Medicine/Healing

Kratom missing from DEA report on drug threats

The Drug Enforcement Administration has released the 2018 National Drug Threat Assessment, the agency’s annual report on drug trafficking and drug abuse in the United States …  there’s not a word about kratom in the National Drug Threat Assessment. There never has been. “It is not surprising.  Kratom is not the ‘dangerous opioid’ that the FDA…

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Politics

British injustice : the courts ignore the killers while persecuting the healers

According to the Gosport Independent Panel, between 456 and 650 patients at Gosport Hospital near Portsmouth, UK were deliberately murdered by the National Health Service (NHS) with opioids … Gosport is expected to be the tip of the iceberg.​Nurses first reported the deaths – “an institutionalized practice of shortening lives” – as whistleblowers in 1991. Some…

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Politics

Ohio plans to ban kratom…

These studies demonstrate kratom’s potential medical uses. By classifying the active compounds in kratom as Schedule I substances, Ohio’s Board of Pharmacy would prevent further medical research into its benefits (similar to the obstacles the DEA has imposed on research of marijuana, a Schedule I substance).  At the time of the assessment’s release, FDA Commissioner…

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Science

What is kratom…?

“Importantly, as commonly used in raw plant form, it does not appear to produce the… lethal respiratory depressing effects of classical opioids.” The group included researchers and scientists from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the University of Florida. “It is our collective judgment that placing kratom into Schedule I will potentially increase the number…

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Spirituality

Human writes: we have lost the war on drugs

The careless disregard for life, and the disrespect for the dead, are the toll of the “war on drugs”. The bloody trail left by this war questions our very humanity … A 145% rise in drug-related deaths in the decade, with 450,000 deaths in 2015 alone … more than 71,000 overdose deaths in the United States…

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Anthropology

Speaking my mind on changing your mind

Psychedelics are, or can be at least, a doorway to a land of wonder and revelation. I’m not confident that in the hands of the medical bureaucracy and the commercial establishment they will stay unblemished. The deeper genius of psychedelics is their ability to totally undermine materialism and comfortable categories by blasting us into ridiculously…

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Medicine/Healing

The 15-ounce pound revisited

U.K. company GW Pharmaceuticals Plc, provided “substantial evidence” of the drug’s [Epidiolex] effectiveness, FDA staff said. The medication [is now FDA approved to] treat seizures associated with two rare forms of epilepsy that typically affect children. …the medication appears to have an increased risk of liver injury. … GW Pharmaceuticals is really part of a conglomeration of international…

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Politics

4 more US States could legalize medical or recreational marijuana

Notwithstanding opposition from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, polls indicate that nearly two-thirds of Utah voters think patients should be able to use marijuana if their doctors recommend it.  Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) described Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s dismay upon hearing that voters in Utah seem set to approve medical marijuana when they…

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