Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to debunk,
Follow the USA re marijuana, as I said earlier and for stimulants we already have lots of Ritalin available on prescription (which students in UK are using for supposed cognitive enhancement as well as stimulant effect)
Ritalin's quite a popular party drug here too. It makes far more sense to use it than to mess about with pills and powders of unknown providence.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to ,
Colorado, has a different system that we are yet to see unfold. It might go down the same path that our alcohol laws have. Advertising it will make you into something you are never going to be if you use to much of the product.
Colorado's up and running. I wrote a feature article about Colorado and Washington State's move to legalisation here. Colorado has the advantage of having already had a very sophisticated system for managing medical marijuana -- there's a bar code for every seedling.
California's med-pot system is all but legalisation -- it's very loose. I wouldn't be comfortable with quite the degree of commercialisation we're now seeing in Colorado and Washington.
The interesting thing is that the Psychoactive Substances Act is in a number of ways quite similar to the systems in those states. Most of what you'd need for the regulated sale of cannabis is in it.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Beta-blockers are a largely obsolete treatment for ordinary hypertension – only indicated for angina risk, nowadays.
No, lots of people are on two-factor treatments for hypertension -- an ACE inhibitor and a beta blocker.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to BenWilson,
I ask because the former seems like a very hard ask. Virginia’s experience in the A&E mirrors my own, the one time I had to take someone who was in a bad way on synthetic stuff to hospital. They didn’t really care what it was that he had – he even had the actual packaging with him, and they scarcely glanced at it.
Here's one example why that's a dangerous thing to do in the modern world.
One symptom of an overdose of MDPV ("bath salts") can be elevated heart rate and hypertension. One standard treatment for those symptoms is beta blockers. Unfortunately, that treatment could kill someone who's taken MDPV. In the words of the Michigan Department of Community Health:
Avoid using beta-blockers to treat ANY degree of elevation in blood pressure as this may cause an unopposed peripheral alpha-adrenergic effect and dangerous, dramatic paradoxical surge in blood pressure.
This is also a really big problem for users who may already be on blood-pressure drugs. Sure, they shouldn't be using MDPV in the first place, but it's entirely possible they're getting it in the guise of something more benign.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to debunk,
“In comparison with regular drugs, there is hardly any data on the harm these drugs do.”
So what does that imply? We should just give up and let the black market rip? We should re-evaluate the better-understood "old" illicit drugs, like LSD and MDMA? We should try and weed out the the most risky of the novel substances? We should ban all psychoactive substances?
You've posted that link alf a dozen times now and not really said what you think it implies for public policy.
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Access: Defective, deficient, deviant…, in reply to sandra,
he refused to attend school. He was interested in marine biology to the exclusion of all else (and was probably bored by what his peers were doing and was being bullied) and was basically teaching himself. They finally discovered at the home that he had a massive IQ. These days he might be recognised as “gifted”
And/or on the autism spectrum. The "to the exclusion of all else" is a bit of a clue. I'm very glad it worked out well for him.
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Access: Defective, deficient, deviant…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Right now I’m seeking second opinions from health professionals as to whether I’m officially on the autism spectrum.
Having met you quite a few times now, my unofficial finding is that you are :-)
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Hard News: Jones: The contender leaves, in reply to HORansome,
Which, in part, proves my claim at KiwiFoo about the whole “Investigate Him/Her” format Ian Wishart has gone for.
I thought of you when I saw it.
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to Virginia Brooks,
What is needed is a way to utilise the knowledge that is already out there + political will + financial means to sustain useful services.
You'll like my story on Erowid et al when it's published (within the next couple of weeks, I think) in the Drug Foundation magazine. And as I said, I'll post the full interviewer with the Erowid founders here too. They struck me as very thoughtful people.
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Just did some high-grade kitchen-dancing to that A Hori Buzz track. The version in the video turns out to be the radio edit -- the full-length A-side is some goddamn funky genius. One of my favourite local tracks of the year.