New: One more time - should ganja be legalized?

[Tropicana]

Possession - USA

Marijuana

Possession of marijuana is punishable by up to one year in jail and a minimum fine of $1,000 for a first conviction.

For a second conviction, the penalties increase to a 15-day mandatory minimum sentence with a maximum of two years in prison and a fine of up to $2,500.

Subsequent convictions carry a 90-day mandatory minimum sentence and a maximum of up to three years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000.
Distribution of a small amount of marijuana, for no remuneration, is treated as possession.

http://norml.org/laws/item/federal-penalties-2

This is harsh but it's hard to have sympathy for people who know the law and break it.

LSD

• Possession for Personal Use (typically more than 3 tabs): 1-3 years in jail and a fine of $1000 to $25,000 (some states now have diversionary treatment plans that supplement jail time).

http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/lsd-penalties-for-sale-and-possession.html

Jamaica

7C. Every person who has in his possession any ganja shall be guilty of an offence and - (a) on conviction before a Circuit Court, shall be sentenced to a fine or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years or to both such fine and imprisonment; or (b) on summary conviction before a Resident Magistrate, shall be liable - (i) to a fine not exceeding one hundred dollars for each ounce of ganja which the Resident Magistrate is satisfied is the subject-matter of the offence, so, however, that any such fine shall not exceed fifteen thousand dollars; or (ii) to imprisonment for a term not exceeding three years; or (iii) to both such fine and imprisonment.

Jamaica - Dangerous Drug Act - http://www.moj.gov.jm/sites/default/...rugs%20Act.pdf

[Tropicana]

The Netherlands

I wrote one of the senior officials I know in The Netherlands. I did not alert her to this board or this discussion. I did say I was having a discussion with some people who didn't believe the legalization of ganja in The Netherlands was causing issues. Here is her verbatim response. Notice she refers to it as the "marijuana problem" - her terminology not mine:

There are indeed a lot of issues concerning the marijuana problem. About two years, our government decided to counteract the drug tourism in Holland, since it causes much trouble and crimes. Since this year, people, who don't live in Holland are not allowed to enter or buy from coffee shops (the locations, where marijuana is smoked and sold) any longer. Unfortunately, many coffee shops still allow them to enter.
Maybe you can find some more information here:
- http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archive...r_legalise.php
- http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archive...r_legalise.php
- http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archive...cannabis_c.php

Once again, sorry for the name dropping.

[Tropicana]

Got to run but I have been reading up a LOT on Don Drummond this week. The guy was a genius....a total genius. Clearly he had some issues but it is really clear that his use of ganja triggered latent psychosis in him and lead to a terrible ending. This is a well documented case so I am stunned that any Jamaican would still support ganja.

Were it not for the ganja flying in im ead, he would have been with us a lot longer. What a loss!


I hope this link works. Scroll back a few pages. It's an interesting read and also read a few pages after this.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=PQo3AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=don+drummond+ganja&source=bl&ots=Ttv0HLjkw3&sig=361AzS71ePGrv-b1LgvefuLfrx4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=RihWUvaVJ9TRqQGx6YDwDw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=don%20drummond%20ganja&f=false

[Emperah]

u tandeh, nuff reggae awtiss get big an get into cocaine an a dat mash dem up, not de ganja

[Tropicana]

u tandeh, nuff reggae awtiss get big an get into cocaine an a dat mash dem up, not de ganja

How you reach in here so quick? Mi talking specifically about Don Drummond...a very specific musician, one of the top 5 trombonists in the world. For sure nuff reggae artists get mess up with cocaine but I am not talking about that. This was back in the early 1960s and it was ganja he was using. He used to go up in the Wareika Hills and meet with rastas and smoke ganja. I think he even lived up there for a bit based on what one of his contemporaries said...I posted that interview in the Don Drummond thread.

And we know in retrospect that Don Drummond would likely have been bipolar.Marijuana-modified mania looks to the uninitiated like schizophrenia.

Psychiatrists began to wonder if cannabis could actually cause psychosis as well as make established psychosis worse. A famous study interviewed 50,000 conscripts into the Swedish Army about their drug consumption and followed them up. Those who were heavy consumers of cannabis at 18 were six times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia over the next 15 years than those did not take it.This year, Dutch epidemiologist Jim Van Os published the results of his study, in which 7,500 people were interviewed about their drug consumption and followed up for three years. Once again, regular consumers of cannabis were more likely to develop psychosis than those who didn't. Two other studies with similar findings are in progress.


It is perhaps surprising that it took the professionals so long to reach this conclusion. For example, it is widely accepted in Jamaica that too much ganja can cause paranoia. Several famous Rastafarians spent their last years incarcerated in Bellevue, the squalid mental hospital in Kingston, among them the legendary ska trombonist, Don Drummond.


Cannabis is now one of the biggest problems on in-patient psychiatric wards in England's major cities. It is common at Maudsley for those making progress to relapse suddenly. The explanation comes when a urine sample tests positive for cannabis. The same effect has been shown at Yale Medical School, where volunteers were given THC - the major active ingredient of cannabis - by injection. Psychotic symptoms could be produced in normal subjects, and people with schizophrenia had a brief exacerbation of their psychosis.
So will reclassifying cannabis cause more people to become psychotic? The incidence of schizophrenia in south London has doubled since the 1960s; the use of cannabis and cocaine could be a factor. The increase in the prevalence and the deteriorating outcomes of schizophrenia due to cannabis use is the main reason why psychiatric services in London are in such a mess.


Any public debate on cannabis needs to take account of the risks as well as the pleasure. Pro-marijuana campaigners claim, extrapolating from their Saturday-night joint, that cannabis is totally safe. Yet they would be unlikely to claim that a bottle of vodka a day is healthy on the basis of sharing a bottle of Chablis over dinner.
No drugs that alter brain chemistry are totally safe. Just as some who drink heavily become alcoholic, so a minority of those who smoke cannabis daily go psychotic. Society has to balance the enjoyment that the majority get from cannabis with the harm it causes to a vulnerable few.

http://www.schizophrenia.com/New/October2002/smokecannabis.htm

[Tuff Gong]

Police arrest 'ganja farmer' featured in Observer front page story

Wednesday, October 23, 2013 | 5:03 PM

WESTMORELAND, Jamaica -- The Westmoreland Police Wednesday confirmed that they have arrested the man whose photograph appears on the front page of today’s (October 23) edition of the Jamaica Observer smoking a chillum pipe.
According to the Constabulary Communication Network (CCN) the man who goes by the name Ras Puddler was taken into custody about midday Wednesday during a raid carried out at his Little London, Westmoreland home.


Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/...#ixzz2ialr4xNf

[Peasie]

Wow. Tuff Gong, that Observer has generated a lot of comments:

Bravo! Jamaica's finest hard at work solving crime and putting fear in the hearts and minds of criminals. This should put a severe dent in rate of murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults islandwide. Congrats Jamaica and Jamaica's finest!

and

What did he expect?

• That his weed sale would increase ten fold..
  
  
  
  

[goldilocks]

[QUOTE=Tropicana;730901]"his use of ganja triggered latent psychosis"

Please consider this: the psychosis was there, and the ganja delayed the onset of his psychosis

and this

"too much ganja can cause paranoia"

paranoia was caused by the fact that ganja is illegal - dem fraid fi get caught

Free the Herb!

[Emperah]

[QUOTE=goldilocks;733570]

"his use of ganja triggered latent psychosis"

Please consider this: the psychosis was there, and the ganja delayed the onset of his psychosis

and this

"too much ganja can cause paranoia"

paranoia was caused by the fact that ganja is illegal - dem fraid fi get caught

Free the Herb!

[Tropicana]

[QUOTE=goldilocks;733570]

"his use of ganja triggered latent psychosis"

Please consider this: the psychosis was there, and the ganja delayed the onset of his psychosis

and this

"too much ganja can cause paranoia"

paranoia was caused by the fact that ganja is illegal - dem fraid fi get caught

Free the Herb!

That is what the term latent psychosis means. It means that it was already there dormant and the person would have functioned very nicely for the rest of their life had they not started messing around with ganja. FYI, every year a UHWI there are students who end up in the psychi unit for this very reason. Ganja is not something anybody should mess around with and anyone who thinks it is has likely been smoking too much wacky tacky.

[Tropicana]

Seriously...do we really want a society filled with people like this?

Marijuana's Role in the Arizona Shooting

With President Barack Obama's eloquent speech at the Tucson memorial, Speaker John Boehner's emotional reminder to his Democratic and Republican colleagues and all Americans that "an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us," and the thousands of pundits, left and right, arguing about the meaning of the tragedy in Arizona, it might seem that there is nothing more to say or learn about the horrific incident that killed six, wounded 13, and put a bullet through the brain of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.But there is -- and it is as important as any other lesson to come out of this tragedy.
It's about the relationship of marijuana use to psychotic illnesses.
There has been plenty of media and talking head attention to the weak gun laws that allow purchase of automatic weapons and super size ammunition clips. There has been story upon story, and comment upon comment, bemoaning how easy it was for this mentally deranged young man to buy such a gun and ammunition clip. And the reporting about the twisted mind of Jared Lee Loughner and his erratic behavior has been extensive.
But I haven't seen press reports or talking heads discuss their concern about how easy it has been for this mentally ill young man to get marijuana. And there has been no mention of the potential of marijuana to spark latent psychosis and exacerbate schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.
In 2007, the British Medical Journal Lancet concluded that an exhaustive review of cannabis use and mental health "leads us now to conclude that cannabis use could increase the risk of psychotic illness." Since then, there has been more research on the relationship of marijuana use and psychosis.
Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City conducted a study of individuals who suffered from schizophrenia, half of whom used marijuana. They found that among marijuana users, three fourths had begun smoking pot before the onset of their mental illness and their schizophrenia appeared two years earlier than it did in those who did not smoke pot.
Marie-Odile Krebs, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in France, found that among a group of 121 patients who used cannabis, 44 either developed schizophrenia within a month of beginning to smoke pot or significantly intensified their existing psychosis with each successive use of the drug. Schizophrenia appeared some three years earlier in these 44 than in the other marijuana users.
From CNN and other press reports, we know that Loughner was turned down by the Armybecause of his admitted regular marijuana use. His childhood friend Kylie Smith tells us that after Loughner's sophomore year in high school, "he got involved with marijuana, and he was really into psychedelics." Smith described how Loughner got more and more involved with marijuana and alcohol during his high school years and how he began hanging out with potheads. In his short stay at Pima Community College, one professor described Loughner's "hysterical kind of laugh, laughing to himself, and his bright red complexion, and his kind of shaking and trembling, as if he was under the influence of drugs."
The question that not enough people are asking -- and the one that should be answered -- is this: Was Loughner under the influence of drugs at the time of the shooting?
If the police have any of the hair shaved from Loughner's head, they can easily find out if marijuana was in his system at the time of the shooting. They may even be able to do so from hair that grows back in.
So as we continue to think about this killer and his deranged mind, we should be asking this question: Is Jared Loughner an individual whose psychosis was prompted or exacerbated by the use of marijuana?
Whether or not he is, it is important for the press and parents to see this horrendous incident not only as a teaching moment about the easy availability and dangerous potential of automatic weapons, but also as a teaching moment about the easy availability and dangerous potential of marijuana to spark and exacerbate psychosis and schizophrenia in individuals with latent mental illnesses.
The missing story line in existing news reports and television chatter shows is about the terrible trinity of easy availability of guns, easy availability of marijuana and mental illness.
The question for all of us, especially parents of teenagers, to ask is this: Is the media's failure to acknowledge this tragic trinity due to its tendency to overlook or underplay the dangers of marijuana use?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-califano-jr/jared-laughner-marijuanas_b_810336.html

[Tropicana]

The Link Between Marijuana and Schizophrenia

ince the days of Reefer Madness, scientists have sought to understand the complex connection between marijuana and psychosis. Cannabis can cause short-term psychotic experiences, such as hallucinations and paranoia, even in healthy people, but researchers have also long noted a link between marijuana use and the chronic psychotic disorder, schizophrenia.
Repeatedly, studies have found that people with schizophrenia are about twice as likely to smoke pot as those who are unaffected. Conversely, data suggest that those who smoke cannabis are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia as nonsmokers. One widely publicized 2007 review of the research even concluded that trying marijuana just once was associated with a 40% increase in risk of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.
(See photos of cannabis conventions around the country.)But here's the conundrum: while marijuana went from being a secret shared by a small community of hepcats and beatniks in the 1940s and '50s to a rite of passage for some 70% of youth by the turn of the century, rates of schizophrenia in the U.S. have remained flat, or possibly declined. For as long as it has been tracked, schizophrenia has been found to affect about 1% of the population.
(See a photoessay on a father with mental illness.)One explanation may be that the two factors are coincidental, not causal: perhaps people who have a genetic susceptibility to schizophrenia also happen to especially enjoy marijuana. Still, some studies suggest that smoking pot can actually trigger the disease earlier in individuals who are predisposed, and yet researchers still aren't seeing increases in the overall schizophrenia rate or decreases in the average age of onset.
In recent months, new research has explored some of these issues. One study led by Dr. Serge Sevy, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, looked at 100 patients between the ages of 16 and 40 with schizophrenia, half of whom smoked marijuana. Sevy and colleagues found that among the marijuana users, 75% had begun smoking before the onset of schizophrenia and that their disease appeared about two years earlier than in those who did not use the drug. But when the researchers controlled for other factors known to influence schizophrenia risk, including gender, education and socioeconomic status, the association between disease onset and marijuana disappeared.
(See TIME's special on preventing mental illness disorders.)Gender alone accounted for a large proportion of the risk of early onset in Sevy's study, which included 69 men and 31 women. "Males in general have earlier age of onset of schizophrenia," says Sevy. In men, the disease tends to take hold around age 19, while in women it isn't typically seen until 22 — irrespective of marijuana use. But, typically, teenage boys are four times more likely than girls to be heavy pot smokers, which may create an illusory association between the drug and onset of the disease.
Yet past studies limited to males have found exactly such a link, associating marijuana use with earlier development of full-blown psychosis. And other research has found that ongoing cannabis use increases hospitalizations for psychotic symptoms in schizophrenic patients and decreases social and cognitive functioning. A 2008 review of the data found that relapse and failure to take prescribed medication was consistently associated with cannabis use, although, again, controlling for other factors weakened the link.
One explanation could be that the effects of marijuana vary depending on the genetics of the individual patient's schizophrenia. Marie-Odile Krebs, professor of psychiatry at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM) laboratory in France, and her colleagues published a study in June that identified two broad groups of people with schizophrenia who used cannabis: those whose disease was profoundly affected by their drug use and those who were not.
Within Krebs's study population of 190 patients (121 of whom had used cannabis), researchers found a subgroup of 44 whose disease was powerfully affected by the drug. These patients either developed schizophrenia within a month of beginning to smoke pot or saw their existing psychosis severely exacerbated with each successive exposure to the drug. Schizophrenia appeared in these patients nearly three years earlier than in other marijuana-users with the disease.

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2005559,00.html

The evidence has been there for some time now that ganja is dangerous. Why do we want to placate a bunch of potheads and put society at risk.

[Tuff Gong]

Wow. Tuff Gong, that Observer has generated a lot of comments:

Bravo! Jamaica's finest hard at work solving crime and putting fear in the hearts and minds of criminals. This should put a severe dent in rate of murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults islandwide. Congrats Jamaica and Jamaica's finest!

and

What did he expect?

• That his weed sale would increase ten fold..

LOL ... Ras Puddler stepped into a deep puddle!
One reason why most folks should leave drugs alone.......!

[Peasie]

Ras Puddler's egg all over police face
The ones who should know are saying that the top one called the divisional commander and gave him a tongue-lashing, which was followed by the arrest of the weed grower. There was embarrassment all over after the Observer report. But the arrest is not popular with John Public because many white visitors were allowed to smoke their spliff without hindrance.




Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/...#ixzz2ija9ztEo

[Tropicana]

Ras Puddler's egg all over police face
But the arrest is not popular with John Public because many white visitors were allowed to smoke their spliff without hindrance.

John Public is woefully misinformed. They think ganja is harmless when it is not. At any rate there can't be one law for Jamaicans and another or White tourists. pon that.

Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/...#ixzz2ija9ztEo