Drug News

College prevention programs used to dealing with alcohol and illicit drugs are devoting more attention to drugs like Ritalin and Adderral, but with limited success. Richard Clark, director of medical toxicology at the University of California at San Diego, said that the drugs are being used as mood-lifters and appetite suppressants as well as to improve concentration.

This school doesn't have a problem with students not paying attention. "They're paying us to come, and our classes are full," says Jeff Jones, chancellor of the Los Angeles branch of Oaksterdam University, where students learn the business of marijuana from seed to ash. Attitudes are changing as 14 states now have laws allowing some form of legal marijuana use with a doctor's recommendation. And with legalization comes a growing cannabis industry.

Fetal growth and development may be impaired when pregnant women smoke marijuana, according to new research from the Netherlands. Reuters reported Jan. 22 that researchers studied 7,000 pregnant women, including some who acknowledged smoking marijuana during pregnancy, and found that babies delivered by marijuana users weighed less at birth and had smaller heads.

On Wednesday, dozens of former addicts made the tough decision to share their stories publicly, doing so before news cameras and a standing-room only crowd. The admissions were not without irony. It was, after all, a federally prohibited drug, according to the patients who spoke, that freed them from their addictions to far more lethal -- though legal -- prescription narcotics.

Twelfth graders’ perceived risk of harm from regular marijuana use has declined in recent years, according to data from the national Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey.

Most Americans are paying too much for marijuana. I'm not referring to people who smoke it—using the drug generally costs about as much as using alcohol. Marijuana is unaffordable for the rest of America because billions are wasted on misdirected drug education and distracted law enforcement, and we also fail to tax the large underground economy that supplies cannabis.

An assistant football coach at the University of Southern California has provided legal statements saying he received painkillers from team doctors to feed his addictions. Dave Watson says he was up-front with head coach Pete Carroll, now heading back to the NFL, about his addiction. He says he was allowed to keep his job and even use a vehicle provided by the school. This admission came in February of 2008, before Watson was involved in an at-fault accident just a few months later.

A proposal to legalize and tax marijuana in California was approved by a key committee of the Assembly on Tuesday, but it is not expected to get further consideration by the Legislature until next year. Despite a procedural glitch, backers hailed the committee's action as historic because it represented the first legislative approval of the proposal.

Some "soccer moms" in California say that they would support marijuana legalization so that their adult children don't have to run the risk of buying drugs on the street, according to recent polls. Backers of the initiative have collected more than enough signatures to get the measure on the ballot.

With the proliferation of Internet pharmacies that dispense drugs without a prescription; doctor shopping, where patients go to multiple doctors to get the same medication; and prescription fraud, where blank prescriptions are stolen and filled out by addicts who try to pass them at pharmacies, the face of the drug addict increasingly is one that people might find in their bathroom mirror.