Don't Weed And Drive - Company Testing Pot Breathalyzer Prototype

Don't Weed And Drive - Company Testing Pot Breathalyzer Prototype Like it or not, weed is going to be available like alcohol. No one can stop this wave. There is too much money involved, and besides - the people want it. Soon more weed smokers will take to the road. Car crashes will happen, in which you - the non weed taker will have to defend yourself. Was the other person drunk? No. Was the other person on prescription drugs? No. Heroin! NO! Was the other person on Weed? Yes. When was their last hit? 40 days ago? 4 days ago? Or 4 minutes ago?

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This is no longer a theoretical concept of, "but weed does not hurt anyone." "No one overdoes from weed" "Weed affects everyone differently." "I am smarter on weed." "I am dumber on weed." "I have better motor skills on weed, so you - the non-week taker is at fault!" Don't laugh, there is data to support this argument - and any pro-week lawyer will hire experts to blow you away in court because your skills were not as sharp as his client's.
Besides, didn't you just wake up - and just a little bit sleepy? Or really tired from a hard days work - and not at full alert? What about that NyQuil you took 10 hours ago? Whereas the weed taker was fully rested - and besides, he functions better on weed! His video game stats prove it! You are now having to prove you are not at fault - the non drug user, or you will pay higher insurance rates for the rest of your life.
On Wednesday Dec 2, 2015, Hound Labs, from Oakland, California announced they are developing technology for a handheld breathalyzer for marijuana. It is supposed to get someone's THC level in real time. Police currently use blood or urine test to measure THC levels. But this test only test for levels, not impairment. Impairment will be the main issue that needs to be addressed.
If you are anyone else needs help with addiction, please call Solutions Recovery at 702-854-2404 or use our online form.

Naloxone, One Dose Does Not Fit All Overdose Situations

Noloxone should not be treated like the Heimlich maneuver, but for overdoses.

Did you know that you should not perform the Heimlich maneuver on someone who can still breath, or is conscious? I know in movies, you see the Heimlich maneuver performed when they see first sign of choking, but this is incorrect like everything Hollywood shows you.

According to https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000047.htm, you should first ask, "Are you choking? Can you speak?" DO NOT perform first aid if the person is coughing forcefully and is able to speak. A strong cough can often dislodge the object. If you administer the Heimlich maneuver to a coughing and speaking person, you could move the obstruction so it completely blocks the air way and they become unconscious. Then you will have to perform CPR. But like the Heimlich maneuver, Naloxone, like any drug - should not be given indiscriminately.

Despite what people are saying, Naloxone is not a wonder drug, but has to be given under the correct circumstances. In the wrong situations it could lead to more deaths if untrained people administer this drug for any overdose. Police officers are not Emergency Medical Personnel, but now they are asked to administer Naloxone because they tend to be the first responders. Other people on the scene, now have the added responsibility of saving the life of an overdose victim - if Naloxone is available and they resist calling 911 through fear of the criminal justice system.

#PassThePie Campaign

Anna Nicole Smith "Obsessed" with pills

Anna Nicole Smith was addicted to pills and was assisted in consuming them by her lawyer/boyfriend in the weeks leading to her death, testified the celebrities bodyguard Friday. Maurice Brightthaupt depicted a chaotic situation at the home where Smith was staying in the Bahamas after the birth of her daughter and the death of her son, Daniel, from a drug overdose. Brightthaupt said he saw the defendant Howard Stern holding Smith's head and giving her pills when she was too weak to take them on her own.

Real healing begins only after drinking stops

Here are two questions I have wondered about off and on for a while:
1. Why are alcoholics, and for that matter recovered alcoholics, the most self-dramatizing people I know? I'm never surprised to find that a self-dramatizing person is an alcoholic. I mean people whose lives are "epic" -- no one has ever had as great a joy, as deep a disaster, as brilliant an idea, more eloquent (and usually broken) promises, that sort of thing. Or is it a chicken-and-egg sort of deal? Does problem drinking create that kind of personality, or is that sort of personality drawn to problem drinking?
2. A friend said to me, "I was really down last month, did x, y and z, and got over my depression. But then I figured, if it really were depression, then I couldn't have cured myself of it."

Can you cure yourself of depression?
-- H.R., New Mexico
While it's not true that all alcoholics are self-dramatizing, you might well be on to something when you wonder if self-dramatizing people are more vulnerable to compulsive/addictive behavior such as alcoholism.
Larger-than-life personalities often are larger than life precisely because they need to stimulate an artificial drama/enthusiasm around them so that they can dodge the deadness/emptiness within them. And it is the emptiness -- and companion depression -- that compulsives are trying to self-medicate.
You also are describing other common companions in the lives of most compulsives: some combination of narcissism, grandiosity and entitlement. "Ordinary" is just not enough for these types. And so they spin a dramatic narrative yarn. Their lives are epic, as you say.
Ah, life as hyperbole! And life as dichotomy! Every moment is narrated as "the best of times" or "the worst of times." Fame or infamy. Sainthood or sinner.
This is why, when treating alcoholics, the work is so much more than the mere cessation of drinking. It would be more accurate to say that the real work begins only and after the drinking stops.

H.R., you notice a self-dramatizing drive in alcoholics. For me, the opposite also is true. I recognize authentic recovery in compulsive personalities because I notice an essential humility. In recovery, people make peace and find peace in ordinary, neutral and average. Life can occasionally be epic, but human beings don't tend to be epic.
As I write, I'm smiling an embarrassed smile. While not an alcoholic, though they swing from the branches of my family tree, I certainly lived too much of my adult life with a need for the artificial stimulation of self-dramatizing. Alas, poor Yorick!
I knew I was growing up when a colleague said to me, "How are you today, Steven?" And I said, "About a B."
"What?" he said.
"I'd give the day a B," I said. Then I shrugged and added, "It's not a bad grade." And then I chuckled with the freedom and relief an ordinary man feels living an ordinary life on an ordinary day.
2. Episodes of mood disorder -- including depression -- strike most people at least once in their lifetime. Some people have chronic struggles with mood disorder. Still others appear to have been born with the bad luck of genetically crummy brain chemistry -- a brain that produces insufficient or the wrong combinations of serotonin, dopamine, etc.
Modern pharmaceuticals, especially in combination with talk therapy, often are very helpful for mood disorders. But, in the recent past, a new array of interventions have brightened the future for these patients.
Some depressed patients can and do "cure" -- or greatly mitigate -- their symptoms through art, meditation or other contemplative discipline, intentional breathing exercises, laughter/comedy or the machinations of better self-talk. One of the most promising disciplines to come along recently is Brain Training. There is now excellent reason to believe many patients can "teach" their brain to "fire" differently. Better. Especially as it regards the emotional centers of the brain.
Sometimes I tell myself I could put pharmaceutical companies out of business if only depressed patients would exercise and eat better. Spiking and collapsing blood sugar levels are typical of modern American diets. And moods track those spikes and those collapses hand in glove.

So, yes, many depressed patients can and do "cure" -- or greatly mitigate -- their symptoms with the help of pharmaceuticals or talk therapy or new, emerging interventions. But not all.
Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling Wellness Center in Las Vegas and the author of "Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing" (Stephens Press). His columns also appear on Sundays in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Contact him at skalas@reviewjournal.com.

Pharmaceutical Drugs and Teens

During his immersion in his new job, Gil Kerlikowske attended a focus group of 7-year-old girls and was mystified by their talk about "farm parties." Then he realized they meant "pharm parties" -- sampling pharmaceuticals from their parents' medicine cabinets. What he learned -- besides that young humans have less native sense than young dachshunds -- is that his job has wrinkles unanticipated when he became director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

People want a different conversation about drug policies. With his first report to the president early next year, he could increase the quotient of realism.
Law enforcement has a can-do culture, but it also instructs its practitioners about what cannot be done, at least by law enforcement alone. Kerlikowske, who was top cop in Buffalo and then Seattle, knows that officers sweeping drug users from cities' streets feel as though they are "regurgitating perps through the system."
He dryly notes that "not many people think the drug war is a success." Furthermore, the recession's toll on state budgets has concentrated minds on the costs of drug offense incarcerations -- costs that in some states are larger than expenditures on secondary education. Fortunately, the first drug courts were established two decades ago, and today there are 2,300 nationwide, pointing drug policies away from punishment and toward treatment.

Kerlikowske is familiar with Portugal's experience since 2001 with the decriminalization of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. Nature made Kerlikowske laconic and experience has made him prudent, so he steers clear of the "L" word, legalization, even regarding marijuana.
Asked whether he thinks that it is a "gateway" drug leading to worse substances, he answers obliquely: "You don't find many heroin users who didn't start with marijuana." And he warns that more intense cultivation of marijuana is yielding a product with notably high THC content -- the potent ingredient.
In 1998, the United Nations, with its penchant for empty grandstanding, committed its members to "eliminating or significantly reducing" opium, cocaine and marijuana production by 2008, en route to a "drug-free world." Nowadays the United Nations is pleased that the drug trade has "stabilized."
The Economist magazine says this means that more than 200 million people -- almost 5 percent of the world's adult population -- take illegal drugs, the same proportion as a decade ago. The annual U.S. bill for attempting to diminish the supply of drugs is $40 billion. Of the 1.5 million Americans arrested each year on drug offenses, half a million are incarcerated. "[T]ougher drug laws are the main reasons why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars," the Economist said in March.
"There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer." Do cultural differences explain this? Evidently not: "Even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates."

The good news is the progress America has made against tobacco, which is more addictive than most illegal drugs. And then there is alcohol.
In "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson," historian David S. Reynolds writes that in 1820, Americans spent on liquor a sum larger than the federal government's budget. By the mid-1820s, annual per capita consumption of absolute alcohol reached seven gallons, more than three times today's rate. "Most employers," Reynolds reports, "assumed that their workers needed strong drink for stimulation: a typical workday included two bells, one rung at 11 a.m. and the other at 4 p.m. that summoned employees for alcoholic drinks."
The elderly Walt Whitman said, "It is very hard for the present generation anyhow to understand the drunkenness of those years. . . . It is quite incommunicable." In 1842, a Springfield, Ill., teetotaler named Lincoln said that liquor was "like the Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay, if not the first, the fairest born in every family." Which helps explain why the nation sobered up (somewhat -- these things are relative). One reason crack cocaine use has declined is that a generation of inner-city young people saw what it did to their parents and older siblings.
Kerlikowske can hope that social learning, although slow and intermittent, is on his side. But perhaps he knows the axiom that experience is a great teacher but submits steep bills.

New Method To Create Meth

There is a new method that is being used more and more frequently, and is faster, cheaper, and much simpler to create a batch of Methamphetamine. A few years ago making Meth required elaborate labs, with containers filled with corrosive and pungent chemicals, open flames, flammable liquids, and hundreds of cough pills. The new method only requires a soda bottle, some noxious chemicals, and a handful of pills. Shaken together creates the worlds most addictive drug.
Due to the fewer number of pseudoephedrine pills needed to create a batch of Meth, it is easier to obtain pills even under the strictest anti-meth laws which only allow an individual to purchase roughly 300 pills a month.

Even though there are no open flames necessary to produce Meth in this new method, the process can be just as, if not more dangerous than in a lab. Pressures can build in the bottle when shaken, and if released too quickly, can erupt in a large and sometimes fatal fire ball-like explosion. Many of these “shake and bake” labs are done while in a car or public bathroom. Due to the on-the-go method, it is easy to be careless when mixing chemicals and shaking a batch, which has resulted in numerous flash fires.
The “Shake and Bake” method only produces a few hits, so more and more individuals are using this method instead of buying from a lab producer. Since it is so much easier to create Meth in this new form, there has been a spike in the declining Meth related arrests over the past year. In Mississippi there has been a rise of nearly 275 percent in Meth related accidents and arrests.