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Tuesday 21st February 2012

A Retweet by Alex Stevens of a tweet from Russell Newcombe took me to this written answer from 9th February about the number of people ‘proceeded against at magistrates courts for cannabis possession’ in England since 2006.

The numbers show a doubling between 2006 and 2010 from 12,616 to 25,100. And this has been a steady increase as the year on year figures show;...more

Monday 20th February 2012

Ahead of the release of the UK government’s strategy for dealing with the problems caused by alcohol, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, has begun speaking about alcohol and suggesting ways that potentially harmful drinking could be countered.

As we know from the situation with illegal substances, no amount of legal force will change the way people use alcohol. What’s required is a change of attitude and I’ve been thinking about how attitudes are formed and whether they can be changed...more

Sunday 19th February 2012

I don’t usually listen to the radio on a Sunday morning but, today, I had to go out so the car radio meant I caught an item about present day life in Russia.

It was one of those long-form pieces from the resident BBC correspondent who had replicated a train journey, from Moscow to Petushki, used in a story written in communist times to show the state of the nation...more

Saturday 18th February 2012

I’m famous. Well, not really, but there are a number of people who may have read about me if they didn’t have anything better to do before Christmas.

Some months ago, I was contacted by a freelance journalist who said she was writing a piece about using plants as murder weapons and would I mind answering some questions. She said the piece would appear in ‘The Field’, she hoped, but couldn’t say when...more

Friday 17th February 2012

I ventured out into the garden just to see what’s going on rather than to do any serious gardening. I really should set aside a few hours to start tidying things up for spring but all I did was to have a potter around and take a look at how the hellebores are doing.

There’s quite a bit of folklore associated with plants from the Helleborus genus but what struck me today was the absence of one piece of folklore you might expect to be associated with these early flowering plants...more

Thursday 16th February 2012

The March edition of Addiction journal is now available online. In addition to the usual mix of items about the widest variety of psychoactive substances, this edition has a letter that introduced me to a world I didn’t know existed.

I’d never heard of the ‘dark web’ nor the Silk Road website until I read this letter from Monica Barratt of Australia’s National Drug Research Institute. Since then, I’ve read and heard more about it though, for reasons that will become clear, I haven’t seen the Silk Road site...more

Wednesday 15th February 2012

A while ago, I read something about the underlying problem with getting scientific topics properly reported. I can’t recall where I saw it so I’m paraphrasing from memory but it was along the lines of saying that scientific journalism won’t improve until scientists acknowledge that there are some bad scientists and journalists accept that there are bad journalists.

I’ve come across two examples on the same day. One from each side of the issue...more

Tuesday 14th February 2012

Last Saturday, when writing about Oklahoma’s moves to outlaw the commercial cultivation of Ricinus communis, castor oil plant, I said ‘I’m loathe to label politicians as stupid even if all the published evidence points in that direction’. After my Google alert for ‘ricin’ directed me to this report I find I’m able to conquer my loathing.

In fact, I think it is essential so to do and say that some of Oklahoma’s politicians are so stupid that they make me think that word needs to be redefined because most people’s understanding of what is meant by stupid goes only part of the way to describe what went on in the Oklahoma House of Representatives on 13th February...more

Monday 13th February 2012

I’ve heard back from the BBC after my complaint about its Radio 4 programme ‘The Report’ on Thursday 26th January on the subject of whether Catha edulis, khat, should be classified under the Misuse of Drugs Act.

The complaint has been answered by the programme’s editor in some detail, though that detail didn’t extend to providing his/her name. Here’s my complaint, again;..more

Sunday 12th February 2012

A bit of a downbeat turn to today’s blog as I want to write about a number of reports of deaths as a result of illegal drugs. This is not any sort of structured survey of recent stories; just a few that have caught my attention.

Shortly after reports, like this one from ABC News, about the continued high number of arrests in New York for low level marijuana offences, comes this story from the New York Times about Ramarley Graham, an 18-year old shot dead by police in an incident involving the teenager’s attempt to dispose of a small quantity of cannabis down the toilet at his home...more

Saturday 11th February 2012

The state of Oklahoma is well on the way to making the commercial farming of Ricinus communis, castor oil plant, illegal. I’ve read a number of reports about this situation since it was first mooted in November last year but I still have no idea what is really behind this move.

The first mention I saw of this was a report in ‘Tulsa World’ dated 26th November noting that bills to outlaw the production and transportation of castor oil plants were among the first to be filed for consideration in the 2012 legislative sessions...more

Friday 10th February 2012

A story from China makes me think I shall have to change what I say about deaths due to toxic fungi. It also made me think about Paracelsus and rhubarb.

The report said that researchers had discovered a fungus to be the cause for what was known as ‘Yunnan Sudden Unexpected Death’, a condition believed to have claimed over 260 lives in the past 30 years. Now, 260 deaths over 30 years is not a huge toll but it, probably, means I should stop saying that deaths from toxic mushrooms are ‘extremely rare’ and substitute ‘very rare’ or ‘quite rare’...more

Thursday 9th February 2012

I’ve written before about Kevin Sabet who was a senior adviser in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy from 2009 to 2011 and now portrays himself as a rational centrist on the question of drug policy rather than an outright prohibitionist.

He came to my attention again as a result of two tweets about recent polling data on the matter of whether Cannabis sativa, marijuana, should be legal in the USA...more

Wednesday 8th February 2012/h4>

Something strange is going on in the world of addiction medicine. I can’t explain it so I’ll have to restrict myself to reporting it.

Reports from Mexico, originally picked up by Spanish language media in the USA and then appearing in English, say that the government’s National Institute of Psychiatry has patented a vaccine against heroin...more

Tuesday 7th February 2012

Ioan Grillo’s ‘El Narco’ that looks at the appalling situation in Mexico is divided into three parts. The first part ‘History’ looks at how the drug trade developed from the time of the Spanish occupation to the present day.

In one page, Grillo summarises the situation during World War II when, according to some people, the American government became the main customer for smuggled opium in order to obtain the morphine needed to offer pain relief to its field casualties. Grillo notes that there are still people in Sinaloa today who will state that such a trade took place and that a history of the drug trade on the wall of the Mexican Defence Department HQ in Mexico City includes reference to it..more

Monday 6th February 2012

Sometimes, I find myself amazed at the things that get written up as scientific papers. I’m not just talking about nonsense surveys of the sort that are supposed to show that one particular day is the saddest of the year or ‘prove’ that someone’s choice of shirt colour can be used to demonstrate their likelihood of committing a crime.

I’m meaning those papers that have conclusions that seem to me to be so obvious or so intuitive that I can’t believe that no-one has written a paper about it before....more

Sunday 5th February 2012

I’ve just finished reading ‘El Narco’ and I was intending to have a shot at writing a review of it. Grillo is a journalist who has covered Latin America since 2001 and is based in Mexico City. His book draws on his extensive experience of reporting on the activities of drug cartels and his attempts to understand why what is happening is happening.

A couple of websites I’ve seen in the last couple of days, however, make me think I shall get diverted into focussing on one aspect of the current situation in Mexico. That is the difficulty of really understanding what is going on...more

Saturday 4th February 2012

Timing is everything.

I thought I’d set myself an easy task today and make a photo tour of the garden to see how the spring plants like Galanthus nivalis (snowdrops), Narcissus (daffodils) and Helleborus (hellebores) are getting on and, also, to see if there’s any sign of new growth on things like the Solanum dulcamara (woody nightshade) and Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade)..more

Friday 3rd February 2012

Esther Hegt, of ‘Ragwort, myths and facts’ sent me a pile of reading, a couple of days ago, and I confess I’ve only glanced at it, so far. Much of it is about illnesses that can afflict horses but get largely ignored by owners and some of the health products offered for treating illness in horses, including some that horses are physically incapable of suffering. Esther’s point is that the attitude toward Jacobaea vulgaris, common ragwort, is not based on logic.

I did make a start on this online version of a slide presentation created by Dr Elio Spinello of California State University. Dr Spinello starts by arguing that Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is definitely not ‘traditional’ and may not even be ‘Chinese’. A quick hunt around suggests that Dr. Spinello is a rationalist who offers evidence for anything he says but I shall want to look at this matter more closely before commenting further...more

Thursday 2nd February 2012

Sometimes, a number catches my eye and I think I should look at it a bit closer to see if it means what it seems to mean. It happened when I read;

‘Another aspect of reducing demand is to make sure that the drugs information we communicate in terms of the risks and awareness is up to date and as effective as possible. You might not have noticed, although hopefully our target audience did, but Frank was relaunched in October. The statistics on Frank in terms of awareness are very strong; 86% of 11-18 year olds, Frank’s target audience, know about the service and over 80% say they trust it to give reliable information.’...more

Wednesday 1st February 2012

There’s something Dickensian about the USA. As soon as I started to write that I realised that there is a great deal that is Dickensian about the USA, at least when viewed from the other side of the Atlantic.

There is a parallel between Jo, the crossing sweeper in Bleak House, clearing away the dirt so as it doesn’t cause problems for decent people, and the scenes we see of vagrants collecting materials for recycling in the hope of making a few dollars, their purloined shopping trolleys rattling with tin cans and glass bottles...more

'Is That Cat Dead? - and other questions about poison plants' is now also available in Kindle form from Amazon.