Common drugs used to treat depression, Parkinson's disease and allergies can produce side effects that can be mistaken for early dementia. Since dementia is a leading symptom of Alzheimer's Disease, this can lead to misdiagnoses. The drugs that cause these side effects are known as anticholinergics. Adversely, the treatment for dementia involves pro-cholinergic drugs.
The City of Santa Cruz has teamed up with the ACLU in a fight to "provide marijuana directly to sick and dying patients." In Riverside, a vote deciding whether the county should join a federal suit against California's medical marijuana law has been delayed until next week.
SB 258, a measure that would legalize medical marijuana use in New Mexico, jumped another hurdle despite strong opposition from David Murray, assistant to drug czar John Walters.
The latest Center for Substance Abuse Research (CESAR) fax reports on the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) Enforcement efforts' claimed cost effectiveness, yielding $63 in seized drugs and assets for every $1 spent. The HIDTA enforcement budget for 2004 was $176.8 million, which produced a staggering $11 billion in seizures.
Pot smokers in the Czech Republic have the highest grow-your-own rate of any nation, suggesting a less harmful alternative to United States marijuana policies. Drug policy expert Mark Kleiman recommends a policy where growth, use, possession and transfer of marijuana is legal, as long as it is not exchanged for anything of value. This would keep big industries and big dealers alike from producing marijuana by eliminating the profit motive. The goal of such a law would be to prevent marketing.
Longer-term, I'd expect some, probably modest, growth in use due to decreased social stigma and employment risk; how much of that growth in use would be among people who then got into trouble with the drug is harder to guess. Overall, a pretty small price to pay for eliminating a big illicit market and several hundred thousands of arrests for using, and tens of thousands of prison and jail terms for dealing, per year.
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