Tag: the war on (some) drugs

HIV epidemic explodes in popular honeymoon destination as crystal meth use surges

A popular honeymoon destination is the site of the Pacific’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic, with officials pointing to rising meth use as a key driver.

In Fiji, HIV/AIDS cases are projected to double this year to more than 3,000, according to UNAIDS and Fiji’s Ministry of Health.

Officials say drug use is fueling the surge across the Pacific island nation.

In December, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a rapid assessment detecting unsafe injecting practices.

These practices can put people who inject drugs in Fiji at an increased risk of HIV transmission.

The “Bluetooth trend” has impacted the spread — with individuals injecting the blood of an already intoxicated person to achieve a high when they cannot afford their own drugs.

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Collins says China-linked Drug Networks are Expanding in Maine as Crackdown Language Heads to Trump’s Desk

Sen. Susan Collins (R) says she secured new funding and legislative language aimed at combating Chinese-linked illicit drug operations in Maine as the Fiscal Year 2026 National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs (NSRP) Appropriations Act heads to President Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law.

The bill passed the Senate last week and was approved by the House of Representatives today, according to Collins’ office. Collins, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the measure is intended to support efforts to disrupt drug and money laundering operations tied to PRC-linked criminal syndicates.

“PRC-linked criminal syndicates continue to expand their illegal marijuana grow operations in Maine while contributing to the flow of fentanyl and its precursor chemicals that threaten communities in our state and across the country,” Collins said. “This legislation strengthens our ongoing efforts to expose and disrupt these networks and provide law enforcement with the information and tools they need to protect public safety.”

Among the provisions highlighted by Collins: the bill includes language directing the Secretary of State, in consultation with the heads of other relevant federal agencies, to submit a report to the appropriate congressional committees on PRC-linked criminal syndicates or nationals who may be directly or indirectly involved in illegal drug and money laundering operations in the United States, including in Maine, California, and Oregon.

The legislation also includes $150 million to counter the flow of fentanyl, fentanyl precursors, and other synthetic drugs into the United States.

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Washington State Senators Approve Bill To Legalize Marijuana Home Grow For Adults

Washington State lawmakers have advanced a bill to expand the state’s voter-approved marijuana legalization law by allowing recreational consumers to grow their own cannabis plants.

Weeks after Sens. Rebecca Saldaña (D), Noel Frame (D) and T’wina Nobles (D) filed the legislation, the Senate Labor & Commerce Committee on Tuesday approved the measure in a voice vote. It next heads to the Senate Rules Committee before potentially reaching the floor.

The vote comes about a week after the Senate panel held an initial hearing on the proposal, with law enforcement representatives voicing opposition to the reform and military veterans testifying in support of allowing personal home cultivation.

Under SB 6204, adults over 21 years of age would be allowed to cultivate up to six marijuana plants at home. No more than 15 cannabis plants could be produced at any one time in a single housing unit, regardless of how many adults live there.

People could lawfully keep the marijuana produced by those plants despite the state’s existing one-ounce limit on possession.

Property owners would be allowed to prohibit tenants from growing cannabis in rental units, and probation and parole officers would be able to bar people from cultivating marijuana as a condition of their supervised release.

Home cultivators would be required to keep plants from public view and grown in such a way that they could not be smelled from public places or private properties of other housing units. Violating those rules would be a class 3 civil infraction.

It would be a class 1 civil infraction for a person to grow more than six but fewer than 16 cannabis plants, while it would be a class C felony to produce more than 16 plants, under the bill.

No cannabis plants could be grown in housing units that are used to provide early childhood education and early learning services by a family day care provider.

The committee on Tuesday approved an amendment from Sen. Mark Schoesler (R) to allow municipalities and counties to ban or enact moratoriums on cannabis cultivation in housing units in areas that are zoned primarily for residential use.

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Oklahoma Governor Wants Voters To Revisit Medical Marijuana Legalization Law And ‘Shut It Down’

The Republican governor of Oklahoma says he wants voters to revisit the state’s medical marijuana law and “shut it down,” arguing that “liberal activists” conned the state and “opened up Pandora’s box’ with legalization.

During his State of the State address on Monday, Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) said his “top priority has always been keeping Oklahoma safe,” and one of the “greatest threats to public safety is the out-of-control marijuana industry.”

“When Oklahomans voted to legalize medical marijuana in 2018, we were sold a bill of goods,” he said. “Out of state liberal activists preyed on the compassionate nature of Oklahomans. Then, it opened up Pandora’s box.”

The governor complained that the state has “more dispensaries than we do pharmacies,” adding that marijuana retailers “hide an industry that enables cartel activity, human trafficking, and foreign influence in our state.”

While regulators and law enforcement have “done incredible work to hold back the tide of illegal activity,” Stitt said, the industry is “plagued by foreign criminal interests and bad actors, making it nearly impossible to rein in.”

“We can’t put a band-aid on a broken bone,” he said. “Knowing what we know, it’s time to let Oklahomans bring safety and sanity back to their neighborhoods. Send the marijuana issue back to the vote of the people and shut it down.”

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San Francisco Ends $5M-A-Year Program That Supplied Alcohol To Homeless Addicts

Sigh. It’s not parody. It’s San Francisco. The city is shutting down a controversial program that used millions in taxpayer funds to provide alcohol to homeless residents struggling with addiction, according to the NY Post.

Mayor Daniel Lurie said the city will end the Managed Alcohol Program, which cost about $5 million each year and began during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For years, San Francisco was spending $5 million a year to provide alcohol to people who were struggling with homelessness and addiction — it doesn’t make sense, and we’re ending it,” Lurie told The California Post.

The program was launched in April 2020, when the city placed unhoused residents in hotels during lockdowns. Medical staff supplied controlled amounts of beer and liquor to prevent dangerous withdrawal symptoms while stores and bars were closed. Although intended as a temporary measure, it continued for nearly six years.

During its operation, the program served only 55 people, translating to an average cost of roughly $454,000 per client.

Now, Lurie says the city has fully pulled its support.

“We have ended every city contract for that program,” he said.

Community Forward, the nonprofit that managed the initiative in recent years, confirmed that the city has terminated its funding. Financial records show the group received millions in public money, much of it spent on staff salaries.

San Francisco’s program was the first of its kind in the United States, modeled loosely on similar efforts in Canada. Unlike other harm-reduction policies, such as needle exchanges, MAP directly supplied alcohol to people already dependent on it.

Since taking office last year, Lurie has moved away from long-standing harm-reduction policies. He has also ended the distribution of drug-use equipment and pushed for stricter enforcement of street drug activity.

“Under my administration, we made San Francisco a recovery-first city and ended the practice of handing out fentanyl smoking supplies so people couldn’t kill themselves on our streets,” Lurie said.

“We have work to do, but we have transformed the city’s response, and we are breaking the cycles of addiction, homelessness and government failure that have let down San Franciscans for too long.”

Last year, he warned open-air drug markets that enforcement would increase.

“If you do drugs on our streets, you will be arrested,” Lurie said. “And instead of sending you back out in crisis, we will give you a chance to stabilize and enter recovery.”

The Post writes that recovery advocates welcomed the decision to end MAP. Tom Wolf, a former homeless addict who now works in outreach, said the program wasted public funds.

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Alabama Lawmakers Pass Bill To Increase Penalties For Smoking Marijuana In A Car Where A Child Is Present

The Alabama House of Representatives Thursday passed a bill that prohibits smoking or vaping marijuana in a car with children.

HB 72, sponsored by Rep. Patrick Sellers, D-Pleasant Grove, would make it a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail,  for those who smoke marijuana in a car with a child under 19.

The bill passed 77-2 after an unusual debate largely limited to the 29 Democrats in the 105-member chamber over potential unintended consequences. Most Democrats abstained from the vote. Four voted in favor; Reps. Mary Moore, D-Birmingham and TaShina Morris, D-Montgomery, voted against the bill.

“It’s about protecting the children, protecting every single child in the state of Alabama,” Sellers said after the meeting. “And that’s the motivation behind making sure that every child has the 100 percent ability to learn in the best environment that they can and keep them safe.”

Under the bill, individuals who are found to have smoked marijuana in the car with a child would be required to go through an educational program conducted by the Department of Public Health and would be reported by law enforcement to local county human resources departments.

Several Democrats who spoke on the measure cited the toll that harsh drug laws had taken on minority communities.

“It goes back to the heart of criminalization of marijuana in certain communities,” Rep. Juandalynn Givan, D-Birmingham, said after the meeting. “And those are communities that are communities typical of people of color.”

Givan also said House Democrats had wanted to work with Sellers on the bill.

“The Democratic Party, on several attempts, said that this is a bill that we might need to sit down and curate,” she said. “I’m not sure why the sponsor of the bill did not do that.”

Morris raised concerns about the bill’s definition of a child during debate.

“So we’re making a parent responsible for an 18-year-old who has a marijuana smell on them,” she said. “We know at the ages of 16 and 17, especially with the influence of walking outside and going different places, that they are smoking, maybe without the parent even knowing.”

Rep. Rolanda Hollis, D-Birmingham, said during debate that parents don’t know everything that their child does.

“As a parent you may not know, and here I don’t know if the counselor or the principal can call you in to say ‘Hey this is what we smelled on your kid’s jacket, how are we gonna handle this?’ But instead you got me going to a class for something I don’t even know about,” she said.

When asked after the meeting about Morris’ concerns about the bill’s language regarding age, Sellers said parents should “stop making excuses” for their children.

“You know whether or not your child is smoking marijuana. If someone lives in your house, you know they’re smoking marijuana because you can smell it. It’s a distinct smell,” he said.

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A dream-like psychedelic might help traumatized veterans reset their brains

A new study suggests that the intensity of spiritual or “mystical” moments felt during psychedelic treatment may predict how well veterans recover from trauma symptoms. Researchers found that soldiers who reported profound feelings of unity and sacredness while taking ibogaine experienced lasting relief from post-traumatic stress disorder. These findings were published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

For decades, medical professionals have sought better ways to assist military personnel returning from combat. Many veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, as well as traumatic brain injuries caused by repeated exposure to blasts. These conditions often occur together and can be resistant to standard pharmaceutical treatments. The lack of effective options has led some researchers to investigate alternative therapies derived from natural sources.

One such substance is ibogaine. This psychoactive compound comes from the root bark of the Tabernanthe iboga shrub, which is native to Central Africa. Cultures in that region have used the plant for centuries in healing and spiritual ceremonies. In recent years, it has gained attention in the West for its potential to treat addiction and psychiatric distress. Unlike some other psychedelics, ibogaine often induces a dream-like state where users review their memories.

Despite anecdotal reports of success, the scientific community still has a limited understanding of how ibogaine works in the human brain. Most prior research focused on classic psychedelics like psilocybin or MDMA. The specific psychological mechanisms that might allow ibogaine to alleviate trauma symptoms remain largely unexplored.

Randi E. Brown, a researcher at the Stanford University School of Medicine and the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, led a team to investigate this question. They worked in collaboration with the late Nolan R. Williams and other specialists in psychiatry and behavioral sciences. The team sought to determine if the subjective quality of the drug experience mattered for recovery. They hypothesized that a “mystical experience” might be a key driver of therapeutic change.

The concept of a mystical experience in psychology is specific and measurable. It refers to a sensation of unity with the universe, a transcendence of time and space, and deeply felt peace or joy. It also includes a quality known as ineffability, meaning the experience is too profound to be described in words. The researchers wanted to know if veterans who felt these sensations more strongly would see better clinical results.

The study analyzed data from thirty male Special Operations Veterans. All participants had a history of traumatic brain injury and combat exposure. Because ibogaine is not approved for medical use in the United States, the veterans traveled to a clinic in Mexico for the treatment. This setup allowed the researchers to observe the effects of the drug in a clinical setting outside the U.S.

The treatment protocol involved a single administration of the drug. The medical staff combined ibogaine with magnesium sulfate. This addition is intended to protect the heart, as ibogaine can sometimes disrupt cardiac rhythms. The veterans received the medication orally after a period of fasting. They spent the session lying down with eyeshades, generally experiencing the effects internally rather than interacting with others.

To measure the psychological impact of the session, the researchers administered the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire. This survey asks participants to rate the intensity of various feelings, such as awe or a sense of sacredness. The researchers collected these scores immediately after the treatment concluded.

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Delaware Lawmakers Approve Bill To Decriminalize Public Marijuana Use And Remove Threat Of Jail Time

Delaware lawmakers have approved a bill to decriminalize public consumption of marijuana.

Under current law, Delaware is the only cannabis legalization state in the U.S. that imposes the threat of jail time for the public consumption, but the House Health & Human Development Committee voted 9-5 on Wednesday to advance legislation to change that.

While certain legal marijuana states like Colorado and Ohio still impose criminal penalties for public cannabis use, Delaware stands out as especially punitive, with a maximum penalty that carries the risk of jail time in addition to a fine.

Under HB 252, sponsored by Rep. Eric Morrison (D), the penalty would be reduced to a civil infraction, punishable by a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 fine for a second or subsequent offense.

Morrison told colleagues at Wednesday’s hearing that “it makes sense that if we’ve seen fit to decriminalize cannabis, that we decriminalize public consumption of it.”

“This legislation puts us in line with what the large majority of other states with decriminalized or legalized cannabis have done when it comes to public consumption,” he said.

“This change does not say it’s okay to consume cannabis in public. It simply updates the current penalty for public consumption to be commensurate with the offense,” Morrison said.

“There are bad things associated with a criminal record. Those things can include difficulty in finding work and difficulty in finding housing. There are also bad things, of course, associated with prison time. You’re taking away family members from their families. You’re taking them away from their jobs, possibly taking away income they need to meet the monthly bills, or maybe even causing them to lose their job.”

The Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) said in an action alert on Tuesday that the state’s current penalty is “out of step with Delaware’s treatment of secondhand tobacco smoke.”

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Top Federal Drug Official Touts Therapeutic ‘Promise’ Of Psychedelics And Slams Schedule I Research Barriers

A top federal health official is again touting the therapeutic “promise” of psychedelics such as psilocybin and MDMA—though she says the drugs’ Schedule I status remains a research barrier to scientifically validating their efficacy.

In a blog post this month, National Institution on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Director Nora Volkow said the “potential use of psychedelics in the treatment of various mental health conditions has made these drugs a hot area of scientific research, as well as growing public interest.”

NIDA, as well as other agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have been particularly interested in tapping into the therapeutic potential of ketamine, psilocybin and MDMA—each of which are undergoing trials that could pave the path to their broader accessibility to patients with serious mental health conditions.

These psychedelics “represent a potential paradigm shift in the way we address substance use disorders,” Volkow said, caveating that “there is much we still do not know about these drugs, the way they work, and how to administer them, and there is danger of the hype getting out ahead of the science.”

The director said the “promise of psychedelic compounds likely centers on their ability to promote rapid neural rewiring,” which “may explain these compounds’ relatively long-lasting effects, even with just one or a few administrations.”

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The Information War Over Antidepressants

Stat News hit the ethical and scientific bottom two weeks ago when they published an article by Stephen B. Soumerai, professor of population medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Christine Y. Lu, professor at the Sydney Pharmacy School of the University of Sydney.1

I have rarely seen so much disinformation in so few words, only 1,220. I reproduce the article in its entirety, in italics, with my comments. 

I do not consider Stat News a reliable news source. It has corporate ties, and despite its name, it has nothing to do with statistics, which I thought for ten years till I looked it up. Stat is short for Statim, which means immediate in Latin. 

The two professors have forgotten that professors have an obligation towards society to be honest conveyors of science. Their article is propaganda of the worst kind, which is apparent already in its title and subtitle: 

RFK Jr.’s war on antidepressants is coming – and it will cost lives. Kennedy’s rhetoric is not only based on bad science, it fuels distrust in mental health treatments.

It is primitive and a no-go for scientists to raise their voice by using war rhetoric but they continue with this in the first sentence of the article: 

While his war on vaccines may be getting more attention, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is coming for another important medical tool: antidepressants. In November, he posted on X that the CDC is “finally confronting the long-taboo question of whether SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs contribute to mass violence.” We fear that in 2026, he may turn his rhetoric into action.

Kennedy has not started a war on vaccines.2-6 As health secretary, he has taken rational, much needed, and evidence-based initiatives. He fired the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) because it rubber-stamped all proposals that came to them and because some members had conflicts of interest in relation to vaccine manufacturers and other drug companies; dropped the much too broad recommendations for the Covid vaccine; cut funding for mRNA vaccines; stopped recommending the hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns; and reduced the huge childhood vaccine schedule that made the US an outlier compared to Europe. 

Moreover, it is well documented that SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs can cause violence.7-11 For antidepressants, the violence is dose-related,11 and it is highly relevant to study their role in mass shootings. Unfortunately, the authorities routinely refuse to release information about what drugs the mass murderers were on. It has become taboo to mention that psychiatric drugs kill people, indeed to such an extent that they are the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer (much because elderly people may lose balance, break their hip, and die).12 

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