research

by Anna Tomova

Previous studies have provided some evidence of a link between early and continued use of marijuana to an increased risk of psychosis and hallucinations, instigating researchers from Queensland, Australia to investigate further. Their investigations have now established a pretty strong connection between the length of marijuana use and the possibility of psychosis in young adults.

Young adults who smoke cannabis or marijuana for six years or more, seem twice as likely to experience psychotic episodes, hallucinations or delusions, than people who have never used the drug.

Checking out pot use and psychosis symptoms among siblings just to ensure no genetic or environmental factor had been missed out, the researchers found marijuana played a role in ‘psychosis-related outcomes’. However, in their conclusion, they write the nature of the relationship between psychosis and use of cannabis is not simple.

First some background: The spinal cord is a bundle of nerve axons that descend from the brain down the back, to around the area of the waist. It is responsible for delivering and relaying messages traveling to and from the brain. The spinal cord is surrounded by bones known as vertebrae, which function to protect the spinal cord from damage or injury. However, it is still possible for damage to occur as a result of severe trauma, which tends to affect bodily functions below the area of injury. However, the initial trauma is not usually the major cause of cell death in the spinal cord. Necrosis occurs after a nerve cell axon is compressed, leading to swelling and eventually bursting. Additionally, a different process occurs known as apoptosis, or programmed cell death, in which neurons surrounding the initial area of damage receive a signal to essentially kill themselves. In spinal cord injuries this normally occurs in two waves: one wave eight hours after the initial injury that affects a specific cell type known as glial cells. The second wave occurs about seven days later in a different cell type known as oligodendrocytes, which can occur at areas distant from the epicenter of injury. This exacerbates initial damage and leads to increased loss of bodily functions.

By. Thomas Kerr and Evan Wood
Three recently published studies on street-involved youth who use drugs in Vancouver from the Urban Health Research Initiative at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

 

1) What brings youth to the streets of downtown Vancouver?

This qualitative study, involving 38 young drug users, sought to investigate the processes that bring youth to the streets in the first place, and then make it difficult for them to leave this environment. The interviews uncovered that a desire to leave difficult living situations, as well as the need to find affordable housing were some of the reasons youth move to downtown Vancouver, while subsequent heavy drug use, homelessness and involvement in illegal activities were some of the factors that create barriers to leaving street life.  This article is published in the journal ‘Social Science and Medicine’ and is entitled: ‘Coming ‘down here’: young people’s reflections on becoming entrenched in a local drug scene’.

A summary of this study is available on our website at: click here.

The abstract for this study is also available on PubMed at: click here.

 

by Croakey

What has Julia Gillard unleashed? The MySchool website is provoking some lateral suggestions that extend well beyond the education portfolio. One Croakey reader, responding to Gavin Mooney’s recent piece on MyHospital, suggested that we need someone to set up MyMP, to monitor our elected representatives’ productivity.

Now Dr Alex Wodak, President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, has taken the notion of public reporting a step further. What difference might it make, he wonders, if governments had to account for their drug policies through a website, My Drug Policy?

He reports from the website’s “launch”:

 

“Tonight I am pleased to announce that a new web site, mydrugpolicy, has just gone live.

By. ScienceDaily

The benefits of marijuana in tempering or reversing the effects of Alzheimer's disease have been challenged in a new study by researchers at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute.

The findings, published in the current issue of the journal Current Alzheimer Research, could lower expectations about the benefits of medical marijuana in combating various cognitive diseases and help redirect future research to more promising therapeutics.

By GARDINER HARRIS, New York Times

Despite the Obama administration’s tacit support of more liberal state medical marijuana laws, the federal government still discourages research into the medicinal uses of smoked marijuana. That may be one reason that — even though some patients swear by it — there is no good scientific evidence that legalizing marijuana’s use provides any benefits over current therapies.

Lyle E. Craker, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Massachusetts, has been trying to get permission from federal authorities for nearly nine years to grow a supply of the plant that he could study and provide to researchers for clinical trials.

But the Drug Enforcement Administration — more concerned about abuse than potential benefits — has refused, even after the agency’s own administrative law judge ruled in 2007 that Dr. Craker’s application should be approved, and even after Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in March ended the Bush administration’s policy of raiding dispensers of medical marijuana that comply with state laws.

Testing municipal wastewater for drugs may be the next big thing in public health research. The methodology will likely confirm the universality of drug use.

By Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet

All kinds of people use illegal drugs, all over the country -- in urban, suburban, ex-urban, and rural areas. Yet our imperfect methods for gauging community drug use disproportionately represent cities and often leave out the highest-risk populations, giving a skewed picture of who uses what types of drugs where.

The answer, oddly enough, may reside in shit. After all, everything that comes in must come out, so using human waste as a measure of society's health makes sense.

LONDON (Reuters) - The active ingredient in marijuana appears to reduce tumour growth, according to a Spanish study published on Wednesday.

The researchers showed giving THC to mice with cancer decreased tumour growth and killed cells off in a process called autophagy.

"Our findings support that safe, therapeutically efficacious doses of THC may be reached in cancer patients," Guillermo Velasco of Complutense University in Madrid and colleagues reported in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.