Dušmane, reaguj! (ili nemoj, baš me briga!)

[smrklja]

Da znaš, mada što kaže Džimi pre mi liči na kompliment 

[DušMan]

Pre će biti da je samo zloban komentar nekoga ko nema ni najmanju predstavu o čemu priča. Ne treba da se obazirati.

[Melkor]

[DušMan]

GASP!
Lepa devojka crvene kose, a još dolazi i iz fine kuće, očigledno.
Gde joj mogu poslati bračnu ponudu u formi moje golišave fotografije?

[zakk]

Evo ti katalog: http://fuckyeahnerdnudity.tumblr.com/

[Meho Krljic]

Persistent cannabis users show neuropsychological decline from childhood to midlife 
Mada, naravno, ja koji nikada nisam zapalio džoint takođe osećam neuropsihološki diklajn... Nekad se kletvi ne može pobeći... Ali dobro, ovo je naučna studija pa... eto.

E, sad, nova studija tvrdi da je ova studija bila grešna! Da nisu uzeti u obzir socioekonomski faktori, bla bla bla...:

Pot smokers might not turn into dopes after all

Cannabis rots your brain — or does it? Last year, a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)1 suggested that people who used cannabis heavily as teenagers saw their IQs fall by middle age. But a study published today2 — also in PNAS — says that factors unrelated to cannabis use are to blame for the effect. Nature explores the competing claims.

What other factors might cause the decline in IQ?

Ole Røgeberg, a labour economist at the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Oslo and the author of the latest paper, ran simulations which showed that confounding factors associated with socioeconomic status could explain the earlier result. For example, poorer people have reduced access to schooling, irrespective of cannabis use.

Is this a case of correlation versus causation?

Possibly. The data used in the original paper came from the Dunedin Study, a research project in which a group of slightly more than 1,000 people born in New Zealand in 1972–73 have been tracked from birth to age 38 and beyond. As with all such birth-cohort epidemiological studies (also called longitudinal studies), there is a risk of inferring causal links from observed associations between one factor and another.

Past research on the Dunedin cohort shows3 that individuals from backgrounds with low socioeconomic status are more likely than others to begin smoking cannabis during adolescence, and are more likely to progress from use to dependence. Røgeberg says that these effects, combined with reduced access to schooling, can generate a correlation between cannabis use and IQ change.

According to Røgeberg, people with low socioeconomic status are, on average, likely to show declining IQ as they age and gradually self-select or are sorted into less cognitively demanding arenas. For example, they are less likely than people with high socioeconomic status to attend university, and more likely to take manual jobs.

Do other studies show a drop in IQ with cannabis use?

Røgeberg cites three studies4–6 in which cannabis use is not associated with declining IQ. He says that these studies show clear reductions in IQ for the heaviest smokers, but these are not permanent, and people who have stopped smoking heavily show no decline.

What do the original paper's authors make of Røgeberg's analysis?


Madeline Meier, a psychologist at the Duke Transdisciplinary Prevention Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, who co-wrote the original paper with her colleagues, says that Røgeberg's ideas are interesting. However, she points out that the authors of the first PNAS paper restricted their analysis to individuals in middle-class families and those with low or high socioeconomic status. The outcome suggests that the decline in IQ cannot be attributed to socioeconomic factors alone.

In their original analysis, Meier says, she and her colleagues controlled for socioeconomic status and found that in all socioeconomic categories, the IQs of children who were not heavy users remained unchanged from adolescence to adulthood. Therefore, she says, socioeconomic status does not influence IQ decline.

So who is right?

It is hard to say. Both analyses study the same data set in different ways, and each has merits.

Is there a way to find out the answer definitively?

Perhaps — by comparing the Dunedin Study with another in a different country. Such comparisons have been done before. For example, the United Kingdom's Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) found that children who were breastfed for longer went on to have higher IQs, lower blood pressure and lower body mass indices than those who were not. However, longer breastfeeding is associated with higher socioeconomic status in the United Kingdom; when the data were compared with data from the Pelotas longitudinal study in Brazil, where breastfeeding is not associated with higher socioeconomic status, the link with increased IQ was maintained, but the other benefits disappeared7.

What do other scientists think?

Mitch Earleywine, a psychologist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, says that Røgeberg's analysis definitely supports the idea that links between adolescent cannabis use and drops in IQ are essentially spurious, arising from socioeconomic differences rather than any sort of pharmacological action. John Macleod of the University of Bristol, UK, who works on the ALSPAC data, points out that Meier and her colleagues acknowledged in their original paper that the results might be caused by confounding factors. He adds that the modelling in Røgeberg's paper shows that within a set of reasonable assumptions, this is indeed possible.
 Naturedoi:10.1038/nature.2013.12207

[ex pistol]

http://www.darkwood.co.rs/forum/index.php?topic=676.msg308341#msg308341


 

[ex pistol]

puj pike ovaj gore link ne važi


mislio sam na ovo:


http://www.darkwood.co.rs/forum/index.php?topic=925.msg308341#msg308341

[Meho Krljic]

Nova studija veli da svakodnevno pušenje kanabisa može da se poveže sa ranijim proživljavanjem psihotičnih epizoda kod ljudi koji bi ih možda i inače imali:



Daily pot tied to age of first psychotic episode

 NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - In a study of adults who experienced psychosis for the first time, having smoked marijuana daily was linked to an earlier age of onset of the disorder, according to UK researchers.
 "This is not a study about the association between cannabis and psychosis, but about the association between specific patterns of cannabis use . . . and an earlier onset of psychotic disorders," Dr. Marta Di Forti, who led the research at the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College, said in an email.
 Among more than 400 people in South London admitted to hospitals with a diagnosed psychotic episode, the study team found the heaviest smokers of high-potency cannabis averaged about six years younger than patients who had not been smoking pot.
 Psychosis is a general term for a loss of reality, and is associated with several psychiatric diseases, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
 Some previous research has suggested that using cannabis might trigger psychosis in some people, especially those who may be vulnerable because of a family history of related mental illnesses or specific gene mutations.
 But the evidence has been unclear. For example, one recent study from the Netherlands found it's equally possible that people prone to psychosis may be more likely to smoke pot, possibly as a way of "self-medicating" (see Reuters Health article of December 25, 2012, here: http://reut.rs/1d7aIvU)
 In the new study, published in the Schizophrenia Bulletin, the researchers focused on patterns of cannabis use, gender and the relationship of those factors to the timing of a first psychotic episode.
 Age is significant, Di Forti's team notes in their report, because the teenage years and early twenties are a critical time for professional and educational development, so experiencing an acute psychotic episode for the first time early on may negatively affect the "likelihood of achieving optimum level of function."
 The researchers surveyed 410 patients between the ages of 18 and 65, two thirds of them male, all of whom had a psychotic episode and were admitted to in-patient psychiatric units.
 The surveys asked about history of using tobacco, alcohol, cannabis and other illicit drugs. They also recorded the potency of cannabis used, characterizing low potency as "hash-type" and high potency as "skunk-type."
 In a previous study based on police seizures of marijuana in South East London, skunk-type cannabis was found to contain 16 percent THC, the active compound in cannabis, compared to 4 percent in the hash-type.
 The researchers found that males were more likely overall to use cannabis and also had a younger age of onset of psychosis. The mean age at the time of the first psychotic episode for male users of cannabis was 26, and for female users was nearly 29. That compared with nearly 30 years old for male non-users and 32 for female non-users.
 They also found the patients who started using cannabis at age 15 or younger preferentially smoked high-potency cannabis more often and had an earlier onset of psychosis than those who started using cannabis after age 15.
 The earliest onset was seen among those who used high-potency cannabis daily - on average their first psychosis was 6 years earlier than for non-users.
 "This study adds to the literature on earlier age of onset for those with significant exposure to cannabis," said Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who was not involved in the study.
 Compton cautioned that this study specifically focused on patterns of cannabis use among people who all developed psychosis, but did not compare them to users who did not experience psychosis.
 "The thorny question is whether they might otherwise have developed the disease or would have not had mental illness. It's a distinction we haven't figured out yet," Compton said.
 Di Forti emphasized that it is important to counsel educators and parents about the risks of cannabis use in teenagers.
 "I would try and understand why people use cannabis, what do they get from it first and then engage them explaining how using daily, choosing high potency type can cause harm to their brain and increase risk of psychosis," she said.
 It is still unclear whether there are safe levels of use for cannabis, she added. "We know for instance that alcohol can be highly toxic or damaging in the long term to health but that sensible use of it causes no harm. We do not yet know enough about safe use of cannabis and more research is needed," she said.
 In counseling teenagers on cannabis use, Compton said, "Parents face the challenge of keeping their children safe in many spheres. Parents must establish a nurturing environment, appropriate supervision and being aware of who their children associate with."
 In light of recent changes in marijuana laws in Washington state and Colorado, Compton said he thinks more research will be done on the effects of marijuana on mental illness to understand the risks associated with use.
 "Even if marijuana is legal for adults, and if cannabinoids have some legitimate medical purpose, that doesn't mean that they are safe for all individuals," he said.
 SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1iX3PRE Schizophrenia Bulletin, online December 17, 2013.

[Meho Krljic]

Svetska zdravstvena organizacija poziva na dekriminalizaciju korišćenja narkotika:


http://www.who.int/hiv/pub/guidelines/keypopulations/en/


Evo kako i zašto:

The United Nations' leading health agency, the World Health Organization, has called on countries around the world to end the criminalisation of people who use drugs. The call was made in a report published this month that looked at policy responses for dealing with HIV among key populations – men who have sex with men, people who inject drugs, people in prisons and other closed settings, sex workers and transgender people. The WHO's unambiguous recommendation is clearly grounded in concerns for public health and human rights. Whilst the call is made in the context of the policy response to HIV specifically, it clearly has broader ramifications, specifically including drug use other than injecting.
In the report, the WHO says:

• “Countries should work toward developing policies and laws that decriminalize injection and other use of drugs and, thereby, reduce incarceration.
• Countries should work toward developing policies and laws that decriminalize the use of clean needles and syringes (and that permit NSPs[needle and syringe programs]) and that legalize OST [opiate substitution treatment] for people who are opioid-dependent.
• Countries should ban compulsory treatment for people who use and/or inject drugs ”

The report also highlights Portugal's success in decriminalising personal drug possession and treating drug use as a health, rather than a criminal justice, issue. (You can find out more about this approach here.)




This is perhaps the clearest call for such far-reaching reform from within the UN community.
The executive director of UNAIDS has also made similar statements in the past. Here he is (on the left) agreeing to a resolution calling for decriminalisation at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna in 2010:


This latest call from a UN agency is likely to have been informed by recommendations made in 2012 by the Global Commission on HIV and the Law (pdf), an independent body convened by the United Nations Development Programme and UNAIDS to explore the discrimination experienced by people living with HIV. The Commission's final report contained the folowing statement:
“Reform approaches towards drug use. Rather than punishing people who use drugs but do no harm to others, governments must offer them access to effective HIV and health services, including harm reduction programmes and voluntary, evidence-based treatment for drug dependence”
The growing chorus of UN voices calling for the same progressive drug policy reform offers some hope that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the body that oversees the current international drug control regime, will adopt a similarly pragmatic and humane approach to dealing with people who use drugs. Ending criminalisation remains something that the UNODC has hinted at but so far never called for as explicitly as their UN colleagues. Given that the WHO, UNAIDS and UNODC share responsibility for HIV policy, it is surely only a matter of time.
For more on decriminalisation, what it means, who is doing it, why, and how, see this chapter written by Transform's Steve Rolles, and Niamh Eastwood from Release, in the HRI Global State of Harm Reduction 2012 report.

[Meho Krljic]

The hipster effect:
When anticonformists all look the same

[Meho Krljic]

Odličan & poučan tekst:


http://www.cracked.com/article_19470_6-classic-kids-shows-slapped-together-from-recycled-material.html

[Meho Krljic]

How America Lost the War on Drugs

After thirty-five years and $500 billion, drugs are as cheap and plentiful as ever. An anatomy of a failure

[Meho Krljic]

How Snoopy Killed Peanuts

[Meho Krljic]

 Nazis Were Fueled by Crystal Meth, New Book Shows

[Meho Krljic]

U kontinuiranom naporu (donekle ispraćenom na ovom topiku) da se utvrdi smeta li konzumacija kanabinoida razvoju intelekta kod mladih ljudi, nova studija tvrdi da ne, ne smeta. Mislim da ju je Lilita kačila negde drugde na forumu pre neki dan ali ja sam sada nezavisno naleteo na nju pa je red da bude i na ovom topiku:



Twins study finds no evidence that marijuana lowers IQ in teens

Roughly half of Americans use marijuana at some point in their lives, and many start as teenagers. Although some studies suggest the drug could harm the maturing adolescent brain, the true risk is controversial. Now, in the first study of its kind, scientists have analyzed long-term marijuana use in teens, comparing IQ changes in twin siblings who either used or abstained from marijuana for 10 years. After taking environmental factors into account, the scientists found no measurable link between marijuana use and lower IQ.
“This is a very well-conducted study … and a welcome addition to the literature,” says Valerie Curran, a psychopharmacologist at the University College London. She and her colleagues reached “broadly the same conclusions” in a separate, nontwin study of more than 2000 British teenagers, published earlier this month in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, she says. But, warning that the study has important limitations, George Patton, a psychiatric epidemiologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, adds that it in no way proves that marijuana—particularly heavy, or chronic use—is safe for teenagers.
Most studies that linked marijuana to cognitive deficits, such as memory loss and low IQ, looked at a single “snapshot” in time, says statistician Nicholas Jackson of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, lead author of the new work. That makes it impossible to tell which came first: drug use or poor cognitive performance. “It's a classic chicken-egg scenario,” he says.
To better probe whether marijuana erodes IQ or inflicts harm in other ways, scientists have started following large groups of teenage drug users over time. The first study to do so, in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 2012 reported significant declines in IQ between ages 13 and 38 in heavy users compared with those who used marijuana occasionally before age 18 or not at all. The paper “had a major effect on thinking about the risks of early heavy exposure to cannabis,” says Patton, a co-author. Critics, however, pointed out that the study failed to rule out other potential explanations for the decline in IQ, such as a teen’s family environment or whether they dropped out of school.
One “powerful” way to address such concerns is to study identical twins, who share genes and upbringing, Jackson says. In the new study, he and his colleagues looked at 789 pairs of adolescent twins from two ongoing studies—one from the Los Angeles, California, area and the other from Minnesota—who enrolled between the ages of 9 and 11. Over the course of 10 years, the team administered five intelligence tests and confidential surveys about marijuana use. They also asked about other drug use such as opioid painkillers, cocaine, and binge drinking.
Marijuana users lost about four IQ points over the course of the study. But their abstinent twin siblings showed a similar pattern of decline, suggesting that the loss of mental sharpness was due to something other than pot, Jackson says. “Our findings lead us to believe that this ‘something else’ is related to something about the shared environment of the twins, which would include home, school, and peers,” he says.
In the new study, teens who reported daily marijuana use for 6 months or longer did not show any difference in how much their IQ changed, compared with teens who had tried pot fewer than 30 times. This is a “clear indication that cannabis is unlikely to be the cause of any IQ decline,” says Claire Mokryz, a Ph.D. student in Curran’s lab.
But others say the new study has flaws—most importantly, a lack of detail about how often and in what quantity the teens used marijuana. The Minnesota and Los Angeles groups used different surveys about drug use. The Los Angeles group’s questions were far less thorough, Patton says. In surveys administered to that group, for example, participants were asked, “Have you ever tried marijuana?” If a 13-year-old respondent answered “yes” after taking just one puff, they could be considered a drug user for every subsequent measurement. “My sense is that this paper does not do enough to dismiss the concerns from [our] Dunedin study about the effects of early heavy cannabis use” in teenagers, Patton says.
 Sarah Feldstein Ewing, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, agrees.  “While it is possible that the findings are absolutely accurate,” she says, the study represents a “missed opportunity to get a truly fine-grained analysis” of the contribution of cannabis and other substances to IQ.
Although there is “emerging evidence” that marijuana does not erode IQ, “this does not mean that heavy use in adolescence is problem-free,” Jackson says. Other aspects of daily functioning could be affected, he says, adding, “we desperately need more research on the effects that marijuana has on the brain.”
The best way to study marijuana’s cognitive effects would be to administer the drug to individuals and see how duration, frequency, and dose affect the brain, Jackson says. “Unfortunately these types of studies are nearly impossible due to federal restrictions,” he says.  For now, he says, "I'm mostly concerned about what's going on in the child's environment, that a 14-year-old is seeking refuge in drugs."
  Posted in:

• Brain & Behavior
• Health

DOI: 10.1126/science.aae0246

Abstrakt: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/01/13/1516648113

[Meho Krljic]

 A Major Problem With Colorado's Marijuana Economy Emerged After Weed Went Legal
 

Something's rotten in Denver, and it's not the pungent stench of burnt cannabis filling the air. As Colorado's legal weed party barrels full tilt into its third year, the laws governing the state's medical and recreational marijuana businesses still haven't reckoned with the ugly racial disparities at their core.
 

The way things are looking, they probably never will. Since Colorado Amendment 64 took effect in January 2014, legal cannabis has meant booming business for the Rocky Mountain State. By mid-June of that year, 292 people had filed notices saying they planned to apply for vendor licenses, according to the Denver Post, while the state government reported it was raking in $52.5 million in marijuana tax revenue including licensing and fees by the end of 2014.
 

It's one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States. But who's being kept out of this lucrative new market?
 
In Colorado, one of the requirements for getting a license to sell medical or recreational cannabis is that you don't have a controlled substance felony conviction on your record — including any involving marijuana. The irony here — that black people are far more likely to have such a conviction than any other racial group in the state — points to one of the biggest problems with legal weed trends sweeping the nation.
 

Legalizing recreational marijuana use has been lauded far and wide as a death knell for the war on drugs. The United States' incarcerated population has risen 500% since the 1970s, much of it fueled by arrests and convictions for nonviolent drug-related crimes. Only recently have politicians and the American people started to agree this is terrible policy and a new approach was necessary. Today, 20 U.S. states have either decriminalized or legalized marijuana.
 
But the racial disparity in who gets punished for drug crimes remains as stark as it always has been. When then-President Richard M. Nixon called for a crackdown on drug use and distribution in 1971, it was widely understood as part of his larger "tough-on-crime" initiative — itself a thinly veiled appeal to whites who felt threatened by the gains of blacks during the civil rights movement. That intent has been reflected in the numbers: 37% of Americans arrested for drug crimes are black, despite whites using drugs at comparable rates, according to the Drug Policy Alliance.
 

And things were certainly no different in the states where marijuana is now legal. In Colorado specifically, black people were 3.1 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites from 2001 to 2010, constituting 10.5% of the state's marijuana arrestees over that period despite making up just 3.8% of the state population.
 
Even now, blacks are 2.5 times more likely to get arrested in Colorado for marijuana-related crimes, including public consumption and possession in excess of the legally sanctioned amount, according to the Guardian. But since voters moved to amend the state constitution to allow for legal marijuana use in 2012, a celebratory zeal has infused the move toward legalization that seems increasingly out of step with its failure to redress the devastation that criminalization left in black communities.
 

We cannot escape that history. Today, just one of Colorado's 424 certified legal marijuana dispensaries is confirmed to be owned by a black woman. (A black man named Dan Pettigrew owns an extract company called Viola Extracts — not technically a dispensary.) That woman's name is Wanda James. In the latest episode of Mic's web series The Movement, James takes aim at the inequality behind this new industry.
 
"When you start to look at the number of white males making billions off of this plant, and black males still serving time because of this plant, it does not make sense that in America, your zip code determines whether you're a millionaire or a felon," James told Mic's Darnell Moore.
 

James' brother, Darrick "Rick" Barnes, is a prime example of these disparities. At 17, Barnes was arrested in Texas for marijuana possession and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Now that the plant is legal in Colorado, he is effectively shut out of the state's cannabis economy, even though he's demonstrated an aptitude for growing the plant as a former employee at his sister Wanda's medical dispensary. "If it's something you like to do, or want to do, or can do, they won't accept you because of [that conviction]," Barnes told Moore. He is currently the manager of his sister's restaurant, Jezebel's, in Denver.
 
As far as whether Colorado's government is making moves to counteract these disparities, that much remains unclear. The Colorado Department of Revenue's Marijuana Enforcement Division did not return Mic's request for comment. But as clemency and pardons are increasingly being handed out to incarcerated victims of the war on drugs — President Barack Obama has commuted the prison sentences of 184 mostly nonviolent drug offenders since spring 2014 — it seems high time to implement reparative measures for those who've suffered the most.
 

Until then, white Coloradans will continue reaping the benefits of the state's booming cannabis economy, while disproportionately targeted black individuals convicted of drug crimes are left in the dust. With this in mind, perhaps the most insidious legacy of the war on drugs is the one that emerged after weed went legit.

[Meho Krljic]

Ovo je vrlo zbunjujuće. Šta sad, jel marihuana štetna il nije? 
 
 What happens when you get stoned every single day for five years
 

New research published today in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine confirms what many of us have suspected for some time: If you smoke a lot of weed — like a lot of it — it can potentially do permanent damage to your short-term memory.
 
Professor Reto Auer of the University of Lausanne led a team of researchers who examined data on the marijuana habits of nearly 3,400 Americans over a 25-year period. At the end of the study period, the subjects took a battery of tests designed to assess cognitive abilities — memory, focus, ability to make quick decisions, etc.
 
The study found that people who smoked marijuana on daily basis for a long period of time — five years or more — had poorer verbal memory in middle age than people who didn't smoke, or who smoked less. This association remained even after researchers controlled for a variety of other factors known to affect cognitive performance, including age, education, use of other substances and depression.
 
Auer and his team measured lifetime marijuana exposure in a fantastic new unit of measurement they call "marijuana-years." Essentially, if you smoke pot every day for a year, that equals one marijuana-year of use. Ditto if you smoke every other day for two years, or once a week for seven years.
 
  [Scientists have found that smoking weed does not make you stupid after all]
 
The relationship between marijuana exposure and memory problems was essentially linear. The more pot people smoked, the worse they performed on the memory tests. But just how much worse?
 
Let's say we have two groups of 10 people each. You tell each of them a list of 15 words and ask them to memorize them. Then 25 minutes later, you ask them to recall all of the words to the best of their ability.
 
The first group consists of 10 people who don't smoke pot or only do so occasionally. Let's say on average, people in this group would be able to remember nine out of the 15 words.
 
The second group consists of people who smoked pot every single day over a period of five years. On average, they'd be able to recall 8.5 out of the 15 words.
 
That doesn't seem like a huge cognitive difference, and by and large it's not. But multiply that by every five marijuana years of exposure and the gap can start to get larger. For instance, say you had a group of people who smoked weed literally every single day from age 20 until they turned 45. At age 45, you'd expect these folks to remember, on average, 2.5 fewer words as a comparable group who had smoked occasionally or not at all over the same period.
 
Few people actually smoke this much pot. Among the 3,385 study subjects, only 311 (8 percent) had more than five marijuana-years of exposure. But many drug policy experts are concerned that legalizing marijuana and making it easier to get will cause rates of heavy, problematic use like this to rise.
 
One important caveat is that a study like this can't determine causality. It could be the case that heavy pot use makes your short-term memory bad, or it could be that people who operate at a lower level of cognitive function are more inclined to use marijuana heavily.
 
It's also worth noting that the other cognitive abilities researchers tested — focus and processing speed — did not seem to be significantly impacted by heavy marijuana use.
 
  [The case for marijuana legalization just got stronger]
 
The association between short-term memory declines — potentially permanent ones — and heavy pot use is very real, according to this study, and shouldn't be discounted. On the other hand, it's also quite surprising that you can smoke weed every single day for five years, and not have it impact your problem-solving abilities or your ability to focus at all.
 
These findings also need to be understood in relation to what we know about the severe cognitive effects of persistent, heavy alcohol use, which include irreversible brain damage.
 
Overall, the take-home message is one of moderation. Whether your preferred vice is pot or alcohol or gambling or Big Macs, it stands to reason that if you overdo it, you're going to hurt yourself.
 
More Wonkblog on marijuana policy:
 
The government is stifling medical marijuana research, major think tank declares
 
Why Bernie Sanders’ marijuana proposal would be a big deal
 
Marijuana is literally the least of the nation’s drug worries, the police have announced
 

[Josephine]

Naravno da jeste u tim kolicinama. Cak i za pluca. No, ne vidim da istrazivanje pominje kvalitet vutre, a trebalo bi. Postoje velike razlike.

Kupila u Amsterdamu dva dzointa jedno vece. Jedan dize, drugi spusta. Podelila ovaj sto dize sa drugricom odmah. Nijedan dzoint me nije tako oraspolozio (stavise, jedan me je u Briselu, jedno vece, zamalo onesvestio - prvi put mi se desilo da mi se svest suzi poput tunela, losa trava. Isto je jednom bilo sa nekim koji sam dobila od druga - drhtala sam 15minuta). Smejala sam se par sati, ustala kristalno ciste glave, puna energije. Ovaj sto spusta ispusila pred voznju natrag u Brisel. Spavala kao bebac, zamalo da prespavamo do Pariza.

Naravoucenije: legalizovanje marihuane poboljsava njen kvalitet, pa se time smanjuje njen stetan dugogodisnji uticaj na zdravlje. Svakako je zdravija od cigareta.

[Meho Krljic]

Long-Term Pot Smoking Doesn’t Seem to Harm Health: Study 
 

Even after years of heavy use, marijuana doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on the physical health of the body.
So finds a recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry, which analyzed data from a group of 1,037 New Zealanders followed from their birth until age 38. The researchers, led by Madeline Meier of Arizona State University, looked at whether cannabis use from age 18 to 38 was linked to several aspects of physical health, which were measured at several points throughout the years of the study through lab tests and self-reports.
The only bad effects pot seemed to have were on the teeth. At age 38, people who used cannabis had worse periodontal health than their peers, and nothing else appeared to be affected. By contrast, tobacco use was connected to all the expected declines: worse lung function, more inflammation and compromised metabolic health. Of course, the results come with a caveat; it’s possible that negative health effects of cannabis could show themselves after the age of 38.
Even more surprisingly, the researchers found that cannabis use over time was linked to a lower BMI, smaller waist circumference and better HDL cholesterol, suggesting that cannabis may be involved in metabolism. But it’s unlikely that this would have a major effect, the study authors note, since pot wasn’t linked to reduced risk of metabolic syndrome.
“There are definitely health risks associated with heavy marijuana use, but there just aren’t as many as we previously thought,” says Dr. Kevin Hill, a marijuana addiction expert and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, whose new commentary on the study is published Tuesday in JAMA.
The same group of researchers discovered some of those health risks in their famous 2012 study. Using data from the same group of New Zealanders, Meier and her team found that heavy marijuana use had effects on the brain on teenagers. Using cannabis regularly was associated with up to an 8 point decline in IQ when people started before age 18. (When adults began using cannabis after age 18—even heavily—they didn’t see this decline.)
“The answers with marijuana aren’t exactly what we would have expected them to be, and this is a great example,” Hill says. “You need to be willing to change your mind on these issues.”
 

[lilit]

Joint Effects: A Pilot Investigation of the Impact of Bipolar Disorder and Marijuana Use on Cognitive Function and Mood
Kelly A. Sagar , M. Kathryn Dahlgren , Megan T. Racine , Meredith W. Dreman , David P. Olson, Staci A. Gruber 
Published: June 8, 2016http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0157060


Abstract
Marijuana is the most widely used illicit substance in those diagnosed with bipolar I disorder. However, there is conflicting evidence as to whether marijuana may alleviate or exacerbate mood symptomatology. As bipolar disorder and marijuana use are individually associated with cognitive impairment, it also remains unclear whether there is an additive effect on cognition when bipolar patients use marijuana. The current study aimed to determine the impact of marijuana on mood in bipolar patients and to examine whether marijuana confers an additional negative impact on cognitive function. Twelve patients with bipolar disorder who smoke marijuana (MJBP), 18 bipolar patients who do not smoke (BP), 23 marijuana smokers without other Axis 1 pathology (MJ), and 21 healthy controls (HC) completed a neuropsychological battery. Further, using ecological momentary assessment, participants rated their mood three times daily as well as after each instance of marijuana use over a four-week period. Results revealed that although the MJ, BP, and MJBP groups each exhibited some degree of cognitive impairment relative to HCs, no significant differences between the BP and MJBP groups were apparent, providing no evidence of an additive negative impact of BPD and MJ use on cognition. Additionally, ecological momentary assessment analyses indicated alleviation of mood symptoms in the MJBP group after marijuana use; MJBP participants experienced a substantial decrease in a composite measure of mood symptoms. Findings suggest that for some bipolar patients, marijuana may result in partial alleviation of clinical symptoms. Moreover, this improvement is not at the expense of additional cognitive impairment.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/asset?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0157060.PDF

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zErP5QoMA3w

[lilit]

http://mondotees.com/collections/toys/products/ramona-flowers-collectible-figure

soon!

[DušMan]

Šteta što se ona deluks verzija sa Skotovom glavom rasprodala i pre nego što je puštena u prodaju.
Hoćemo da naručujemo?

[lilit]

a kako drugačije?
planiram i neki kongres u to doba, taman da ih pokupim 

[DušMan]

Računaj na mene, ako ti ne bude preveliko cimanje. Dobar sam za pare. 

[lilit]

računala sam na tebe, ofc, od momenta kad stavih link, ako deluje da se nije podrazumevalo a valjda je bar "da IH pokupim" značilo nešto
ne gađajmo se ciframa, sve će to stripovi podmiriti
u svakom slučaju, planiram da je imamo čim je izbace i onda stavimo na police o'ma' pored naših skotova.
skot je uvek skot!

[DušMan]

Ma i ja sam se ponadao da to znači to, ali nekad stvari zvuče suviše dobro da bi bile istinite... 
Jedva čekam! 

[Meho Krljic]

Smoking marijuana provides more pain relief for men than women         

Researchers from Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) found that men had greater pain relief than women after smoking marijuana.
Results of the study were recently published online in Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
“These findings come at a time when more people, including women, are turning to the use of medical cannabis for pain relief,” said Ziva Cooper, PhD, associate professor of clinical neurobiology (in psychiatry) at CUMC. “Preclinical evidence has suggested that the experience of pain relief from cannabis-related products may vary between sexes, but no studies have been done to see if this is true in humans.”
In this study, the researchers analyzed data from two double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies looking at the analgesic effects of cannabis in 42 recreational marijuana smokers. After smoking the same amount of either an active or placebo form of cannabis, the participants immersed one hand in a a cold-water bath until the pain could no longer be tolerated. Following the immersion, the participants answered a short pain questionnaire.
After smoking active cannabis, men reported a significant decrease in pain sensitivity and an increase in pain tolerance. Women did not experience a significant decrease in pain sensitivity, although they reported a small increase in pain tolerance shortly after smoking.
Despite differences in pain relief, men and women did not report differences in how intoxicated they felt or how much they liked the effect of the active cannabis.
The authors noted that additional studies in both men and women are needed to understand the factors that impact the analgesic effects of cannabinoids, the active chemicals in cannabis products, including strength, mode of delivery (smoked versus oral), frequency of use and type of pain measured.
“This study underscores the importance of including both men and women in clinical trials aimed at understanding the potential therapeutic and negative effects of cannabis, particularly as more people use cannabinoid products for recreational or medical purposes,” said Dr. Cooper.

A žene nek trpe, kad već ne znaju da muški podnesu bol... ili tako nešto.

[Meho Krljic]

Ali nije sve tako divno!
New study shows marijuana users have low blood flow to the brain

COSTA MESA, CA.,: As the U.S. races to legalize marijuana for medicinal and recreational use, a new, large scale brain imaging study gives reason for caution.  Published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, researchers using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), a sophisticated imaging study that evaluates blood flow and activity patterns, demonstrated abnormally low blood flow in virtually every area of the brain studies in nearly 1,000  marijuana users compared to healthy controls, including areas known to be affected by Alzheimer's pathology such as the hippocampus.
All datawere obtained for analysis from a large multisite database, involving 26,268 patients who came for evaluation of complex, treatment resistant issues to one of nine outpatient neuropsychiatric clinics across the United States (Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Fairfield, and Brisbane, CA, Tacoma and Bellevue, WA, Reston, VA, Atlanta, GA and New York, NY) between 1995-2015. Of these, 982 current or former marijuana users had brain SPECT at rest and during a mental concentration task compared to almost 100 healhty controls. Predictive analytics with discriminant analysis was done to determine if brain SPECT regions can distinguish marijuana user brains from controls brain. Low blood flow in the hippocampus in marijuana users reliably distinguished marijuana users from controls. The right hippocampus during a concentration task was the single most predictive region in distinguishing marijuana users from their normal counterparts. Marijuana use is thought to interfere with memory formation by inhibiting activity in this part of the brain.
According to one of the co-authors on the study Elisabeth Jorandby, M.D., "As a physician who routinely sees marijuana users,  what struck me was not only the global reduction in blood flow in the marijuana users brains , but that the hippocampus was the most affected region due to its role in memory and Alzheimer's disease.  Our research has proven that marijuana users have lower cerebral blood flow than non-users. Second, the most predictive region separating these two groups is low blood flow in the hippocampus on concentration brain SPECT imaging. This work suggests that marijuana use has damaging influences in the brain - particularly regions important in memory and learning and known to be affected by Alzheimer's."
Dr. George Perry, Editor in Chief of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease said, "Open use of marijuana, through legalization, will reveal the wide range of marijuana's benefits and threats to human health.  This study indicates troubling effects on the hippocampus that may be the harbingers of brain damage."
According to Daniel Amen, M.D., Founder of Amen Clinics, "Our research demonstrates that marijuana can have significant negative effects on brain function. The media has given the general impression that marijuana is a safe recreational drug, this research directly challenges that notion.  In another new study just released, researchers showed that marijuana use tripled the risk of psychosis. Caution is clearly in order."

[lilit]

ameri i njihovi izgovori: došlo proljeće, ramone ni od korova a kaće neZnamo! 
https://mondotees.com/blogs/news/january-2017-collectibles-update?mc_cid=96b0e58897&mc_eid=6cedef811c

[Meho Krljic]

Here's how long various drugs stay in your body

[lilit]

01.07.2016. rehoh "soon" i naručih, 09.11.2017. se to "soon" materijalizovalo.   
ramona je putovala tamo-ovamo preko raznih kontinenata, i napokon stigla kući.
sreća, radost!

[Meho Krljic]

Da li je gori alkohol ili marihuana? Razum kaže: oboje, ali šta kaže, hm, nauka?
 
 
https://amp.businessinsider.com/alcohol-marijuana-which-worse-health-2017-11

[Petronije]

Relativno korektan "naučni" članak. Ja na stvari gledam iz malo drugačijeg ugla. Ako se svi složimo da ne treba preterivati ni u seksu i pecanju, a ne u duvanju i alkoholisanju, u smislu da ne treba brinuti o zdravlju nekoga ko nema mere, jer je svakako rešio da se dokusuri, zanimljivije mi je da analiziram kako povremeni i stalni korisnici THCa i alkohola deluju na svoju okolinu, koliko su opasni, kako je sa njima raditi, živeti, i slično. Tu su po meni duvači u prednosti, ajde ovi rekreativci, tu može biti raznih varijacija, ali hard core alkos je zlo. Više mi ima smisla poređenje alkohola i heroina, tu je već mrtva trka.

[Meho Krljic]

In a new episode of “Buried Treasure,” a regular feature of the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery,” Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman interview historian and journalist Stephen Kinzer, the author of the new book “Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.” It’s a biography of the man behind MK-Ultra, a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, who also devised poisons the agency used to try to assassinate foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.

[Meho Krljic]

   Cannabis researchers say it’s high time to drop ‘lazy stoner’ stereotype 
 
Pravda za, jelte, whatever man..

[Meho Krljic]

DušMan upravo izdominiro na Beogradskoj hronici. Ako se setim za par dana kad to okače na Jutjub embedovaću ovde.

[dark horse]

https://24sedam.rs/kultura/7-dana-sa-umetnicima/200051/intervju-dusan-mladenovic-veseli-cetvrtak/vest