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‘Street Drugs – The New Addiction Industry’ is a long awaited and vital resource for those who cannot see through the thinly veiled ‘War FOR Drugs’ hiding in plain sight. Elaine Walters OAM is a veteran in the arena of drug education and a relentless advocate for best practice Demand Reduction and drug use exiting recovery. The truths reasserted in this work are an imperative for those who care about the well-being, safety, dignity and potential of our communities and their emerging families. And to remember the words of Aldous Huxley quoted in the book… “Facts do no cease to exist because they are ignored or eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood.”
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Cannabis & Motivation or Not or….
Testing the Amotivational Syndrome: Marijuana Use Longitudinally Predicts Lower Self-Efficacy Even After Controlling for Demographics, Personality, and Alcohol and Cigarette Use
- Take away: The research team found that only marijuana (but not alcohol or tobacco) intake significantly and longitudinally prompted lower initiative and persistence and provides partial support for the marijuana amotivational syndrome.
Abstract:The marijuana amotivational syndrome posits that cannabis use fosters apathy through the depletion of motivation-based constructs such as self-efficacy. The current study pursued a two-round design to rule out concomitant risk factors responsible for the connection from marijuana intake to lower general self-efficacy. College students (N = 505) completed measures of marijuana use, demographics (age, gender, and race), personality (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism), other substance use (alcohol and tobacco), and general self-efficacy (initiative, effort, and persistence) in two assessments separated by a month. Hierarchical regression models found that marijuana use forecasted lower initiative and persistence, even after statistically ruling out 13 pertinent baseline covariates including demographics, personality traits, alcohol use, tobacco use, and self-efficacy subscales. A cross-lagged panel model involving initiative, effort, persistence, alcohol use, cigarette use, and marijuana use sought to unravel the temporal precedence of processes. Results showed that only marijuana (but not alcohol or tobacco) intake significantly and longitudinally prompted lower initiative and persistence. Furthermore, in the same model, the opposite temporal direction of events from lower general self-efficacy subscales to marijuana use was untenable. Findings provide partial support for the marijuana amotivational syndrome, underscore marijuana as a risk factor for decreased general self-efficacy, and offer implications and insights for marijuana prevention and future research.
(Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28620722/
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“Decriminalization of drugs is the worst thing we could have ever done…We’ve given people who lack critical thinking, rational thought, the ability to use now as much as they want and what it’s doing is it’s killing them,”
Kevin Dahlgren (25 year veteran drug counselor and homeless advocate https://www.koin.com/video/we-enable-portland-drug-counselor-calls-for-new-approach-to-homelessness/8562716/ )
Also see
- Decriminalization Of Hard Drugs Destroyed The City
- ‘Loving People to Death’ Facebook Seattle
Is Australia following suit? Who is driving this chaotic, careless and community unravelling agenda? Will our children be better or worse off on drugs or with easier access to drugs?
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Study: No More Than 6 Teaspoons of Added Sugar per Day
JAMA. Published online April 19, 2023. doi:10.1001/jama.2023.6285
Moderate-quality evidence has tied high intake of sugars, particularly those containing fructose, with a range of poor outcomes, such as obesity in children, coronary heart disease, and depression, according to an umbrella review of 73 meta-analyses that included 8601 studies, a majority of which were observational.
Low-quality evidence linked each additional serving of a sugar-sweetened beverage per week with a 4% higher risk of gout. Each extra cup per day of a sugar-sweetened drink was associated with a 17% and a 4% higher risk of coronary heart disease and all-cause mortality, respectively.
“[W]e recommend reducing the consumption of free sugars or added sugars to below 25 g/day,” the researchers wrote in The BMJ. That translates to about 6 teaspoons daily. The authors also advised limiting sugar-sweetened beverages to less than 1 a week.
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Substance engagement – drug use – is always, and we do mean always, the first step to addiction.
It all too often starts innocuously enough, a taste, a try, an experiment. However just below the surface of that seemingly libertarian, care-less and ‘free spirited’ façade, there is almost always an attempt to meet or alleviate a perceived need, deficit or dis-ease. We may not be able to ‘name’ it, but we sense it, and that nagging discomfort or discontent that must be addressed legitimately is ever primed for a short-cut for relief. And the seductively clad, but tyrannical mistress of substance use, stands by with its counterfeit solution to ‘whatever ails you!’
At its core, this solution, this invitation, this temptation to use is a lie disguised as a promise of fulfilment.
Outcome?
At best it becomes a perpetual allurement that never quite delivers, but seductive enough that it keeps you in that humanity diminishing regimen of toxin consumption with all its attending short and long-term harms.
At worst, it leads you ever whirling in a dance of inevitable death of both body and soul.
The Dalgarno Institute
