New Antidepressant Drug Increases 'Brain's Own Cannabis'

ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2005) — Researchers have discovered a new drug that raises the level of endocannabinoids -- the 'brain's own cannabis' -- providing anti-depressant effects. The new research published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggests the new drug, called URB597, could represent a safer alternative to cannabis for the treatment of pain and depression, and open the door to new and improved treatments for clinical depression--a condition that affects around 20% of Canadians.

New Antidepressant Drug Increases 'Brain's Own Cannabis'

Shared via AddThis

Kings Cross Times: Drug laws create major social injustice

If prohibition is a false and failed instrument -- and this blog shows there is a very strong case for that proposition -- then all the people arrested, jailed, injured or killed in its name are the victims of a social injustice that ranks with any of the more visible progressive causes.

Concerned and caring people fight for the rights of minorities oppressed because of their race, gender or religion etc, but the victims of prohibition remain a relatively unseen class, even though their numbers overlap hugely with the more readily identified oppressed groups.

This is explained carefully in an article by Harry G. Levine, author and professor of sociology at Queens College, City University of New York. He shows how the 430,000 arrests in New York for possession of small amounts of cannabis since 1997 are often carried out under false pretenses by police, who also discriminate heavily against blacks and hispanics.

This is happening even though the possession of less than one ounce of marihuana is explicitly decriminalised in New York State.

And the same is happening here. While we don't seem to have professors doing the research, it's obvious enough on the streets of Kings Cross. Here police routinely stop people they don't like the look of, demand ID without legal grounds to do so, publicly search people and target particular people with sniffer dogs, while pulling the dogs off others who have been indicated.

These are not wild accusations -- I have photographs of this happening. Pictured above is a policeman clearly pulling a sniffer dog on a tight leash to a Koori man in Springfield Plaza. The man was unconcerned and the dog did not indicate. I also have photographs of several police with two sniffer dogs running down a man who was walking along the street, before putting the dogs onto him. No drugs were found, as usual.

I took this up with a previous local commander who surprised me by claiming that this was legal procedure. I had naïvely thought that the dogs operated like random breath testing for alcohol, simply trotting around until they smelt drugs on someone. But no, it seems they are an active tool of discrimination.

No-one in progressive politics seems to care about this except to a small extent The Greens who, unfortunately, have retreated from their previous policy of regulated supply in the pursuit of more middle class votes. Tough luck for the oppressed minorities, I guess.

PS 18 Aug 09: Here's a fiery talk from Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance in the US, speaking at an NAACP conference on prohibition as an instrument of racial oppression.

Kings Cross Times: Drug laws create major social injustice

Kings Cross Times: NCPIC Director exposed as 'prohibitionist'

Professor Jan Copeland, highly paid Director of The National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC), has been described as "a very enthusiastic supporter of prohibition" on the UKCIA blog.

The writer, who says he has heard Professor Copeland speak three times at forums in the UK, claims her input into NCPIC publicity is slanted and easy to spot. This opinion resonates with this blog's sharp criticism of NCPIC's output since its inception.

Questions must be asked about a supposedly evidence-based public organisation which is seen to be driven by the personal ideology of its director. Our tax dollars should be spent on establishing the truth, not selectively interpreting evidence to support a preordained ideology.

The public has a right to assume that information presented as scientific is unbiased and reliable, especially when it comes from a Professor and they are paying for it.

And credulous media accepting NCPIC's media releases as authoritative need to look a little further into the facts, or at least seek opposing comment, before amplifying such propaganda. I name The Sydney Morning Herald and 702 Radio's Deborah Cameron as guilty in this regard. At least Professor Copeland's inaugural essay on the ABC blog was open to comments and was factually flamed.

To see previous posts on this subject, with links to the abovementioned material, just type NCPIC into the blog search field above.

Posted by The Editor at 10:28 AM

Kings Cross Times: NCPIC Director exposed as 'prohibitionist'

Global tide turning against the War on Drugs

Author:
Michael Gormly
Posted:
Thursday, 3 September 2009

OPINION

Except for the occasional glimmer of light, consumers of Australian media can be forgiven for thinking the dark age of drug prohibition is not only justified but securely incumbent.

While our media, most politicians and even some health experts continue to regurgitate an evolving panoply of drug myths usually traceable to ultra-conservative US elements, truth will out and the international tide is on the turn against prohibition.

One of these myths is the one about cannabis and psychosis. New strains of skunk are X times stronger than the weed baby-boomers smoked in the 60s, and it's sending today's teenagers crazy, right?

Wrong. The perpetrators of this myth have funded a swag of dodgy research to link cannabis and psychosis, and our media faithfully regurgitate the moral panic. But they fail to explain why rates of psychosis have not significantly risen since pot became popular in the West over the past four decades; and anyone who thinks the drugs of the 1970s were not potent either wasn't there or had no personal experience of them.

Yet research still shows links between cannabis and psychosis. It drives horror headlines variously claiming that smoking pot results in a 40 or even a 200 per cent increase in the risk of mental illness, depending on the shrillness of the source. But what they don’t tell you is that this dramatic increase in risk is limited to far less than one percent of smokers. While a 40 percent increase in risk sounds alarming, 40 per cent of nearly nothing is no reason for a worldwide War on Drugs which directly kills countless thousands of people each year.

Other recent marijuana myths claim that it shrinks your brain, makes your teeth fall out and gives you cancer. Horrid little Frankensteins are still injecting people and rats with pure THC (an active ingredient of cannabis) to prove it is toxic, even though no-one has ever died directly from cannabis.

Locally we now have the lavishly funded National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre (NCPIC) to foment panic. It published a minor study claiming that cannabis makes people violent “ pure Reefer Madness nonsense. It has now conducted an evidence review to support a new campaign claiming that driving stoned is the same as driving drunk. But this is not backed up by NCPIC's own report, which concludes that great variations and inconsistencies in the findings detract from the likelihood of a clear synthesis of results.

None of these cannabis plagues actually show up clearly in population studies, which is why authoritative bodies like the British Government's Scientific Advisory Panel advised against reclassifying pot into the more serious Category B. This was ignored by Gordon Brown, who went ahead anyway in a desperate pursuit of political points. The privately funded Beckley Commission recognises dangers of cannabis but concludes that prohibition is disproportionate and ineffective.

A recent Cato Institute study assessed Portugal's progress since it decriminalised all drugs including the hard ones in 2001. Cannabis use is down among teens and HIV transmission has been slashed.

This is awkward stuff for prohibitionists who always assert that going soft on drugs will unleash a tsunami of drug abuse and mental illness. They also have trouble with solid world-wide evidence that liberal harm minimisation practice“ needle exchanges, supervised injecting centres and the like“ is the best way to reduce HIV transmission among injecting drug users and does not increase drug use.

It is this HIV factor which is turning the United Nations away from the US-driven War on Drugs towards a new approach based on harm minimisation.

This is despite the still-powerful influence of Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and a keen prohibitionist.
In 1998 his organisation declared it would make the world drug-free by 2008. Despite the spectacular failure of this ambition, he has recommended another ten years of War on Drugs. Given that the global illicit drug market rivals the oil industry in size, and any kid can still score pot in any town in Australia, his defence is reduced to nonsense sound-bites such as Drugs are not harmful because they are controlled, they are controlled because they are harmful. Sounds neat, except that drugs are not controlled and prohibition clearly makes them more harmful ” as we are repeatedly told by police who warn against buying ecstasy pills because you never know what's in them.

Costa ignored a recent global email campaign urging him to explain why, if prohibition was effective, cannabis usage in the Netherlands (where it is freely available) is around one-third the rate in the prohibitionist US, which jails more people for possession than any other country. The US has five per cent of the world’s population but 25 per cent of its prisoners, most of them black or Hispanic. No-knock raids on homes by armed para-military police are common there, frequently resulting in the death of innocent people because information was wrong or police just got the wrong house.

Fortunately for the world, Costa is outranked by UN General Assembly resolutions in support of harm minimisation, echoed by WHO.

The election of Barak Obama is also significant. While he is not dismantling US prohibition, he has stopped Federal law enforcers busting people for medical marihuana use in the growing number of states which have legalised it.

Mexico has just decriminalised personal possession of most drugs with nary a peep out of the Obama Administration, in sharp contrast to the last time Mexico tried this route only to backtrack under intense pressure from the Bush administration. Now Argentina has also decriminalised cannabis, and the cocaine-producing nations of South America are calling for a change of strategy as their countries are being ripped apart by drug cartel warfare without any reduction in cocaine production which is fuelled, ironically, by the huge profits to be made in the US market..

Respected journal The Economist is campaigning against prohibition while the idea of regulated supply is making the opinion pages of leading newspapers including The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.

Even police in the US have a 16,000-member organization, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which has erected roadside billboards announcing Drug abuse is bad “ the Drug War is WORSE

But here in backward Sydney, the Miranda Devines, Fred Niles and the Christian Right keep singing from the same old songbook and this supposedly global city is embarrassed when travellers from progressive countries are confronted by the sight of police with sniffer dogs searching people in the street like a scene from some hardcore American cop show or an Iron-Curtain police state. This is no longer the free country we have fought so many wars to defend.

All inner city residents suffer the fallout from prohibition “ from syringes in the street to muggers, beggars and burglars feeding addictions, to less obvious problems such as police focusing on easy drug busts instead of, say, high-visibility policing in late-night entertainment precincts where a stronger presence would reduce actual violence.

It's time we got real.

by Michael Gormly

PS The latest study to question the cannabis-schizophrenia link, and a host of other current Drug Law Reform information, is blogged on my Kings Cross Times site.


Global tide turning against the War on Drugs « Alternative Media Group

Shared via AddThis

Cannabis chemicals may help fight prostate cancer

LONDON - Chemicals in cannabis have been found to stop prostate cancer cells from growing in the laboratory, suggesting that cannabis-based medicines could one day help fight the disease, scientists said Wednesday.

After working initially with human cancer cell lines, Ines Diaz-Laviada and colleagues from the University of Alcala in Madrid also tested one compound on mice and discovered it produced a significant reduction in tumor growth.

Their research, published in the British Journal of Cancer, underlines the growing interest in the medical use of active chemicals called cannabinoids, which are found in marijuana.

Experts, however, stressed that the research was still exploratory and many more years of testing would be needed to work out how to apply the findings to the treatment of cancer in humans.

"This is interesting research which opens a new avenue to explore potential drug targets but it is at a very early stage," said Lesley Walker, director of cancer information at Cancer Research UK, which owns the journal.

"It absolutely isn't the case that men might be able to fight prostate cancer by smoking cannabis," she added

The cannabinoids tested by the Spanish team are thought to work against prostate cancer because they block a receptor, or molecular doorway, on the surface of tumour cells. This stops them from dividing.

In effect, the cancer cell receptors can recognize and "talk to" chemicals found in cannabis, said Diaz-Laviada.

"These chemicals can stop the division and growth of prostate cancer cells and could become a target for new research into potential drugs to treat prostate cancer," she said.

Her team's work with two cannabinoids -- called methanandamide and JWH-015 -- is the first demonstration that such cannabis chemicals prevent cancer cells from multiplying.

Some drug companies are already exploring the possibilities of cannabinoids in cancer, including British-based cannabis medicine specialist GW Pharmaceuticals.

It is collaborating with Japan's Otsuka on early-stage research into using cannabis extracts to tackle prostate cancer -- the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men -- as well as breast and brain cancer.

GW has already developed an under-the-tongue spray called Sativex for the relief of some of the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, which it plans to market in Europe with Bayer and Almirall.

Other attempts to exploit the cannibinoid system have met with mixed success. Sanofi-Aventis was forced to withdraw its weight-loss drug Acomplia from the market last year because of links to mental disorders.

Cannabis chemicals may help fight prostate cancer

Shared via AddThis

Melanoma in Australia expected to rise

Lucky for us that Hemp Oil rubbed directly onto melanoma's has been known to cure them in as fast as 2 weeks just apply a small amount of hash oil made from female cannabis flowers to your melanoma then cover with a band aid. Repeat every 12 - 24 hours for 5 days. 2 weeks after the end of treatment be sure to go back to your specialist to be re-checked so you can make sure that the cancer is infact gone and tell them how you cured your own skin cancer.

Quote

"Melanoma in Australia expected to rise"

Doubt cast on cannabis, schizophrenia link

A British study has cast doubt on the supposed link between cannabis use and schizophrenia, but at least one Australian researcher says the study needs more evidence.

Previous research has suggested cannabis use increases the risk of being diagnosed with either psychosis or schizophrenia.

This latest study, led by Dr. Martin Frisher of Keele University, examined the records of 600,000 patients aged between 16 and 44, but failed to find a similar link.

"An important limitation of many studies is that they have failed to distinguish the direction of association between cannabis use and psychosis," the authors write in the September edition of the journal Schizophrenia Research.

They point out that "although using cannabis is associated with a greater risk of developing psychosis, there is also evidence of increased cannabis use following psychosis onset."
Not as predicted

Frisher and colleagues compared the trends of cannabis use with general practitioner records of schizophrenia and psychosis.

They argue that if cannabis use does cause schizophrenia, an increase in cannabis use should be followed by an increase in the incidence of schizophrenia.

According to the study, cannabis use in the United Kingdom between 1972 and 2002 has increased four-fold in the general population, and 18-fold among under-18s.

Based on the literature supporting the link, the authors argue that this should be followed by an increase in schizophrenia incidence of 29 per cent between 1990 and 2010.

But the researchers found no increase in the rates of schizophrenia and psychosis diagnosis during that period. In fact, some of the data suggested the incidence of these conditions had decreased.

"This study does not therefore support the specific causal link between cannabis use and the incidence of psychotic disorders," the authors say. "This concurs with other reports indicating that increases in population cannabis use have not been followed by increases in psychotic incidence."
Study 'just a start'

Prof. Joseph Rey of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Sydney, whose previous research has identified a link between cannabis and schizophrenia, is skeptical of the study's results.

"Not showing that there is a link does not mean there is no link," he says. "There might be other factors at play that may reduce the incidence of diagnosed schizophrenia."

According to Rey, "this study is just a start and the evidence suggesting that cannabis use does increase the risk of schizophrenia is quite strong. We need more evidence to counteract what we already know."

The authors of the study say that while they cannot completely dismiss all alternative explanations of their data, such explanations "do not appear to be plausible."
Doubt cast on cannabis, schizophrenia link

Shared via AddThis

Its time to Legalize Cannabis in Australia

It is time for the Australian government to legalise cannabis in Australia immediately. The Australian government has continued to ignore any real evidence related to cannabis and they seem to still be under the belief that it is bad for you, regardless of the multitudes of information and evidence out there proving the exact opposite.

Now i don't know what news and medical reports they are reading but if you go through the Archive of my blog for example www.legalizecannabisaustralia.blogspot.com you will see quite a few very interesting headings there, and if you take the time to read the articles and the source information you will see that even in a short time i have been able to accumulate massive amounts of legitimate medical and non-medical studies showing, proving that cannabis is a safe natural medicine and far safer that other medicine's on the market today and also that cannabis is a far safer form of recreational activity that alcohol and other recreational drugs.
These are studies from some of the biggest names in medicine like Dr. Donald Tashkin, Dr. Robert Melemede CEO of "Cannabis Science", studies and reports from the United States law enforcement community LEAP "Law Enforcement Against Prohibition". Independent studies from United Kingdom.

I also provide links and resources to the real world of cannabis the truth untainted by Government greed and political opinion. There are now even money making organisations popping up trying to reap peoples hard earned $$ to spread further lies about cannabis like NCPIC "National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre" who clearly state on their website that:

There is limited research on the long-term effects of cannabis. On the available evidence, the major probable adverse effects are:

    * increased risk of respiratory diseases associated with smoking, including cancer (WRONG & WRONG READ DR DONALD TASHKIN'S REPORT & THIS REPORT ON CANCER)
    * decreased memory and learning abilities (WRONG READ THIS MEDICAL REPORT ON CANNABIS'S IMPACT ON BRAIN FUNCTION)
    * decreased motivation in areas such as study, work or concentration(WRONG ESPECIALLY IF THE USER HAS ADD OR ADHD READ THIS REPORT)
    * Drive on Cannabis and your as good as drunk. (WRONG THIS IS BASED ON STATISTICS THAT ARE BASED OFF INACCURATE TESTING EQUIPMENT THAT DOESN'T TEST FOR THE DIFFERENT FORM OF THC CREATED WHEN YOU ARE NOT UNDER THE INFLUENCE SEE THE ONLY STUDY WHERE THEY ACTUALLY TESTED THIS UNDER REAL LIFE CIRCUMSTANCES WITH REAL PEOPLE SEE THE EVIDENCE HERE AND HERE)

Lets pause a second and look at NCPIC's Information statement

    "One of the key goals of the Centre is to provide the Australian community with access to evidence-based information on cannabis and related harms."

Wow i am seeing a real lack of evidence so far but wait there's more

    "Not only is it important that this information be accurate and up-to-date, it is also vital that it is easily accessible to a range of target audiences. As a result, NCPIC has endeavored to provide as much of this information in an electronic form on the website as possible."

And there it is they are spreading lies and making money. It is time we put a stop to the lies and propaganda and start to tell Australians the truth about cannabis.

We as Australians supporting Australians are calling for the following:

• to re legalise and regulate cannabis for personal, medical and industrial uses.

• to allow for health education, home growing, and regulated sales through registered outlets which will separate cannabis from the criminality of the black-market and end consequent associated corruption.

• to allow medical use, utilising cannabis' painkilling, relaxing, anti nausea and healing properties.

• to establish a commercial hemp industry producing fuel,fibre, paper, textiles, food, oil and other environmentally sound products.

• to release all those imprisoned for cannabis alone and the removal of all records of previous criminal cannabis convictions.

If you are seriously interested in cannabis legalisation and are brave enough please join the Australian HEMP Party we need all the members we can get. I know your out there according to studies 11% of Australians use cannabis now. Its time to re-educate Australia from the lies that are being spread to Australians about the worlds most powerful plant.

Please take the time to see this well presented video on the Truth about cannabis

High: The True Tale of American Marijuana PT1

"I smoked Marijuana since I was to young but I never became a drinker and never got hooked on any other drugs. In fact Marijuana probably kept me from looking any further and exploring other drugs because I all ready felt happy with weed. It helped me through physical back pain, and also a period in my life when I had anxiety. Its been 20 years of occasional use now I do not have cancer and I am not addicted and use it maybe 6 times a year" by bonzaibb12