Posts by Russell Brown
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Lorde has postponed her Australian tour dates on account of illness and will return to NZ to rest and get well.
Whatever the issue, I think it's pretty clear she's due a rest.
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From Stuff's story about the recent report from the Illegal Drug Monitoring System:
Wilkins said the internet made sharing the blueprints for making new synthetic drugs easier than ever. This meant users were more likely not to know what they were taking, as new drugs were passed off as familiar products.
A potent synthetic psychedelic, called NBOMe, has been linked to overdose deaths overseas, but in New Zealand is often mistakenly sold as less dangerous LSD. Ecstasy is also increasingly being linked to psychotic episodes and admissions to hospital. However, this may be because the pills being passed off as ecstasy are actually an unpredictable cocktail of other drugs.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to Ross Bell,
But it’s arguable whether it will do anything for demand for the speedy legals highs (the first, BZP, was no cannabis substitute).
Yes, I meant to point out that this whole story really began with BZP.
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Thomas again, on some of the rather credulous reporting of the Global Drug Use Survey:
__Results from this year’s Global Drug Survey, conducted in partnership with Fairfax Media, found almost 4 per cent of synthetic cannabis users sought emergency medical treatment. More than a quarter of those were admitted to hospital.__
It simply cannot be true that 4% of 22% of the country has sought emergency treatment after using synthetic cannabis. Even restricting to adults, that’s 30,000 people, with more 7,500 admitted to hospital. In the most recent year for which I can find data (2010-11, when the drugs were more widely available than now) there were 672,000 publicly funded hospital admissions for all causes, and of those, only 896 were for cause categories X41 & X42, which would include all synthetic cannabis cases plus many others.
But of course, this is just in a statistics blog and not all over the home page of Stuff, so there'll never be a correction and it will become the truth. Sigh.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to Pete George,
Didn’t they enable themselves by working around the drug laws at the time?
Yes.
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I’d been meaning to read up on the recently-reported study claiming changes in the brain from even occasional cannabis use. But Thomas Lumley at StatsChat has done it already.
I’d guessed it might be questionable because of the claims being made for it. Turns out it was a real shocker and the senior author has flat-out lied about it.
Mark Kleimann explores the angle that immediately occurred to me. There are all kinds of things you can do that change the structure of your brain. Like, say, learning stuff.
And Thomas himself noted this in his first post about the study:
Firstly, no-one in the study was found to have ‘changes’ in the brain: the participants got only one brain scan, so the research didn’t even look at changes. It found differences between cannabis users and non-users. There’s nothing even slightly surprising about the possibility that people who end up as regular users of an illegal drug might have started off with brain differences.
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The Spelling Mistakes (and some helpers) performing 'Feels So Good' on Saturday:
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to Ross Bell,
Peter Dunne is doing a great job in defending the law, and he got some help from the PM on this morning’s TV3 news.
Clip here. His contention that legalising cannabis wouldn't kill the synthetic cannabinomimetic market is ... debatable.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to Ross Bell,
and while Labour's Iain Lees-Galloway is wanting the full range of regulations in place now
This is an unfortunate feature of the new process. Mid-2015 seems a long time to wait.
his caucus colleague Trevor Mallard is saying if the vote was held today, Parliament wouldn't pass the law - so we need some consistency from them.
Sigh ... Mallard.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Record Store Day, in reply to Kumara Republic,
The Spelling Mistakes were presumably quite a bit louder than Dave, but crowds too at Real Groovy, where they were very pleased with their day.
