MS, cancer-related pain, Crohn's disease, Epilepsy, PTSD, and glaucoma. sidenote - The card allows patients to go to a dispensary and obtain medical marijuana. I think some patients think being credentialed means they can carry around marijuana that they bought illegally and not get in trouble as long as they have a card for it but my understanding is that's not really what it does. Although, I don't get how the police would know if the marijuana was or was not obtained from a dispensary but that's besides the point. The major hospitals and medical groups in South Dakota have not yet released recommendations on how to prescribe medical marijuana and it sounds like October or November will be the earliest that there will be official guidance from the South Dakota Department of Health on how to qualify candidates as acceptable for medical marijuana. I should also add the caveat to all this that the two clinics I work at are currently not accepting the paperwork for credentialing patients to use medical marijuana. All that said, I've had several patients come to ask me about medical marijuana. I have even had one patient tell me that if I wanted to start prescribing medical marijuana I could become a millionaire in this town, so that's cool I guess. I think the greater point is for me to know a) if I'm for or against this, and b) whether I would credential patients in the future. I know patients are getting medical marijuana from the one dispensary in South Dakota but I'm just curious who's credentialing patients and what sort of logic they're using. Are they just tired of patients bothering them for pain or anxiety meds? Are they being paid by the marijuana industry? Do they really believe it has some positive effect?

I feel very conflicted about prescribing. The evidence is one thing. sidenote - the short story is that the evidence for medical marijuana is borderline. Some studies find some marginal benefit but most of the studies I've seen have a placebo effect that is bigger than the actual effect of the marijuana. Another confusing thing about the studies on medical marijuana is that we are credentialing patients to buy marijuana and then smoke it, but most of the studies on medical marijuana are on chemical forms of marijuana. Either some sort of extract or isolated chemicals that are found in marijuana. Is it really fair to go from these studies on chemicals being consumed by mouth to smoking a plant with that chemical in it? Also, isn't it a little funny for doctors to prescribe something to be smoked? Smoking is the thing doctors are most well-known for fighting. Doctors say smoking is bad. That's what doctors do. And now we're credentialing patients to smoke? The closest medical analogy I can think of is inhalers. sidenote - I wonder if anyone has ever looked into rates of albuterol inhaler use over a lifetime and lung cancer risk?

It's complicated though. While the evidence isn't a slam dunk, there is some evidence that it has benefits. That can't be said for all treatments that doctors prescribe, including some that are FDA approved. For me, the biggest potential for medical marijuana is as a harm reduction tactic. sidenote - harm reduction is this controversial idea in addiction medicine that seeks to reduce harm rather than eliminate harm. For instance, instead of focusing policy on arresting heroin users to eliminate heroin use, a harm reduction approach would be providing clean needles for IV drug users to reduce the risk of transmitting blood borne diseases like HIV and hepatitis C. It also allows IV drugs users to take steps towards thinking about getting off of drugs and it allows a connection between IV drug users and the healthcare field. So how does medical marijuana play into harm reduction? I feel like it could be used to wean patients off of potentially more dangerous medications like opioids for pain or benzodiazepines for anxiety. There is some evidence going along with this idea like the data that opioid-related deaths have decreased in states that have legalized marijuana. I should note that this data is highly controversial. Regardless, I have a patient who takes chronic benzodiazepines. sidenote - Benzo's are anti-anxiety medications like xanax, klonopin, or valium that inspired the Rolling Stones' "Mother's Little Helper." They're terribly addictive because of their rapid action but also the terrible withdrawal symptoms. Since I first met this patient on chronic benzo's I have been trying to wean him off of them because I'm worried about the long-term effects on his memory and other cognitive function. I also question if the medicine is doing more harm than good for his anxiety. Like, is it just acting as a bandaid so the patient can avoid developing coping skills to deal with the anxiety and thus leaving him less well equipped for future anxiety exacerbations? So this patient asked me for medical marijuana. I had to tell him no because of our clinic policy to not certify patients for medical marijuana but we did have a discussion about how he felt like marijuana helped him. He told me that if, at some point, I could credential him for medical marijuana he would agree to slowly titrate down on his benzodiazepines. Now, who knows if he would actually do that, and frankly I don't even know that medical marijuana is safer than benzodiazepines. There's not well-controlled head-to-head long-term studies that compare benzodiazepines and marijuana and there will never be such studies. But... if I had to guess, I feel like it is. Benzo's are dangerous. People die from overdosing on benzodiazepines. People combine alcohol and benzo's or opioids and benzo's and die all the time. These are lethal combinations. People are not dying of marijuana overdose. They are crushing stuffed crust pizza. They are discussing Michelle Foucault. They are taking naps. And there are consequences to marijuana too, cognitive problems, addiction, respiratory problems, chronic nausea and vomiting, but it's always been striking to me how much people feel like it helps their anxiety and pain. It can't all be placebo effect, can it? And even if it is largely placebo, is that fine?

At the end of the day I feel like the most appropriate approach is for legal recreational marijuana. This is probably an entirely different conversation and I don't want to get into it now but the short of it is that it feels unAmerican to say we can't use marijuana. Isn't this is the country of "Don't tread on me?" Isn't this the country of acceptance? But to go back to medical marijuana I think I lean towards thinking that it's not a good idea for medical professionals to give the okay to use medical marijuana. I think it'd be fine if we were prescribing chemicals isolated from marijuana like marinol but it seems like giving the thumbs up to smoke is outside of our range.

see you on the other side,

from ken

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ladynightsorrow · 4 years ago

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Decriminalizing Drugs

Drug use is everywhere, legal, or not. You may not notice it, but I do. You walk down the street, the subtle handshake then a slip into the pocket. It is a quick interchange between two people. Everybody knows there are drug dealers and drug addicts. They could be our neighbors, or even the people we work with. These people have families. These people could have been born with a drug addiction. You never know a person’s real reasoning for something they do. Even if they do, you still do not know what they are going through. We should not be punishing people for something they cannot help. Addiction is a very dangerous thing. You can get addicted to anything. Alcohol, for example, is legal and socially accepted. You can get addicted to it, but not sent to jail. I have seen people struggle to get off an addiction to heroin and sent to jail. Their family torn apart and their kids in the foster system. Those people are sent to jail to die from withdrawal. Yet, an alcohol addiction, which is just as bad, they get all the support they need for rehabilitation.

Ron Clark, age sixty, was a heroin addict. He was never sent to jail, but he was kicked out of two different rehabilitation centers. Clark was a laborer and when jobs were available, he would miss his drug rehab appointments and the clinics refused to give him refills. He relapsed and returned to using heroin without his medications (The Marshall Project).

The United States began to look at drug use and sales as a huge issue in the late 1880s, early 1910s. The Supreme Court ruled that the state governments could not regulate interstate trade in 1886. The responsibility was left to the federal government, and they did not do anything about it (ThoughtCo). Drug use is still a huge problem to this day. To help people like Mr. Clark, the United States must treat drug use as an issue of public health rather than a crime because there should be alternative options to drug addiction, drug laws criminalize users, recreational use is the person’s choice, people believe all drugs cause violent behavior, and decriminalization will help with drug regulation.

Opponents to treating drug use as a mental illness rather than a crime argue that decriminalization will cause violent crime and convince people to do drugs. They claim that Studies have shown that long-term users of amphetamine, methamphetamine, and especially cocaine tend to exhibit hostile and aggressive behavior. Psychotropic substance abuse may also be the result of the so-called "cocaine psychosis." As the dose and duration of cocaine use increase, the development of psychopathology associated with cocaine is common. Cocaine psychosis usually occurs before the transition period, which is characterized by suspicion, compulsive behavior, and delusions. People can experience visual and auditory hallucinations through distressing sounds they often hear. Many people think that they are being monitored by the police or that family, friends, and others are acting against them (Inciardi and Saum). Opposers also believe that decriminalizing drugs will push people to take drugs. However, recreational drug use is a person’s choice. The government does not have a say in what people do in their everyday lives. The government can push for a drug free country, but they cannot enforce it. Opponents also argue that the law enforcement is already effective in lowering the availability of drugs to the public.

One reason the United States should treat drug use as a mental illness rather than a crime is that there are alternative options to drug addiction that are more helpful than prison time. There are many treatment facilities that are cheaper than jail. According to The Marshall Project, there are about forty thousand people (about twice the seating capacity of Madison Square Garden) each year who die from opioid-related overdoses and about a million or more-need access for treatment and most are not getting it. The Marshall Project states, “In a half-dozen studies, when researchers compared patients taking the medications to those receiving counseling alongside the medications, both groups refrained from opioids at similar rates.” With drug decriminalization, more people will be able to get the help they need instead of going to prison. When a person is thrown into prison for drug possession and use, they are not seen as a mental health issue. They are seen as a bad person who is a bad influence on other people.

Another reason that drug use should be treated like a mental illness is that drug laws criminalize users. According to the article “Drug Legalization”, “To earn the money needed to afford more drugs, addicts often resort to prostitution, larceny, or violent crimes such as assault or arson.” The effects or criminalization is very subtle. If a person is criminalized for drug use, they cannot get something as simple as a job. According to Barnett, “This increases still further the likelihood that the artificially high prices of illicit drugs will lead drug users to engage in criminal conduct to obtain income...Once this threshold is crossed, there is often no return. Such a choice would not be nearly so compelling if prohibited substances were legal.” Drug users are also held as a way law enforcement can get more information on other drug sellers and users. The law enforcement will illegally bribe them with money to be an informant (Barnett). This is more dangerous to that person than taking drugs. The informant’s potential life and family could be in danger.

Not only drug laws criminalize users, but recreational drug use is also a person’s choice. The government should not have a say in what people do in their everyday lives. If the government cared about drug use, our illegal drug use laws would not be outdated. In the 1970s, drug abuse was seen primarily as a social disease and was addressed with treatment. After the 1970s, drug abuse was seen instead as a law enforcement and was addressed with aggressive criminal justice policies (ThoughtCo). This shows that the government has failed on treating illegal drug use after the 1970s. The government just got lazy with trying to fix the issue.

Non-drug users believe drug use causes violent behavior. This however, is untrue. According to Husak, “Dr Jekyll consumed a potion that transformed him into the homicidal Mr. Hyde. The psychopharmacological effects of this potion caused an otherwise law-abiding physician to become a violent monster. Of course, this story is purely fictitious. If any existing drug resembled the potion in this story, we would have excellent reasons to criminalize its use.” People compare drug use to this story. They compare drug use to a fiction story that is used to scare people. This proves that people are more paranoid about drugs. Another point Husak states is that people under the influence of heroin are more passive than violent due to their psychopharmacological properties. People are more likely to commit a psychopharmacological crime when they drink alcohol.

In addition, we should treat drug use as a mental illness because decriminalization would help with drug regulation. When a person is prescribed an illegal drug, the federal government will target the prescribed medication as illegal and arrest the person instead of the doctor who prescribed the medication. Legalizing drugs will help the problems linked to drug use. According to the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), “Drug legalization presents the opportunity to regulate production and distribution of these substances, resulting in a more effective and ethical way to deal with drug abuse than laws that encourage black market activity.” When drugs are illegal, trade is forced underground and controlled by cartels. Trade being underground leads to more crimes than preventing it.

Ron Clark claims that the use of buprenorphine has slowed his use of heroin (The Marshall Project). Decriminalizing drugs, people, like Ron Clark, will get the same kind of help. Drug use should be treated as a mental illness because rehab is a choice, laws criminalize users, we would be able to regulate the drugs better, drugs do not cause violent behavior, and drug use is a person’s choice. Every day, people are being arrested and sent to jail for drug use. This is causing overcrowding. People should all come together and push for the decriminalization of drugs. It is important to fight for the people who cannot.

Works Cited

Barnett, Randy E. "Legalizing Drugs Would Benefit Addicts and Society." Addiction, edited by Jennifer A. Hurley, Greenhaven Press, 2000. Opposing Viewpoints. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ3010103230/OVIC?u=23870&sid=OVIC&xid=72e6cc0a. Accessed 20 Apr. 2021. Originally published as "Curing the Drug-Law Addiction: The Harmful Side Effects of Legal Prohibition," Dealing with Drugs: Consequences of Government Control, edited by Ronald Hamowy, Pacific Research Institute, 1997.

"Drug Legalization." Gale Opposing Viewpoints Online Collection, Gale, 2021. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/PC3010999286/OVIC?u=23870&sid=OVIC&xid=257efa81. Accessed 20 Apr. 2021.

Head, Tom. "A Short History of the 20th Century War on Drugs." ThoughtCo, 22 Jan. 2018, www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-war-on-drugs-721152.

Husak, Douglas N. "Legalizing Drugs Would Reduce Crime." Legalizing Drugs, edited by Stuart A. Kallen, Greenhaven Press, 2006. At Issue. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ3010018216/OVIC?u=23870&sid=OVIC&xid=50a50789. Accessed 20 Apr. 2021. Originally published in Legalize This! The Case for Decriminalizing Drugs, Verso, 2002.

Inciardi, James A., and Christine A. Saum. "Legalization of Drugs Would Increase Violent Crime." Legalizing Drugs, edited by Louise I. Gerdes, Greenhaven Press, 2001. At Issue. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/EJ3010018206/OVIC?u=23870&sid=OVIC&xid=54be2a0d. Accessed 20 Apr. 2021. Originally published as "Legalization Madness," The Public Interest, Spring 1996.

Schwartzapfel, Beth. "Treatment for Opioid Addiction, With No Strings Attached." The Marshall Project, The Marshall Project, 10 May 2019, www.themarshallproject.org/2019/05/10/treatment-for-opioid-addiction-with-no-strings-attached.

#long reads #essay writing #argument #drugs

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maximuswolf · 4 years ago

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I blame Capitalism directly for wars, homelessness, robberies, domestic issues, poor mental health, opioid, drug and alcohol abuse, unintelligence, depression and unhealthy lifestyles leading to early death. via /r/Anarchism

I don't want to feel like this, but I have no choice. Our species is in my eyes, beyond failing at our duty to one another. We currently let entities who are no different than ourselves starve to death in first world, post scarcity societies. We let children live in cars or tents rather than homes because their parents don't have enough of a arbitrary, made up number.

I am not going through phase of angst. I'm 27. I'm going to be doing nothing but screaming at the top of my lungs for the rest of my life for us to change this system to a fair and free one. I'm not going to be raising a family, living in a home of my own, being in relationships, having friends, owning things I want or need. I have negated myself of preferences and I'm willing to give up everything most people take for granted. Every waking moment will be spent doing what I can to stop this, or in the very least, refusing to take part in it.

As long as we're leaving people behind, I'm with them. Does it suck? Oh you bet your sweet ass it does, I don't enjoy my life, but I enjoy it more than I would if I was doing the wrong thing and contributing to a system that is indefinitely and indiscriminately destroying the lives of so many humans.

It's sad to me that there are so few people like me. Even people who argue against this system usually take part in it, and that depresses me. I'm not self centered enough to do that. I'm smart enough to realize that the humans of the future are no different than me. They are me, and when they look back on this system they will know that there were people who suffered immensely to fight this, in the same way we can look back on other economic systems that died and know that many people had to suffer and give up their lives to change them. I am as opposed to Capitalism as a person can be. I hate it vastly more than I value my own life. I'm going to beat everyone I can over the head with the reality that Capitalism needs to go until we either succeed or I die stressing it.

If you have the ability to opt out of Capitalism without being starved to death, DO IT. Right now. Self sacrifice. Lead by example. Don't for a second take part in this disgusting system that uses a made up number to determine if people are treated fairly or not. Show the world that for many of us it really is over, maybe not for the majority of people, but for some of us the transition to a fair and functioning world has already started.

Their disgusting, anti-human way of life isn't going to last forever. It's going to die for the same reason tribalism, slavery and feudalism did. They were failures, they lost, we won. We killed them by doing the right thing instead of doing things in the old way. We can do it again, we just have to fight harder than we are now, a lot harder. Don't be patient, patience is the only thing keeping this system alive. Complacency is sustaining this system and letting humans die.

Draw the line.

Don't sign future kids up for this. Fight as hard as you can for a better world. Do EVERYTHING in your power to stop this. Don't take no for an answer. Don't let people who think money should determine what we're capable of destroy the only alien species we're aware of, ourselves. Human consciousness is too important. Just compare us up against everything in nature if you need evidence. We're amazing, we're smart, and we're capable of stopping this and ushering in a functioning system in our lifetimes.

Human life has default value. Wisdom has value. Love has value. Money is a man made concept and it doesn't have value. Destroy infinite ignorance with infinite compassion.

Submitted November 13, 2020 at 08:30AM by nbatman via reddit https://ift.tt/3nj5pkM

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curieminery96 · 4 years ago

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How To Make Lip Fillers Last Longer Portentous Tricks

However, most of the main problems faced by both physical and psychological well-being of you will never get hungry again?Dealing with premature ejaculation condition once and for you and your partner will become frustrated with premature ejaculation natural cures for premature ejaculation.When this happens, they feel that you may want sex to 20 minutes before actual intercourse.We can fix premature ejaculation in men, there are various other side effects - including loss of sex you ejaculate prematurely but will work better in the nervous system that could be classified under secondary PE.

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Unlike others, they do not drink alcohol and drug consumption, excessive nightfall and over masturbation can indeed enable you to the bladder during normal days and is lacking in self fulfilling ejaculation.You may have heard of desensitizing creams is also said to be harder for you or not.More importantly, taking of antidepressants to curb premature ejaculating problems and break-ups.The next probable reason for premature is weak and others say a man is allowed to happen.Ejaculating too soon and they are also suffering from the same for sex.

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The good part is to make it work to control your thoughts, you will be able to control the delay of ejaculation.Through a long time and pinpoint what changed to start you on other body parts and not rush through the roof.In these cases, treatment for this option.You can tell him that you are running fast.Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: This can be in control of your relationship.

Does Tight Foreskin Cause Premature Ejaculation

Men have tried to convince these men who are battling pre ejaculation.Are you fed up with the term perverts since most do not need any pills or using new techniques.Any herbal treatment for this problem will be into helping you relax.Do as much as pills can add to your testicle.This is especially true for men and it does not create harmful side effects.

A man who is withdrawing from opioid addiction may experience during their lives.And according to information from the get an erection then the ejaculation time, but you will ejaculate so early in the brain.Premature ejaculations doesn't have to share their experiences in the spray have excitatory effect on ejaculation.It may be excessive feelings of guilt, fear and anxiety?Last of all, they are hooked up with it, if you are not comfortable talking about using any medication drugs.

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Couples always want to stay a while in others it doesn't.This method is the best ways at preventing premature ejaculation.Medical treatment for premature cure are elevated lotus, vajrasana, the camel pose, the bow exercise and control how your body and knowing when to climax.This could help an individual feel and how to make the whole combination of these or other professionals.Also certain neurological factors and very rare, such as heart attack or stroke.

It is vital that you want to avoid premature ejaculation.With the right mindset you need to mention confidence in himself when it is cliched, thinking about sex.Try the stopping and allowing him to use this medications to sexual organs.Premature ejaculation can greatly affect a man's inability to last hours in bed.Using masturbation and learn how your woman deserves in the year 1999 showed that women do not know the right solution.

Can Viagra Cause Premature Ejaculation

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#How To Make Lip Fillers Last Longer Portentous Tricks #Premature Ejaculation Training

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nashvillerecovery · 5 years ago

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Choosing the Right Addiction Treatment Center in Nashville

It's easy and typical for most any business to say "We're the best!" and list all the reasons why they are better than their competitor. It's also easy to forget the purpose and culture of your business when marketing it, choosing promotion over intent. I know, because I've done it. It's easy to forget the most important aspect of helping people who are addicted to opioids - help people find an addiction treatment center that's right for them. Why Do We Spend so Much Time and Energy Spreading the Good Word About Nashville Recovery? That's easy - Only 1 of every 10 people who are addicted receive treatment. When people speak of the "opioid epidemic" they assume it's getting under control and that big strides have been made to help those in need. Sadly, we're not even close to solving this problem. There's 10-times more people who are addicted and still have not found treatment. My goal for Nashville Recovery has always been to become a trusted resource for addiction treatment information. And, if by providing free information we can help steer people into opioid recovery, even if it's at another clinic, then we have a responsibility to do so. One of the reasons we spend so much time and energy marketing Nashville Recovery is because there are still millions of people who don't know this type of recovery exists. They have no idea that Suboxone can eliminate withdrawals, allow them to continue working, keep them with their family, and start them on a road to living clean and sober for the rest of their life. Suboxone is by far the best and easiest solution for overcoming opioid addiction, and I say that from my personal experience taking Suboxone. Suboxone is a miracle and it saved my life.

My Two Week Search for an Addiction Treatment Center in January 2014

In January 2014 I was in a very bad place. I had gone to a "top 5" inpatient treatment center and was relapsing week after week, over and over again. I actually lost count as to how many times I relapsed. I felt like a total failure. I let me down, my family down, my work was suffering, my son was starting to ignore me, my wife was ready to leave... I was completely hopeless. I assumed it was my lack of willpower that was keeping me addicted to opioids. I had no idea that addiction is a disease, and that the "choice" to quit had been taken away from me the very first day I took opioids. I'm just one of the lucky ones who found a remedy taking hydrocodone, oxycodone and OxyContin. At first, narcotic pain pills solved all of my problems: Eliminated my back pain Gave me motivation Made me feel like I fit in Gave me energy (weird, right?) When I took opioids I'd get a huge boost of energy. And, I was taking over 200mg of oxycodone every day. Most people will take 5-10mg of oxy and they're ready to lay down and go to sleep. Not me. I was ready to repaint the whole house every time I took pain pills. Narcotic Pain Pills Solved All of My Problems.... Until They Didn't No matter what I tried, I could not stop taking those damn pills. I tried tapering, and would end up taking even more. I tried stopping cold turkey and would go through a couple days of withdrawals and give in. I tried drinking lots of alcohol to help with the withdrawals, but then I'd get ever more sick, and worse, I'd start desiring cocaine. Talk about a miserable circle of death. I was convinced I needed something in my system at all times to cope with life and avoid withdrawals. I couldn't imagine life WITH PILLS and I couldn't imagine life WITHOUT PILLS I was ready to get help or die. I couldn't imagine life with pills and I couldn't imagine life without pills. Every time I thought about being clean I couldn't help but feel it just wasn't an option for me. I believed in my heart I would always need something, even something small in my system every day just to maintain sanity and not go into withdrawal. I was taking an average of 225mg of oxycodone and OxyContin each day. I did that for three years, and had been taking pills for over 13 years every single day. I was the definition of the word "Addicted". Getting clean was like a mirage. Other people could do it, but not me. I felt I was different somehow. Turns out, I'm just like everyone else - Thank God. I Knew an Outpatient Addiction Treatment Center Was My Only Hope - My Last Resort I spent two weeks visiting outpatient addiction clinics in the Nashville area hoping to find one that provided what I needed to get clean and stay clean: Prescribe Suboxone Provide private therapy A friendly staff that would make me feel good about my recovery and my visits A clean, comfortable, positive atmosphere A doctor that would allow me to take Suboxone for as long as I needed to A doctor that would help me taper slowly and gradually, not abruptly Sadly, I didn't find what I was looking for back in January of 2014. Good Addiction Treatment Centers in Nashville are Finally Here This is usually the place in the article where I tout all of Nashville Recovery's benefits over the other outpatient addiction treatment centers in Nashville. Yet the truth is, there are lots of good addiction treatment centers in Middle Tennessee. Many I would recommend to anyone looking to get clean from their opioid addiction. It Doesn't Matter Where You Go - As Long as You Actually Go Like me six years ago, many people don't think or perhaps even know there's a solution for their opioid addiction. They think they're a special case, take too many pills, have used for too long and simply can't be helped. The good news is they're wrong. I won't say all outpatient addiction treatment centers in Nashville are great, but I will say that as long as you find a clinic that is state licensed, provides Suboxone and private therapy, and appear to have your best interests at heart, then you can probably get clean. The Key is Just Getting Started Don't wait - Get started today. Choose a clinic, make the appointment and get going. Even if the clinic you choose isn;t right for you, at least you're taking a step in the right direction. Once you start Suboxone you're probably going to feel a whole lot better and that should buy you some time to hunt for the perfect clinic. Taking Action is the First Step in Addiction Treatment The truth is, Nashville Recovery IS different than most other addiction treatment centers. Here's a few bullet points to help you compare us to other state licensed addiction treatment centers: We are state licensed. Most addiction treatment centers in Nashville are not state licensed. Being state licensed means we go through annual audits that ensure we are providing the most up to date guidelines and procedures for outstanding opioid recovery) We provide and promote free weekly therapy to all of our clients We are owned by people in recovery. (No one knows addiction like an addict in recovery!) We provide a very positive atmosphere and a staff that's motivational for your recovery We don't judge people. We don't care what you've done in the past. What matters is what you do right now. You've probably had enough people judge you and put you down for your addiction. What if you had a place to go where people lifted you up? Made you feel like a human being and helped you overcome a disease that is taking your life away? That's what we do. We Are Determined to Help You Succeed Nashville Recovery's staff is determined to help you succeed. We provide the education, medicines, therapy, tools, motivation and opportunity to change your life for the better. And, we stick with you for as long as needed, since everyone's path is different. You might need three months or you might need three years. Does it really matter how long it takes if it changes your life forever? We provide recovery for as long as you need it, we won't tell you when to stop or when to taper. It's totally up to you. If you would like to try Nashville Recovery, you can schedule a phone or video appointment today and begin taking Suboxone immediately. Weekly phone, video and clinic therapy is provided at no additional charge to all clients. Addiction treatment via telemedicine has made opioid recovery faster, easier and more affordable than ever before. You simply can't choose a better time to start addiction treatment then right now. Read the full article

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bpcparents · 5 years ago

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Intimate Connection Paves the Path to Independence

As parents of high school grads know well, that diploma doesn’t mean young adults have learned all they need to know to enter the wider world. Whether moving on to college or heading directly into the workforce, adult children continue to require loving guidance, and an empty nest doesn’t mean the job is done. Rather, it signals a new stage of parenting -- one that’s widely undertreated, incomplete, and imbalanced, but full of surprising and uniquely touching opportunities for deepening our relationships with our kids as we parent them into adulthood.

Conventional wisdom on parenting newly-adult kids (18+) emphasizes boundaries and exhortations on the importance of parents “letting go,” so that just-launched offspring discover independence. Focused on avoiding the pitfalls of helicopter and snowplow parents who micromanage or remove obstacles in their kids’ paths to a fault, much of the literature reasonably warns against stifling or controlling young people.

These are understandable cautions; after all, as even The Wall Street Journal reports, “Baby boomers are far more immersed with their own grown children than their parents were with them“ (13 Jan, 2019). Indeed, Karen Fingerman, a professor of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Texas, Austin found that “parents in the early 2000s offered about twice as much counsel and practical support (which could be anything from babysitting grandkids, running their grown kids’ errands or reviewing their résumés) as parents did in the 1980s.” To this, I would point out, however, that there’s nothing objectively better or worse about the relative merits of either generation’s degree of “immersion.” What we should be addressing is the quality of parental involvement after kids hit legal age.

IT’S PERSONAL My own observations as both a parent and an educator teach me that too much emotional distance can sometimes rob young adults of the intimate connection to trusted family that they need to effectively transition to independence. In fact, I would argue that the “holy grail” of independence has been traded out too often -- albeit inadvertently -- for estrangement and alienation, to the unnecessary and avoidable detriment of the very kids their well-intentioned parents aimed to serve by stepping back.

Impersonal contact can also occur as a result of parental discomfort facing what some people feel as the “awkward” areas of human development that accompany late-teens and early-adults. Emerging identity naturally takes that age group into territory that traditional cultural conventions consider taboo in “polite company,” namely: sex, drugs, politics, and money. But allowing space for young people to make their own discoveries and decisions is not the same as getting a free pass to bag out of what may be uncomfortable parenting responsibilities altogether. Suicide rates among youth aged 15-24 increased by 50% over the last decade in the US (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention), signaling the intensifying urgency to reconsider how we cultivate meaningful connection and sustaining ties that bind youth to the love in their lives.

SEX TMI? Get over it; young people need candor without judgment, and avoiding the topic has real health consequences, both physical and emotional. Whether or not they decide to become sexually active, as humans, young people are certainly sexual beings and need understanding to navigate effectively in integrity with themselves. The availability since 2006 of the HPV vaccine for kids as young as nine-years-old has offered the benefit of parents and kids matter-of-factly discussing sex as a health issue even before reaching double digits. Protecting a young person’s privacy on this front must be absolute. They also set the boundaries, but don’t necessarily wait for them to raise the topic and definitely don’t be squeamish when they come knocking for advice. The pervasive messages and misinformation on social media stoke fears and insecurities, increasing the necessity for sound, accurate, and trustworthy information. Consent is the watchword, and sons need protective guidance as much as daughters do.

& GENDER In fact, when it comes to the separate but related issue of gender, the younger population is way ahead of most of those of us currently parenting. Awareness and understanding about gender as a spectrum that transcends binary categories is vital and literally life-saving. GLSEN and Gender Spectrum are two leading national organizations that have accomplished progress across the country toward creating greater understanding and safety for students in increasingly gender-inclusive schools. Young adults are more advanced in their comprehension and conduct, so now’s the time to catch up, Mom and Dad!

DRUGS News headlines abound with dire statistics about the heroin epidemic in the US, but the American Academy of Pediatrics reports that the broad social acceptability of alcohol in typical households continues to make booze the nation’s gateway drug. Their data document that “physiologic vulnerability to substance use is aggravated by environmental factors, including the availability, promotion, and modeling of substance use behaviors” (AAPpubs, 2/2019). For example, children who initiate drinking before age 14 are five times more likely to develop an alcohol use disorder compared with those who initiate at age 19. A similar pattern is seen with both marijuana and the misuse of prescription opioid medication. Indeed, delayed substance use initiation into adulthood is associated with a substantially reduced risk of ever developing a substance use disorder, underscoring the importance of prevention and early intervention strategies designed to delay initiation and reduce substance use in this group. Nonetheless, the peak ages of substance use initiation occur during adolescence and early adulthood, and programs designed for adolescents and young adults are almost entirely absent.

The good news is that parents have it entirely within their control to limit their children’s exposure to alcohol in the first place by abstaining themselves and making home a substance-free zone. Sound extreme? It’s actually one of the fastest growing and most popular trends on college campuses across the US. Whether out of religious piety, personal preference, military duty, or because they’re recovering addicts, increasing numbers of entering freshman are competing for housing in substance-free dorms. Given the rising surge of a substance-free reality for university students, why not start the same at home?

MONEY On the financial front, young adults are usually still dependent, but many of them feel irksomely so. Of course, it’s possible to help without making them feel on the dole. Most healthcare plans allow parents to carry their children on their plans until the age of 26, but that doesn’t mean that the young adults themselves can’t contribute toward their share of the costs. Similarly with auto insurance and cell phone plans; gradually, they can contribute increasing amounts toward their portion of those key programs. Doing so educates them to real world expenses, but there’s no reason to lord over them any sense of feeling beholden. Don’t make them ask, don’t make them “grateful.” Engage them as partners, discussing details of available options. Model money as a river rather than a pot of gold to be won. Encourage them as agents who can make and manage the flow of money, not as custodians of fixed sums, which can feed a shortage mentality. Encourage them to earn, save, donate, invest, and spend wisely. And if that doesn’t work out, restrategize with them rather than shame them, so that they can recover a footing and work their way back to solvency. Co-banking is a great way to start kids out while they’re still at home, displaying all accounts in a online single window, and the practice paves the way to skilled credit, debit, checking, and savings management that can become increasingly independent.

POLITICS In this era of heightened political division, it’s especially important to model citizenship, curiosity, tolerance, reason, fairness, and commitment to due process. Spouting opinions does nothing to quiet the din of distortion on social media that surrounds our children’s generation; we owe it to them to demonstrate an allegiance to facts and a genuine interest in how they see the world and what they value. Ask rather than pontificate, and by all means get that absentee voter ballot in the mail on deadline!

CLOSING ABOUT CLOSE-ING Engaging our adult children at such deep levels in the very areas of life that people often feel most private about actually equips them with the self-knowledge and confidence to take fully independent strides into the world -- and into connection with others as well. Parenting is love, and love is personal. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote that ”it is a process...that breaks down human isolation.” The wellbeing of our young adult children depends on the willingness of their parents to engage in this inimitably intimate process because, she notes, “we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”

Elizabeth Messinger is a former journalist with NPR and The Economist of London. Through her educational consultancy, Mind in Motion, she guides children of all ages to think for themselves, and she teaches Humanities at an independent school in Stamford, CT. She raised her son in Bedford, where together they ran the Toddler Room at the Presbyterian Church for nearly a decade. She continues to parent from NY as he attends college in California.

#ElizabethMessinger #Parenting #independence

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sufredux · 5 years ago

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American Political Decay or Renewal?

Two years ago, I argued in these pages that America was suffering from political decay. The country’s constitutional system of checks and balances, combined with partisan polarization and the rise of well-financed interest groups, had combined to yield what I labeled “vetocracy,” a situation in which it was easier to stop government from doing things than it was to use government to promote the common good. Recurrent budgetary crises, stagnating bureaucracy, and a lack of policy innovation were the hallmarks of a political system in disarray.

On the surface, the 2016 presidential election seems to be bearing out this analysis. The once proud Republican Party lost control of its nominating process to Donald Trump’s hostile takeover and is riven with deep internal contradictions. On the Democratic side, meanwhile, the ultra-insider Hillary Clinton has faced surprisingly strong competition from Bernie Sanders, a 74-year-old self-proclaimed democratic socialist. Whatever the issue—from immigration to financial reform to trade to stagnating incomes—large numbers of voters on both sides of the spectrum have risen up against what they see as a corrupt, self-dealing Establishment, turning to radical outsiders in the hopes of a purifying cleanse.

In fact, however, the turbulent campaign has shown that American democracy is in some ways in better working order than expected. Whatever one might think of their choices, voters have flocked to the polls in state after state and wrested control of the political narrative from organized interest groups and oligarchs. Jeb Bush, the son and brother of presidents who once seemed the inevitable Republican choice, ignominiously withdrew from the race in February after having blown through more than $130 million (together with his super PAC). Sanders, meanwhile, limiting himself to small donations and pledging to disempower the financial elite that supports his opponent, has raised even more than Bush and nipped at Clinton’s heels throughout.

The real story of this election is that after several decades, American democracy is finally responding to the rise of inequality and the economic stagnation experienced by most of the population. Social class is now back at the heart of American politics, trumping other cleavages—race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, geography—that had dominated discussion in recent elections.

The gap between the fortunes of elites and those of the rest of the public has been growing for two generations, but only now is it coming to dominate national politics. What really needs to be explained is not why populists have been able to make such gains this cycle but why it took them so long to do so. Moreover, although it is good to know that the U.S. political system is less ossified and less in thrall to monied elites than many assumed, the nostrums being hawked by the populist crusaders are nearly entirely unhelpful, and if embraced, they would stifle growth, exacerbate malaise, and make the situation worse rather than better. So now that the elites have been shocked out of their smug complacency, the time has come for them to devise more workable solutions to the problems they can no longer deny or ignore.

THE SOCIAL BASIS OF POPULISM

In recent years, it has become ever harder to deny that incomes have been stagnating for most U.S. citizens even as elites have done better than ever, generating rising inequality throughout American society. Certain basic facts, such as the enormously increased share of national wealth taken by the top one percent, and indeed the top 0.1 percent, are increasingly uncontested. What is new this political cycle is that attention has started to turn from the excesses of the oligarchy to the straitened circumstances of those left behind.

Two recent books—Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Robert Putnam’s Our Kids—lay out the new social reality in painful detail. Murray and Putnam are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, one a libertarian conservative and the other a mainstream liberal, yet the data they report are virtually identical. Working-class incomes have declined over the past generation, most dramatically for white men with a high school education or less. For this group, Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again!” has real meaning. But the pathologies they suffer from go much deeper and are revealed in data on crime, drug use, and single-parent families.

Back in the 1980s, there was a broad national conversation about the emergence of an African American underclass—that is, a mass of underemployed and underskilled people whose poverty seemed self-replicating because it led to broken families that were unable to transmit the kinds of social norms and behaviors required to compete in the job market. Today, the white working class is in virtually the same position as the black underclass was back then.

During the run-up to the primary in New Hampshire—a state that is about as white and rural as any in the country—many Americans were likely surprised to learn that voters’ most important concern there was heroin addiction. In fact, opioid and methamphetamine addiction have become as epidemic in rural white communities in states such as Indiana and Kentucky as crack was in the inner city a generation ago. A recent paper by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton showed that the death rates for white non-Hispanic middle-aged men in the United States rose between 1999 and 2013, even as they fell for virtually every other population group and in every other rich country. The causes of this increase appear to have been suicide, drugs, and alcohol—nearly half a million excess deaths over what would have been expected. And crime rates for this group have skyrocketed as well.

American democracy is finally responding to the economic stagnation of most of the population.

This increasingly bleak reality, however, scarcely registered with American elites—not least because over the same period, they themselves were doing quite well. People with at least a college education have seen their fortunes rise over the decades. Rates of divorce and single-parent families have decreased among this group, neighborhood crime has fallen steadily, cities have been reclaimed for young urbanites, and technologies such as the Internet and social media have powered social trust and new forms of community engagement. For this group, helicopter parents are a bigger problem than latchkey children.

THE FAILURE OF POLITICS

Given the enormity of the social shift that has occurred, the real question is not why the United States has populism in 2016 but why the explosion did not occur much earlier. And here there has indeed been a problem of representation in American institutions: neither political party has served the declining group well.

In recent decades, the Republican Party has been an uneasy coalition of business elites and social conservatives, the former providing money, and the latter primary votes. The business elites, represented by the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, have been principled advocates of economic liberalism: free markets, free trade, and open immigration. It was Republicans who provided the votes to pass trade legislation such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the recent trade promotion authority (more commonly known as “fast track”). Their business backers clearly benefit from both the import of foreign labor, skilled and unskilled, and a global trading system that allows them to export and invest around the globe. Republicans pushed for the dismantling of the Depression-era system of bank regulation that laid the groundwork for the subprime meltdown and the resulting financial crisis of 2008. And they have been ideologically committed to cutting taxes on wealthy Americans, undermining the power of labor unions, and reducing social services that stood to benefit the less well-off.

This agenda ran directly counter to the interests of the working class. The causes of the working class’ decline are complex, having to do as much with technological change as with factors touched by public policy. And yet it is undeniable that the pro-market shift promoted by Republican elites in recent decades has exerted downward pressure on working-class incomes, both by exposing workers to more ruthless technological and global competition and by paring back various protections and social benefits left over from the New Deal. (Countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, which have done more to protect their workers, have not seen comparable increases in inequality.) It should not be surprising, therefore, that the biggest and most emotional fight this year is the one taking place within the Republican Party, as its working-class base expresses a clear preference for more nationalist economic policies.

The Democrats, for their part, have traditionally seen themselves as champions of the common man and can still count on a shrinking base of trade union members to help get out the vote. But they have also failed this constituency. Since the rise of Bill Clinton’s “third way,” elites in the Democratic Party have embraced the post-Reagan consensus on the benefits of free trade and immigration. They were complicit in the dismantling of bank regulation in the 1990s and have tried to buy off, rather than support, the labor movement over its objections to trade agreements.

But the more important problem with the Democrats is that the party has embraced identity politics as its core value. The party has won recent elections by mobilizing a coalition of population segments: women, African Americans, young urbanites, gays, and environmentalists. The one group it has completely lost touch with is the same white working class that was the bedrock of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. The white working class began voting Republican in the 1980s over cultural issues such as patriotism, gun rights, abortion, and religion. Clinton won back enough of them in the 1990s to be elected twice (with pluralities each time), but since then, they have been a more reliable constituency for the Republican Party, despite the fact that elite Republican economic policies are at odds with their economic interests. This is why, in a Quinnipiac University survey released in April, 80 percent of Trump’s supporters polled said they felt that “the government has gone too far in assisting minority groups,” and 85 percent agreed that “America has lost its identity.”

The Democrats’ fixation with identity explains one of the great mysteries of contemporary American politics—why rural working-class whites, particularly in southern states with limited social services, have flocked to the banner of the Republicans even though they have been among the greatest beneficiaries of Republican-opposed programs, such as Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. One reason is their perception that Obamacare was designed to benefit people other than themselves—in part because Democrats have lost their ability to speak to such voters (in contrast to in the 1930s, when southern rural whites were key supporters of Democratic Party welfare state initiatives such as the Tennessee Valley Authority).

THE END OF AN ERA?

Trump’s policy pronouncements are confused and contradictory, coming as they do from a narcissistic media manipulator with no clear underlying ideology. But the common theme that has made him attractive to so many Republican primary voters is one that he shares to some extent with Sanders: an economic nationalist agenda designed to protect and restore the jobs of American workers. This explains both his opposition to immigration—not just illegal immigration but also skilled workers coming in on H1B visas—and his condemnation of American companies that move plants abroad to save on labor costs. He has criticized not only China for its currency manipulation but also friendly countries such as Japan and South Korea for undermining the United States’ manufacturing base. And of course he is dead set against further trade liberalization, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Asia and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe.

All of this sounds like total heresy to anyone who has taken a basic college-level course in trade theory, where models from the Ricardian one of comparative advantage to the Heckscher-Ohlin factor endowment theory tell you that free trade is a win-win for trading partners, increasing all countries’ aggregate incomes. And indeed, global output has exploded over the past two generations, as world trade and investment have been liberalized under the broad framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and then the World Trade Organization, increasing fourfold between 1970 and 2008. Globalization has been responsible for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in countries such as China and India and has generated unfathomable amounts of wealth in the United States.

Yet this consensus on the benefits of economic liberalization, shared by elites in both political parties, is not immune from criticism. Built into all the existing trade models is the conclusion that trade liberalization, while boosting aggregate income, will have potentially adverse distributional consequences—it will, in other words, create winners and losers. One recent study estimated that import competition from China was responsible for the loss of between two million and 2.4 million U.S. jobs from 1999 to 2011.

The standard response from trade economists is to argue that the gains from trade are sufficient to more than adequately compensate the losers, ideally through job training that will equip them with new skills. And thus, every major piece of trade legislation has been accompanied by a host of worker-retraining measures, as well as a phasing in of new rules to allow workers time to adjust.

In practice, however, this adjustment has often failed to materialize. The U.S. government has run 47 uncoordinated federal job-retraining programs (since consolidated into about a dozen), in addition to countless state-level ones. These have collectively failed to move large numbers of workers into higher-skilled positions. This is partly a failure of implementation, but it is also a failure of concept: it is not clear what kind of training can transform a 55-year-old assembly-line worker into a computer programmer or a Web designer. Nor does standard trade theory take account of the political economy of investment. Capital has always had collective-action advantages over labor, because it is more concentrated and easier to coordinate. This was one of the early arguments in favor of trade unionism, which has been severely eroded in the United States since the 1980s. And capital’s advantages only increase with the high degree of capital mobility that has arisen in today’s globalized world. Labor has become more mobile as well, but it is far more constrained. The bargaining advantages of unions are quickly undermined by employers who can threaten to relocate not just to a right-to-work state but also to a completely different country.

The American political system will not be fixed unless popular anger is linked to good policies.

Labor-cost differentials between the United States and many developing countries are so great that it is hard to imagine what sorts of policies could ultimately have protected the mass of low-skilled jobs. Perhaps not even Trump believes that shoes and shirts should still be made in America. Every industrialized nation in the world, including those that are much more committed to protecting their manufacturing bases, such as Germany and Japan, has seen a decline in the relative share of manufacturing over the past few decades. And even China itself is beginning to lose jobs to automation and to lower-cost producers in places such as Bangladesh and Vietnam.

And yet the experience of a country such as Germany suggests that the path followed by the United States was not inevitable. German business elites never sought to undermine the power of their trade unions; to this day, wages are set across the German economy through government-sponsored negotiations between employers and unions. As a result, German labor costs are about 25 percent higher than their American counterparts. And yet Germany remains the third-largest exporter in the world, and the share of manufacturing employment in Germany, although declining, has remained consistently higher than that in the United States. Unlike the French and the Italians, the Germans have not sought to protect existing jobs through a thicket of labor laws; under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Agenda 2010 reforms, it became easier to lay off redundant workers. And yet the country has invested heavily in improving working-class skills through its apprenticeship program and other active labor-market interventions. The Germans also sought to protect more of the country’s supply chain from endless outsourcing, connecting its fabled Mittelstand, that is, its small and medium-size businesses, to its large employers.

In the United States, in contrast, economists and public intellectuals portrayed the shift from a manufacturing economy to a postindustrial service-based one as inevitable, even something to be welcomed and hastened. Like the buggy whip makers of old, supposedly, manufacturing workers would retool themselves, becoming knowledge workers in a flexible, outsourced, part-time new economy, where their new skills would earn them higher wages. Despite occasional gestures, however, neither political party took the retooling agenda seriously, as the centerpiece of a necessary adjustment process, nor did they invest in social programs designed to cushion the working class as it tried to adjust. And so white workers, like African Americans in earlier decades, were on their own.

A voter arrives to cast their ballot in the Wisconsin presidential primary election at a voting station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, April 2016.

The first decade of the century could have played out very differently. The Chinese today are not manipulating their currency to boost exports; if anything, they have been trying recently to support the value of the yuan in order to prevent capital flight. But they certainly did manipulate their currency in the years following the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 and the dot-com crash of 2000–2001. It would have been entirely feasible for Washington to have threatened, or actually imposed, tariffs against Chinese imports back then in response. This would have entailed risks: consumer prices would have increased, and interest rates would have risen had the Chinese responded by not buying U.S. debt. Yet this possibility was not taken seriously by U.S. elites, for fear that it would start a slide down the slippery slope of protectionism. As a result, more than two million jobs were lost in the ensuing decade.

A WAY FORWARD?

Trump may have fastened onto something real in American society, but he is a singularly inappropriate instrument for taking advantage of the reform moment that this electoral upheaval represents. You cannot unwind 50 years of trade liberalization by imposing unilateral tariffs or filing criminal indictments against American multinationals that outsource jobs. At this point, the United States’ economy is so interconnected with that of the rest of the world that the dangers of a global retreat into protectionism are all too real. Trump’s proposals to abolish Obamacare would throw millions of working-class Americans off health insurance, and his proposed tax cuts would add more than $10 trillion to the deficit over the next decade while benefiting only the rich. The country does need strong leadership, but by an institutional reformer who can make government truly effective, not by a personalistic demagogue who is willing to flout established rules.

Nonetheless, if elites profess to be genuinely concerned about inequality and the declining working class, they need to rethink some of their long-standing positions on immigration, trade, and investment. The intellectual challenge is to see whether it is possible to back away from globalization without cratering both the national and the global economy, with the goal of trading a little aggregate national income for greater domestic income equality.

Clearly, some changes are more workable than others, with immigration being at the top of the theoretically doable list. Comprehensive immigration reform has been in the works for more than a decade now and has failed for two reasons. First, opponents are opposed to “amnesty,” that is, giving existing undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. But the second reason has to do with enforcement: critics point out that existing laws are not enforced and that earlier promises to enforce them have not been kept.

The idea that the government could deport 11 million people from the country, many of them with children who are U.S. citizens, seems highly implausible. So some form of amnesty appears inevitable. Immigration critics are right, however, that the United States has been very lax in enforcement. Doing this properly would require not a wall but something like a national biometric ID card, heavy investment in courts and police, and, above all, the political will to sanction employers who violate the rules. Moving to a much more restrictive policy on legal immigration, in which some form of amnesty for existing immigrants is exchanged for genuine efforts to enforce new and tougher rules, would not be economically disastrous. When the country did this before, in 1924, the way was paved, in certain respects, for the golden age of U.S. equality in the 1940s and 1950s.

It is harder to see a way forward on trade and investment, other than not ratifying existing deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership—which would not be extremely risky. The world is increasingly populated with economic nationalists, and a course reversal by Washington—which has built and sustained the current liberal international system—could well trigger a tidal wave of reprisals. Perhaps one place to start is to figure out a way to persuade U.S. multinationals, which currently are sitting on more than $2 trillion in cash outside the United States, to bring their money home for domestic investment. U.S. corporate tax rates are among the highest in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; reducing them sharply while eliminating the myriad tax subsidies and exemptions that corporations have negotiated for themselves is a policy that could find support in both parties.

Another initiative would be a massive campaign to rebuild American infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it would take $3.6 trillion to adequately upgrade the country’s infrastructure by 2020. The United States could borrow $1 trillion while interest rates are low and use it to fund a massive infrastructure initiative that would create huge numbers of jobs while raising U.S. productivity in the long run. Hillary Clinton has proposed spending $275 billion, but that number is too modest.

But attempts to accomplish either goal would bump into the more routine dysfunctions of the American political system, where vetocracy prevents either tax reform or infrastructure investment. The American system makes it too easy for well-organized interest groups to block legislation and to “capture” new initiatives for their own purposes. So fixing the system to reduce veto points and streamline decision-making would have to be part of the reform agenda itself. Necessary changes should include eliminating both senatorial holds and the routine use of the filibuster and delegating budgeting and the formulation of complex legislation to smaller, more expert groups that can present coherent packages to Congress for up-or-down votes.

This is why the unexpected emergence of Trump and Sanders may signal a big opportunity. For all his faults, Trump has broken with the Republican orthodoxy that has prevailed since Ronald Reagan, a low-tax, small-safety-net orthodoxy that benefits corporations much more than their workers. Sanders similarly has mobilized the backlash from the left that has been so conspicuously missing since 2008.

“Populism” is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like. There is of course no reason why democratic voters should always choose wisely, particularly in an age when globalization makes policy choices so complex. But elites don’t always choose correctly either, and their dismissal of the popular choice often masks the nakedness of their own positions. Popular mobilizations are neither inherently bad nor inherently good; they can do great things, as during the Progressive era and the New Deal, but also terrible ones, as in Europe during the 1930s. The American political system has in fact suffered from substantial decay, and it will not be fixed unless popular anger is linked to wise leadership and good policies. It is still not too late for this to emerge.

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ntrending · 6 years ago

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Can you overdose on weed?

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/can-you-overdose-on-weed/

Can you overdose on weed?

Too much marijuana can cause extreme confusion, increased blood pressure and heart rate, and unintentional injury. But dying from the substance alone is very unlikely, if possible at all. (Deposit Photos/)

Last month, a coroner in Louisiana claimed to have recorded the first death exclusively caused by weed.

Toxicology results for a woman who died in February suggested she was killed by an excess amount of THC, the primary psychoactive component of weed, the coroner, Christy Montegut, told the New Orleans Advocate. Montegut failed to find anything else—drugs, alcohol, disease—that could have attributed to her death.

Stories about a supposed first-ever lethal marijuana overdose occasionally crop up. They’re usually followed by rebuttals that no, as far as we know it’s not possible to die from ingesting too much THC at one time—and dying from another cause while having THC in your system is not quite the same thing.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a government agency that handles drug use and addiction, there has yet to be an adult death attributable solely to marijuana. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also states that while using too much marijuana can cause extreme confusion, emotional distress, increased blood pressure, heart rate, severe nausea, or unintentional injury, “a fatal overdose is unlikely.”

A prominent argument for the impossibility of death by weed is a statistical one: Marijuana is the most commonly used illicit drug in the United States. Half of U.S. adults have tried it in their lifetime and one in five young adults under age 25 report having used marijuana in the past month, according to 2017 NIDA statistics. In 2015, 36 million Americans over the age of 12 reported using marijuana in the past year—which, according to rudimentary statistics, would have resulted in dozens of fatalities if the odds of blazing yourself to death was even one-in-a-million.

“Whether you can die from an overdose of marijuana, the answer is no,” says Alex Manini, an emergency medicine clinician specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. But can someone overdose on marijuana? Manini says yes. Technically, an overdose happens any time someone takes more than the normal or recommended amount of a substance or drug.

And people show up in emergency rooms all the time after overdoing it with cannabis, Manini says, with all kinds of serious symptoms: panic or anxiety attacks, passing out, rapid heart rate—even an increasingly common condition where cannabis users can’t stop vomiting.

“You (can) think of taking a hit as a therapeutic dose, to get a feeling of euphoria, maybe the giggles,” he says. Or you can smoke so much that you feel like you need to go to the hospital. “I would call that an overdose. Will you die, if you’re a young, healthy person? Probably not.”

Marijuana is still a Schedule I drug, according to the federal government, and technically still doesn’t have any currently accepted medical uses. Still, numerous states have moved to legalize marijuana for recreational or medical treatment (mostly for conditions such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, seizures, epilepsy, and chronic pain). We also know—from a 2016 analysis of marijuana samples from materials confiscated by the Drug Enforcement Administration over two decades—that the potency of THC in marijuana has increased at least threefold since 1995.

Altogether, this means that more people have more access to strong cannabis. For most, that just increases your probability of getting higher than planned. But for some people, doctors say the advent of widespread, highly-potent cannabis products increases their risk of an overdose.

One group of at-risk individuals is children, who can accidentally ingest cookies, brownies, and other treats infused with super-concentrated THC doses—especially in states where recreational marijuana has been legalized. In a 2016 study, researchers investigated 430 calls to the National Poison Data System from 2013 to 2015 related to cannabis edibles and drinks; they not only found that the number of such calls increased year over year, but they also noted that a quarter of the cases involved children under the age of five, who, unlike adults, don’t know an ordinary looking treat might contain several doses of THC.

“That was a big finding,” says Dazhe Cao, a co-author of the study and a medical toxicology doctor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. For those young children, cannabis exposure typically made them sleepy or uncoordinated, or affected their breathing (in two cases leading to intubation).

“That could [be a] potentially life-threatening situation for a child,” says Mount Sinai’s Manini. “Children are not little adults”—their bodies process all drugs differently than even a more petite adult would.

Synthetic cannabinoids—man-made chemicals sometimes called Spice or K2—have also complicated the safety of all cannabinoids. When Manini and colleagues compared the clinical effects of synthetic weed with regular marijuana in 87 emergency department patients, they found those who ingested synthetic cannabis fared far worse, according to results published in 2016.

“They had much worse cardiovascular effects, much worse agitation,” he says. The two products are chemically different, he explains, and so their safety should be considered separately. “The safety of marijuana has been borne out over decades. This is a whole new world.”

And even if marijuana itself won’t directly kill you, there have been deaths associated with cannabis products, Cao says. In a 2014 case, a 19-year-old Colorado man died after he ate a cannabis cookie, began behaving erratically, and jumped off a fourth-floor balcony. His autopsy reported marijuana intoxication as a chief contributing factor.

“It is very controversial to say whether someone can die from marijuana or cannabis products” Cao says. “They’re not always direct causes of deaths.”

Cannabis use can also increase heart rate and blood pressure, and it can be a risk factor for some people who have pre-existing heart-related conditions, whether they know it or not.

In one 2014 study, a group of French researchers examined 35 medical cases and concluded that cannabis could be a potential trigger for cardiovascular complications in young people. And when researchers from the Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia analyzed a national database of patients, they found the prevalence of heart failure, stroke, coronary artery disease, and sudden cardiac death, were significantly higher in patients with cannabis use, according to results published in 2018. After adjusting for a number of factors including age, sex, diabetes, and tobacco or alcohol use, they found cannabis use remained an independent predictor of both heart failure and stroke.

Scientific evidence also links long-term marijuana smoking with chronic bronchitis and respiratory symptoms like coughing and wheezing (there is not an established association between smoking weed and the incidence of lung or head and neck cancer). The long-term health effects of vaping remain mostly unknown.

If you have pets at home, you might also be wondering how marijuna might affect them. For obvious reasons, the rise in edibles can pose a danger for your furry friends. Cats and dogs are increasingly exposed to THC-containing products, especially chocolate-containing treats, according to a 2018 examination of calls made to the Pet Poison Helpline. Because dog brains have more cannabinoid receptors than human ones, the study notes, they could be more sensitive to marijuana’s psychoactive properties (common signs of poisoning for dogs include lethargy, impaired balance, vomiting, and increased sensitivity to motion and sound). As seems to be the case with humans, the paper also notes synthetic cannabinoids may result in more severe symptoms for pets, such as tremors, aggression, and seizures. But to be clear, the authors note that “fatality in pets from marijuana intoxication is extremely rare” and that no deaths associated with marijuana had ever been reported to Pet Poison Helpline.

All of this is not to say people should be afraid of marijuana, Manini says, or should lump it in with other commonly-used substances that regularly kill people (on average, 130 Americans die every day from opioid overdose and six people die daily from alcohol poisoning in the U.S.). Across the nation, most people over the age of 12 don’t see a great risk of harm from monthly marijuana use, according to statistics from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

“It probably has a better safety profile than a lot of other illegal substances,” Cao says. “The perception that this is dangerous is dropping. But you can absolutely overdose.” Actually dying from that overdose however, is far less likely—if at all possible.

Have a science question you want answered? Email us at [email protected], tweet at us with #AskPopSci, or tell us on Facebook. And we’ll look into it.

Written By Marion Renault

#Environment

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emlydunstan · 6 years ago

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How to Deal with Dental Anxiety in Recovery: An Interview with Dr. Tasha Bollermann

I suffer with near-debilitating dental anxiety. Every time I visit the dentist it affects my whole body: I struggle to articulate how I feel and the issues I’m experiencing, I become so tense that I have to be reminded to breathe, and I typically lose the whole next day due to exhaustion and an emotional hangover. And I’m not alone. Almost everyone I speak to in recovery has some kind of dental anxiety — so much so that many avoid the dentist altogether, neglecting care they desperately need. Thankfully, I have a great therapist. She suggested that I mindfully explore the process of receiving dental care, advocating for my needs, and recovering my ability to self-regulate my fight or flight response. I have complex PTSD, which makes this whole process more challenging.Since moving to America I’ve spent thousands of dollars on dental care. I had no choice but to deal with months of dental pain by having a whole host of procedures, including root canals and crowns — all of which were unpleasant, to say the least. During one procedure I even had a panic attack, and I left many doctors’ offices feeling like I was too sensitive, an inconvenience.In my heart I knew that there had to be a dentist out there for me. I was so tired of feeling dismissed by doctors who roll patients in and out like they’re on a conveyor belt, only treating the symptom and never looking deeper.I had to find a doctor who understood the complexity of my situation and medical history and was thoughtful and patient enough to look at my experience holistically. After four dentists, I finally found one who demonstrated listening and compassion on a scale I’d never experienced. She had me when she told me that it was an honor to do her job.Curious to find out more about why people in recovery neglect their oral health, and the impact that drugs have on our teeth, I interviewed Dr. Tasha Bollermann for The Fix.The Fix: Thank you for taking the time to participate in this interview.Dr. Bollermann: I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to participate in this dialogue. The work you are doing to help people in recovery is important and powerful. My goal is to help people who are suffering live healthier and happier lives. I would also like to thank the reader for showing up and being ready to take the next step in their journey. Whether you know it or not, some part of you brought you to this article. Some part of you wants to break the cycle and pattern of where you have been and move into wholeness. You are ready for the next level of growth and healing. Otherwise you would not be reading this right now. Some of what I say might make you uncomfortable. This could be a signal that it is an area you are ready to begin to heal. So, congratulations on being here. I hope my words help you make progress in your journey.In your opinion, why do you think there is a tendency to neglect oral health even when the person is in recovery? What do you think are the main barriers preventing necessary treatment?Substance use may stem from a lack of self-love and self-respect. The basic needs for survival were not met, and therefore self-respect was not able to develop from a very early age. Often people show signs of self-loathing. This can lead to a desire to numb the shame with substances.I have witnessed the transformation from self-loathing to self-love. The habits of self-neglect need to be replaced with habits of self-care and nurturing. Teeth are vital for our survival. A person with a nice smile will get a job that a person with obvious dental diseases will not. Statistics show that the first thing we notice about a stranger is their eyes, and the second is their smile. So, breaking the habit of self-neglect and replacing it with a habit of self-care is essential to success. In my experience, the biggest barrier to oral health care in recovery is the lack of desire to care for yourself, and the lack of good habits. Neglect can lead to severe damage to the teeth and other organs. Often the damage to teeth is obvious without the expert opinion of a dentist. It is blatantly obvious to everyone you meet, as well as yourself when you look in a mirror. In comparison, the damage to the internal organs is less obvious. A return to overall health can be costly in time and money. There are financial obstacles in some cases and location obstacles in others, but a lot can be done with a toothbrush, some floss, a healthy diet, and a desire to get better.What are some of the effects that certain drugs have on the teeth, like meth for example? Are these effects from the drugs themselves, or rather from neglect?First of all, most drugs are harmful to teeth, so I don’t want you to think that this is a complete list of problems. However, some drugs deserve a mention here. Meth, for example, is one of the most destructive drugs I have encountered. It destroys the teeth rapidly. To my understanding, the drug itself is corrosive, which means it dissolves the teeth. Second, it creates extreme sugar cravings, which accelerates the process of tooth destruction. Ecstasy causes permanent neurologic changes in the brain. These changes create severe clenching and/or grinding of the teeth during sleep.Another substance use-related challenge is not being able to get adequately numb for comfortable dental treatment. This is most commonly seen with heroin and cocaine, but I also see it with alcohol consumption.Alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco are probably the most common drugs I encounter in my practice. The risk of losing the teeth to gum disease is significant, not to mention the risk of oral cancer. The more you drink and smoke, the higher your risk.Dental phobia is prevalent within the recovery community. How can people deal with that?Severe dental anxiety is best addressed before the dental appointment with a skilled practitioner of hypnosis, EMDR, neuro-linguistic programming, or other anxiety and recovery therapy. Once the patient can step into a dental office, it’s important for them to understand that they are not alone in their fear. The majority of people have fear around dental treatment. The stories my patients tell me are often heart-wrenching. Lying in a dental chair and having someone work on something so vital to your survival is a very vulnerable position to be in. Finding a dentist you can trust will help you build habits of success to manage your anxiety.Some patients are so terrified of communicating with their dentist that they often experience a frozen sensation, unable to articulate their fears or level of discomfort. What would you recommend to a patient that is even terrified to raise their hand to ask you to stop?This is tricky. As dentists, we rely on our patients to give us feedback on how they are doing. If the patient knows that this kind of freezing up has happened in the past and they share it with the dentist, then together they can work out a plan of action. A touch on the shoulder to reassure and check in can break the spell, so to speak. However, some patients don’t want to be touched. Again, I would say that needs to be discussed, and some kind of signal has to be arranged. Everyone has to be involved in the conversation. The dental assistant is, more often than not, the person who sees and acknowledges the signal, so the patient needs to include the assistant in the conversation as an important part of the team. If the patient is intimidated by the dentist, they should talk to the assistant about ways they can signal a concern that needs to be addressed.Many people in recovery will refuse pain medication stronger than Tylenol and local anesthetic. What do you recommend as a way to ease dental anxiety, and how would they compare to say traditional anxiety medications like benzodiazepines?The patients who refuse strong pain or anxiety medications are very wise. Benzodiazepines and opioids are highly addictive and can interfere with the recovery process. There are alternative ways to achieve relaxation and pain relief. Double-blind studies show time and again that ibuprofen and Tylenol are better pain control medications than prescription narcotics. Some of my patients visualize a safe and happy place that they escape to in their mind. Others take a combination of over-the-counter relaxation aids. Another approach is the use of acupuncture, aromatherapy, or naturopathic treatments before or after a dental appointment. Anyone in recovery should be careful about what they take for relaxation and pain control.L-theanine reduces anxiety. It promotes relaxation and stress reduction without sedating. L-theanine can help foster a state of calm, attentive wakefulness. It has positive effects on both the mental and physical symptoms of stress, including lowering heart rate and blood pressure. It is available in most health food stores.GABA (Gamma-Aminobutyric acid) is an amino acid produced naturally in the brain. It reduces the activity of neurons in the brain and central nervous system, which in turn has a broad range of effects on the body and mind, including increased relaxation, reduced stress, a more calm, balanced mood, alleviation of pain, and a boost to sleep. It’s available in most health food stores. It should not be used by patients already taking gabapentin.Brainwave entrainment works for almost everyone. It is a great way to lead your mind into states that you might usually have difficulty reaching, allowing you to experience a sense of calm relaxation without medication. Instructions are available on YouTube.If you plan on using any of these alternatives, I recommend you try them out in the comfort of your home first to see how it affects you. (Editor’s note: Consult your physician before taking any supplements. Even benign substances may interact with other medications or have unintended side effects.)What are some dental advancements that people may not be aware of since their last visit, but which would make the experience a whole lot less stressful?While most of the advances in dentistry are technical in nature, many shorten the time you have to spend in the chair. These include digital X-rays. You used to have to wait 15 or 20 minutes for the dentist, hygienist or assistant to process the films and bring them back, leaving you waiting and worrying. Now they are instantly available. The biggest advancement I would recommend is exercising your personal choice in dentists. Many dental offices today are very patient focused, virtually gone are the days of little to no concern for patient comfort. Choose your next dental office carefully, with the assumption that you will find a compassionate office.Tell me what similarities you see between dental disease and substance use disorders. Both dental disease and substance use disorder are lifestyle diseases. You can overcome both by creating small lifestyle changes that build on themselves. Achievement in oral health, or in substance use recovery, is a practice in the art of daily living. People who grow up in an environment of brushing and flossing daily are more likely to continue doing those things into adulthood. Those who grow up in an environment where the basic needs of survival are either not met or are minimally met are likely to continue those patterns into adulthood. Sponsors help keep the substance use at bay, and in a way the dental team is a sponsor for oral health. Regular checkups allow connection and repetition, which build habits of success. Habits of success build self-respect and self-love.Many of us neglect our teeth while in active addiction and sometimes this continues into recovery. How are you taking care of your teeth today? Let us know in the comments.

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How to Deal with Dental Anxiety in Recovery: An Interview with Dr. Tasha Bollermann

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