HomeMy WebLinkAbout2019/06/04 Public Comments - Lippitt THE DANGERS OF CBD Written Communicati '
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The Pied Pipers of pot are cynically and purposely exploiting the sick among us while leading others off the
cliff with enticements of good health and better profits.
The CBD industryis just the pot industry with a better PR campaign.
The link below will also take you to another'excellent article about the vaping crisis - one-more example of
what happens when evil people/corporations-are allowed to grow exponentiallyin wealth, power and influence
as governments sit idly by (and share drug proceeds disguised as tax revenue).
The risk of contaminants and false labeling in the exploding`CBD industry
WASHINGTON (ABC7/'WJLA) ' The cannabis derivative, CBD, is popping up everywhere — in-lip balm; body
cream and even as a shot in your morning espresso.
But not all CBD is created equal.
The ABC7 I-Team was given exclusive access to the largest set of test results-and analysis'on CBD products to
date. And those tests reveal not only potential dangers, but patently false claims plaguing the industry.
"Bad players are really messing the industry up for everyone, including good players," said Jason Cranford as
we walked through his 30,000 square foot indoor cannabis grow operation in the Colorado Rockies.
"If it's not USDA-Organic certified, and it's not full panel lab tested, you have no way of knowing what you're
getting," said Cranford, who's been producing CBD long before it was en vogue.
"We grow-the plants, we do the extractions and then we do the infusing and the bottling from seed to sell,"
said Cranford, whose farm is USDA regulated and certified organic.
He tests and tracks every°batch made and knows exactly what's in his products.
But most consumers, he says, don't know what's in theirs.
"Overseas they use hemp to do cover crops. They use it to purposely suck out the pesticides and
heavy metals on soil there so they can plant food crops next," Cranford said. "These crops are
being imported into the US and people are making CBD out of,it. The really scary part is when
you have these_ contaminants in your plant material, and you make this oil, you're concentrating
About 70 percent of US hemp is from China.
The cannabis derivative is believed to have medical benefits.At high doses; it's under clinical investigation to
control epilepsy and at low doses believed useful for a host-of issues including pain, inflammation and
insomnia.
And with the CBD frenzy just beginning, concerns are mounting over the lack of regulation in an industry
expected�to hit $22 billion,8 year by 2022. = _
"You have an industry that has a rampant quality control issue," Dr. Sean Callan said.
Callan leads the team at'Ellipse Analytics that tested top-selling CBD products for contaminants and truth in
labeling.
"Comparing thislo other.supplements that we've tested, we found really high levels of
pesticides,really high levels of heavy metals," Callan said.
The lab tested the top-selling 240 products for 300 contaminants and for truth in labeling: Was the amount of
CBD claimed actually in the product?
After thousands of tests, 70 percent of products were found "highly contaminated" with heavy
metals like lead-and arsenic, herbicides like glyphosate (the active ingredient in, RoundUp) and.a
host of other contaminants including pesticides, BPA and•toxic mold.
One product - by Ananda Hemp contained levels of lead so high, it exceeded by 100-times what the
EPA would consider actionable for drinking water.
And as it turns out, what was on the bottle was sometimes as troubling as what was in it,,
Because hemp-derived CBD is an unregulated industry, makers are not required to test for CBD content.
"They have to test for the THC content because there's a federal law," Callan said, "but there's no rule that
says you have to:actually test your CBD content."
More than half the products tested had labels that inaccurately reflected the concentration of
CBD in the product..
"There were several that claimed to have CBD on the label where we found no CBD whatsoever,"
Callan_said. "All the way up to, on the other end of the spectrum, there are products that have
five, six times as much CBD in them as they say they do." .
Creating a."buyer beware" marketplace that has national pro-cannabisorganizations also pro-regulation. .
"It's incredibly difficult for consumers to navigate these unregulated products," said Jenn Michelle Pedini,
who's the Virginia Executive Director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, or.-
NORML.
"Study after study is showing these products very rarely contain what would be a therapeutic
level of cannabidiol or.even the amount of CBD that's indicated on the label," Pedini said.
NOTE FROM ME: THIS STATEMENT COMES FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF NORML IN VIRGINIA!
Virginia Commonwealth University, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and other
medical journals have published studies that reflect similar outcomes to the hundreds of tests
done by Ellipse Analytics, citing contamination, false labeling and false.claims.
VCU even discovered;the compound.5F-ADB, known to be in street drugs like, K2 and Spice - making
purchases confusing and potentially dangerous for consumers..
And for producers like Cranford, putting the reputation of a young industry in peril.
https•//wjla com/features/7-on-your-side/the-risk-of-contaminants-and-false-labeling-in-the-exploding-cbd-
industry
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Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence --
January 2019 • Volume 48, Number 1 • Alex Berenson
Alex Berenson Author, Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence
Alex Berenson is a graduate of Yale University with degrees in history and economics. He began his
career in journalism in 1994 as a business reporter for the Denver Post,joined the financial news website TheStreet.com in
1996, and worked as an investigative reporter for The New York Timesfrom 1999 to 2010, during which time he also served
two stints as an Iraq War correspondent. In 2006 he published The Faithful Spy, which won the 2007 Edgar Award for best
first novel from the Mystery Writers of America. He has published ten additional novels and two nonfiction books, The
Number:How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate Americaand Tell Your Children: The
Truth About Maryuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.
The following is adapted from a speech delivered on January 15,2019,at Hillsdale College's Allan P.Kirby,Jr.
Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington,D.C.
Seventy miles northwest of New York City is a hospital that looks like a prison, its drab brick buildings wrapped in layers of
fencing and barbed wire. This grim facility is called the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Institute. It's one of three places
the state of New York sends the criminally mentally ill—defendants judged not guilty by reason of insanity.
Until recently, my wife Jackie—Dr. Jacqueline Berenson—was a senior psychiatrist there. Many of Mid-Hudson's 300
patients are killers and arsonists. At least one is a cannibal. Most have been diagnosed with psychotic disorders like
schizophrenia that provoked them to violence against family members or strangers.
A couple of years ago,Jackie was telling me about a patient. In passing,she said something like, Of course he'd been
smoking pot his whole life.
Of course?I said.
Yes, they all smoke.
So marijuana causes schizophrenia?
I was surprised,to say the least. I tended to be a libertarian on drugs.Years before,I'd covered the pharmaceutical
industry for The New York Times.I was aware of the claims about marijuana as medicine,and I'd watched the slow
spread of legalized cannabis without much interest.
Jackie would have been within her rights to say, I know what I'm talking about, unlike you. Instead she offered something
neutral like,I think that's what the big studies say. You should read them.
So I did. The big studies, the little ones, and all the rest. I read everything I could find. I talked to every psychiatrist and
brain scientist who would talk to me. And I soon realized that in all my years as a journalist I had never seen a story where
the gap between insider and outsider knowledge was so great,or the stakes so high.
I began to wonder why—with the stocks of cannabis companies soaring and politicians promoting legalization as a low-risk
way to raise tax revenue and reduce crime—I had never heard the truth about marijuana, mental illness, and violence.
Over the last 30 years, psychiatrists and epidemiologists have turned speculation about marijuana's dangers into science.
Yet over the same period, a shrewd and expensive lobbying campaign has pushed public attitudes about marijuana the other
way. And the effects are now becoming apparent.
Almost everything you think you know about the health effects of cannabis,almost everything advocates and the
media have told you for a generation, is wrong.
They've told you marijuana has many different medical uses. In reality marijuana and THC, its active ingredient, have been
shown to work only in a few narrow conditions. They are most commonly prescribed for pain relief. But they are rarely
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tested against other pain relief drugs like ibuprofen—and in July, a large four-year study of patients with chronic pain in
Australia showed cannabis use was associated with greater pain over time.
They've told.you.cannabisxaat'-stem opioid use—"Two new studies show how marijuana can help fight the opioid
epidemic,"according to Wonkblog, a Washington Post website, in April 2018—and that marijuana's effects as a painkiller
make it a potential substitute for opiates. In reality,like alcohol,marijuana is too weak as a painkiller to work for most
people who truly need opiates,such as terminal cancer patients. Even cannabis advocates, like Rob Kampia,the co-
founder of the Marijuana Policy Project, acknowledge that they have always viewed medical marijuana laws primarily as a
way to protect recreational users.
As for the marijuana-reduces-opiate-use theory, it is based largely on a single paper comparing overdose deaths by state
before 2010 to the spread of medical marijuana laws—and the paper's finding is probably a result of simple geographic
coincidence. The opiate epidemic began in Appalachia,while the first states to legalize medical marijuana were in the West.
Since 2010,as both the epidemic and medical marijuana laws have spread nationally,the finding has vanished. And the
United States, the Western country with the most cannabis use,also has by far the worst problem with opioids.
Research on individual users—a better way to trace cause and effect than looking at aggregate state-level data—consistently
shows that marijuana use leads to other drug use. For example, a January 2018 paper in the American Journal of
Psychiatry showed that people who used cannabis in 2001 were almost three times as likely to use opiates three years later,
even after adjusting for other potential risks.
Most of all,advocates have told you that marijuana is not just safe for people with psychiatric problems like
depression,but that it is a potential treatment for those patients. On its website,the cannabis delivery service Eaze
offers the"Best Marijuana Strains and Products for Treating Anxiety.""How Does Cannabis Help Depression?" is the topic
of an article on Leafly,the largest cannabis website.But a mountain of peer-reviewed research in top medical journals
shows that marijuana can cause or worsen severe mental illness,especially psychosis,the medical term for a break
from reality. Teenagers who smoke marijuana regularly are about three times as likely to develop schizophrenia,the most
devastating psychotic disorder.
After an exhaustive review,the National Academy of Medicine found in 2017 that"cannabis use is likely to increase the
risk of developing schizophrenia and other psychoses;the higher the use,the greater the risk."Also that"regular cannabis
use is likely to increase the risk for developing social anxiety disorder."
Over the past decade,as legalization has spread, patterns of marijuana use and the drug itself—have changed in
dangerous ways.
Legalization has not led to a huge increase in people using the drug casually. About 15 percent of Americans used cannabis
at least once in 2017, up from ten percent in 2006, according to a large federal study called the National Survey on Drug
Use and Health. (By contrast, about 65 percent of Americans had a drink in the last year.)But the number of Americans
who use cannabis heavily is soaring. In 2006, about three million Americans reported using cannabis at least 300 times a
year, the standard for daily use. By 2017, that number had nearly tripled, to eight million,approaching the twelve million
Americans who drank alcohol every day. Put another way, one in 15 drinkers consumed alcohol daily; about one in five
marijuana users used cannabis that often.
Cannabis users today are also consuming a drug that is far more potent than ever before, as measured by the amount of
THC—delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol,the chemical in cannabis responsible for its psychoactive effects—it contains. In the
1970s,the last time this many Americans used cannabis, most marijuana contained less than two percent THC. Today,
marijuana routinely contains 20 to 25 percent THC,thanks to sophisticated farming and cloning techniques—as well as to a
demand by users for cannabis that produces a stronger high more quickly. In states where cannabis is legal, many users
prefer extracts that are nearly pure THC. Think of the difference between near-beer and a martini, or even grain alcohol,to
understand the difference.
These new patterns of use have caused problems with the drug to soar. In 2014, people who had diagnosable cannabis use
disorder,the medical term for marijuana abuse or addiction, made up about 1.5 percent of Americans. But they accounted
for eleven percent of all the psychosis cases in emergency rooms-90,000 cases,250 a day,triple the number in 2006. In
states like Colorado, emergency room physicians have become experts on dealing with cannabis-induced psychosis.
Cannabis advocates often argue that the drug can't be as neurotoxic as studies suggest, because otherwise Western countries
would have seen population-wide increases in psychosis alongside rising use. In reality, accurately tracking psychosis cases
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i� impossible in the United States. The government carefully tracks diseases like cancer with central registries, but no such
registry exists for schizophrenia or other severe mental illnesses.
On the other hand, research from Finland and Denmark,two countries that track mental illness more
comprehensively,shows a significant increase in psychosis since 2000, following an increase in cannabis use. And in
September of last year, a large federal survey found a rise in serious mental illness in the United States as well, especially
among young adults, the heaviest users of cannabis.
According to this latter study, 7.5 percent of adults age 18-25 met the criteria for serious mental illness in 2017, double the
rate in 2008. What's especially striking is that adolescents age 12-17 don't show these increases in cannabis use and severe
mental illness.
A caveat: this federal survey doesn't count individual cases,and it lumps psychosis with other severe mental illness. So it
isn't as accurate as the Finnish or Danish studies.Nor do any of these studies prove that rising cannabis use has caused
population-wide increases in psychosis or other mental illness. The most that can be said is that they offer intriguing
evidence of a link.
Advocates for people with mental illness do not like discussing the link between schizophrenia and crime. They fear
it will stigmatize people with the disease. "Most people with mental illness are not violent,"the National Alliance on
Mental Illness (NAAM explains on its website.But wishing away the link can't make it disappear.In truth, psychosis
is a shockingly high risk factor for violence. The best analysis came in a 2009 paper in PLOS Medicine by Dr. Seena
Fazel, an Oxford University psychiatrist and epidemiologist. Drawing on earlier studies,the paper found that people with
schizophrenia are five times as likely to commit violent crimes as healthy people, and almost 20 times as likely to commit
homicide.
NAMI's statement that most people with mental illness are not violent is of course accurate, given that"most" simply
means "more than half'; but it is deeply misleading. Schizophrenia is rare. But people with the disorder commit an
appreciable fraction of all murders, in the range of six to nine percent.
"The best way to deal with the stigma is to reduce the violence," says Dr. Sheilagh Hodgins, a professor at the University of
Montreal who has studied mental illness and violence for more than 30 years.
The marijuana-psychosis-violence connection is even stronger than those figures suggest.People with schizophrenia
are only moderately more likely to become violent than healthy people when they are taking antipsychotic medicine
and avoiding recreational drugs.But when they use drugs,their risk of violence skyrockets. "You don't just have an
increased risk of one thing—these things occur in clusters," Dr. Fazel told me.
Along with alcohol,the drug that psychotic patients use more than any other is cannabis: a 2010 review of earlier studies
in Schizophrenia Bulletin found that 27 percent of people with schizophrenia had been diagnosed with cannabis use disorder
in their lives. And unfortunately—despite its reputation for making users relaxed and calm—cannabis appears to provoke
many of them to violence.
A Swiss study of 265 psychotic patients published in Frontiers of Forensic Psychiatry last June found that over a three-year
period,young men with psychosis who used cannabis had a 50 percent chance of becoming violent. That risk was four times
higher than for those with psychosis who didn't use, even after adjusting for factors such as alcohol use. Other researchers
have produced similar findings. A 2013 paper in an Italian psychiatric journal examined almost 1,600 psychiatric patients in
southern Italy and found that cannabis use was associated with a ten-fold increase in violence.
The most obvious way that cannabis fuels violence in psychotic people is through its tendency to cause paranoia—
something even cannabis advocates acknowledge the drug can cause. The risk is so obvious that users joke about it and
dispensaries advertise certain strains as less likely to induce paranoia. And for people with psychotic disorders, paranoia can
fuel extreme violence. A 2007 paper in the Medical Journal of Australia on 88 defendants who had committed homicide
during psychotic episodes found that most believed they were in danger from the victim, and almost two-thirds reported
misusing cannabis—more than alcohol and amphetamines combined.
Yet the link between marijuana and violence doesn't appear limited to people with preexisting psychosis.
Researchers have studied alcohol and violence for generations, proving that alcohol is a risk factor for domestic
abuse,assault,and even murder.Far less work has been done on marijuana, in part because advocates have
stigmatized anyone who raises the issue. But studies showing that marijuana use is a significant risk factor for
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violence have quietly piled up. Many of them weren't even designed to catch the link, but they did. Dozens of such studies
exist, covering everything from bullying by high school students to fighting among vacationers in Spain.
In most cases, studies find that the risk is at least as significant as with alcohol. A 2012 paper in the Journal of Interpersonal
Violence examined a federal survey of more than 9,000 adolescents and found that marijuana use was associated with a
doubling of domestic violence; a 2017 paper in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology examined drivers of
violence among 6,000 British and Chinese men and found that drug use—the drug nearly always being cannabis—translated
into a five-fold increase in violence.
Today that risk is translating into real-world impacts. Before states legalized recreational cannabis,advocates said that
legalization would let police focus on hardened criminals rather than marijuana smokers and thus reduce violent crime.
Some advocates go so far as to claim that legalization has reduced violent crime. In a 2017 speech calling for federal
legalization, U.S. Senator Cory Booker said that"states.[that have legalized marijuana] are seeing decreases in violent
crime." He was wrong.
The first four states to legalize marijuana for recreational use were Colorado and Washington in 2014 and Alaska
and Oregon in 2015. Combined,those four states had about 450 murders and 30,300 aggravated assaults in 2013.
Last year,they had almost 620 murders and 38,000 aggravated assaults—an increase of 37 percent for murders and
25 percent for aggravated assaults,far greater than the national increase,even after accounting for differences in
population growth.
Knowing exactly how much of the increase is related to cannabis is impossible without researching every crime. But police
reports, news stories, and arrest warrants suggest a close link in many cases. For example, last September, police in
Longmont, Colorado, arrested Daniel Lopez for stabbing his brother Thomas to death as a neighbor watched. Daniel Lopez
had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was"self-medicating" with marijuana, according to an arrest affidavit.
In every state,not just those where marijuana is legal,cases like Lopez's are far more common than either cannabis or
mental illness advocates acknowledge. Cannabis is also associated with a disturbing number of child deaths from abuse and
neglect—many more than alcohol, and more than cocaine, methamphetamines, and opioids combined—according to reports
from Texas, one of the few states to provide detailed information on drug use by perpetrators.
These crimes rarely receive more than local attention. Psychosis-induced violence takes particularly ugly forms and is
frequently directed at helpless family members. The elite national media prefers to ignore the crimes as tabloid fodder. Even
have been slow to recognize the trend in art because the epidemic of
police departments, which see this violence up close, gn p p
opioid overdose deaths has overwhelmed them. So the black tide of psychosis and the red tide of violence are rising
steadily, almost unnoticed, on a slow green wave.
For centuries,people worldwide have understood that cannabis causes mental illness and violence—just as they've
known that opiates cause addiction and overdose. Hard data on the relationship between marijuana and madness dates
back 150 years,to British asylum registers in India. Yet 20 years ago, the United States moved to encourage wider use of
cannabis and opiates. In both cases, we decided we could outsmart these drugs—that we could have their benefits without
their costs. And in both cases we were wrong. Opiates are riskier, and the overdose deaths they cause a more imminent
crisis, so we have focused on those. But soon enough the mental illness and violence that follow cannabis use will also be
too widespread to ignore.
Whether to use cannabis, or any drug, is a personal decision. Whether cannabis should be legal is a political issue. But its
precise legal status is far less important than making sure that anyone who uses it is aware of its risks. Most cigarette
smokers don't die of lung cancer. But we have made it widely known that cigarettes cause cancer,full stop.Most
people who drink and drive don't have fatal accidents.But we have highlighted the cases of those who do.
We need equally unambiguous and well-funded advertising campaigns on the risks of cannabis. Instead,we are now in the
worst of all worlds. Marijuana is legal in some states, illegal in others, dangerously potent, and sold without warnings
everywhere.
But before we can do anything, we—especially cannabis advocates and those in the elite media who have for too long
credulously accepted their claims—need to come to terms with the truth about the science on marijuana.That adjustment
may be painful. But the alternative is far worse, as the patients at Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Institute—and their
victims—know.
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Health Day 4.22.19 EJMundell
Many Teens Don't Know They Are Vaping Nicotine
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MONDAY,April 22, 2019(HealthDay News) --As e-cigarette use soars in high schools across America, new research
shows many people don't understand the amount of addictive nicotine they're inhaling with every puff.
In a new survey, many teens said they regularly used e-cigarettes, but swore they only vaped nicotine-free products.
However, urine tests for a "marker" of nicotine use came up positive 40% of the time in this same group of vapers,
the researchers reported.
"Many of our participants were unaware of the nicotine content of the e-cigarette products they were using,"concluded a
team led by Dr. Rachel Boykan, a pediatrics researcher at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook,N.Y. That could mean
even more lifelong nicotine addictions arising in the young, including many who already believe vaping to be "harmless"
compared to traditional smoking, experts said.
Patricia Folan directs the Center for Tobacco Control at Northwell Health in Great Neck,N.Y. She said, "Other studies
have revealed that one of the main reasons adolescents use e-cigarettes is that they perceive them to be less harmful than
combustible cigarettes --without full knowledge of their actual contents."
But the new study "shows that many of the participating youth were unaware of the nicotine content in their vaping
devices," Folan said. The study findings were published online April 22 in the journal Pediatrics.As Boykan's group
noted,about one in five high school students now say they've used an e-cigarette at least once over the past month,
and in just the 12 months between 2017 and 2018,teen vaping rates soared 78%.
But do young people even understand the addictive dangers of nicotine-laden vaping products such as Juul vape "pods"?
To find out,the Stony Brook team first had 517 people,aged 12 to 21, complete questionnaires about their use of e-
cigarettes, traditional cigarettes and marijuana. The investigators then compared those survey results against the
results of urine tests that looked for a chemical called cotinine. Cotinine is a well-known "marker" for the presence
of nicotine in a person's body.
Overall,the survey participants were largely honest about their use of tobacco, e-cigarettes and marijuana: Only about 2%
who said they didn't use those substances later were found to have evidence of tobacco, nicotine or pot in their urine
samples. The big discrepancy came among young vapers,Boykan's team found.
In this subgroup,about four of every 10 people who said they vaped non-nicotine products only were found to have
markers for nicotine in their urine.In many cases,this lack of awareness occurred with use of Juul vaping pods,
which actually "have the highest nicotine concentrations to date," the researchers reported.
These products have also "become the most widely used [vaping] products among adolescents,"the study authors added.
"The risk for addiction is clear," said Dr. Len Horovitz, a lung health specialist who wasn't involved in the new study. The
fact that many young vapers may not even realize that they are ingesting nicotine is "disturbing," he said.
"It's well known that e-cigarettes end up delivering more nicotine because every 'draw' yields nicotine,whereas
traditional cigarettes burn down between puffs and therefore deliver less nicotine," Horovitz said.He works in
pulmonary care at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.For her part,Folan believes more must be done to alert
kids to the danger. "This study demonstrates the need for more regulation regarding e-cigarettes,including
labeling of ingredients and health warnings," she said.Better education about what's in a vaping product "may
help teens make more educated decisions," Folan added.
More information, visit the American Lung Association.
SOURCES: Patricia Folan,DNP,director, Center for Tobacco Control,Northwell Health, Great Neck,N.Y.; Len
Horovitz, M.D., pulmonary specialist, Lenox Hill Hospital,New York City; April 22, 2019,Pediatrics, online