Too lifted to read the news about the drugs you love and loathe? Every week, we recap the most interesting news in the world of drugs. To inform, to liberate.
1. San Francisco potheads rejoice as city plans to wipe clean the criminal records of thousands of folks arrested for cannabis, a drug now legal in California.
2. After a lull, the Philippines' deadly drug war has restarted. The police have killed nearly 50 people in the last two months. In the year and a half since new president Rodrigo Duterte took office, his forces have killed between 4,000 and 12,000 people it says were drug users, sellers or sympathizers.
3. This shroom kills fascists — researchers found that two doses of psilocybin reduce feelings of sympathy toward authoritarianism and increase feelings of nature relatedness. Do mushrooms, love trees, hate Stalin.
4. Fentanyl keeps showing up in cocaine, confusingly. Cocaine is an upper; so why are people mixing downer drugs like fentanyl in with cocaine, as keeps happening? A mix of cocaine and fentanyl killed a Northern Virginia man and fent is showing up in cocaine in the black communities of Cleveland. It's a mystery.
5. Pot keeps us safe: marijuana legalization is causing decreases in crime, one study found.
6. Pot is benign: Americans believe that weed is less harmful than tobacco, sugar or alcohol. (Some studies back this up.)
7. Can dying people try some drugs not approved by the FDA? President Trump urged congress to give people the "right to try" as it's called. But a letter signed by over 300 health care professionals says the move could be a dangerous loss of FDA oversight, and some say it gives false hope to dying folks.
8. The rich get richer, and higher: 90 percent of the world's opioid pain medications are consumed by the world's richest 10 percent of people. Meanwhile, poor countries barely have enough to do surgeries and manage real pain.
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