Tag: News

New Jersey Moves Closer To Marijuana Legalization

Marijuana legalization could potentially happen before the end of the year in New Jersey.

Members of the state legislature in New Jersey took an important step toward legalizing recreational marijuana this week, although legalization might still be months away in the Garden State.

On Monday (Nov. 26) lawmakers in the Senate and Assembly budget committees approved a bill which would legalize recreational cannabis. That allows the bill to move forward to a vote in the full Senate and Assembly, clearing the way for recreational marijuana legalization potentially as soon as Dec. 17, the next time the full assembly will meet, according to NJ.com.

However, most agree that it’s more likely that legalization will not take place until next year.

As it is now, the bill would legalize possession and personal use of less than one ounce of weed for people 21 and older. The bill calls for a 12% state tax and a 2% excise tax that may apply to towns with marijuana businesses. In addition, the bill calls for an electronic system to speed up the expungement of low-level marijuana convictions.

Some details of the bill, including the rate at which cannabis will be taxed, and how the state will handle the criminal records of people who have marijuana-related offenses, still have to be worked out.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy campaigned in part on a promise to legalize marijuana in 2018. “I am committed to working with you to get this passed this year,” he said in March.

However, Murphy would like cannabis taxed at a higher rate, and said that he is not sure whether he’ll sign the bill in its current form. “It’s too early to tell,” he said this week. “We haven’t commented on specifics, but I am very happy that this is moving.”

Other lawmakers are concerned that the bill does not address racial disparities in enforcing marijuana laws.

“This is still being sold under the auspices of social justice, but it’s about money,” said state Sen. Ron Rice, a Democrat who opposes legalization. “It’s not about social justice. It’s about money for white investors. It’s a slap in the face to people like me and people of color.”

The bill also leaves some gray areas. Although it would allow possession and personal use, growing weed will remain illegal and it could take up to a year to get the recreational market functioning, according to NJ.com. However, existing medical facilities could begin selling recreational cannabis sooner.

View the original article at thefix.com

28 November 2018
Man Dies After Huffing Deodorant Spray

The 19-year-old man was in a recovery center receiving treatment for substance use disorder when he relapsed by huffing the deodorant spray.

A 19-year-old man’s recent death highlights the dangers of abusing inhalants, according to a case report published in the BMJ.

The Dutch man was in a recovery facility at the time, where he was admitted for cannabis and ketamine use disorder. According to CNN, he had a history of psychotic symptoms and was taking antipsychotic drugs.

In July, the man relapsed. He “placed a towel over his head and inhaled deodorant spray to get high,” CNN reported. He “became hyperactive, jumping up and down, before blood flow stopped suddenly, causing him to go into cardiac arrest and collapse.”

The man could not be revived and was placed in a medically-induced coma in the hospital. After nine days, he was taken off life support and died.

“[The] patient did not have enough brain function to sustain life,” said Dr. Kelvin Harvey Kramp of Maasstad Hospital intensive care unit in Rotterdamn.

While we know that inhalants can cause liver and kidney damage, hearing loss, delayed behavioral development and brain damage, such cases are “very rare,” Kramp says, and thus the “consequences aren’t really known.”

Kramp says the deodorant spray may have over-sensitized the heart, making the man more vulnerable to cardiac arrest. He may have experienced a “scary hallucination,” causing stress to the heart and triggering cardiac arrest.

According to the case report, there are up to 125 deaths caused by inhalant abuse every year in the U.S.

Generally, inhalant abuse is most prevalent among people who have less access to mind-altering drugs or alcohol, like people in recovery centers, prisons, and those between the ages of 15-19.

A similar case occurred in the English town of Oldham many years ago. The BBC reported in 1998 that 16-year-old Jonathan Capewell died from his obsession with “smelling fresh.” His overuse of deodorant spray resulted in his death, caused by a heart attack. Ten times the lethal dosage of propane and butane were detected in his blood.

“To stop the abuse, we can only try to increase awareness about the possible dramatic consequences of inhalant abuse among youngsters, parents and medical personnel,” said Kramp.

View the original article at thefix.com

28 November 2018
Drug-Related Deaths Plunge In Ohio: How They Did It

The fading presence of carfentanil may have played a major role in the decline of drug-related deaths in some parts of Ohio.

Overdose deaths in Montgomery County—in Dayton, Ohio—have dramatically decreased in 2018. The county has seen an incredible 54% decline in overdose deaths: there were 548 by November 30 last year; this year there have been 250.

Dayton is an economically-challenged city, deserted of jobs after manufacturers left in droves. Some speculate that this is part of the reason why Dayton had the highest opioid overdose death rates in the nation in 2017.

The overdose deaths were so rapid and unrelenting that according to Wral.com, the coroner’s office continuously ran out of space, and ended up renting refrigerated trailers. So what has changed?

The New York Times did extensive research and reporting on the ground to look into the positive changes in Dayton. Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley believes the largest impact on the rate of overdose deaths came from Gov. John Kasich’s decision to expand Medicaid in 2015. This expansion allowed almost 700,000 low-income adults access to free addiction and mental health treatment.

In addition to the treatments being free for low-income residents, the expansion of Medicaid pulled in more than a dozen new treatment providers within a year. Some of these providers are residential programs and outpatient clinics that utilize methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone for their patients. These are the three FDA-approved medications to treat opioid addiction.

“It’s the basis — the basis — for everything we’ve built regarding treatment,” NYT reported Mayor Whaley said at City Hall. “If you’re a state that does not have Medicaid expansion, you can’t build a system for addressing this disease.”

Dayton’s East Held holds a bimonthly event called Conversations for Change, which lays out the available addiction treatment options. Food is served, and anyone attending can meet treatment providers. The New York Times reported the evening they attended there were more than a dozen tables of providers.

Significant to a large degree is the fading presence on the streets of Dayton of carfentanil, an analog of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. Carfentanil is described by the CDC as 10,000 times more powerful than morphine.

In recent years carfentanil was very present in Ohio street drugs, for unknown reasons. Mid-2017 carfentanil’s hold began to loosen, possibly because drug traffickers realized they were losing money due to the large upsurge in overdose deaths, said Timothy Plancon, a DEA special agent in charge of Ohio.

A crucial decision was made by Richard Biehl, Dayton police chief, in 2014. Chief Biehl ordered all officers to carry naloxone, directly contrary to some of his peers in other Ohio cities. Naloxone, or Narcan, is the well-known medication that reverses opioid overdoses if administered in a timely manner.

Police in Ohio and others elsewhere oppose harm reduction tools like naloxone due to a belief that they simply enable drug use. Still, the evidence is overwhelming that they save lives.

View the original article at thefix.com

28 November 2018
Why Some Drug-Sniffing Dogs Are Being Forced Into Early Retirement

Some police departments across the US have found that marijuana-trained drug-sniffing dogs have become a liability.

Police K-9s have helped sniff out many a marijuana offender, but as local governments relax their marijuana laws, some of these drug-sniffing dogs are being forced into early retirement.

The New York Times reports that police departments across the United States are having to retire their drug-sniffing dogs and seek newer K-9s with no marijuana-sniffing experience. Not only is the skill becoming obsolete in parts of the country, it is now seen as a liability.

“A dog can’t tell you, ‘Hey, I smell marijuana’ or ‘I smell meth.’ They have the same behavior for any drug that they’ve been trained on,” says Tommy Klein, police chief in Rifle, Colorado.

Tulo, a yellow Labrador retriever who has helped with more than 170 arrests in his eight years with the Rifle police department, will retire in January. “If Tulo were to alert on a car, we no longer have probable cause for a search based on his alert alone,” said Klein.

Colorado police departments like Rifle’s are following a 2017 ruling by a Colorado appeals court that said a marijuana-trained drug-sniffing dog’s signal was “no longer a reliable indicator of illegal activity,” the NYT reported.

Kilo alerted Moffat County officers to the presence of contraband on a man’s truck. A search turned up a pipe with “what appeared to be methamphetamine residue.”

However, based on the judge’s ruling, the officers had no legal grounds to search the man’s vehicle because Kilo was trained to detect marijuana, among other drugs.

The state Supreme Court will review the decision and plans to hear arguments in January, but some police departments are taking it as a sign that times are changing.

“Almost every state is trying to get ahead of this,” says David Ferland, executive director of the United States Police Canine Association. “Nearly every one is having some newly trained teams not introduce marijuana odors to their dogs.”

Even in places like Texas, where marijuana is still criminalized, law enforcement are planning ahead.

“I just did a dog for a department in Texas that asked me not to put marijuana on her. They and the feeling there could be some changes coming there, and they wanted to plan ahead,” said Ron Cloward, a K-9 trainer based in Modesto, California.

Younger dogs, like Rudy in Arvada, Colorado, will be trained to detect only cocaine, heroin, ecstasy and methamphetamine. Makai and Jax will replace Tulo in Rifle, Colorado. They, too, will have no marijuana training.

View the original article at thefix.com

28 November 2018
Amanda Bynes Talks Being Four Years Sober, Reflects On Past Drug Use

Amanda Bynes credits her parents with helping her “get back on track” after her past issues with problematic drug use.

Amanda Bynes is moving on from her past. The actress, now 32, was a popular target of the paparazzi during her twenties, racking up DUIs and a reputation for drug abuse and bizarre behavior.

But she’s now sober and studying at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) in Los Angeles.

In a new interview with Paper magazine, the former Nickelodeon star relives her hectic past.

As a child, Bynes landed a place on the Nickelodeon sketch comedy show All That, alongside Kenan Thompson and Nick Cannon, and quickly became a fixture of the network. As a teenager, Bynes appeared in films like Big Fat Liar, What a Girl Wants, and She’s the Man.

Despite her success, Bynes began having issues with her self-image. She recalled being thrown “into a funk” after seeing herself in She’s the Man. In this 2006 film, Bynes plays a teenage girl who disguises herself as her brother in order to play on the boy’s soccer team. “When the movie came out and I saw it, I went into a deep depression for 4-6 months because I didn’t like how I looked when I was a boy,” she said.

Still, she continued to churn out hits on the big screen like Hairspray (2007) and Easy A (2010). But she couldn’t shake her self-image issues. While watching herself at a screening of Easy A, Bynes said, “I literally couldn’t stand my appearance in that movie and I didn’t like my performance. I was absolutely convinced I needed to stop acting after seeing it.”

Bynes “never liked the taste of alcohol” and “never really liked going out that much. I [only] started going out around 25 years old,” she said.

While she couldn’t stomach alcohol, Bynes did start using marijuana when she was 16. “Even though everyone thought I was the ‘good girl,’ I did smoke marijuana from that point on.”

However, this progressed to molly, ecstasy and Adderall. The combination of drugs that she was abusing did not agree with her.

Bynes announced that she was retiring from acting, and found herself out of work with not much to do. “I just had no purpose in life. I’d been working my whole life and [now] I was doing nothing. I had a lot of time on my hands and I would ‘wake and bake’ and literally be stoned all day long,” she said.

This cycle of being “just stuck at home, getting high, watching TV and tweeting,” eventually spiraled out of control. Bynes began “hanging out with a seedier crowd and I isolated a lot… I got really into my drug usage and it became a really dark, sad world for me.”

She explained that her bizarre behavior was truly “drug-induced, and whenever I got off of [drugs], I was always back to normal.”

Bynes, with her past behind her, is now looking forward to earning her fashion degree and returning to acting. “I’ve been sober for almost four years now.” She credits her parents with “really helping me get back on track.”

“Those days of experimenting [with substances] are long over. I’m not sad about it and I don’t miss it because I really feel ashamed of how those substances made me act,” she said.

With everything she has been through, magnified by the relentless pursuit of the paparazzi, Bynes says she’s now able to live fearlessly.

“I think that’s kind of how I go about [life] now—like, what’s there to lose? I have no fear of the future. I’ve been through the worst and came out the other end and survived it so I just feel like it’s only up from here.”

View the original article at thefix.com

28 November 2018
New Non-Opioid Treatment For Back Pain Heads To Clinical Trials

Researchers hope the non-opioid treatment for back pain will be approved by the FDA so that it will be eligible for coverage by Medicaid and Medicare.

Researchers at West Virginia University (WVU) are taking part in a clinical trial for a non-opioid, non-steroid treatment of a common form of back pain that is usually treated with opioid painkillers.

The Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute is the first site to enroll a patient in a randomized trial, currently in its third phase, that uses a micropellet injection of clonidine—a treatment for blood pressure and pain—to alleviate pain caused by sciatica. The participation of WVU is part of what the university described as its ongoing commitment to fight opioid addiction in a state that had the highest rate of opioid-related overdose deaths in the nation.

The Institute reported on November 15 that it had successfully injected the clonidine micropellet, which is approximately half the size of a grain of rice, into a patient’s lower back. The micropellet dissolves in the body and is expected to provide relief from acute pain caused by sciatica, a common form of back pain that radiates from the sciatic nerve down the lower back through the hips, buttocks and down each leg.

As the West Virginia Gazette noted, 60% of sciatica patients—which include some five million U.S. residents—are treated with opioid medication.

“We hope that the patients that have sciatica will have very good and prolonged pain relief from this formulation of this medicine,” said Dr. Richard Vaglienti, principal investigator for WVU’s site of the study and director of the Center for Integrative Pain Management. “This is a medicine we’ve used for many years for pain in anesthesiology, and now it’s been formulated into these pellets that we’re injecting into the patients’ epidural space in hopes of finding a better treatment than what we have now.”

Currently, one patient from WVU has been enrolled, though others have signed up and are ready for treatment. The study itself will enroll 200 patients nationwide; if effective, the study authors hope to have it approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) so that it will be eligible for coverage by Medicaid and Medicare.

Making the drug available to all Americans, and especially those in West Virginia, is key to WVU’s participation in the study.

“Sadly, West Virginia, in 2017, had the highest drug overdose mortality in the nation, followed by Ohio,” said Dr. Ali Rezai, executive chair of the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, and scientific adviser to Sollis Therapeutics, which developed the clonidine micropellet.

“It’s important that we also explore solutions to deal with the opioid crisis, and in this case, be the first in the country to use this technology so we can stop opioid addiction at its roots.”

View the original article at thefix.com

28 November 2018
Sexual Orientation Tied To Increased Risk Of Opioid Abuse

A new study examined the link between sexual orientation and opioid abuse.

People who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual are more likely to misuse opioids, and bisexual women are at a particularly high risk, according to a study published this week.

The study, published in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that bisexual women were about twice as likely to misuse opioids as members of the general population who identify as heterosexual.

Lead study author Dustin Duncan, an associate professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU School of Medicine, told The Washington Post that these findings are consistent with previous studies that have showed people who are not heterosexual have poorer health overall.

“I think the findings speak to the life experiences of people in society,” he said. “People who have less privilege and power generally have worse health. This isn’t a fluke or a one-time finding. It tends to be systematic.”

For the study, researchers analyzed data from more than 40,000 individuals who took the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an annual study conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

In 2015, questions were introduced asking about sexual orientation for the first time, allowing researchers to see the connection between sexual orientation and substance abuse, particularly focused on prescription opioids.

Joseph Palamar, an associate professor in the Department of Population Health at New York University’s School of Medicine and another author of the study, said that he was surprised to see that bisexual women were most at risk for opioid abuse, since the opioid epidemic is usually associated with men.

“Typically women are more protected against drug use,” he said. “It’s usually the men we worry about.”

Palamar theorized that bisexual woman might be more open to experimentation — both sexually and with drug use. However, Duncan pushed back on that idea, instead suggesting that the “minority stress model” can explain the increased risk factor for bisexual women. The minority stress model suggests that the stress of being a member of a minority group can contribute to negative health outcomes.

Bisexual woman, he said, are minorities in many ways: they are female and not heterosexual, but they also don’t fit in fully with members of the lesbian or gay communities.

“These things together create further stress, less ability to cope and give rise to poor health,” Duncan said.

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health does not include questions about gender identity, so researchers were not able to study any potential links between transgender or non-binary individuals and drug abuse. However, Duncan said that doctors can use the study to better serve people who are at increased risk of abusing opioids.

“We need to continue documenting who is at risk,” he said. “This study is really the first step.”

View the original article at thefix.com

27 November 2018
New York's Opioid Prescription Monitoring System Needs Improvement

The newly re-elected State Comptroller has found some major issues with the opioid prescription monitoring system.

An audit of the New York State opioid prescription monitoring database found that patients in treatment for opioid dependency may have received potentially dangerous opioid prescriptions outside of their treatment programs.

Newly re-elected State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli issued a statement indicating that some treatment programs were not cross-referencing patients’ treatment with other opioid prescriptions, or coordinating with health care professionals.

The audit showed that a third of Medicaid recipients in treatment received opioid prescriptions outside of their program; of that number, nearly 500 were said to need medical treatment for an opioid or narcotic overdose within a month of receiving the prescription, and 12 died as a result of said overdose.

The Internet System for Tracking Over-Prescribing (I-STOP) is a database of records for all controlled substances dispensed in the state and reported by either a pharmacy or dispenser. Treatment programs are not required to disclose the medication they give to patients, but in some cases, are required to check I-STOP to determine if a patient is receiving opioid prescriptions from other sources.

If outside prescriptions are found, the program can consult with health care professionals to determine the appropriate response, after consent from the patient is obtained.

According to the statement, DiNapoli’s auditors looked at state Department of Health (DOH) records from October 1, 2013 to September 30, 2017 and found 18,786 Medicaid patients who were receiving opioid treatment—usually methadone—through a recovery program as well as additional opioid prescriptions. Of that group, 493 required medical attention as a result of 691 opioid or narcotic overdoses that occurred within a month of receiving the opioid, and 12 died while under medical care.

The statement also reviewed medical records from a sample group of 25 Medicaid recipients from three treatment programs. Data from Medicaid showed that these individuals had received 1,065 Medicaid opioid prescriptions while undergoing treatment; additionally, these treatment programs only cross-referenced the patients’ data on 18 occasions, and did not check if a medication-assisted opioid was prescribed for take-home use, which is required by state law.

Consent forms to coordinate care with prescribers were required of only 13 of the 25 in the sample group, of which three did not sign the form. The programs were aware of only 53% of those Medicaid prescriptions for these patients, while consent to care was coordinated for just 8% of those prescriptions.

“New York and the rest of the country are facing an opioid addiction epidemic, and people’s lives are at stake,” said DiNapoli in the statement. “Programs designed to get individuals off highly addicted opioids can only be effective with proper vigilance. The state Department of Health should take steps to help treatment programs and health care providers work together to prevent overdoses that could lead to hospitalizations or death.”

DiNapoli’s statement also included a list of recommendations for the DOH to improve I-STOP, including a report that notifies treatment programs when recipients are receiving opioid prescriptions. The DOH did not agree with all of the audit’s conclusions, but added that actions would be taken to address the suggestions.

View the original article at thefix.com

27 November 2018
Inside The Mental Health Crisis In Federal Prisons

At some federal prisons in the midst of a mental health crisis, the number of inmates receiving care has fallen by 80% in the past four years.

Despite promises for better health care and oversight, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has dramatically cut the number of inmates on its mental health caseload, according to an investigation by the Marshall Project.

In part, that’s because the prison system didn’t add more employees while officials promised more care, increasing the workload for the existing mental health staff without providing the resources to do it.

“The catchphrase in the bureau was ‘Do more with less,’” Russ Wood, a long-time federal prison psychologist, told the Marshall Project. “The psychologists were getting pulled off to work gun towers and do prisoner escorts. We’re not really devoted to treating.”

As of February 2018, only 3% of federal prisoners were classified as mentally ill enough to need treatment. At some facilities, the number of inmates getting mental health care has fallen 80 or more percent in the past four years.

Afterward, suicides and self-harm increased, data shows. Between 2015 and 2017 the figures for suicides, suicide attempts and self-injuries rose by nearly one-fifth. And, having fewer prisoners on the proper medication or receiving the care they need could have other effects on the prison system; the average monthly rate of prison assaults bumped up 16% between 2015 and 2016.

FCI Hazelton in West Virginia—the lock-up where Whitey Bulger was killed earlier this year—had among the largest decreases in mental health care treatment, accompanied by a sharp increase in the assault rate which rose from 29 per 5,000 inmates per month to 40 per 5,000 inmates per month.

In addition to failing to hire mental health providers, the federal prison system has come under scrutiny for reassigning non-security staff to cover for guards—who also face understaffing problems. Using a practice called augmentation, federal prisons routinely force teachers, medical workers, counselors and cooks to work as correctional officers, a USA Today investigation found earlier this year.

The paper reported on the problem two years ago, but since then it seems only to have gotten worse, according to prison workers.

“The problems have only escalated,” said Eric Young, president of the union for prison workers. “Some of the facilities are making those assignments every day to avoid paying overtime to corrections officers.”

View the original article at thefix.com

27 November 2018
"Teen Mom" Star Leah Messer Reveals Past Addiction

“It almost cost me my children. Everything was crashing down on me. I became suicidal,” Leah Messer said about her past addiction to pain medication.

Reality television star Leah Messer spoke candidly about her past addiction to prescription drugs on an episode of her podcast.

During a November 14 episode of her Life Reboot series, the Teen Mom 2 personality said that she understood “how it feels to become dependent on anything given by doctors,” and discussed how a botched epidural given during the birth of her second child led to a dependency on pain medication, which her ex-husband, Jeremy Calvert, said she received from her father, who was himself struggling with addiction.

Messer, who also discussed a battle with depression that left her feeling suicidal in 2015, declared herself “in a much better place now” and feeling no shame for her past struggle.

On the podcast, Messer said that while preparing to deliver her daughter, Adalynn, in 2013, she was given multiple injections during the epidural. “I couldn’t, like, feel my body,” she said. “I couldn’t get up and they just put me on morphine. I kept telling Jeremy, ‘Something’s not right.”

Messer claimed that the hospital kept her for observation over the course of seven days, but never determined what the cause of her physical condition. She was eventually sent home with “three different drugs.” Calvert, who was a guest on the podcast, said that the post-hospital experience was “a nightmare.”

“It was hell,” he explained. “She couldn’t move out of bed… it was just a messed up situation… and she was in pain.”

Things became much worse when Messer’s father, who was himself addicted to pain medication and living with the couple, gave her pain medication. “It was easily available [to her] with him living in our basement.”

Messer said that by this point, she was already dependent on pain meds. “Then they put me on Diazepam (the generic form of Valium), and it had me nodding off. I didn’t even know what it was!”

Despite her struggle, Messer denied claims that she was struggling with dependency and depression. But in a 2018 episode of her podcast, she admitted that this period in her life was among her most difficult.

“I wasn’t in the greatest place mentally, and then it was affecting me physically,” she said. “It almost cost me my children. Everything was crashing down on me. I became suicidal.”

Messer would go on to complete a 30-day treatment program for depression and anxiety in 2015 and declared herself “in a much better place now.” She is also reluctant to give her children any prescription medication.

“We do the numbing gel (for pain) and that’s it,” she said. “I don’t want them to become dependent on or even go through that. I do know how it feels to become dependent on anything given by doctors.”

View the original article at thefix.com

27 November 2018