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Vancouver mayor Sam Sullivan has introduced a pilot program to determine whether prescribing oral stimulants can help people struggling with addiction to cocaine, methamphetamine and other illicit stimulants.

The program, the Chronic Addiction Substitution Treatment program (CAST), will administer oral doses of stimulant drugs through local pharmacies. CAST will target people who volunteer for treatment, giving priority to sex workers and those who are frequently arrested. The project also will include counseling and homelessness services. 

A similar trial focusing on heroin rather than stimulants is already underway in Vancouver and Montreal. This new initiative addresses the fact that addiction to cocaine, methamphetamine and other stimulant drugs is more widespread in Vancouver than heroin addiction. Sullivan said he chose to initiate this program to reach as large a number of chronic addicts as possible.

"The mayor’s bold initiative is precisely the sort of thing we should be trying in the United States," said DPA executive director Ethan Nadelmann. "The principal obstacle to making drug treatment more effective here in the United States is the unwillingness to experiment and innovate, mostly because of ignorance and ideological resistance. Canada offers lesson we ignore at our own peril."

Similar trials have been done, with successful results, in the United Kingdom and Australia, said Dr. David Marsh, an addiction medicine expert with the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.  In the United States, the principal research on prescribing oral stimulants to treat addiction is taking place in Houston.

"Addiction is a complex problem which requires a continuum of responses. Examining the effectiveness of prescribing oral stimulants or alternative opioid agonists as maintenance treatment would be an important addition to the range of treatment options," said Marsh. "Just like any other new use of a medication, this will be subjected to the framework of a scientifically rigorous, ethically sound clinical trial designed to show benefits for the drug user and society."

Vancouver has a history of being on the cutting edge of innovative strategies to combat drug misuse. The city started the first syringe exchange program in Canada and the country’s first supervised safe injection site. Vancouver also is home to a clinical heroin maintenance program as well as a methadone maintenance program.

Seriously ill people in New Mexico urgently need your help. The Drug Policy Alliance Network bill to make marijuana legal for medical use is getting close to passage and the governor has already promised to sign, but the legislation faces a final, major hurdle: a vote by the full House.

Although the legislature has considered the bill twice before, it has never been put to an up-or-down vote in the House. Finally, that could happen--as early as this week.

This is where you come in. We need to raise $3,000 in the next 24 hours to bring patient advocates and their families from all over the state to the capitol so they can talk to their representatives face-to-face. These legislators need to understand how important this bill is before they vote, and your gift of $25, $50, $100 or even $500 will help make that happen.

Please donate now. With your support, we can clear this final hurdle and bring compassion to New Mexico. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Reena Szczepanski
Director, Drug Policy Alliance Network

Drug Czar John Walters is a pervert. There I said it. Deal with it. Who else but a pervert would be so obsessed with the urine of teenagers? Seriously. I'm usually a very straight-laced guy who would rather cite scientific reports in support of drug policy reform then call drug war extremists names. But the fact that so many teachers, bureaucrats, and politicians don't think there is something creepy about making 14-year-olds pee in front of adults shows how coarse our culture has become. This "ick" factor is something rarely put forward in debates over student drug testing. Opponents generally talk about how student drug testing has proven to be ineffective at deterring drug use, how it breaks down trust between teens and adults, and how it is creating a generation of Americans with no concept of privacy and civil liberties (if teens are taught to accept urine tests and warrantless searches at an early age, then they're going to be more likely to accept restrictions on freedom as adults). For me, an excerpt from the transcript of a recent Lou Dobbs show says it all:

ROMANS: At Hunterdon Central High School in New Jersey, it's a trip to the nurse's office if your name comes up randomly.

SUZANNE COOLEY, VICE PRINCIPAL, HUNTERDON CENTRAL HS:
Once they get to the health office, they get -- they pick a little ball out of the box. One says urine. One says oral. And whatever one is picked is the test that we administer for them.

Gross.

At least DPA's Jenny Kern got a few facts in:

JENNIFER KERN, DRUG POLICY ALLIANCE: You're pushing teens way from the very things that have been proven most effective. To keep them engaged in those after-school hours while their parents aren't home, during the peak drug use hours.

My colleague Jasmine likes to refer to ONDCP as ONDCPee. Because that's what they're obsessed with. Someone should do a background check on our drug czar. I think he has a pee fetish. Which is fine if he was limiting it to his own home. But using his public office and taxpayer dollars to get off on making teenagers pee in a cup is just plain sick. And I'm not afraid to call the perv on it.

Posted by Bill Piper

This article discusses several points of comparison between hemp and marijuana.

Surely no member of the vegetable kingdom has ever been more misunderstood than hemp. For too many years, emotion-not reason-has guided our policy toward this crop. And nowhere have emotions run hotter than in the debate over the distinction between industrial hemp and marijuana. This paper is intended to inform that debate by offering scientific evidence, so that farmers, policymakers, manufacturers, and the general public can distinguish between myth and reality.