Marijuana

A Los Angeles Times commentary written by current Office of National Drug Control Policy Director R. Gil Kerlikowske, as well as predecessors John Walters, Barry McCaffrey, Lee Brown, Bob Martinez and William Bennett, published this week explains why Californians should "just say no" to Proposition 19 to legalize marijuana, which is on this November's ballot.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) supports a campaign to defeat her state's controversial marijuana legalization ballot measure, Proposition 19. Feinstein called it "a jumbled legal nightmare that will make our highways, our workplaces and our communities less safe."

Hood River, Ore. is known as a tourist attraction for its wind surfing and its lush natural beauty. However, it's also an economically challenged area, where more than 14 percent of people live below the poverty level and 17 percent of children under age 18 live in poverty. It's also a place with high marijuana, alcohol and tobacco use among youth. That is, until the Hood River County Prevention Network – also known as Hood River Prevents – mobilized the community to address their drug use and other associated problems.

After three years of community outreach and advocacy, the Partnership for a Drug-Free Community coalition succeeded in persuading the Alabama Legislature to make salvia divinorum and K2 illegal. On July 1, the two substances that have marijuana-like effects on those who smoke them will no longer be legal to sell or purchase, thanks to a bill passed by the Alabama Legislature and signed by Gov. Bob Riley.

As a treatment for psychiatric disorders, the risks of marijuana use exceed the benefits, reports the April 2010 issue of the Harvard Mental Health Letter .

A coalition in Detroit wants drug paraphernalia to be out of sight, but on the minds of city council. The Drug Free Communities Coalition is asking the Detroit City Council to regulate store owners who display drug paraphernalia at the checkout counter.

Fourteen states have enacted laws that legalize medical marijuana and a state-level advocacy group in Ohio doesn't want to be one of them. The Columbus, Ohio-based Drug-Free Action Alliance, a conglomerate of state-wide coalitions, has recently distributed a position paper against legalizing medical marijuana to Ohio lawmakers.

A new study has found that use and misuse of alcohol and marijuana are influenced by a common set of genes. The results are in the March 2010 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research.

Imagine spraying dry herbs with unknown chemicals and then smoking them? That's what some youth are doing to get high from what is known on the streets as "spice" or "K2," a synthetic marijuana product sold at convenience stores and smoke shops. However, instead of the typical marijuana-like effects, many youth are turning up in Emergency Rooms with rapid heart rates, elevated blood pressure, severe agitation, anxiety and vomiting.

Teens and young adults who are heavy marijuana users are more likely than non-users to have disrupted brain development, according to a new study that appeared last month in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

For many Detroit, Mich. teens, pot is all relative. When it's your relatives—your aunts, uncles, parents, and grandparents—with the joint in their hand, just saying no isn't always easy. That's why three years ago, the Detroit Recovery Project Coalition began the Love Detroit Youth Initiative as a way to intervene in the destructive path many youth in the area were taking and to change community norms.

The New York Times reported that the L.A. City Council approved an ordinance on Tuesday that would shut down 80 percent of the city's medical marijuana dispensaries because of problems they've had with their dispensaries.

 Teens who frequently listen to music that contains references to marijuana are more likely to use the drug than their counterparts with less exposure to such lyrics, according to a University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study online now in the journal Addiction.

While there were slight decreases in the use of cocaine and methamphetamine among youth, teen marijuana use showed no signs of slowing down. In fact, according to the 2009 Monitoring the Future Survey, marijuana use among adolescents has increased gradually over the past two years after years of declining use; and past year rates of Vicodin and OxyContin abuse increased during the last 5 years among 10th graders and remained unchanged among 8th and 12th graders. The MTF Survey, which surveys youth in 8th, 10th and 12th graders, was released Monday by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the University of Michigan.