Paul Armentano, Deputy Director of NORML - Alternet
Stephan: America has low income rural White mostly Republican opioid epidemic that is killing 33,000 people a year. Jeff Sessions by the judgment of his peers an incompetent racist now Attorney General thanks to some of those same peers wants to reopen the War on Drugs. And then there is this.
Credit: Shutterstock
It is time for politicians to put to rest the myth that cannabis is a gateway to the use of other controlled substances — a theory that is neither supported by modern science or empirical data.
Over 60 percent of American adults acknowledge having tried cannabis, but the overwhelming majority of these individuals never go on to try another illicit substance. Further, nothing in marijuana’s chemical composition alters the brain in a manner that makes users more susceptible to experimenting with other drugs. That’s why both the esteemed Institute of Medicine and the Rand Corporation’s Drug Policy Research Center conclude that “[M]arijuana has no causal influence over hard drug initiation.”
In contrast, a growing body of evidence now exists to support the counter notion that for many people, pot serves as a path away from the use of more dangerous substances, including opioids, alcohol, prescription drugs, cocaine, and tobacco.
For example, in jurisdictions where marijuana use is legally regulated, researchers have reported year-over-year declines in opioid-related abuse and mortality. According to data published in the Journal of the American Medical […]
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Ariel Edwards-Levy, - The Huffington Post
Stephan: You know what you and your friends think about what is happening to the United States. Now a reality check to let you know what the rest of Americans actually believe. It's very depressing.
Trump voters’ sense that they occupy an increasingly tenuous place in the nation has ebbed as quickly as Clinton voters’ faith in the progress they’ve made, a new survey finds
One of the starkest fault lines last year between voters who supported Donald Trump and those who backed his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton lay in their answers to a question that wasn’t explicitly political: whether they felt life had gotten better or worse for “people like them” in the last 50 years.
By a 70-point margin, Trump supporters said that life had gotten worse, not better, according to a Pew Research survey in August. By a 40-point margin, Clinton supporters said it had improved.
The gap between each candidate’s backers was wider than the divides along a host of other demographics, including gender, race, age and education.
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Bobby Azarian, - The Raw Story/Neuropsychologia
Stephan: There is a growing body of evidence showing that there are neurophysiological factors that account for fundamentalist religiosity and conservative political affiliations. I have published before on the relationship of an overactive right amygdala with conservative political and religious views, and an inability to think rationally.
This is further supported by the fact that whatever the flavor of religious fundamentalism -- Christian, Muslim, Jew or whatever -- the same four psychological attributes define it: 1) A sense of persecution and grievance; 2) A sense of self-righteous superiority and specialness; 3) sexual dysfunction; 4) An obsessive desire to dominate and make subordinate anyone with a vagina. The fact that these views are present regardless of religious dogma suggests that these perspectives arise not from religion but from psychophysical considerations. Religion is simply the justifying context through which such views are expressed.
Now we have a new study giving another dimension to this syndrome.
Citation: Zhong W, Cristofori I, Bulbulia J, Krueger F, Grafman J. Biological and cognitive underpinnings of religious fundamentalism. Neuropsychologia. 2017 Apr 6;100:18-25. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.04.009.
Angry Christian preacher
A new study published in the journal Neuropsychologia has shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest that damage to particular areas of the prefrontal cortex indirectly promotes religious fundamentalism by diminishing cognitive flexibility and openness—a psychology term that describes a personality trait which involves dimensions like curiosity, creativity, and open-mindedness.
Religious beliefs can be thought of as socially transmitted mental representations that consist of supernatural events and entities assumed to be real. Religious beliefs differ from empirical beliefs, which are based on how the world appears to be and are updated as new evidence accumulates or when new theories with better predictive power emerge. On the other hand, religious beliefs are not usually updated in response to new evidence or scientific explanations, and are therefore strongly associated with conservatism. They are fixed and rigid, which helps promote predictability and coherence to the rules of society among individuals within the group.
Religious fundamentalism […]
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Stephan: Jeff Sessions, a man notable for his racism, intellectual limitations, and incompetence, was made the Attorney General of the United States and a Republican Senate that had previously thought him inappropriate and inadequate as a Federal judge quickly confirmed him, to their shame.
Given his past statements it should come as a surprise to no one that he now is pouring his attention and energy into reawakening the War on Drugs, a social policy begun under the criminal presidency of Richard Nixon. Millions of lives have been destroyed, and untold sums of money have been squandered on this policy, universally considered by those who have no financial interest in it as an abject failure. The only people who liked the War on Drugs, surprise, surprise, were those whose rice bowl depended on this stupidity being perpetuated.
Now we are about to start it up again. Given the mood of the country and the legalization trend it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions
Back when Jeff Sessions was attorney general for Alabama instead of the entire United States, he pushed for a bill that would have established mandatory death sentences for individuals convicted of a second drug trafficking offense — even if the drug was as innocuous as marijuana.
While Sessions’ new directive as United States Attorney General doesn’t go that far, it is definitely a step in a draconian direction when it comes to American drug policy.
The memo, issued by Sessions on Wednesday, instructs prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense,” according to a report by The Washington Post. Sessions’ memo also immediately reverses a policy implemented by Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. in August 2013, one that ordered prosecutors to refrain from pursuing drug charges if doing so would trigger lengthy mandatory minimum sentences — and if the defendants did not belong to a gang, cartel, or other large-scale drug trafficking organization.
The goal of Holder’s policy was to begin to roll back the war on drugs, […]
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Rory Carroll, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: Here is the latest in the Neo-feudalism Trend. Increasingly it has become the reality that the financial aristocracy and nobility live in a different world than the economic peasants. This article from the British Guardian lays it out.
The guiltiest pleasure at Los Angeles international airport’s (LAX) new private terminal for the mega-rich is not the plush, hushed privacy, or the beds with comforters, or the massages, or the coriander-scented soap, or the Willie Wonka-style array of chocolates and jelly beans, or the Napa Valley cabernet.
It is the iPad that sits on a counter at the entrance, with a typed little note: “Here is a glimpse of what you’re missing over at the main terminal right now.”
The screen shows travellers hauling bags through packed terminals, queuing in long lines, looking harassed and being swallowed into pushing, shoving paparazzi scrums – routine hazards for the 80 million people who pass through LAX each year.
“There they process thousands of people at a time, they’re barking. It’s loud. Here it’s very, very lovely,” said Gavin de Becker, who runs the new terminal, called Private Suite.
He wasn’t wrong. The $22m facility, the first of its […]
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