Articles

11/06/2015

 “It is important to know that legalizing marijuana would not mean greater access to potentially effective treatment for children and adults with a medical illness such as epilepsy. Cannabidiol, or CBD, is not at all marijuana.”

CBD is not medical marijuana. CBD does not get anyone high nor does it increase appetite. It may be beneficial in treating children with rare forms of epilepsy, often difficult to control with medication or other available treatments, but it does not work for everyone with seizures.

“The stories of kids having fewer seizures described in the media are heartwarming and can possibly be of some benefit – just like many other medications available to treat seizures,” Dr. Patel adds.

What are the possible side effects?
CBD can cause nausea, diarrhea, or worse, affect the liver.

Dr. Patel states, “There is nothing natural about marijuana and its components. It is broken down in a person’s liver, similar to many other medications. It has interactions with other medications and is still not fully understood. If further studies show that CBD is safe and effective, it will be sent to the FDA for official approval. If the FDA approves this medication, it will be available in the form of a prescription and no laws will need to be changed.”

“Legalization would make our jobs as medical providers more difficult as we will not know what changing, non-tested preparations a child may be getting. I understand that parents are desperate and want to help their children, however, it is dangerous to give a child or patient a product unless it has been studied properly and is the same consistent product each time.” If the ongoing trials show that Epidiolex is safe and effective, then all people can have access to it through a prescription and know that it has been properly tested and is consistent each month. Medical providers will know how to dose it and it will be regulated by the FDA.

11/05/2015

The project is intended to treat 50 children from ages 2 to 16 living with epilepsy that have exhausted most of their treatment options, Carney said.
Every step of the three-year study will be meticulously tracked. Patients will check-in at regular intervals and the researchers will examine how the children are responding, Carney said.
All subjects will be clinically evaluated and seizure frequency will be recorded in a diary given to patients, according to the ClinicalTrials.gov website.
“Through this research, we want to learn about what type of children respond, if they can tolerate the medication and if there are any side effects we need to worry about,” Carney said.
The study will begin later this summer and participants are still being accepted, Carney said.The project is intended to treat 50 children from ages 2 to 16 living with epilepsy that have exhausted most of their treatment options, Carney said.
Every step of the three-year study will be meticulously tracked. Patients will check-in at regular intervals and the researchers will examine how the children are responding, Carney said.
All subjects will be clinically evaluated and seizure frequency will be recorded in a diary given to patients, according to the ClinicalTrials.gov website.
“Through this research, we want to learn about what type of children respond, if they can tolerate the medication and if there are any side effects we need to worry about,” Carney said.
The study will begin later this summer and participants are still being accepted, Carney said.

11/04/2015

Most of the deaths occurred in the spring, when fishers come out to mate and raise their kits, and all of the poisoned animals were found in remote areas but within the vicinity of illegal marijuana farms.

11/03/2015

More Positive Results With Cannabidiol in Epilepsy (You will need to google this title in order to get the article to avoid creating an account)
They found a reduction of the total number of seizures by a median of 38% at 3 months and 31% at 6 months.
These patients started on a cannabidiol (CBD) dose of 2 mg/kg per day, which was increased to a maximum tolerated dose or to 25 mg/kg per day.
Of the 25 patients enrolled in the study, two discontinued treatment before 6 months. One boy stopped medication after a few months because of intolerable diarrhea, and another patient discontinued the drug because of persistent nausea/vomiting. One patient didn't report 6-month data at the time of the analysis.
More than three quarters (77%) of the 22 remaining patients experienced fewer seizures after 6 months.
However, he stressed that the study was uncontrolled, symptoms were self-reported by families, and there has been a lot of news coverage of medical marijuana for the treatment of epilepsy. "Many parents had been avidly desirous of their child going on this cannabidiol because of what they had read in the lay press, so they were primed to believe this cannabidiol might be beneficial." On the other hand, he said, it's important to keep in mind that these children have "horrible epilepsy" and most have been on more than 10 medications for seizure without success. "Any improvement to that degree in this population that is sustained is a pretty dramatic response."

11/01/2015

Adolescent cannabis use increased the odds of non-progression with formal education.

• •Associations for adolescent alcohol use were inconsistent and weaker.
• •Cannabis use accounted for a greater proportion of the overall rate of educational underachievement than alcohol use.
• •Findings inform the debate about the relative harms of cannabis and alcohol use.

10/27/2015

§Puff for puff, smoking marijuana is more dangerous than smoking cigarettes.  http://162.99.3.213/products/manuals/matrix/ppt/marijuana.ppt

• 22.2 million (8.4%) people were current (past month) users of marijuana in 2014, making it the most used illicit drug.
• Marijuana use was most prevalent among people age 18 to 25 (with 19.6% using it in the past month).
• 7.4% of people aged 12 to 17 reported using marijuana.
• A higher percentage of males (10.9%) used marijuana in the past month than females (6%).

10/19/2015

The overstuffed vehicles parked outside Pueblo’s Posada, a nonprofit organization that helps homeless families, have license plates from as far away as South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida and Texas.
Those families have come in what social service agencies here see as a perfect storm: legal marijuana, Colorado’s Medicaid expansion (which extends coverage to all qualified adults under the 2010 Affordable Care Act), and Pueblo’s ranking as one of the least expensive cities to live in the US.
Is this what we want in Florida?

10/16/2015

10/16/2015

10/14/2015

Is legal 'medical' marijuana linked to high youth substance abuse rates?

Let's look at Colorado's substance abuse rates in 2011- 2012 when medical marijuana was legal but recreational pot was not, Colorado youth ages 12- 17 and 18- 25 ranked in the top percentiles for most substance abuse rates: illicit drugs, marijuana, cocaine, non-medical use of painkillers and ranked the lowest for perception of great risk of smoking marijuana.

10/12/2015

Kembel's is the highest-profile death associated with cannabis since it became legal for adults to purchase recreational marijuana in Oregon last week. Police said Tuesday it was unclear to what extent marijuana impairment had been a factor in the crash.

10/11/2015

But “having medical value” isn’t the same thing as “being a medicine.” A medicine is a material of known chemical composition and dosage that has been shown in clinical trials to be safe and effective in the management of some condition in some patient population. By that standard, natural cannabis can’t be a medicine, simply because natural cannabis varies so widely in its chemical content: not only from one strain to another, but from one plant to another and even from one bud to another from the same plant.

10/09/2015

Levy says. “We are simply not prepared for the fallout of marijuana legalization.”
Each hit of THC rewires the function of this critical cognitive system: Early evidence in mice has shown that repeated exposure to THC causes these receptors to disappear altogether, blunting the natural response to positive behaviors and requiring higher doses to achieve the same effect. Marijuana exploits essential pathways we’ve evolved to retrieve a memory, to delicately regulate our metabolism, and to derive happiness from everyday life.

10/07/2015

“I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of similar lawsuits in other states,” Malsbury said, pointing out that the nation’s largest marijuana producer, California, has no pot regulations at all. Medical marijuana is grown and sold in California but recreational sales remain against state law.

09/30/2015

“Every state must take steps to reduce drug-impaired driving, regardless of the legal status of marijuana,” said Jonathan Adkins, Executive Director of GHSA. “This is the first report to provide states and other stakeholders with the information they need. And we encourage NHTSA to issue guidance on best practices to prevent marijuana-impaired driving. We look to the federal government to take a leadership role in this issue similar to that of drunk driving and seat belt use.”

09/30/2015

A quadrupling in the use of prescription drugs since 1999, and legalization of marijuana use in some states are cited among the reasons drug use has become an increasing threat to roadway safety, according to a report released today by the Governors Highway Safety Association, an organization of state highway safety officers.

09/30/2015

Background Paper on Legalization of Marijuana for Medical Use  Prepared for the Members of the Georgia Medical Cannabis Commission by National Families in Action
1. Reviewing the conditions, needs, issues, and problems of medical cannabis 
1a. No Randomized Controlled Clinical Trials 
1b. Most Medical Marijuana States Do Not Test for Potency or Contaminants 
1c. FDA Cracking Down on CBD Producers Making Unsubstantiated Medical Claims 
1d. Five percent THC Makes People High 
1e. Marijuana Edibles Are Hurting Children 
1f.  Pharmaceutical CBD Products in FDA Clinical Trials vs Artisanal CBD 
1g. What is a medical marijuana doctor? 
1h. Is marijuana about medicine or money?

 2. Evaluating the Best Practices, Experiences, and Results of Medical Cannabis in Other States
2a. Advocacy vs Reality
2b. A Commercial Medical Marijuana Industry Increases Marijuana Use
2c. Availability Drives Use among Children
2d. Doctors, Scientists Dismayed at States’ Legalizing Marijuana for Medical Use
2e. Questions Commission Members Might Want to Consider
 3. Recommending Any Proposed Action or Legislation You Deem Necessary
Determining Which State Department or Departments Should Have Oversight of Such a System
3a. Recommendations     4. Addendum    5. References

09/24/2015

Olympia, WA – Newly released data from the Washington Traffic Safety Commission (WTSC) shows that marijuana is increasing as a factor in deadly crashes. The number of drivers involved in deadly crashes who tested positive for marijuana increased 48 percent from 2013 to 2014. 
“This study is a step towards answering the myriad of questions we have about the impact of legalized marijuana on driving.

09/21/2015

• Prenatal exposure to marijuana has been shown to be predictive of psychotic symptoms in young adulthood.
• Monitoring the Future survey reported a five-year decline in the perceived harm of regularly smoking marijuana, from 52.4% of high school seniors to 36.1%
• Marijuana is the most widely used illegal drug in the United States and it is estimated that it is used by 61% of all persons suffering from a substance use disorder related to drugs other than alcohol.
• The risk of developing addiction associated with cannabis use has been reported to increase to about 17% among those who start using marijuana in adolescence, and to 25-50% among those who smoke marijuana daily.
• Smoke from marijuana combustion has been shown to contain a number of carcinogens and cocarcinogens, as well as many of the toxins, irritants, and carcinogens as tobacco smoke. 
• Marijuana-infused edibles account for 45% of the legal marijuana marketplace.
• AMA Marijuana has a high potential for abuse. It has no scientifically proven, currently accepted medical use for preventing or treating any disease process in the United States.

Number Using Opioids and Marijuana on the Rise

Chart: Colorado among states with growing heroin, prescription drug abuse problem 

Consistent with the past, in 2014 still only 47 percent of operators involved in traffic deaths were tested for drug impairment.

09/18/2015

The commonly heard expression that “no one ever died from a marijuana overdose” minimizes the cost of unmet potential and inability to fully engage in the challenges of daily life. Scientific research cites multiple impacts of the recreational misuse of marijuana.

09/15/2015

Positive top-line results have been reported from an exploratory phase 2a placebo-controlled clinical trial of cannabidiol (CBD, GW Pharmaceuticals) in patients with schizophrenia who had failed to respond adequately to first-line antipsychotic medications.  DOES NOT CONTAIN THC.

09/15/2015

"We found support for the synergistic effect on an individual level; people who tend to use more marijuana also tend to use more opioids," said Scott Novak, PhD, senior research scientist at RTI International, a leading research institute in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
What's worrisome is that the positive association between cannabis and opioid use is growing stronger. The study found that over time, people were using these drugs more often; there were more opioids days and more cannabis days.

09/14/2015

State medical marijuana legislation.

09/12/2015

This week, the Department of Health and Human Services found that marijuana use among all Americans 12 and over – especially those over 26 – significantly increased in 2014 compared to 2013. The number of 16 and 17 year-olds using marijuana in the past month also increased, (14.2% versus 15.0%).

09/09/2015

About 27% of high school students who have used both marijuana and e-cigarettes reported using the devices to vaporize cannabis. Those most likely to vaporize pot with e-cigarettes included males and younger students.

09/09/2015

There are difficulties in researching the effects of cannabis.

1. Many people who smoke cannabis also smoke tobacco. And users of cannabis often mix it with tobacco. This can make it difficult to know whether it is the tobacco, the cannabis, or both that has caused a cancer.
2. The amount of THC in cannabis also varies. Some of the cannabis available today is much stronger than it was 20 years ago. These versions contain more THC.
3. Another difficulty researchers have is in recruiting people who smoke cannabis into studies. Because cannabis is an illegal drug in many countries, people may be reluctant to take part in research. And if they do agree to take part, they may not say how much cannabis they actually smoke.

09/02/2015

An employer should have a written drug testing policy that includes:  

• Descriptions of the types of tests that employees can expect to be asked to take.
• Descriptions of the testing procedures. 
• The disciplinary consequences for violating the drug testing policy.

09/02/2015

09/01/2015

See report for details, graphs, data.

09/01/2015

In summary, marijuana use is harmful to children and adolescents.  For this reason, the American College of Pediatricians opposes its legalization for recreational use and urges extreme caution in legalizing it for medicinal use.  Likewise, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) recently offered their own policy statement opposing efforts to legalize marijuana. They similarly pointed out that “marijuana’s deleterious effects on adolescent brain development, cognition, and social functioning may have immediate and long-term implications, including increased risk of motor vehicle accidents, sexual victimization, academic failure, lasting decline in intelligence measures, psychopathology, addiction, and psychosocial and occupational impairment.” 

08/31/2015

Does this sound like someone concerned about sick people?  What is he really compassionate about?  

08/28/2015

Moreover, in the men in the study who smoked marijuana and used other recreational drugs, the sperm counts were reduced by 55 percent, and the sperm concentrations were reduced by 52 percent, compared with men who hadn't used the drugs.

08/25/2015

08/21/2015

Data released Tuesday indicate that the number of Washington drivers involved in deadly crashes who tested positive for active marijuana doubled from 2013 to 2014 - the first year of legal marijuana sales in the state.

08/19/2015

Twenty-eight studies were undertaken to evaluate the effectiveness of cannabinoids for chronic pain. Of these, only 2 were found to be at low risk of bias. 

Overall, these studies seem to indicate that cannabinoids have a significant role to play in the management of chronic pain. However, there are important issues that limit the validity of this conclusion. First and most important is how the improvement in pain was evaluated. In many of the studies, only instruments to measure the level of pain, most notably the Visual Analogue Scale, were used. This is fine when one is measuring acute pain. But when it comes to chronic pain—which is what the studies were looking at—the most important measures of the impact of any treatment are improvement in functioning and other objective measures, such as reduction in use of analgesic medications. 

08/15/2015

Pharmacokinetics encompasses the absorption of cannabinoids following diverse routes of administration and from different drug formulations, the distribution of analytes throughout the body, the metabolism of cannabinoids by different tissues and organs, the elimination of cannabinoids from the body in the feces, urine, sweaty oral fluid, and hair, and how these processes change over time. Cannabinoid pharmacokinetic research has been especially challenging because of low analyte concentrations, rapid and extensive metabolism, and physio-chemicaI characteristics that hinder the separation of drugs of interest from biological matrices and from each other, and that lower drug recovery because of adsorption of compounds of interest to multiple surfaces. Mass spectrometric developments now permit highly sensitive and specific measurement of cannabinoids in a wide variety of biological matrices.

08/15/2015

Male teens who experiment with cannabis before age 16, and have a high genetic risk for schizophrenia, show a different brain development trajectory than low risk peers who use cannabis.

08/13/2015

"Our study indicates that there are real problems associated with a higher density of marijuana dispensaries in neighborhoods," Mair said. Community discussions are needed to ensure that marijuana laws have the fewest negative consequences for vulnerable people.

08/09/2015

People who drive within three hours of smoking marijuana are at nearly twice the risk of being in an accident that leads to serious injury or death, compared with sober drivers, according to a new review of the research.
While driving stoned is clearly risky — and combining marijuana with alcohol is even more dangerous — drunk driving remains a bigger hazard on the road. Driving with a blood alcohol concentration of .08 — the legal limit — nearly triples the risk of crashing; a blood alcohol concentration of .10 almost quintuples it. Although drunk driving deaths have dropped by more than half since 1982, they still represent about one-third of all auto fatalities and kill about 11,000 people annually.

08/03/2015

Here is why there is confusion: the only time someone is sentenced to jail for smoking pot is if there is a more serious crime they are clearly guilty of, and the prosecutor or judge wants to give them a lighter sentence. Theft or burglary were the most common crimes I came across. Instead of being required to sentence a defendant to a year imprisonment for stealing, a defendant could plead guilty to marijuana possession instead and get a much lesser sentence. So on paper, it looks like they are serving time for drug possession, but in reality, they were let off the hook for a serious crime.

08/02/2015

07/31/2015

07/29/2015

Mr. Wright was confident that a new anticancer drug called Krebiozen would cure him. Mr. Wright’s tumors had shrunk by half, and after 10 more days of treatment he was discharged from the hospital. And yet the other patients in the hospital who had received Krebiozen showed no improvement.

07/27/2015

Trends in cannabis use suggest that twice as many males as females use the drug. This gender ratio is mirrored in rates of psychosis with males outnumbering females by 2:1. However, researchers at the University of York found there is a significant widening of this ratio for cannabis psychosis, where males outnumber females by four to one.

07/27/2015

Current marijuana use was positively related to frequency of child physical abuse and negatively related to physical neglect.Density of medical marijuana dispensaries and delivery services was positively related to frequency of physical abuse. As marijuana use becomes more prevalent, those who work with families, including child welfare workers must screen for how marijuana use may affect a parent's ability to provide for care for their children, particularly related to physical abuse.

07/24/2015

"She said she didn't know where her son was, and then saw him standing in the living room and made the decision to walk to the manager's office for help instead of going in and getting him out," Nelson said.  By the time she returned, Sosa-Martinez could see her son through the flames, it wasn't too late.

07/21/2015

07/16/2015

Safety concerns coupled with a lack of evidence of efficacy in controlled studies result in a risk/benefit ratio that does not support use of marijuana for treatment of seizures at this time. Healthcare professionals, patients, and caregivers are reminded that use of marijuana for epilepsy may not be advisable due to this lack of information on safety and efficacy. 

07/16/2015

“Telling someone to use marijuana for PTSD or any mental health problem is like telling them to go get drunk,” says one specialist who has treated the disorder among veterans and active-duty service members for more than 15 years.