More states legalize Pot 8) when for Oz?

[K]

Attracting headlines, a Lancet paper:

Risk thresholds for alcohol consumption: combined analysis of individual-participant data for 599 912 current drinkers in 83 prospective studies

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)30134-X/fulltext

"In current drinkers of alcohol in high-income countries, the threshold for lowest risk of all-cause mortality was about 100 g/week. For cardiovascular disease subtypes other than myocardial infarction, there were no clear risk thresholds below which lower alcohol consumption stopped being associated with lower disease risk. These data support limits for alcohol consumption that are lower than those recommended in most current guidelines."


Figure 1:




Figure 4: ("Years of life lost")

[K]

Why Is CBD Everywhere?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/style/cbd-benefits.html

"It’s hard to say the precise moment when CBD, the voguish cannabis derivative, went from being a fidget spinner alternative for stoners to a mainstream panacea.
...

With its proponents claiming that CBD treats ailments as diverse as inflammation, pain, acne, anxiety, insomnia, depression, post-traumatic stress and even cancer, it’s easy to wonder if this all natural, non-psychotropic and widely available cousin of marijuana represents a cure for the 21st century itself.
...

CBD is short for cannabidiol, an abundant chemical in the cannabis plant. Unlike its more famous cannabinoid cousin, THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), CBD does not make you stoned.

Which is not to say that you feel utterly normal when you take it.

Users speak of a “body” high, as opposed to a mind-altering one.
...

It may or may not be a coincidence that one of the best-known CBD retailers in New York, the Alchemist’s Kitchen in the East Village, serves up cannabidiol tinctures and gel caps, alongside workshops on astrocartography, lucid dreaming and full-moon ancestral healing.
...

Skeptics who assume CBD is just 21st-century snake oil, however, may be surprised to learn that the substance is being studied as a potential treatment for maladies as diverse as schizophrenia, insomnia and cancer.

“CBD is the most promising drug that has come out for neuropsychiatric diseases in the last 50 years,” said Dr. Esther Blessing, an assistant professor at New York University School of Medicine, who is coordinating a study of CBD as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol use disorder. “The reason it is so promising is that it has a unique combination of safety and effectiveness across of very broad range of conditions.”
...

“Most of the products where people are putting CBD in coffee or food, there’s no solid evidence that they contain enough CBD to do anything,” Dr. Blessing said. “A CBD coffee may only have five milligrams in it. In order to treat anxiety, we know you need around 300 milligrams.”

Don’t go chugging a shot of CBD oil just yet, though. Dr. Blessing said that much of the research is in its infancy, and the purity and dosage of some CBD consumer products may not reliable. And, she noted, CBD can have negative interactions with many medications, so potential users should talk to their doctors before taking it.”
..."

[K]

A mobile phone is not really what we think of as a drug... but in the US "the Federal Communications Commission and the Food and Drug Administration ... regulate cellphones and gauge any risks to human health".

On with the story then:

Study of Cellphone Risks Finds ‘Some Evidence’ of Link to Cancer, at Least in Male Rats

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/health/cellphone-radiation-cancer.html

"For decades, health experts have struggled to determine whether or not cellphones can cause cancer. On Thursday, a federal agency released the final results of what experts call the world’s largest and most costly experiment to look into the question. The study originated in the Clinton administration, cost $30 million and involved some 3,000 rodents.

The experiment, by the National Toxicology Program, found positive but relatively modest evidence that radio waves from some types of cellphones could raise the risk that male rats develop brain cancer.

“We believe that the link between radio-frequency radiation and tumors in male rats is real,” John Bucher, a senior scientist at the National Toxicology Program, said in a statement.
...

The rodents in the studies were exposed to radiation nine hours a day for two years — far longer even than heavy users of cellphones. For the rats, the exposures started before birth and continued until they were about 2 years old.

Some 2 to 3 percent of the male rats exposed to the radiation developed malignant gliomas, a deadly brain cancer, compared to none in a control group that received no radiation. Many epidemiologists see no overall rise in the incidence of gliomas in the human population.

The study also found that about 5 to 7 percent of the male rats exposed to the highest level of radiation developed certain heart tumors, called malignant schwannomas, compared to none in the control group. Malignant schwannomas are similar to acoustic neuromas, benign tumors that can develop in people, in the nerve that connects the ear to the brain.

The rats were exposed to radiation at a frequency of 900 megahertz — typical of the second generation of cellphones that prevailed in the 1990s, when the study was first conceived.

Current cellphones represent a fourth generation, known as 4G, and 5G phones are expected to debut around 2020. They employ much higher frequencies, and these radio waves are far less successful at penetrating the bodies of humans and rats, scientists say.
...

In a statement, the director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health said it disagreed with agency’s finding of “clear evidence” for heart schwannomas, but raised no questions about its citing “some evidence” for the brain tumors."

[K]

Liam Anderson's best friend 'under something evil' when he attacked

https://www.theage.com.au/national/nsw/liam-anderson-s-best-friend-under-something-evil-when-he-attacked-20181105-p50e53.html

'... allegedly under the influence of MDMA, marijuana and alcohol...
... taken a number of MDMA capsules through the night ...
... allegedly took up to eight capsules in total ... '


' Mr Anderson told others as he followed Mr Flame: "He's my best friend, I would never leave my best friend." '

[K]

Dry Spell: Canada Runs Low on Legal Pot Just Weeks After Its Approval

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/world/canada/canada-marijuana-shortage.html

[Skids]

[Skids]

[HAL]

It depends on what the meaning of the word "it" is.

[K]

What if the Placebo Effect Isn’t a Trick?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/magazine/placebo-effect-medicine.html

"Give people a sugar pill, they have shown, and those patients — especially if they have one of the chronic, stress-related conditions that register the strongest placebo effects and if the treatment is delivered by someone in whom they have confidence — will improve. Tell someone a normal milkshake is a diet beverage, and his gut will respond as if the drink were low fat. Take athletes to the top of the Alps, put them on exercise machines and hook them to an oxygen tank, and they will perform better than when they are breathing room air — even if room air is all that’s in the tank. Wake a patient from surgery and tell him you’ve done an arthroscopic repair, and his knee gets better even if all you did was knock him out and put a couple of incisions in his skin. Give a drug a fancy name, and it works better than if you don’t.

You don’t even have to deceive the patients. You can hand a patient with irritable bowel syndrome a sugar pill, identify it as such and tell her that sugar pills are known to be effective when used as placebos, and she will get better, especially if you take the time to deliver that message with warmth and close attention. Depression, back pain, chemotherapy-related malaise, migraine, post-traumatic stress disorder: The list of conditions that respond to placebos — as well as they do to drugs, with some patients — is long and growing.
...

“What makes our research believable to doctors?” asks Ted Kaptchuk, head of Harvard Medical School’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter. “It’s the molecules. They love that stuff.” As of now, there are no molecules for conditioning or expectancy — or, indeed, for Kaptchuk’s own pet theory, which holds that the placebo effect is a result of the complex conscious and nonconscious processes embedded in the practitioner-patient relationship — and without them, placebo researchers are hard-pressed to gain purchase in mainstream medicine.

But ... this might be about to change. Aided by functional magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.) and other precise surveillance techniques, Kaptchuk and his colleagues have begun to elucidate an ensemble of biochemical processes that may finally account for how placebos work and why they are more effective for some people, and some disorders, than others. The molecules, in other words, appear to be emerging. And their emergence may reveal fundamental flaws in the way we understand the body’s healing mechanisms, and the way we evaluate whether more standard medical interventions in those processes work, or don’t. Long a useful foil for medical science, the placebo effect might soon represent a more fundamental challenge to it.
...

In the last half of the 1950s, this calculus gave rise to a new way to evaluate drugs: the double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial, in which neither patient nor clinician knew who was getting the active drug and who the placebo. In 1962, when the Food and Drug Administration began to require pharmaceutical companies to prove their new drugs were effective before they came to market, they increasingly turned to the new method; today, virtually every prospective new drug has to outperform placebos on two independent studies in order to gain F.D.A. approval.
...

As a result, although virtually every clinical trial is a study of the placebo effect, it remains underexplored — an outcome that reflects the fact that there is no money in sugar pills and thus no industry interest in the topic as anything other than a hurdle it needs to overcome.
...

The findings of the I.B.S. study were in keeping with a hypothesis Kaptchuk had formed over the years: that the placebo effect is a biological response to an act of caring; that somehow the encounter itself calls forth healing and that the more intense and focused it is, the more healing it evokes. He elaborated on this idea in a comparative study of conventional medicine, acupuncture and Navajo “chantway rituals,” in which healers lead storytelling ceremonies for the sick. He argued that all three approaches unfold in a space set aside for the purpose and proceed as if according to a script, with prescribed roles for every participant. Each modality, in other words, is its own kind of ritual, and Kaptchuk suggested that the ritual itself is part of what makes the procedure effective, as if the combined experiences of the healer and the patient, reinforced by the special-but-familiar surroundings, evoke a healing response that operates independently of the treatment’s specifics. “Rituals trigger specific neurobiological pathways that specifically modulate bodily sensations, symptoms and emotions,” he wrote. “It seems that if the mind can be persuaded, the body can sometimes act accordingly.
...

In the course of conducting the study, Kaptchuk had taken DNA samples from subjects in hopes of finding some molecular pattern among the responses. This was an investigation tailor-made to Hall’s expertise, and she agreed to take it on. Of course, the genome is vast, and it was hard to know where to begin — until, she says, she and Kaptchuk attended a talk in which a colleague presented evidence that an enzyme called COMT affected people’s response to pain and painkillers. Levels of that enzyme, Hall already knew, were also correlated with Parkinson’s disease, depression and schizophrenia, and in clinical trials people with those conditions had shown a strong placebo response. When they heard that COMT was also correlated with pain response — another area with significant placebo effects — Hall recalls, “Ted and I looked at each other and were like: ‘That’s it! That’s it!’ ”
...

When Hall analyzed the I.B.S. patients’ DNA, she found a distinct trend. Those with the high-COMT variant had the weakest placebo responses, and those with the opposite variant had the strongest. These effects were compounded by the amount of interaction each patient got: For instance, low-COMT, high-interaction patients fared best of all, but the low-COMT subjects who were placed in the no-treatment group did worse than the other genotypes in that group. They were, in other words, more sensitive to the impact of the relationship with the healer."

[K]

Canada’s Message to Teenagers: Marijuana Is Legal Now. Please Don’t Smoke It.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/world/canada/marijuana-legalization-teenagers.html

" “The most disingenuous element of legalization is that it will keep it out of the hands of children,” said Dr. Benedikt Fischer, a senior scientist at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. “It is a big experiment, in many ways.”
...

Studies have shown that marijuana use in adolescents can impair brain function for some time after the cannabis has left their bodies, and a concern raised by some experts is that many adolescents use cannabis to self-medicate for anxiety or depression.

Most scientists agree the risk to young brains is greatest for those who start smoking at age 12 or younger, smoke regularly and choose high-potency marijuana.

Smoking is also dangerous for young people with family histories of serious mental illness, like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

But for young people who start lightly experimenting with the drug at a later age, the risks of long-term damage to their growing brains are reduced.
...

While some studies found that regular cannabis use by adolescents changed brain structure and long-term cognitive functioning, follow-up studies disputed those findings and concluded that alcohol use, cigarette smoking and family background were the main drivers in I.Q. reduction.

A recent analysis of 69 studies on young, frequent cannabis users, published in JAMA Psychiatry, found that the negative effects on cognitive functioning dissipated after 72 drug-free hours.
...

According to a recent census bureau report, 32.7 percent of [Canadian] teenagers had smoked marijuana in the previous three months, for example."

[HAL]

What's your source for these studies?

[stui magpie]

[npalm]

To save anyone else looking it up:

A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And, when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.

In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we all know, kills brain cells, but naturally it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine!

That's why you always feel smarter after a few beers.

[think positive]

lol!!

[HAL]

Oops. Too much data.