Photo Credit: Opra

In her latest blog post [3], US National Institute on Drug Abuse director Nora Volkow claims that ‘science should guide marijuana policy.” But if the nation’s top anti-drug doc truly believes that facts, not ideological rhetoric, ought to shape America’s drug policies, why does she feel the need to keep distorting the truth about pot?

Writes Volkow: ‘Besides being addictive, marijuana is cognitively impairing even beyond the phase of acute intoxication and regular use during adolescence may cause a significant, possibly permanent IQ loss.”

Or, more than likely, it may not. In fact, the very study Volkow relies on to make this questionable claim was publically repudiated in a 2012 review [4] published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That review suggests that socioeconomic differences, not pot use, are responsible for dissimilarities found among former teen marijuana users and non-users. In fact, once economic variables were factored into the assessment, the analysis reported that cannabis’ actual effect on IQ was likely to be ‘zero.”

As for Nora Volkow’s allegation […]

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EAST PORTERVILLE, CALIFORNIA — Hundreds of people in a California town have no water after wells ran dry during the state’s drought.

The small town of East Porterville in Tulare County has about 7,300 residents, and at least 300 homes have been without water for weeks.

‘We can’t shower. We’re wearing dirty clothes. My kids had to wear dirty clothes to school this morning,” said Elizabeth Baker. ‘I had to go across the street last night to get water for my kids from the fire department.”

The county set up a 5,000-gallon water tank for residents to help with flushing toilets and irrigation, but now drinking water is the problem. They had to distribute more than 15,000 gallons of drinking water last week.

There are fears the problem could be even worse as people believe some people aren’t reporting their wells have gone dry out of fear their landlords will evict them, or their children will be taken away. In fact, the county didn’t know how dire the problem was until they were tipped off by a nonprofit group.

Donna Johnson […]

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We’ve all heard those phrases that denote a certain blindness to the passage of time. ‘She looks as young as the day I met her” husbands say of their wives 50 years into married life, or ‘haven’t they grown”, people tell me of my children. How about ‘it wasn’t even hot” said the frog, realising too late that he had sat unawares in the pot while the water slowly crept up to boiling point.

The thing is, we don’t tend to notice change if it’s gradual. Andaccording to a recent study from Georgia Southern University and published in Paediatrics, parents don’t recognise when their children have become obese.

Slow changes over time in anything we see every day become invisible and can be ignored – which is great for the ageing wives among us but not so helpful for frogs or children whose parents who should be taking notice so something can be done about it.

But is it just a matter of timing and what should parents do when they do eventually realise that […]

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Scott Walker, David Koch (Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin/Phelan M. Ebenhack/Photo montage by Salon)

Back when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid began publicly attacking the Koch brothers and their right-wing political empire, a lot of the media treated it as a desperate and maybe unseemly attack on ‘a couple of relatively unknown private citizens,” in the words of Politico, by a guy who saw Senate control slipping from his hands in 2014.

But the more we learn about Charles and David Koch’s sway with top Republican leaders, thanks to embarrassing leaks from their June retreat, the clearer it is that attacks by Reid and other Democrats are justified and proportionate.

Also clear: Wisconsin is ground zero in the battle over whether the Kochs’ vision of a low-tax, union-free neo-feudalism prevails, and Gov. Scott Walker is a wholly owned Koch subsidiary.

On Wednesday we heard Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell thank the Kochs ‘for the important work you’re doing,” adding, ‘I don’t know where we’d be without you.” Then he […]

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Photo Credit: mayamaya / Shutterstock.com

Let’s face it, many of us would need a little extra incentive to spend our careers standing on the wrong side of history. And a whole bunch of leading researchers who are frequently cited by supporters of marijuana prohibition look to be no different, according to a report by investigative journalist Lee Fang: They’re paid by companies that manufacture painkillers.

The academics on Fang’s list include:

*Dr. Herbert Kleber, director of the Substance Abuse Division of Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry. Widely quoted and published by mainstream media, and cited by the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police and the American Psychiatric Association to justify anti-pot positions, Kleber has served as a paid consultant for Purdue Pharma, Reckitt Benckiser and Alkermes-the manufacturers of OxyContin, Nurofen and Zohydro, respectively.

*Dr. A. Eden Evins, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and board member of SAM-the anti-legalization organization fronted by Patrick Kennedy and Kevin Sabet. Fang notes a disclosure by the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry that Evin, another widely quoted figure, […]

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