Science

The Peace Drug

Bilmes, who has studied the ongoing costs of the wars, estimates that treating Iraq vets with PTSD over the next 50 years will cost taxpayers $100 billion. Vets with PTSD are particularly costly to the [Veterans Affairs] system,” says Linda Bilmes, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “They constitute 8…

READ MORE

Bill would stop kicking kids out of college for marijuana

Since 1998, U.S. college students relying on federal financial aid to help pay their tuition have put their access to education at risk every time they brought a joint to their lips. That year’s version of the Higher Education Act made it so that anybody with a conviction for possessing or selling an illegal drug…

READ MORE
Politics

Taking Control: Pathways to Drug Policies that Work

The obstacles to drug policy reform are both daunting and diverse. Powerful and established drug control bureaucracies, both national and international, staunchly defend status quo policies. They seldom question whether their involvement and tactics in enforcing drug policy are doing more harm than good. Meanwhile, there is often a tendency to sensationalize each new “drug…

READ MORE
Medicine/Healing

LSD, Reconsidered for Therapy

The new publication marks the latest in a series of baby steps by a loose coalition of researchers and fund-raisers who are working to bring hallucinogens back into the fold of mainstream psychiatry. ​Before research was effectively banned in 1966 in the United States, doctors tested LSD’s effect for a variety of conditions, including end-of-life…

READ MORE
Psychology

So what happens when teen pot smokers get older?

“There were no differences in any of the mental or physical health outcomes that we measured regardless of the amount or frequency of marijuana used during adolescence.” After tracking more than 400 men from their teenage years to their mid-30s, the scientists say chronic marijuana use does not lead to later physical and mental health…

READ MORE
Biography/Memoir

Governor Of Vermont considers controversial psychedelic Ibogaine to solve the State’s addiction nightmare

But now a bill has been introduced in the state’s House of Representatives that would create something far more radical than taxed and regulated cannabis: a pilot program to use ibogaine in the treatment of substance use disorders. On March 10th, Rep. Paul Dame (R-Chittenden-8-2) and Rep. Joseph “Chip” Troiano (D-Caledonia-2) introduced H. 387, an…

READ MORE
Anthropology

The new ‘Psychoactive substances Bill’ – the nail in the coffin for cognitive liberty…

“Under the [adopted] legislation, substances are… banned solely on the basis of whether or not they are psychoactive: regardless of any research or understanding of the potential harms or benefits of a given substance.” This legislation is tantamount to a prescription of approved psychological states: working, consuming, [producing]… the “legitimacy” of given substances has nothing…

READ MORE