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New York is smoking. eating and vaping more than 77 tons of weed a year...Even more interesting is that marijuana is legal in Los Angeles, and only partially legal in New York.Karachi, Pakistan came in second to New York when broken down globally. While it is illegal there, they are still consuming just under 42 tons of the green goods.

Lumberton Police Chief Shane Flynt has been suspended with pay, according to Mayor Quincy Rogers. The mayor said Flynt was sent home Tuesday after WDAM showed Rogers a video showing the police chief smoking what he implies to be marijuana. Rogers said Flynt will remain on suspension until the city’s board of aldermen can meet. Rogers said he tried to call a special meeting to address the issue, but could not get board members to meet. The board’s next scheduled meeting is March 6. Before taking the video to the mayor Tuesday, we confronted Flynt. At the time, he said...

A Democrat running for Congress in Illinois' fifth congressional district showcased his support for marijuana legalization by smoking pot in a new campaign ad. Benjamin Thomas Wolf, a former FBI official turned Chicago restaurant owner, told the Chicago Sun-Times that it is important to be upfront about recreational cannabis use and the potential economic and social benefits of legalization. "As a cannabis user, I think it's important we get out front and talk about it," said Wolf, who is vying to defeat incumbent Rep.I Mike Quigley (D., Ill.) in this year's Democratic primary. "We realize that cannabis can bring billions...

FULL TITLE: Unclaimed bodies pile up as opioid overdose death rates soar and burial costs overwhelm the government Unclaimed bodies are piling up across the US as state and local governments struggle to keep up with payments to the funeral homes that spend thousands to bury them. A 2004 report estimated that there are 40,000 unclaimed bodies stored in morgues across the US, and experts say that number has risen dramatically in recent years in part due to the opioid crisis. More than 115 people die from opioid overdoses each day, and the most affected populations are those in lower...

Nearly all cannabis on Britain’s streets is now super-strength skunk that could be fueling the rise in mental health problems, scientists have warned. Researchers at King’s College London tested almost 1,000 police seizures from Kent, Derbyshire, Merseyside, Sussex and the capital in 2016, and found 94 percent were of a dangerously high potency. In 2005, just 51 percent of cannabis sold on the street was sinsemilla, also known as skunk. Dr. Marta Di Forti, Medical Research Council Clinician Scientist at King’s College warned that the powerful drug placed Britain’s 2.1 million cannabis users at risk of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression,...

FULL TITLE: Son, 61, of billionaire Little Caesars pizza founder found dead surrounded by drugs in Michigan hotel room The son of the billionaire Little Caesars founder and owner of both the Detroit Red Wings and the Detroit Tigers, has been found dead surrounded by drugs in a hotel room. Ronald Ilitch, 61, was found dead on the floor of his Marriott Hotel room in Troy, Michigan, on Friday afternoon, MLive.com reports. A female acquaintance had called 911 at about 2.12pm to report that Ilitch wasn't breathing, and when emergency crews arrived, they found him face-up on the floor. A...

Molson Coors Brewing Co. (TAP) voiced concerns about the potential impact that cannabis legalization could have on its beer sales, in its latest 13F filing. Although it has been a slow process, the legalization of cannabis across various parts of the United States has ushered in new business opportunities and provided legitimate alternatives to once-clandestine industries. (See also: The Economic Benefits of Legalizing Weed.)Supporters of the marijuana legalization movement contend that this has a beneficial impact on everything from individual growers and distributors to secondary markets and governments, which could benefit from taxes on sales. However, there are also detractors...

Alcohol use disorders are the most important preventable risk factors for the onset of all types of dementia, especially early-onset dementia. This according to a nationwide observational study, published in The Lancet Public Health journal, of over one million adults diagnosed with dementia in France.

The Sackler brothers represented America’s wildest dream: three Brooklyn-born sons of Jewish immigrants who became physicians and went on to found a pharmaceutical dynasty that is today worth more than $13 billion. The family used their fortune to invest in the arts and philanthropy, with Sackler wings at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Louvre in Paris – to name just a few. The Sackler name, however, is conspicuously missing from anything associated with their main source of income, Purdue Pharmaceuticals and its related companies, or its billion dollar product: OxyContin. You...

Efforts to find solutions to the opioid epidemic have managed to stay mostly above the fray of partisan politics. But inject the issue of immigration into just about anything these days and even the pretense of unity evaporates.

Mexico recorded more than 29,000 murders in 2017, the highest annual tally in decades, government figures have shown.

The American government has issued a stark warning to all potential tourists to Mexico: "Don't go." It comes after the country revealed nearly 30,000 people were murdered last year - the highest number in 20 years. The CIA says the violence levels are comparable with the war zones of Iraq and Syria. The resort city of Acapulco, a former playground of the rich and famous, is now at the centre of a crime wave that has swept across the country. Extortion, kidnapping and murder are daily events. I joined the Mexican Federal Police on patrol in what is now one...

Philippines' Duterte orders female communist fighters shot in the genitals, reports say Feb. 14, 2018 Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte last week bragged that he had ordered troops to shoot female communist fighters in their vaginas, according to multiple reports, triggering a wave of criticism against the strongman when the remark was published Monday. “Tell the soldiers, ‘There’s a new order coming from the mayor,'” Duterte, a former mayor, told an audience of approximately 200 former rebels in Malacañang. “We won’t kill you. We will just shoot your vagina.’” “If there is no vagina, it would be useless,” Duterte added to...

The maker of the powerful painkiller OxyContin said it will stop marketing opioid drugs to doctors, bowing to a key demand of lawsuits that blame the company for helping trigger the current drug abuse epidemic. Purdue's statement said it eliminated more than half its sales staff this week and will no longer send sales representatives to doctors' offices to discuss opioid drugs. Its remaining sales staff of about 200 will focus on other medications. The company announced its surprise reversal on Saturday. OxyContin has long been the world's top-selling opioid painkiller, bringing in billions in sales for privately-held Purdue, which...

If we extend the attorney general's medical advice to people who suffer from severe chronic pain—people who need opioids to get out of bed in the morning and have something like a normal life, people who may be driven to suicide when they are denied adequate medication—his attitude is not merely cruel but downright barbaric. As a college student with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome told me when I interviewed him for an upcoming Reason feature story about opioids, the right kind of pain medication can be "the difference between wanting to put a bullet in your brain and enjoying life." Sessions' "tough...

The warnings have been ubiquitous for decades: drinking alcohol while pregnant could have severe impacts on the unborn child. Now, a new study of thousands of first graders in four different regions of the United States contends the rates are much higher than previously believed – perhaps five times the most recent estimates. The study, published in the Journal of American Medical Association, has already indicated that the effects of alcohol on fetuses are statistically comparable to other development disabilities. “Our results suggest that the rate of FASD (fetal alcohol spectrum disorder) in children in the Untied States is as...

Use of the devices in criminal trials is fairly new and controversial.New technology purchased by the San Diego Police Department to detect the presence of drugs including marijuana in drivers was used during a fatal hit-and-run investigation Saturday in Paradise Hills. The Drager 5000 is a device that detects cannabis, cocaine, methadone, methamphetamine, prescription drugs and other controlled substances in drivers. On Saturday night, a Paradise Hills couple was on their evening stroll a few yards from their home when a driver, who was allegedly high on drugs plowed up onto the sidewalk and ended the 67-year-old man’s life....

Abstract Recent work finds that medical marijuana laws reduce the daily doses filled for opioid analgesics among Medicare Part-D and Medicaid enrollees, as well as population-wide opioid overdose deaths. We replicate the result for opioid overdose deaths and explore the potential mechanism. The key feature of a medical marijuana law that facilitates a reduction in overdose death rates is a relatively liberal allowance for dispensaries. As states have become more stringent in their regulation of dispensaries, the protective value generally has fallen. These findings suggest that broader access to medical marijuana facilitates substitution of marijuana for powerful and addictive opioids....

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have published one of the largest reports to have ever investigated the effects of electronic cigarettes. We summarize its findings below. A comprehensive new report reviews the health risks of electronic cigarettes. The report — which can be accessed in full here — reviews over 800 scientific studies and draws several conclusions on various health aspects that may be affected by the use of electronic cigarettes, also known as e-cigarettes. The need for an in-depth analysis of e-cigarettes is evident given their widespread use. According to the Centers for Disease Control and...

The Association of German Criminal Officers (BDK) has spoken out in favor of ending the ban on cannabis, and has called for the decriminalization of all use of the drug. “The prohibition of cannabis has historically been seen as arbitrary and has not yet been implemented in an intelligent and effective manner,” the head of BDK, André Schulz, told Bild newspaper on Monday. “In the history of mankind, there has never been a society without the use of drugs; this is something that has to be accepted,” he added. “My prediction is cannabis will not be banned for long in...