Posts Tagged ‘cocaine’

Time for Change

In 1998 the UN declared: “a drug-free world, we can do it!” In reality, we cannot. The War on Drugs has failed. According to all available indices, it is no longer defendable. Vast expenditure on drug law enforcement has resulted in increasing levels of overall drug-use and lowered drug prices....

April 11th, 2011 | Drug Policy | Read More

Drugs: the highs and lows

Natural or synthetic, legal or illegal, people have been taking drugs for thousands of years. High Society, a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, explores the culture of getting out of it By the end of planning her new exhibition, Caroline Fisher had come to an interesting conclusion. “It’s...

December 14th, 2010 | Arts | Read More

“WATSON: THE NEEDLE!”

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND COCAINE By Mike Jay – http://mikejay.net/ Cocaine was the great pharmaceutical success story of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In a few short years, it went from a minor item in specialist catalogues to a major seller in a huge range of preparations in high-street...

July 1st, 2010 | Arts | Read More

The New Cocaine Mafia

Vanguard correspondent Christof Putzel travels to southern Italy to investigate how Europe’s growing appetite for cocaine is funding the growth of West African crime syndicates and fueling a turf war with Italy’s largest mafia organization, the Camorra.

March 8th, 2010 | Drug Policy | Read More

Let’s All Move To Portugal

Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It’s not the Netherlands.) Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled “coffee shops,” Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don’t...

January 20th, 2010 | Drug Policy | Read More

Does Cocaine make you Smarter?

Hey. Did any of you read this paper on the role of G9a in cocaine-induced dendritic spine plasticity? No? OK, well did you at least read this summary of the findings in Time? Still no? Fine. The gist is that repeated coke use suppresses a protein called G9a, which slows the growth of dendritic spines...

January 15th, 2010 | Science of the Mind | Read More

Legalisation: The First Hundred Years

What happened when drugs were legal and why they were prohibited Mike Jay Today, as the notion of legalising drugs is making its way into the mainstream political agenda for the first time in living memory, one of the most common objections to it is that it represents...

January 3rd, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More

A Village that Cocaine Built

The village of La Reforma in eastern Guatemala doesn’t seem like the kind of place that would have a first-rate hospital and a handful of mansions. There’s no bank, no grocery store and more than 70% of the inhabitants of the municipality that includes La Reforma, called Huite, are poor....

November 20th, 2009 | Drug Policy | Read More

And The Beat Goes On

“A Big Arrest Could Revive the Medellin Drug War” - Time Magazine reports on a typical example of how removing one Latin-American drug-lord, only results in an increase in violence as others fight to fill his place, without having any impact on the prevalence of drugs in either producer...

November 9th, 2009 | Drug Policy | Read More

The White Stuff

Celebrated documentary-maker Angus Macqueen spent 18 months on the cocaine trail across Latin America from the dirt-poor valleys of Peru to the shanty towns of Rio. Here he recalls the journey that revolutionised his views and explains why he believes ‘the dandruff of the Andes’ should be...

October 21st, 2009 | Drug Policy | Read More