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[igotthisguitar]

Denver voters OK marijuana possession

By JON SARCHE
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Wednesday, November 2, 2005 �� Last updated 4:40 a.m. PT

DENVER -- Residents of the Mile High City have voted to legalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana for adults. Authorities, though, said state possession laws will be applied instead.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday, 54 percent, or 56,001 voters, cast ballots for the ordinance, while 46 percent, or 48,632 voters, voted against it.

Under the measure, residents over 21 years old could possess up to an ounce of marijuana.

"We educated voters about the facts that marijuana is less harmful to the user and society than alcohol," said Mason Tvert, campaign organizer for SAFER, or Safer Alternatives For Enjoyable Recreation. "To prohibit adults from making the rational, safer choice to use marijuana is bad public policy."

Bruce Mirken of the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project said he hoped the approval will launch a national trend toward legalizing a drug whose enforcement he said causes more problems than it cures.

Seattle, Oakland, Calif., and a few college towns already have laws making possession the lowest law enforcement priority.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1135AP_Denver_Marijuana.html

[The Bobster]

[igotthisguitar]

Alcohol Makers on Tricky Path in Marketing to College Crowd
By Bruce Horovitz, Theresa Howard and Laura Petrecca, USA TODAY
Thu Nov 17, 8:02 AM ET

Every marketer has its sweet spot.

That's the age group where brand preferences begin forming for their product. For fast-food giants, it's the Happy Meal set. For soft-drink makers, it's preteens. For beer kingpins - and, increasingly, wine and liquor producers - it's the college crowd.

"If you're going to attract a new group to your brand that has a chance of sticking over a lifetime, the college years are crucial," says Barry Glassner, sociology professor at University of Southern California.

Also lucrative. Besides being ripe for learning brand names, these students have money to burn. The bulk of them hold down jobs, and they wield $231 billion in annual spending, according to a 2005 study from youth marketing firm Alloy.

Those facts are why beer and spirits makers have quietly worshiped at the dorm-room altar.

But something's changing in the cultural ozone that is giving chills to alcohol marketers - and a lot of other big-time food and beverage advertisers. They are under the microscope of industry watchdogs, savvy lawyers, vote-seeking lawmakers and health-and-safety-conscious boomer parents. Their goal, the companies fear, is nothing less than a ban on advertising, or even, for alcohol marketers, prohibition.

That's why McDonald's now sells apple slices and Coke pitches bottled water. But perhaps no industry has been hit harder than the big alcohol makers, particularly when it comes to marketing in and around campuses. This comes even as some marketers have put the brakes on over-the-top college promotions, such as giant inflatable beer bottles and raucous spring break beach booths.

Momentum is building to ban alcohol ads from college sports broadcasts, arenas and even whole campuses. Already, conferences have set various TV ad limits for their events. For tournaments and championships, the National Collegiate Athletic Association limits beer and wine ads to 60 seconds per broadcast hour and says they must include a "drink responsibly" tagline in the ad.

Even so, $68 million was spent to advertise alcohol on college sports TV in 2004, up from $54 million the year before, reports TNS Media Intelligence.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20051117/bs_usatoday/alcoholmakersontrickypathinmarketingtocollegecrowd

[igotthisguitar]

Child antidepressant use increases
By Amy Norton
Thu Nov 24, 1:14 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The number of U.S. children and teens who were diagnosed with depression more than doubled between 1995 and 2002, while the use of antidepressant drugs rose and the use of psychotherapy or counseling declined.

The findings, say researchers, point to possible instances of inappropriate prescribing to children.

While guidelines call for children to be treated with either mental health counseling or a combination of counseling and medication, the study found a trend of antidepressants replacing talk therapy.

In addition, although only one antidepressant, Prozac (fluoxetine), has been specifically approved for patients younger than 18, prescriptions for other antidepressants rose after 1995 as well -- with children receiving prescriptions for them on an "off-label" basis.

"These trends raise concerns regarding the widespread off-label use of antidepressants lacking reliable evidence of safety and efficacy for use in children and adolescents," the study authors report in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

It's not clear why antidepressant use increased during the study period, according to lead study author Dr. Jun Ma of the Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, California.

But, she told Reuters Health, it likely reflects a combination of factors, including widespread drug advertising, perceptions that drugs are more effective than therapy and the fact that taking medication is more convenient than counseling.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051124/hl_nm/child_antidepressant_dc;_ylt=Au_scsQn38.8Kpfqy8uDX1xa24cA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3czJjNGZoBHNlYwM3NTE-

[itaewonguy]

legalize it!!!!

[igotthisguitar]

Iraq: The New Heroin Route
Arnaud Aubron - Liberation



Losing war on drugs: Iran is on the heroin supply route from Asia to Europe.

Opiates - and cannabis - produced in Afghanistan transit through Iraq before being distributed in Europe. Their consumption is growing in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Repeat yet again. Although Washington took the lead thirty years ago in the global anti-drug war, narcotics seem to stubbornly want to surge through the wake of the American Army.

Thus, in 2001, following the prohibition of poppy cultivation by the Taliban, Afghanistan had seen its opium production fall by 185 tons ... to shoot up to 3,200 tons (or a 1,700% increase) immediately after the United States' intervention, a scenario that is finding an echo today in Iraq. According to the Iranian Hamid Ghodse, President of the OICS (Organe international de contrôle des stupéfiants, an expert group headquartered in Vienna charged with applying UN conventions relating to drugs), Iraq is in the process of becoming an important transit country on the route for Afghan heroin. Opiates and cannabis produced in Afghanistan "are brought through Iraq to Jordan from where they are sent on to the European markets of the East and West," he declared during a press conference given Thursday in Vienna.

This tendency is confirmed by the rise in narcotics seizures along the Iraqi-Jordanian border the last twelve months. "This situation is made possible by the domestic situation in Iraq, where border controls have been loosened and traffickers can come through disguised as pilgrims" going to the great Shiite cities, propounded Hamid Ghodse, for whom the situation is comparable to that of most countries emerging from a conflict situation.

While drug problems have been historically unknown in Iraq (out of fear of repression striking traffickers and consumers or quite simply from lack of information), OICS has worried about the new trend since its March 2004 annual report. "Drugs have started to enter the country in huge quantities, notably through the Eastern border," with Iran, revealed Iraqi Minister of the Interior Nouri Badrane then, who worried especially about the increase in narcotics consumption among young Iraqis: "Consumption of these drugs is on the rise, due to unemployment, insecurity, and the sense of uncertainty about the future, especially among young people." A few months later, his equivalent at the Health Ministry talked about "a problem that has become endemic," submitting a number of 2,029 registered addicts.

A trend confirmed this year by Hamid Ghodse, who, on Thursday, inventoried a troubling increase in the number of addicts treated in the capital's hospitals, but also in other cities in the country. To confront the situation, Baghdad has adopted a national anti-narcotics plan. "It's urgent that the Iraqi government and the international community take the preventative measures the situation requires before it becomes worse," Hamid Ghodse concluded.

A deterioration that Washington, which for the moment has other priorities, could also pay the price for. If drug consumption by GIs is not at present the subject of any study, the highlight of the June 2004 edition of the magazine "High Times" (specializing in cannabis) was a GI in Iraq posing next to a cannabis plant. In 1971, 11% of GIs based in Vietnam declared that they consumed heroin regularly, while one in five said that they had tried it.[1]

It was following their return to the United States that Nixon decided to launch his global war on drugs.

http://www.banderasnews.com/0506/hb-heroinroute.htm

[SPINOZA]

I'm all for the decrimilization of so-called hard drugs - coke and heroin in particular. Not sure about crack. Our governments are constantly throwing billions down the toilet trying to win the war on drugs and it'd be more sensible to eliminate the black market by making drugs' sale and use less illegal somehow. They should be cheap too, so addicts don't need to rob, mug people - also an expensive menace to society.

The only objection I would have to this is that alcohol being legal and socially acceptable causes enough mayhem already and we don't particularly need more.

Bring back the days of opium dens!

[deessell]

[quote="igotthisguitar"]Iraq: The New Heroin Route
Arnaud Aubron - Liberation



Losing war on drugs: Iran is on the heroin supply route from Asia to Europe.

Opiates - and cannabis - produced in Afghanistan transit through Iraq before being distributed in Europe. Their consumption is growing in Baghdad and elsewhere.



This is how the black-ops are funded. CIA, Mossad etc are all behind this. War is always about resources.

[igotthisguitar]

[bigverne]

It is a bit simplistic to say that the War on Drugs hasn't worked. It would be more accurate to say that the War on Drugs hasn't worked in the West. In countries like Singapore and Korea, they take a very tough stance on drugs and have few of the social problems associated with it. This, however, may be more to do with culture than the success of government policy, but illegal drug taking in these countries is very low, compared to the West.

[igotthisguitar]

Teens Say Marijuana "Easy to Get" Despite Record Arrests
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- For the 31st year in a row, approximately 85% of high school seniors have told government survey-takers that marijuana is "easy to get," according to the 2005 Monitoring the Future survey released today. The report comes less than two months after the FBI reported an all-time record number of marijuana arrests in 2004.

In today's survey, 85.6% of high school seniors described marijuana as being either "fairly easy" or "very easy" to get. This "easy to get" figure has remained virtually unchanged since the survey began in 1975, having never dropped lower than 82.7% (in 1992) or higher than 90.4% (in 1998).

Over the same 31-year period, the number of U.S. marijuana arrests has varied dramatically, dropping to a low of 282,800 in 1991 and then beginning an almost unbroken rise to a record high of 771,605 last year.

"The near-tripling of marijuana arrests since 1991 has produced exactly zero reduction in the availability of marijuana to kids," said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C. "Prohibition of marijuana for adults not only doesn't keep marijuana away from children, it actually guarantees that marijuana stays accessible to young people by giving unregulated criminals an exclusive franchise on marijuana sales."

"In contrast, look at the success we've had with tobacco, another product we don't want children to use," Kampia continued. "Today's survey shows teen smoking at its lowest level ever. Reports from around the country show that tobacco products are becoming less accessible to kids, and merchants can be fined or even lose their license if they sell tobacco to minors. Walk into nearly any store that sells cigarettes, and you'll see a large sign saying, 'Under 18, No Tobacco: We Card.' Have you ever seen a drug dealer with a sign like that? To keep marijuana away from kids, the first step is to take control -- and prohibition guarantees that we have no control."

With more than 19,000 members and 100,000 e-mail subscribers nationwide, the Marijuana Policy Project is the largest marijuana policy reform organization in the United States. MPP believes that the best way to minimize the harm associated with marijuana is to regulate marijuana in a manner similar to alcohol.

For more information, please visit http://MarijuanaPolicy.org.

[Satori]

The only problem with illegal drug taking is that it's illegal.

A person only really has a "drug problem" when they don't have enough cash to score...

[igotthisguitar]

[Satori]