‘More people are using the cannabis plant as modern basic and clinical science reaffirms and extends its medicinal uses. Concomitantly, concern and opposition to smoked medicine has occurred, in part due to the known carcinogenic consequences of smoking tobacco. Are these reactions justified? While chemically very similar, there are fundamental differences in the pharmacological properties between cannabis and tobacco smoke. Cannabis smoke contains cannabinoids whereas tobacco smoke contains nicotine. Available scientific data, that examines the carcinogenic properties of inhaling smoke and its biological consequences, suggests reasons why tobacco smoke, but not cannabis smoke, may result in lung cancer.’
‘A Coatesville mother made her 6-year-old daughter drive a car because “[mom] was sleepy” after smoking “that stinky stuff,” according to police. [..]
Officer Robert Keetch said he had to do a double take after seeing the little girl driving. “There were two white knuckles and a little head popping over the stearing wheel,” he said.
The woman, Lakisha Hogue, was sitting in the passenger seat, laughing, when a patrol officer pulled her over, said police. Hogue told the Officer Keetch that she was teaching her daughter how to drive.
“Mom made me drive because she was sleepy,” the girl told police.
Then police say the aunt asked her niece, “Was your mom smoking that stinky stuff again?” The girl replied “yes,” say police.’
‘Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around “as high as a kite”, a government official has said.
Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania, said the kangaroo-like marsupials were getting into poppy fields grown for medicine.
She was reporting to a parliamentary hearing on security for poppy crops. [..]
Rick Rockliff, a spokesman for poppy producer Tasmanian Alkaloids, said the wallaby incursions were not very common, but other animals had also been spotted in the poppy fields acting unusually.
“There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles,” he added.’
‘A young Russian woman, a devoted collector of horror films and spiders, is on trial for sedating and raping ten men. [..]
She gave them drinks with clonidine, which almost immediately sent them to sleep for almost 24 hours.
After that, she undressed her victims and raped them, tightening a rope on their male organs to kep them erect. [..]
At present, the police know about ten of Valeria’s victims, although one of them refused to file a complaint against her.
“It was great,” the unnamed man said.
“I like hot women. I only wish she hadn’t use the clonidine on me.”’
There are a few stories of Thomas Edison’s adventures. Science was extremely dodgy in the past. 🙂 For example:
“I had read in a scientific paper the method of making nitroglycerine, and was so fired by the wonderful properties it was said to possess, that I determined to make some of the compound. We tested what we considered a very small quantity, but this produced such terrible and unexpected results that we became alarmed, the fact dawning upon us that we had a very large white elephant in our possession. At 6 A.M. I put the explosive into a sarsaparilla bottle, tied a string to it, wrapped it in a paper, and gently let it down into the sewer, corner of State and Washington Streets.”
‘I originally wrote this story as a reply in one of those “funny drinking stories” threads a couple of months ago. It is a very embarrassing story about me when I was a stupid teenager, not that much different from a lot of people’s drinking stories, but with a twist of lemon. Lots of people seemed to like it, so I thought I would illustrate and narrate the story in its own thread for maximum hilarity.
This all happened when I was 18 years old. I had dropped out of highschool twice by this point, ditched a lot of my friends because I was a selfish idiot and generally didn’t give a gently caress about anything. I hardly ever ate anything and was skinny as gently caress, showered maybe once every three days, took a poo poo load of drugs and smoked like a chimney. I didn’t have any prospects for the future. I just followed every impulse I had. I stole hundreds of dollars of stuff from the gas station I worked at. I stole poo poo from my parents. I shop lifted. I’m sure lots of people have been through a phase like this and I feel very sorry for all of you.’
‘Chemicals in marijuana may be useful in fighting MRSA, a kind of staph bacterium that is resistant to certain antibiotics. Researchers in Italy and the U.K. tested five major marijuana chemicals called cannabinoids on different strains of MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). All five showed germ-killing activity against the MRSA strains in lab tests.
Some synthetic cannabinoids also showed germ-killing capability. The scientists note the cannabinoids kill bacteria in a different way than traditional antibiotics, meaning they might be able to bypass bacterial resistance. At least two of the cannabinoids don’t have mood-altering effects, so there could be a way to use these substances without creating the high of marijuana. [..]
In the study, published in the Journal of Natural Products, researchers call for further study of the antibacterial uses of marijuana. There are “currently considerable challenges with the treatment of infections caused by strains of clinically relevant bacteria that show multi-drug resistance,” the researchers write.
New antibacterials are urgently needed, but only one new class of antibacterial has been introduced in the last 30 years. “Plants are still a substantially untapped source of antimicrobial agents,” the researchers conclude.’
‘I’m making a gang. It’s going to be called the “Regulators.” It’s a popular name but I don’t know of any with that name in my area so I’m going to use it. You must live in downtown DC. You must be at least 5’8. You can be smaller but you have to prove yourself to join. You don’t have to get beat up to get initiated into the gank. You should have to be down for the cause. If you’re not loyal though, I will cock glock and lay you out. That’s real talk. [..]’
‘Two “modern day Ninjas” calling themselves Shinobi Warriors on a quest to rid the area of drug users and drug dealers have been put out of business by police.
On Wednesday at 2:35 a.m. police officers approached a car parked in the left lane of Route 46 east and found two Clifton men dressed in black claiming to be Ninjas. The men were wearing tactical vests and armed with knives in sheaths at their waists along with Ninja throwing knives, Chinese throwing stars, four-pointed tacks, swords, bows and arrows and nunchucks, said detective Capt. Robert Rowan.
The two men, Jesse Trojaniak, 19, and Tadieusz Tertkiewicz, 20, told police they were “modern day Ninjas” also called Shinobi Warriors on their way to deliver warning letters to known drug dealers and drug users to stop their “impure” activities. They told police they planned to leave the letters on the front doors of these individuals they had singled out.
Their weapons, Rowan said, were to be a precaution in case they were confronted by the drug dealers.
The officers located five envelopes decorated with red Chinese designs containing the letters to be delivered. Reports show the two men had already delivered one such letter to Tertkiewicz’ 16-year-old ex-girlfriend in Clifton. Police contacted the teen and her mother and alerted them to the situation. Tertkiewicz was charged with harassment, both were charged with weapons possession.’
‘An evil mother driven by rage and jealousy killed her five-year-old son to spite his father, a horrified coroner heard yesterday.
Emma Hart, 27, force-fed Lewis Dangerfield a lethal cocktail of painkillers and antidepressants at their home, then fled to her mother’s flat nearby and ended her own life by slashing her wrists.
In a note to Lewis’s father, Shaun Dangerfield, which she left by the boy’s body, she wrote: ‘I told you I would make you pay, enjoy your life now, nothing is stopping you, ha ha ha. Just remember it’s all your fault.’
Coroner Robin Balmain described the case as the most distressing he had ever dealt with in 25 years of inquests. ‘I can’t imagine something quite so evil as a mother who is prepared to do that.
‘Her actions were simply spite – she was prepared to kill her son to spite Mr Dangerfield. I find it difficult to believe how anybody could do that.”
‘A Territory man filmed himself speeding at 150km/h while masturbating at the wheel of his drug-laden car, a court heard.
His Holden SV6 was allegedly laden with 5kg of drugs, including two cannabis plants resting on the back seat, the court was told.
Brendon Alan Erhardt, 39, was granted bail so he could marry his girlfriend of six months before he goes to jail.
Prosecutor Sergeant Melinda Edwards said in court the father-of-three told police he “had masturbated while driving” just before he was stopped for speeding on the 130km/h stretch of the Stuart Hwy.
“(He) also video recorded himself masturbating while travelling at a speed of 150km/h.”
Sgt Edwards said Mr Erhardt — who was disqualified from driving — also told officers his act was “not dangerous” as the “only person he could hurt was himself”.’
‘Katie Holmes has been wearing gloves and long sleeve shirts with the sleeves pulled down over her hands, in order to cover their freakish purple coloration.
It’s rumored that Katie may have taken part in a Scientology purification ritual that caused her hands to turn purple.
According to reports, the purification ritual is called the Purification Rundown or Purif, which is the process of taking ‘vitamin bombs’ to get ‘toxins’ out of their bodies.
It’s reported that in almost every single case, Scientology founder Hubbard recommends dosages in his teachings that are well above the safe limits, in some cases as much as 142 times more than the toxic level. The side effects of such huge overdoses range from liver damage, hair loss, brain swelling and nausea up to fatal heart and respiratory failure.’
‘Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has vowed to stop smoking marijuana – because it makes him too paranoid.
MacFarlane signed a GBP50 million deal with 20th Century Fox in May, in a move which will make him the highest-paid writer-producer in television – and he’s determined to increase his productivity by swearing off illegal drugs.
He says, “I don’t smoke much pot anymore. One of the last times I was stoned, I was convinced that I would die unless I kept moving my body.
“So I sat there, baked, waving my arms around like a crazy person.”‘
‘If you have a problem with school officials strip searching 13-year-olds for Advil – or if you care about the government’s standards for informant use and invasive searches – you can take relief in yesterday’s ruling by a full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled 6-5 that students cannot be strip-searched based on the uncorroborated word of another student who is facing disciplinary punishment.
“A reasonable school official, seeking to protect the students in his charge, does not subject a thirteen-year-old girl to a traumatic search to ‘protect’ her from the danger of Advil,” the federal appellate court wrote in today’s opinion. “We reject Safford’s effort to lump together these run-of-the-mill anti-inflammatory pills with the evocative term ‘prescription drugs,’ in a knowing effort to shield an imprudent strip search of a young girl behind a larger war against drugs.”
“It does not take a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old girl is an invasion of constitutional rights. More than that: it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity,” the court continued.’
‘Controlling blood pressure from middle-age onwards may dramatically reduce the chances of developing dementia, researchers have said.
Two studies support a link between high blood pressure and dementia risk – with one by an Imperial College London team suggesting treatment could cut this.
This study, by published in the Lancet Neurology journal, found blood pressure drugs reduce dementia by 13%.
The Alzheimer’s Society said better control could save 15,000 lives a year. [..]
The precise reasons why high blood pressure might increase the risk of dementia are not fully understood although many scientists believe that it can starve the brain of bloodflow and the oxygen it carries.’
‘The “spiritual” effects of psilocybin from so-called sacred mushrooms last for more than a year and may offer a way to help patients with fatal diseases or addictions, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.
The researchers also said their findings show there are safe ways to test psychoactive drugs on willing volunteers, if guidelines are followed.
In 2006, Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and colleagues gave psilocybin to 36 volunteers and asked them how it felt. Most reported having a “mystical” or “spiritual” experience and rated it positively.
More than a year later, most still said the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction, Griffiths and colleagues report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
“This is a truly remarkable finding,” Griffiths said in a statement. “Rarely in psychological research do we see such persistently positive reports from a single event in the laboratory.”‘
‘Morphine, as little as a single dose, blocks the brain’s ability to strengthen connections at inhibitory synapses, according to new Brown University research published in Nature.
The findings, uncovered in the laboratory of Brown scientist Julie Kauer, may help explain the origins of addiction in the brain. The research also supports a provocative new theory of addiction as a disease of learning and memory.
“We’ve added a new piece to the puzzle of how addictive drugs affect the brain,” Kauer said. “We’ve shown here that morphine makes lasting changes in the brain by blocking a mechanism that’s believed to be the key to memory making. So these findings reinforce the notion that addiction is a form of pathological learning.”‘
‘Australian researchers have found that long-term heavy use of marijuana may cause parts of the brain to shrink.
Published in this month’s Archives of General Psychiatry, the study found that the hippocampus and amygdala were smaller in men who were heavy marijuana users compared to non-users.
The study looked at 15 men heavy marijuana users, who had smoked at least five marijuana cigarettes daily for on average of 20 years.
Brain scans showed that on average their hippocampus volume was 12% less and amygdala volume was 7% less than in the 16 men who were not marijuana users.
The hippocampus regulates memory and emotion, while the amygdala plays a critical role in fear and aggression.’
‘Two Australian burglars broke into a house – only to find it full of police officers staging a drugs raid.
The pair jemmied open a window to get into the house in a midnight raid in Melbourne, reports the Herald Sun.
But they had been beaten to it by police officers who had just burst through the door to search for drugs.
The property was allegedly being used for growing hydroponic cannabis, and the detectives were on a raid to arrest the resident, a man in his 20s.
The startled burglars fled, but were caught a couple of days later, said Det Sen-Sgt Paul Cassidy, of Melton detectives.
“It is unusual,” he said, but declined to comment on whether the burglars had been after money or drugs.’
‘”His heart filled virtually his whole chest,” recalls Dr. Diane Meier describing her very first patient, an 89-year-old suffering from end-stage congestive heart failure.
It was the first day of Meier’s internship at a hospital in Portland Oregon, and after being assigned 23 patients, she was suddenly told that one of her patients, who had been in the Intensive Care Unit for months, was “coding.” She raced to the ICU where the resident told her to put in a “central line.”
“I didn’t know how,” Meier admits. “I felt overwhelmed and inadequate. Then, the patient died …
“Everyone just walked out of the room,” she remembers. I stood there. I still sometimes flash back on that scene: the patient, naked, lying on the table, strips of paper everywhere, the room empty. This was my patient. I felt I was supposed to do something — but I didn’t know what.”‘
‘Blake Dwyer remembers pain:
And shouting.
And fear.
“I thought a swarm of wasps was after me,” the 17-year-old Guyer High School athlete said. “I was trying to fight them off.”
He doesn’t remember the epileptic seizure he suffered July 18, 2007, when he was 16.
He doesn’t remember fighting to keep from being tied to a stretcher or hitting a paramedic.
His brother, Travis Baker, 17, remembers all of it. He recalls screaming at Corinth police to stop shocking Blake with a Taser. His mother, Deana, remembers hearing Travis crying on the telephone.
“He was saying, ‘Blake is having a seizure, and they’re hurting him,'” she said.’
‘Police in Russia are investigating after pupils stripped off their clothes, climbed walls or lay on the floor laughing after their school dinners were spiked with drugs.
The teenaged students were given ecstasy in their soup and drinks at their school in the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in eastern Russia.
Doctors who were called in said the students showed signs of intoxication and prosecutors later found traces of ecstasy.’
‘In homes, apartments, and shanties throughout Buenos Aires, thousands of graying women joyfully pee into plastic containers at all hours of the day.
It isn’t exactly the picture postcard image that Argentina’s Secretariat of Tourism wants spread around the globe.
Gauchos, mountain peaks, tango, Patagonia, steak – now that’s the stuff of travel brochures.
Yet at any given moment, there are thousands more 65-year-old matrons holding a piece of Tupperware between sagging thighs – silently praying that their hand is steady and aim direct – than tight-assed 20-year-olds twirling the Tango.
Properly aged piss, it turns out, is one of Argentina’s least-known but most-valued exports.
The liquid gold from the ripe bladders of postmenopausal women has been helping “float” the Argentine economy by tens of millions of dollars a year for the last decade. Somewhere deep within the pungent molecules of senescent whiz – we’re clearly running out of original ways to say pee – is a high-value hormone used to combat infertility in younger women with ripe, but unwilling eggs.’
‘A woman is in custody for child neglect this morning after mixing prescription medication with alcohol and leaving her 2-year-old child to fend for herself.
Neighbors saw Tiffany Garland’s daughter playing on the balcony and eating cigarette butts for at least four hours.
According to reports, Garland took the antidepressant Paxil and drank an unspecified amount of tequila.
The child was seen on the balcony a short time after and police were called.’
‘In my previous life as a fed agent I was often asked to assist with some “undercover” sting operations all over the Northeast US. One of the most memorable was a op in northern Maine. I was to play the brother-in-law of our source who’s co-worker had recently asked him if he knew of any good dealers of crack.
Long story short they brought me in to sell him crack. We met the “Client” as planned and you should have seen this kids eyes when I pulled out this giant bag of crack we had obtained from a previous bust. He looked like he was going to start crying, like he had just come to know Jesus or something… anyway he wanted to buy it all, every last gram of it, but he had only brought $150.00 bucks with him. I thought for a second and asked him if had his checkbook on him and he did. [..]’
‘Tom Cruise isn’t getting any giggles from a new strain of medical marijuana being marketed as “Tom Cruise Purple.”
Word is that the actor’s lawyers are taking a serious look at the strong brand of bud after we brought it to their attention.
One of Cruise’s friends found it “outrageous” that licensed cannabis clubs in Northern California are selling vials of pot featuring a picture of Cruise laughing hysterically. [..]
Staffers at several California clinics we called said they were forbidden to discuss any of the herbal varieties in their “inventory.”
But one weed devotee said, “I heard it’s the kind of pot that makes you hallucinate.”‘
‘A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.
To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.
But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.
In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.’
‘A baker who put abortion tablets into his wife’s breakfast to try to make her lose their baby has been jailed.
Gil Magira, 36, crushed the tablets into his 38-year-old wife Anat Abraham’s sandwich, a bowl of cereal and a yoghurt, the Old Bailey was told.
Mrs Abraham suffered pain and bleeding but the child survived unharmed.
Magira, of Holmebrook Drive, Hendon, north London, admitted “using an instrument to procure a miscarriage” – the first such charge in 30 years. [..]
His wife said she feared for her life – and that of the child – when she realised what he had done.
“What made it worse was how desperate and determined he was to try to kill the baby that I already felt moving inside me,” she said.’
‘A Camarillo High School employee has been jailed for stealing snack money from a disabled student.
Ventura County Superior Court Judge James Cloninger sentenced Kristen Rene Santoyo on Tuesday to six months in jail, followed by three years’ probation. She was also pay $285 restitution to the student.
The student’s parents put $5 a day in her lunch box along with her food. The money was for snacks, but her parents say she came home from school hungry.
The 37-year-old Oxnard woman earlier pleaded guilty to felony petty theft and misdemeanor cruelty to a child by inflicting injury. Defense attorney James Harmon says Santoyo took the money to feed a methamphetamine habit.’
