WEAVERVILLE, Calif. (Reuters) - Pollution from illegal marijuana farms deep in California's national forests is far worse than previously thought, and has turned thousands of acres into waste dumps so toxic that simply touching plants has landed law enforcement officers in the hospital.
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Marijuana: The "Gateway to Homicide" and Crime
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In the city of Denver since the legalization of recreational marijuana the number of crimes in Denver has grown by about 44%, according to annual figures the city reported to the National Incident-Based Reporting System. In 2015 in Denver alone crime rose in every neighborhood in the city.
Read MoreWhat Does it Take to Admit the Failures of Legalizing Pot?→
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Marijuana labs — sometimes called hash oil labs or BHO labs — were exploding before legalization, but the problem grew bigger after marijuana possession became legal in July 2015. The number of burn victims rose from 7 to 30 within a year. Today marijuana users can buy“wax” or “dabs” from licensed dispensaries, but it is cheaper to make at home using butane. Unlicensed chemists who run the marijuana labs may be trying to sell their own supply to undercut the legal market. Or they be so addicted that risking death is not enough to stop them.
Read MoreLegal weed isn't living up to all of its promises. We need to shut it down→
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Today, a growing class of well-heeled lobbyists intent on commercializing marijuana are doing everything they can to sell legal weed as a panacea for every contemporary challenge we face in America. Over the past several years we've been barraged by claims that legal pot can cure the opioid crisis, cure cancer, eliminate international drug cartels, and even solve climate change.
Read MoreThese college students lost access to legal pot — and started getting better grades→
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The most rigorous study yet of the effects of marijuana legalization has identified a disturbing result: College students with access to recreational cannabis on average earn worse grades and fail classes at a higher rate.
Read MoreEconomy Needs Workers, but Drug Tests Take a Toll→
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It’s not that local workers lack the skills for these positions, many of which do not even require a high school diploma but pay $15 to $25 an hour and offer full benefits. Rather, the problem is that too many applicants — nearly half, in some cases — fail a drug test.
The fallout is not limited to the workers or their immediate families. Each quarter, Columbiana Boiler, a local company, forgoes roughly $200,000 worth of orders for its galvanized containers and kettles because of the manpower shortage, it says, with foreign rivals picking up the slack.
Read MoreI Can Stay Sober Amidst A Mountain Of Marijuana→
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Society, in general, was encouraging to people trying to get and stay sober. At least — back then — it was considered self-destructive to use drugs, smoke marijuana, drink alcohol and take pills. Today we live in a different country that has fallen prey to the lobbying of Big Marijuana.
Read MoreThe Clinical Conundrum of Medical Marijuana→
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In Colorado, patients have a tremendous variety of products at their disposal for pain conditions. These products are not highly regulated or controlled, and potentially contain contaminants such as pesticides, fungicides and rodenticides.
There is no limit on dosing or potency. For example, there is no limit to the amount of residual butane in butane hash oil that patients can inhale, and there are no studies as to the benefits of inhaled butane. The available products in Colorado can push the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content to nearly 100%.
Read MoreIs Marijuana Use for Pain Driving Negative Societal Effects?→
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The problem of increased marijuana use has origin in its purported use for pain, but the medical literature is completely void of evidence for the treatment of common pain conditions with cannabinoids or cannabis. Current medical literature suggests benefit in less common pain conditions, with products not commercially available in the United States, or with synthetic THC, not with dispensary cannabis. The variability of available products changes regularly and their use in medicine, particularly pain, is unproven. The end game is in the court of law enforcement, mental health providers, the medical community, and our educational systems, at unknown societal costs, which are only now becoming apparent.
Read MoreA tour of a Colorado Commercial Marijuana Operation→
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Two officers of the Marijuana Enforcement Division (MED) in Colorado started off the presentation by repeating how utterly impossible it is to regulate marijuana and keep all the rules and know all the enforcement measures they are supposed to follow (these are the people overseeing enforcement for the whole state.) They bragged that they now have 98 people in their office overseeing regulation but later in the day admitted that only 25% of those do on-site inspections statewide (3,000 facilities), the rest are trying to keep up with paperwork.
They cannot get to every site in the state for inspections (again – impossible) so they respond to complaints, spot-check and rely on other community entities to report anything they may find or see. The largest amount of complainants come from other MJ facilities trying to get their competition shut-down.
Read MoreA Teenager’s Lament→
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There is no limit to the genre of students which teen drug use has effected- the popular and the unpopular, the athletes as well as members of the robotics club, the dancers, the singers, the freshmen and the seniors– everyone is doing it. Ironically, even the leaders of my school’s ‘Students Against Destructive Decisions’ (SADD) are getting “turnt” on the weekends. While I would consider this to be a major form of hypocrisy, perhaps the bigger problem is that they don’t realize how destructive some of their decisions are…
Read MoreMarijuana, Legalization and the Workplace
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This year American workers tested positive for illicit drugs at the highest rate in 12 years with marijuana positivity increasing 75%. Being in construction and manufacturing business for over 40 years I know well the challenges of finding, training, and maintaining an effective workforce. There is also the demand for creating and maintaining a safe workplace. None of these business demands are assisted by having marijuana legalized.
Read MoreLegalized marijuana turns Colorado resort town into homeless magnet→
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Caleb Preston, a store manager in a gift shop and a former “street entertainer,” said the homeless and panhandling issue in Durango has gotten out of hand since the state legalized marijuana.
“Just this year there has been a major influx of people between 20 to 30 who are just hanging out on the streets,” Preston said. “The problem is while many are pretty mellow, there are many more who are violent.”
Read MoreDangers of Marijuana Experienced Firsthand→
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I recently finished my residency in emergency medicine and began to practice in Pueblo, Colorado. I grew up there, and I was excited to return home. However, when I returned home, the Pueblo I once knew had drastically changed. Where there were once hardware stores, animal feed shops, and homes along dotted farms, I now found marijuana shops—and lots of them. As of January 2016, there were 424 retail marijuana stores in Colorado compared with 202 McDonald’s restaurants.1
These stores are not selling the marijuana I had seen in high school. Multiple different types of patients are coming into the emergency department with a variety of unexpected problems such as marijuana-induced psychosis, dependence, burn injuries, increased abuse of other drugs, increased homelessness and its associated problems, and self-medication with marijuana to treat their medical problems instead of seeking appropriate medical care.
Read MoreTHC can't help PTSD, experts say→
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For every military veteran appearing in a Colorado public meeting to advocate for the right to use marijuana to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, mental health professionals throughout Colorado estimate they've worked with thousands whose pot use made their PTSD - and their lives in general - much worse.
Read MoreMarijuana and Alcohol DUI's Differ By Time of Day
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Marijuana and DUI fatal crashes by time of day are startlingly different. Marijuana fatal crashes dominates daytime populated rush hour traffic - before and after standard work hours. For 11 consecutive daytime one-hour time periods, 6am to 5pm, the percentage of marijuana crash fatalities exceeded DUI crash fatalities. DUI crashes dominate the evening hours and occur during some of the least populated road times. For 8 consecutive evening time periods, 8pm to 4am, the percentage of DUI crashes exceeded marijuana crashes.
Read MoreKicking Pot To The Curb
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Renowned Alzheimer’s researcher Dr. Vincent Fortanasce says marijuana use may lead to the disease
An estimated 200,000 people in the United States under age 65 are living with younger-onset Alzheimer’s disease. And hundreds of thousands more are coping with mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to Alzheimer’s and other dementias.
“It’s beyond epidemic proportions. There truly is a tidal wave of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Vincent Fortanasce, a clinical professor of neurology in Southern California who is also a renowned Catholic bioethicist, author and radio host.
Fortanasce, a member of Legatus’ San Juan Capistrano Chapter, for several years has studied Alzheimer’s disease, its underlying causes and treatments. Through his research, he believes there may be a link between chronic use of marijuana — especially when started at a young age — and Alzheimer’s.
Read MoreDrugged driving eclipses drunken driving in tests of motorists killed in crashes
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Of the drivers who tested positive for drugs, more than a third had used marijuana and more than 9 percent had taken amphetamines.
“As drunken driving has declined, drugged driving has increased dramatically, and many of today’s impaired drivers are combining two or more substances,” said Ralph S. Blackman, president of the foundation, a nonprofit founded and funded by a group of distillers.
Read MoreMarijuana laws hard and expensive to enforce→
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While serving on Gov. John Hickenlooper’s task force to implement Amendment 64, I quickly learned that we were changing more than our laws, we were engaged in a huge paradigm shift which was the creation of what would be a new marijuana culture. To this day, Colorado law enforcement struggles with the litany of conflicts created by “legal marijuana.”
Read MoreDon't Let Anyone Tell You Youth Marijuana Use Hasn't Gone Up in States Like Colorado
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Despite claims to the contrary by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, and other officials, the nation's only representative sample of people in U.S households released special Colorado state data finding increases in marijuana use.
Colorado past-month marijuana use among 12-to-17 year-olds saw a significant increase, from 9.82% to 12.56%, according to the most recent year-by-year comparison looking at pre-legalization data.
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health data also found that Colorado teens and adults use marijuana at a higher rate than the rest of the country. Colorado legalized marijuana in 2012 and implemented legal marijuana stores in 2014. At the same time, the sales of alcohol shows a slight increase.
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