Posted on 12/27/2005 7:26:46 AM PST by billorites
Marijuana--or more specifically its active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol--has a well-documented tendency to stimulate hunger. And while scientists have traced this property to cannabinoid receptors in the brain, they have had little understanding of the neural circuitry underlying this effect.
Understanding this circuitry has important practical implications because blocking the cannabinoid receptor, CB1, offers a promising approach to treating obesity. One such compound, rimonabant (trade name AcompliaTM) is already undergoing clinical testing.
In an article in the December 22, 2005, issue of Neuron, Young-Hwan Jo and colleagues report how the circuitry of CB1 is integrated with signaling by the appetite-suppressing hormone leptin. The CB1 receptor is normally triggered by natural regulatory molecules, called endocannabinoids.
In their studies, the researchers concentrated on the lateral hypothalamus (LH) of the brain, known to be a center of control of food intake. Their studies involved detailed electrophysiological measurements of the effects of specific neurons that they had identified in previous studies as being important in endocannabinoid signaling.
Their studies revealed that activation of CB1 receptors, as by endocannabinoid molecules, induced these neurons to be rendered more excitable by a mechanism called "depolarization-induced suppression of inhibition" (DSI).
What's more, they found that leptin inhibits DSI. However, they found that leptin did not interfere with the CB1 receptors themselves. Rather, leptin "short-circuits" the endocannabinoid effects by inhibiting pore-like channels in the neurons that regulate the flow of calcium into the neurons. Such calcium is necessary for the synthesis of endocannabinoids.
In further studies of mice genetically altered to be leptin deficient, the researchers found the DSI to be more prolonged than in normal mice. Thus, they said, the findings "implicate this mechanism for leptin receptor/endocannabinoid signaling in contributing to the maintenance of weight balance...." The researchers also included that "upregulation of endocannabinoid signaling in the LH may explain, at least in part, the increased body weight consistent with a prior report of elevated endocannabinoids" in such leptin-deficient mice.
The researchers concluded that their findings "are consistent with the hypothesis that the integration of endocannabinoid and leptin signaling regulates the excitability of neurons on appetite-related circuits."
They also wrote that "the cellular mechanisms of recently developed antiobesity drugs, such as rimonabant, may include decreased endocannabinoid signaling and hence decreased excitability of LH circuits related to appetite, even in the context of leptin insufficiency or resistance."
Which means your basic soil mixture is pretty good, and you had a good location.
My Dad didn't use Miracle Gro, his secret ingredient was more bother to come up, but it did grow some killer tomatoes and other food plants as well. The ingredient was chicken shit, cleaned from his own chicken coops. Raising chickens, even prize show chickens, is at least as much bother as keeping plants from being pollinated.
There were plenty of mental institutions in those days. They just saved them for the insane, not the morally depraved, or for the criminally amoral. For them we had other institutions, called prisons. We also had the gallows, the electric chair and the firing squad. Those too were put to good use in those days. Unlike banning guns, they actually worked.
Please provide evidence that drug use has gone up.
How did we get from growing tomatoes to raising chickens? I grew fine tomatoes easily and with no help from chickens or their byproducts.
Why didn't you ask me to provide evidence between the increase in drug use and the increase of gun control?
Are you certain? Do you really know what was in that Miracle Gro?
But the real point was that growing superior pot, or whatever other plant you might choose to grow, is unlikely to be any more difficult, than growing most any other superior plant, or raising superior animals for food. With commercially grown stuff, including that grown by family farmers, much of the "difficulty" is out of sight to the layman, and sometimes even to the grower, if he purchases commercially produced supplies. The same would be the case if pot were legal, there'd be whole above board support industry, for those who chose to grown their own, and a more or less sophisticated horticulture industry to grow it for those who don't.
What decreasing drug laws? At the beginning of the 20th century, you could legally buy cocaine, in your Coke-a-Cola no less, smoke whatever you wished, and you could also own whatever firearm you chose without any federal permission. It's not just a coincidence that the first federal firearm law was patterned after the Harrison Narcotics Act. Very explicitly so in fact according to the testimony of the Attorney General before Congress when the NFA was being debated and passed. Both laws used, illegitimately IMHO, the delegated power to tax to regulate what was otherwise not within the delegated powers of the federal government to regulate and in the case of the National Firearms Act, to infringe upon that which the Constitution states "shall not be infringed".
It's also probably no coincidence that these laws were passed shortly after the repeal of alcohol prohibition.
I think I saw it in some other thread but it really wasn't as funny as his post is. I think it's all in the way you say it. I laughed just as hard as you did--I mean, geez, does it EVER get old when someone tells the same joke again? It's like seeing a really talented comedian tell a joke after you already heard it from your brother-in-law, it's the same joke, but waaaay better. I mean, it's like watching a pro bowler roll a strike after an amateur did, you're just seeing the vast difference that one skilled and practices person can make in execution, even if it's the exact same thing they're doing that other people have done lots of times before over and over ad nauseum. Only a pro like Clint N. Sukhs could tell a joke a second or third or hundredth time and make it as funny as he does here. I mean, that is what TALENT does for ya, baby. It's like seeing the second coming of Bill Cosby, only Bill Cosby isn't dead, of course, or maybe Steve Allen, except Steve Allen wasn't funny, of course.
I have to compliment you for doing a phenomenal job addressing the comments you have tackled on this thread. I saw the spew here and wanted to jump in, but you responded before I did in such a wonderfully logical, unemotional fashion, one that I could not have managed given the sheer vitriol poured out.
I didn't much point interrupting that to add my two cents, but I did want to add a 'well done' BUMP!
Now our heros from the "Greatest Generation" were all violently insane? Keep it up.
Here's a clue, no platoon or squad leader, nor their Sergeants, wants some nut case berserker in their unit. They want disciplined soldiers, who can think for themselves when necessary. Move, shoot and communicate. Adapt and overcome. Not go down in a hail of bullets because they were "mad" at the enemy or for that matter at their first shirt.
Well yes, if you insist on using an old lead soldered radiator core for your condenser.
I guess I must have hit it about right though, one respondent thinks pot is much harder to grown than 'shine is to make, another thinks shine is much harder to make than to grow pot for personal use. I'd wager that making good beer or wine is harder than either, but not enough to discourage the home brewer/raiser of any of them.
Its not that suprising considering that the manufacturers do indeed care about the quality of their product, since producing and then selling a large batch of bad product would probably put them out of buisness.
I doubt there's much traceability back to the cooker. There's likely several layers of "cut out" between the cooker and the consumer. Most in the supply chain also likely don't know who the maker was. Of course that's an excellent argument for not taking the stuff, be it meth or shine from an unknown source (if you know the source of the 'shine, you can judge for yourself).
Add "Grasshopper".
Perfect.
"Well yes, if you insist on using an old lead soldered radiator core for your condenser."
I meant poisoning from methanol. If the temperature is off, it will evaporate along with the ethanol. It's nasty stuff that can cause blindness or death.
Methanol is indeed nasty stuff, but how did it get into the mix? Well, without much explanation, Wikipedia does say: "Methanol and other toxic alcohols can occur naturally in distilled spirits and are called fusel oils. The methanol is concentrated in the first few percent of condensate produced in a batch. The fusel oils are mostly found at the end of a batch or run. Ordinarily these portions are discarded, though if ingested alone or included with the rest of the distilled product it may cause toxic effects. Like commercial beer, wine, and liquor, properly produced moonshine contains small amounts of methanol at levels that are not toxic. A common way to determine the "quality control" of a batch of moonshine was to see if the moonshiner would dare to drink it.".
You should be more concerned about the effects of Prozac and other government-approved psychotropic drugs....not marijuana.
The teenager who went on a shooting rampage at his high school was put on the antidepressant Prozac after a suicide scare last summer, a longtime friend said. Family members said the boy's dosage had recently been increased.
Jeff Weise, 16, also had watched a movie about a school shooting with friends earlier this month — skipping ahead to some of the most violent scenes, according to Sky Grant, a friend of Weise's since sixth grade.
Columbine shooter was prescribed anti-depressant
Reports surfaced Wednesday that one of the gunmen in the Littleton, Colorado, school shooting, Eric Harris, was rejected by Marine Corps recruiters days before the Columbine High School massacre because he was under a doctor's care and had been prescribed an anti-depressant medication.
Harris' prescription was for Luvox, an anti-depressant medication commonly used to treat patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
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