How Pot Became Demonized: the Fine Line Between Good Medicine and ‘Dangerous Drugs’
The following is an excerpt from “Dying to Get High” by Wendy Chapkis and Richard J. Webb (NYU Press, 2008). (c) 2008 NYU Press. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.
For many modern critics, the concept of “medical marijuana” is a contradiction in terms. Medicine is standardized, synthetic, and pure; marijuana involves the unrefined and promiscuous coupling of more than four hundred components rooted in the dirt. Medicine — in its most powerful and privileged forms — rests in the hands of men, while the most potent form of marijuana is found in the female flowering plant. Medicine engages in heroic battles against death. Marijuana claims only to enhance the quality of life.
Medicine presents itself as an objective science safeguarded by the ritual of the double-blind, randomized clinical trial. The therapeutic value of marijuana relies largely on the “soft science” of subjective experience and anecdotal evidence. From the perspective of its critics, then, cannabis is an effeminate interloper in the masculine world of real medicine, a dangerous drug pushed on a credulous public by illegitimate quacks.
American College of Physicians Endorses Medical Marijuana
(NaturalNews) Transcending political controversy and stigma surrounding the subject, the second largest physician group in the country has endorsed the use, reclassification, and further study of medicinal marijuana. In a position paper issued February 14th, the American College of Physicians (ACP) makes the case that the red tape surrounding the medical use of cannabis has obscured good science for too long.
Dope without the high
It’s a stoner’s worst nightmare: pot without the high. But a drug that offers the pain-killing and appetite boost associated with marijuana without the forgetfulness, giggles and general dopiness might appeal to cancer patients and others who would otherwise turn to medical marijuana.
Now, researchers in California (one of the first US states to legalise medical marijuana) have identified a family of chemicals that comes close to mimicking weed, but without the high.
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In marijuana debate, both sides can point to the science
If marijuana were a new discovery, without cultural and political baggage, “it would be hailed as a wonder drug,” wrote Dr. Lester Grinspoon last year. The Harvard psychiatrist has advocated for medical marijuana for decades.
Yet a gap has persisted between what many believe about medical marijuana’s potential and what scientists could prove. Now recent research has applied the same rigor that would be used on any new pill to testing marijuana.
Marijuana And Alcohol Taken Together Induced Widespread Nerve Cell Death In Brains Of Young Rats
Marijuana is among the most frequently used illicit drugs by women during their childbearing years and there is growing concern that marijuana abuse during pregnancy, either alone or in combination with other drugs, may have serious effects on fetal brain development. There is strong evidence that THC, the main psychoactive component of marijuana, crosses the placenta, that maternal marijuana abuse results in intrauterine growth retardation and that infants exposed to marijuana exhibit a temporary syndrome that includes lethargy and decreased muscle tone.
So Stop Drinking!
Chem Lab: Scientists Are Learning How Weed Causes Paranoia
In the January issue of Neuropharmacology, which happens to have a marijuana theme, two teams of researchers tried to explain what causes some people to feel paranoid when they smoke weed.
If you think it’s impossible to have too much of a good thing — think again.
In the first sentence of their research paper, a group of Italian scientists explained that low doses of tetrahydrocannabinol — the psychoactive chemical in marijuana — tend to be calming while large amounts have the opposite effect. What they wanted to know is: which parts of the brain cause those moods?
Excess Nitrogen Boosts Tropical Plant Growth By 20 Percent
A study by UC Irvine ecologists finds that excess nitrogen in tropical forests boosts plant growth by an average of 20 percent, countering the belief that such forests would not respond to nitrogen pollution.
Faster plant growth means the tropics will take in more carbon dioxide than previously thought, though long-term climate effects are unclear. Over the next century, nitrogen pollution is expected to steadily rise, with the most dramatic increases in rapidly developing tropical regions such as India, South America, Africa and Southeast Asia.
Nitrogen fertilizer, applied to farmland to improve crop yield, also affects ecosystems downwind by seeping into runoff water and evaporating into the atmosphere. Industrial burning and forest clearing also pumps nitrogen into the air.
Nematodes
The nematodes or roundworms: are one of the most common phyla of animals, with over 80,000 different described species (over 15,000 are parasitic). They are ubiquitous in freshwater, marine, and terrestrial environments, where they often outnumber other animals in both individual and species counts, and are found in locations as diverse as Antarctica and oceanic trenches. Further, there are a great many parasitic forms, including pathogens in most plants, animals, and also in humans.
The nematodes were originally named nematoidea by Rudolphi (1808). They were renamed nematodes by Burmeister 1837 (as a family; Leuckart 1848 and von Siebold 1848 both promoted them to the rank of order), then nematoda (Diesing 1861), though Nathan Cobb (1919) argued that they should be called nemata or nemates (and in English ‘nemas’ rather than ‘nematodes’). After some confusion which saw the nematodes placed (often together with the horsehair worms, nematomorpha) as a class or order in various groups such as Aschelminthes, Lankester (1877) definitively promoted them to the level of phylum.
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Thermographic camera
A thermographic camera, sometimes called a FLIR (Forward Looking InfraRed), or an infrared camera less specifically, is a device that forms an image using infrared radiation, similar to a common camera that forms an image using visible light. Instead of the 450–750 nanometer range of the visible light camera, infrared cameras operate in wavelengths as long as 14,000 nm (14 µm).
Theory of operation
Infrared energy is just one part of the Electromagnetic Spectrum that encompasses radiation from gamma rays, x-rays, ultra violet, a thin region of visible light, infrared, radar, TV and radio waves. These are all related and differentiated in the length of their wave (wavelength). All objects emit a certain amount of black body radiation as a function of their temperatures. Generally speaking, the higher an object’s temperature is, the more infrared radiation as black-body radiation it emits. A special camera can detect this radiation in a way similar to an ordinary camera does visible light. It works even in total darkness because ambient light level does not matter. This makes it useful for rescue operations in smoke-filled buildings and underground.
Images from infrared cameras tend to be monochromatic because the cameras are generally designed with only a single type of sensor responding to single wavelength range of infrared radiation. Color cameras require a more complex construction to differentiate wavelength and color has less meaning outside of the normal visible spectrum because the differing wavelengths do not map uniformly into the system of color vision used by humans. Sometimes these monochromatic images are displayed in pseudo-color, where changes in color are used rather than changes in intensity to display changes in the signal. This is useful because although humans have much greater dynamic range in intensity detection than color overall, the ability to see fine intensity differences in bright areas is fairly limited. This technique is called density slicing.
For use in temperature measurement the brightest (warmest) parts of the image are customarily colored white, intermediate temperatures reds and yellows, and the dimmest (coolest) parts blue. A scale should be shown next to a false color image to relate colors to temperatures. Their resolution is considerably lower than of optical cameras, mostly only 160×120 or 320×240 pixels. Thermographic cameras are much more expensive than their visible-spectrum counterparts, and higher-end models are often deemed as dual-use and export-restricted.
Thermal imaging photography finds many other uses. For example, firefighters use it to see through smoke, find persons, and localize hotspots of fires. With thermal imaging, power line maintenance technicians locate overheating joints and parts, a telltale sign of their failure, to eliminate potential hazards. Where thermal insulation becomes faulty, building construction technicians can see heat leaks to improve the efficiencies of cooling or heating air-conditioning. Thermal imaging cameras are also installed in some luxury cars to aid the driver, the first being the 2000 Cadillac DeVille. Some physiological activities, particularly responses, in human beings and other warm-blooded animals can also be monitored with thermographic imaging. Cooled infrared cameras can also be found at most major astronomy research telescopes.
Cannabis Pistil
The Pistil
A pistil (from Latin pistillum “pestle”) is made up of a carpel (if single) or carpels (if fused). A flower with two or more fused carpels (called a compound ovary or compound pistil) is termed syncarpous. However, if the gynoecium consists of one or more free, simple, and distinct carpels, each carpel makes an individual pistil and the gynoecium is termed apocarpous. Fertilization of the ovule or ovules results in development of the carpel(s) into a fruit.
When two or more carpels are fused or joined together its called syncarpy. In a compound pistil, the carpels are fused together in one of two basic ways:
- the carpels are fused at or near their margins (parietal placentation), usually forming a single large cavity — an example would be the violet.
- the folded carpels extend in towards the center, being fused along their outer faces (laterally concrescent), with the placentae arranged around a central column of tissue (axile placentation). There may be as many locules as there are carpels; and tissue of the receptacle may be involved in forming the axillary column. An example of axile placentation would be the lily.
