Yolanda Ng was on the cusp of a full time job as a pediatric nephrologist at Providence Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital in Spokane, Washington, in the summer of 2014. She was going through the motions of onboarding at the hospital—filling out paperwork and finalizing her new position. Then she took a drug test, and it came back positive for cannabis use.
A few months prior, Ng had started to take a few drops from a cannabis-infused tincture that her friend recommended to help with menstrual cramps for a few days every month when she had her period. She tells me that it was such a small amount that she’d had no concerns about giving the requisite urine sample. Weed was already decriminalized in Washington at the time, and Ng says she had never used cannabis at work or before seeing patients.
But when the positive result came back, her supervisor said it was protocol to report her to the state’s physician health program, an organization tasked with protecting the public from unsafe medical practice. What followed was a costly and messy process of legal proceedings, suspended licenses, mandatory rehab, and regulatory middlemen—a process that pushed Ng to decide to leave the field altogether.
Now Ng’s story is another cautionary tale, adding to a growing number from medical professionals facing repercussions for using medical and recreational cannabis in the 23 states where it has been decriminalized. As the country continues to push for legalization, the lack of clarity and regulation within the medical establishment is leaving physicians in the crosshairs with little guidance and often fewer rights than other working citizens.
“The law doesn’t provide paths forward for [physicians like Ng],” says Nicole Li, an attorney who represents Ng and several other physicians who have faced similar issues as a result of both authorized medical and adult cannabis use. “Resolving the situation is going to require a political solution prompted by political pressure.”
Cases like Ng’s have cropped up across the country. There’s the neurosurgery resident in California who said she smoked weed on her days off. Or one of Li’s current clients in Washington who was only reported and tested when a patient complained about him after he refused to prescribe unnecessary opioids. Physician Paul Bregman in Colorado lost his medical license after he used marijuana as a treatment for bipolar disorder.
There are no specific laws that govern what a physician can and cannot do when it comes to cannabis. It’s widely accepted that a doctor cannot legally practice if his or her work is compromised by any drug—be it opioids, alcohol, or weed. But marijuana poses a specific challenge since the substance can stay in your system, and show up on drug tests, for up to a month after use. There is no way to distinguish between someone who smoked a joint in the morning before work and one who did so three weeks ago on a weekend.
Sometimes the rules around whether or not a doctor can use cannabis depends on the workplace, not the state. Micah Matthews, deputy executive and legislative director for the Washington Medical Commission, the state licensing agency, says that hospitals or clinics that accept federal dollars often have to comply with federal, not state, regulations. And under the US law, marijuana is still a Schedule I—i.e., illegal—drug.
“An employer may not have a problem with recreational use,” he says, “but if they accept federal money, as all hospitals tend to do, that creates some requirements for continued funding should cannabis use be discovered.”
The grey area, however, is not just about what is permitted. It’s also about who determines what happens to physicians who are found using cannabis. This task often falls to physician health programs, semi-voluntary organizations that are meant to direct physicians to rehab or report dangerous behavior. State licensing boards, like the one in Washington, often defer to these organizations to evaluate the physicians and recommend a course of action.
Physician health programs are controversial in the medical community, and have been criticized for forcing doctors into unnecessary treatment. There’s also the chance that these programs have a financial interest in sending physicians to costly treatment centers. “They’re pursuing our clients when there are dangerous doctors out there,” Li says, referring to physicians who put their patients’ safety at risk.
When psychiatrist Michael Alpert in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a Change.org petition to protect doctors who use marijuana safely, the petition was directed at the Federation of State Physician Health Programs, which oversees the state programs. (Full disclosure: I know Alpert socially).
When I reached out to Chris Bundy, the director of Washington’s physician health program, he told me that his organization tries to address and rehabilitate doctors so that they don’t have their licenses revoked. He also emphasizes that the organization believes that regular cannabis use (which he defined as at least weekly) leads to cognitive impairment, and shouldn’t be used by doctors, especially since it is federally illegal.
“How would we know or define safe limits for physicians?” he says. “The danger is the assumption that most people have that getting drunk or high on Sunday won’t impact practice performance on Monday.”
There is a dearth of research on the long-term use of cannabis, and we still don’t know if using the drug has permanent impact on cognitive functioning in adults. But Bundy says the program would never make a decision about referral for evaluation, treatment or monitoring based only on the frequency of cannabis use. Instead, he says it has to be evaluated in the context of the other clinical information available. (Bundy didn’t comment on any specific cases.)
Doctors have spoken out against the state programs and their treatment of doctors in the past, saying the programs are not looking out for physicians like Ng. “Mandating people go for evaluations at physician health programs solely on the basis of a marijuana test is ridiculous,” says J. Wesley Boyd, a physician and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “The fact that the state board of medicine in Washington state went along with that is appalling.”
In Ng’s case, the physician health program she was referred to conducted an interview, determined they couldn’t make a conclusion, and referred her to Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation Center, an addiction program, for a $5000, three-day evaluation. And while the psychologist and psychiatrist determined she wasn’t at risk, Ng tells me that one of the program’s counselors decided she had “severe substance abuse” and that her marijuana use had permanently impacted her brain.
They then recommended that she enter a three-month inpatient rehabilitation program at the same center, which would have required her to pay $50,000. When she didn’t comply, she was reported to the Washington Medical Quality Assurance Commission. “There were some people who legitimately needed to be there,” she says. “I don’t understand why I qualified.”
The misunderstanding and lack of research around cannabis use can have severe repercussions on a physician’s career, not to mention their well-being. Li says that none of the clients she’s currently representing had been reported for threatening a patient’s safety. But even then, some of their names appeared in local media, stating that they were reported for using illegal drugs.
“Physicians call me from across the country—they don’t know what kind of lawyer they need. There’s shame and stigma around it,” Li says. “The amount of suicide talk is alarming.”
Meanwhile, Ng, now living in California, says she wants to leave her past, and the stress of her three-year ordeal, behind. After hearing the requirements for probation—working every day, and remaining 100 miles away from the original hospital—she hung up her white coat entirely and is now working as an interior designer.
Originally published at: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/vbknb4/doctors-using-legal-weed-suspended
Analysis from New Frontier Data, a firm that focuses on the marijuana industry, also found that the federal government would create at least $131.8 billion in federal tax revenue over the next eight years if cannabis were legalized in all 50 states.
With federal legalization, there would be 782,000 jobs created immediately, and the firm forecasts that the number would increase to 1.1 million by 2025, including growers and retailers.
In 2015, a year after Colorado legalized recreational cannabis sales, the legal marijuana industry created 18,000 full-time jobs and $2.4 billion in economic growth in the state, according to the Marijuana Policy Group. New Frontier suggested this trend could be sustainable on a national level.
“If cannabis businesses were legalized tomorrow and taxed as normal businesses with a standard 35 percent tax rate, cannabis businesses would infuse the U.S. economy with an additional $12.6 billion this year,” New Frontier CEO Giadha Aguirre De Carcer told the Washington Post.
The economic growth would be pushed by increased demand on various industries, according to the Marijuana Policy Group. Farmers need warehouse space, and they purchase specialized equipment like lighting and irrigation for marijuana growth. Retailers rely on contractors and book-keeping services to run businesses. In states like Washington and Colorado, legal recreational marijuana has also led to a boost in some tourism sectors.
California became the eighth state to sell legal recreational marijuana on January 1, and 29 states now allow medical marijuana. Federal legalization, while popular across nearly every demographic group in the U.S., is facing renewed challenges from U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose strong opposition to statewide marijuana laws has slowed the bipartisan push. Sessions last week rescinded an Obama-era rule that told federal prosecutors to leave marijuana alone in states that legalized it, leaving open questions about the future of the burgeoning industry.
Originally published by: SUMMER MEZA ON 1/11/18 AT 6:29 PM
Western medicine has some good points, and is great in an emergency, but it’s high time people realized that today’s mainstream medicine (western medicine or allopathy), with its focus on drugs, drugs, radiation, drugs, surgery, drugs and more drugs, is at its foundation a money spinning Rockefeller creation.
People these days look at you like a weirdo if you talk about the healing properties of plants or any other holistic practices. Much like anything else, politics and money have been used to warp people’s minds and encourage them to embrace what is bad for them.
It all began with John D. Rockefeller (1839 – 1937) who was an oil magnate, a robber baron, America’s first billionaire, and a natural-born monopolist.
By the turn on the 20th century, he controlled 90% of all oil refineries in the U.S. through his oil company, Standard Oil, which was later on broken up to become Chevron, Exxon, Mobil etc.
World Affairs reports: At the same time, around 1900, scientists discovered “petrochemicals” and the ability to create all kinds of chemicals from oil. For example, the first plastic — called Bakelite — was made from oil in 1907. Scientists were discovering various vitamins and guessed that many pharmaceutical drugs could be made from oil.
This was a wonderful opportunity for Rockefeller who saw the ability to monopolize the oil, chemical and the medical industries at the same time!
The best thing about petrochemicals was that everything could be patented and sold for high profits.
But there was one problem with Rockefeller’s plan for the medical industry: natural/herbal medicines were very popular in America at that time. Almost half the doctors and medical colleges in the U.S. were practicing holistic medicine, using knowledge from Europe and Native Americans.
Rockefeller, the monopolist, had to figure out a way to get rid of his biggest competition. So he used the classic strategy of “problem-reaction-solution.” That is, create a problem and scare people, and then offer a (pre-planned) solution. (Similar to terrorism scare, followed by the “Patriot Act”).
He went to his buddy Andrew Carnegie – another plutocrat who made his money from monopolizing the steel industry – who devised a scheme. From the prestigious Carnegie Foundation, they sent a man named Abraham Flexner to travel around the country and report on the status of medical colleges and hospitals around the country.
This led to the Flexner Report, which gave birth to the modern medicine as we know it.
Needless to say, the report talked about the need for revamping and centralizing our medical institutions. Based on this report, more than half of all medical colleges were soon closed.
Homeopathy and natural medicines were mocked and demonized; and doctors were even jailed.
To help with the transition and change the minds of other doctors and scientists, Rockefeller gave more than $100 million to colleges, hospitals and founded a philanthropic front group called “General Education Board” (GEB). This is the classic carrot and stick approach.
In a very short time, medical colleges were all streamlined and homogenized. All the students were learning the same thing, and medicine was all about using patented drugs.
Scientists received huge grants to study how plants cured diseases, but their goal was to first identify which chemicals in the plant were effective, and then recreate a similar chemical – but not identical – in the lab that could be patented.
A pill for an ill became the mantra for modern medicine.
And you thought Koch brothers were evil?
So, now we are, 100 years later, churning out doctors who know nothing about the benefits of nutrition or herbs or any holistic practices. We have an entire society that is enslaved to corporations for its well-being.
America spends 15% of its GDP on healthcare, which should be really called “sick care.” It is focused not on cure, but only on symptoms, thus creating repeat customers. There is no cure for cancer, diabetes, autism, asthma, or even flu.
Why would there be real cures? This is a system founded by oligarchs and plutocrats, not by doctors.
As for cancer, oh yeah, the American Cancer Society was founded by none other than Rockefeller in 1913.
Originally published at: http://ehealthmagz.com/2018/08/17/how-rockefeller-founded-big-pharma-and-waged-war-on-natural-cures/
The contemporary version of argument can be traced to a 2012 Duke University study, which found that persistent, heavy marijuana use through adolescence and young adulthood was associated with declines in IQ.
Other researchers have since criticized that study’s methods. A follow-up study in the same journal found that the original research failed to account for a number of confounding factors that could also affect cognitive development, such as cigarette and alcohol use, mental illness and socioeconomic status.
Two new reports this month tackle the relationship between marijuana use and intelligence from two very different angles: One examines the life trajectories of 2,235 British teenagers between ages 8 and 16, and the other looks at the differences between American identicaltwin pairs in which one twin uses marijuana and the other does not.
Despite vastly different methods, the studies reach the same conclusion: They found no evidence that adolescent marijuana use leads to a decline in intelligence.
I wrote about the study of British teenagers before, when it was still a working paper. It has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, and its findings still stand: After adjusting for a range of confounding factors, such as maternal health, mental health and other substance use, the researchers found that “cannabis use by the age of 15 did not predict either lower teenage IQ scores or poorer educational performance. These findings therefore suggest that cannabis use at the modest levels used by this sample of teenagers is not by itself causally related to cognitive impairment.”
They did find, though, a distinct relationship between cigaretteuse and poor educational performance, which is in line with what other research has found. The researchers did not find a robust link between cigarette use and IQ.
The authors of this study stress that their results don’t necessarily invalidate the findings of the 2012 Duke University paper. That paper focused on persistent heavy use over a long period of time, while this study looked only at low to moderate levels of adolescent use. “While persistent cannabis dependence may be linked to declining IQ across a person’s lifetime,” the authors write, “teenage cannabis use alone does not appear to predict worse IQ outcomes in adolescents.”
But the researchers in the study of American twins tackle the Duke University findings head-on. Examining the life trajectories of twin pairs in which one uses marijuana while the other doesn’t, they found that those who used marijuana didn’t experience consistently greater cognitive deficits than the others.
Identicaltwin comparisons are a powerful tool for this kind of analysis, because their genetic makeup is nearly identical and their early home environment is consistent. This automatically controls for a lot of the confounding factors that can make sussing out causality difficult.
The twin data “fails to support the implication by Meier et. al. [the authors of the Duke study] that marijuana exposure in adolescence causes neurocognitive decline,” the study concludes. The numbers suggest, on the contrary, that “children who are predisposed to intellectual stagnation in middle school are on a trajectory for future marijuana use.” In other words, rather than marijuana making kids less intelligent, it may be that kids who are not as smart or who perform poorly in school are more inclined to try marijuana at some point in their lives.
Also, if marijuana use were responsible for cognitive decline, you might expect to find that the more marijuana a person smokes, the less intelligent they become. But this paper found that heavier marijuana use was not associated with greater decreases in IQ.
Originally published by: Christopher Ingraham on January 18, 2016 at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/18/scientists-have-found-that-smoking-weed-does-not-make-you-stupid-after-all/
Good news for people who’ve worried that smoking too much marijuana (cannabis) — especially as a teenager — might lead to some dramatic problems in the future, even schizophrenia.
New research from Harvard Medical School, in a comparison between families with a history of schizophrenia and those without, finds little support for marijuana use as a cause of schizophrenia.
“The results of the current study suggest that having an increased familial morbid risk for schizophrenia may be the underlying basis for schizophrenia in cannabis users and not cannabis use by itself,” note the researchers.
The new study is the first family study that, according to the researchers, “examines both non-psychotic cannabis users and non-cannabis user controls as two additional independent samples, enabling the examination of whether the risk for schizophrenia is increased in family members of cannabis users who develop schizophrenia compared with cannabis users who do not and also whether that morbid risk is similar or different from that in family members of schizophrenia patients who never used cannabis.”
Marijuana use is becoming increasingly commonplace as two U.S. states have already legalized its use next to alcohol for adults. Some previous studies have suggested that there may be a correlational link between teenage marijuana use and the increased likelihood of being diagnosed with schizophrenia in the future.
So researchers from Harvard Medical School and the VA Boston Healthcare system got together to determine whether family risk for schizophrenia is a crucial factor underlying the association between the development of schizophrenia in teens who smoke marijuana.
The researchers recruited 282 subjects from the New York and Boston metropolitan areas who were divided into four groups: controls with no lifetime history of psychotic illness, cannabis, or any other drug use; controls with no lifetime history of psychotic illness, and a history of heavy cannabis use during adolescence, but no other drug use; patients with no lifetime history of cannabis use or any other drug and less than 10 years of being ill; patients with a history of heavy cannabis use and no other drug use during adolescence and prior to the onset of psychosis.
Information about all first-, second-, and third-degree relatives was obtained, as well as information about any other relative who had a known psychiatric illness. This resulted in information on 1,168 first-degree relatives and a total of 4,291 relatives. The study gathered together information regarding cannabis use, and family history regarding schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and drug abuse.
The researchers concluded that the results of the current study, “both when analyzed using morbid risk and family frequency calculations, suggest that having an increased familial risk for schizophrenia is the underlying basis for schizophrenia in these samples — not the cannabis use.
“While cannabis may have an effect on the age of onset of schizophrenia it is unlikely to be the cause of illness,” said the researchers, who were led by Ashley C. Proal from Harvard Medical School.
“In general, we found a tendency for depression and bipolar disorder to be increased in the relatives of cannabis users in both the patient and control samples. This might suggest that cannabis users are more prone to affective disorders than their non-using samples or vice versa.” Future research is needed to understand this relationship.
Drug abuse also appears to have an important genetic component.
“Drug abuse is present more frequently in family members of all 3 samples compared to those of non-cannabis abusing controls. This is in line with past research confirming a genetic predisposition for drug use.”
The research was published earlier this month in Schizophrenia Research.
Source: Schizophrenia Research
Originally Published by: John M. Grohol, Psy.D. in August 2018 at https://psychcentral.com/news/2013/12/10/harvard-marijuana-doesnt-cause-schizophrenia/63148.html?fbclid=IwAR38zTvmfLeXKZ8fS_Zt3e0pTZKzLzV6rYPHiTjSmXsu7-uqFwOWErWtyX4
An amazing study authored by professors D. Mark Anderson (University of Montana) and Daniel Rees (University of Colorado) shows that traffic deaths have been reduced in states where medical marijuana is legalized.
The study notes that this is equal to the effect raising the drinking age to 21 had on reducing traffic fatalities.
One key factor is the reduction in alcohol consumption. The study finds that there is a direct correlation between the use of marijuana and a reduction in beer sales, especially in the younger folks aged 20-29.
A drop in beer sales supports the theory that marijuana can act as a substitute for liquor.
The study also finds that marijuana has the inverse effect that alcohol does on drivers. Drivers under the influence of alcohol tend to make rash decisions and risky moves, whereas those under the influence of marijuana tend to slow down, make safer choices, and increase following distances.
Originally Published By: Travis Okulski on Dec. 19, 2011, 10:55 AM at https://www.businessinsider.com/it-turns-out-that-smoking-marijuana-may-actually-make-you-a-better-driver-2011-12?international=true&r=US&IR=T&fbclid=IwAR214UmrezPQFFh1cfbq0Xbhp4n9LLQewu2w-SrYTDse5o85EgAvt3R5sII
