Come take my hand, let me lead you to hell. – DRUGS

I saw this on Facebook and really felt the need to share. It gave me the shivers just reading it, and as to how accurate it is.
I have never seen a more perfect poem, written in the saddest way.

“I destroy homes, tear families apart – take your children, and that’s just the start.
I’m more costly than diamonds, more costly than gold – the sorrow I bring is a sight to behold.
And if you need me, remember I’m easily found.

I live all around you, in schools and in town.
I live with the rich, I live with the poor, I live down the street, and maybe next door.
My power is awesome – try me you’ll see.
But if you do, you may never break free.
Just try me once and I might let you go, but try me twice, and I’ll own your soul.
When I possess you, you’ll steal and you’ll lie.
You’ll do what you have to just to get high.
The crimes you’ll commit, for my narcotic charms, will be worth the pleasure you’ll feel in your arms.

You’ll lie to your mother; you’ll steal from your dad.
When you see their tears, you should feel sad.
But you’ll forget your morals and how you were raised.
I’ll be your conscience, I’ll teach you my ways.
I take kids from parents, and parents from kids, I turn people from God, and separate from friends.
I’ll take everything from you, your looks and your pride, I’ll be with you always, right by your side.

You’ll give up everything – your family, your home, your friends, your money, then you’ll be alone.
I’ll take and I’ll take, till you have nothing more to give.
When I’m finished with you you’ll be lucky to live.
If you try me be warned this is no game.
If given the chance, I’ll drive you insane.
I’ll ravish your body, I’ll control your mind.
I’ll own you completely; your soul will be mine.

The nightmares I’ll give you while lying in bed.
The voices you’ll hear from inside your head.
The sweats, the shakes, the visions you’ll see.
I want you to know, these are all gifts from me.
But then it’s too late, and you’ll know in your heart, that you are mine, and we shall not part.

You’ll regret that you tried me, they always do.
But you came to me, not I to you.
You knew this would happen.
Many times you were told, but you challenged my power, and chose to be bold.
You could have said no, and just walked away.

If you could live that day over, now what would you say?
I’ll be your master; you will be my slave.
I’ll even go with you, when you go to your grave.
Now that you have met me, what will you do?
Will you try me or not?
Its all up to you.
I can bring you more misery than words can tell.

Come take my hand, let me lead you to hell.”

Signed
DRUGS

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It’s So Cold, that a Rare Phenomenon “Ghost Apples” Have Started To Grow On Trees

It’s So Cold, that a Rare Phenomenon “Ghost Apples” Have Started To Grow On Trees

The Great Cold Snap of 2019 has given us a ton of terms we didn’t know we needed: Frost quakes. Snow squalls. Steam fog.

Now we can add another one to the list: ghost apples.

Andrew Sietsema was pruning apple trees in an icy orchard in western Michigan when he came across some.

Freezing rain this week caused an icy spectacle to form at an orchid near Sparta, Michigan: so-called “ghost apples.”

Local resident Andrew Sietsema first spotted the odd phenomenon while pruning apple trees in the Fruit Ridge area of Kent County.

Helater took to Facebook with photos of the glass-looking orbs, dubbing the icy creation “Ghost Apples.”

Freezing rain coated the rotting apples, which were a variety known as Jonagold.

Later, when Sietsema began to prune the trees, “mush” fell out the bottom of the icy shells, leaving only the encasements behind.

“I guess it was just cold enough that the ice covering the apple hadn’t melted yet, but it was warm enough that the apple inside turned to complete mush (apples have a lower freezing point than water),” he said.

“And when I pruned a tree it would be shaken in the process, and the mush would slip out of the bottom of the ‘ghost apple.’”

Also Read: Unprecedented Polar Vortex Turns Deadly as Arctic Cold Blasts Majority of Americans

While most of the apples fell off of the trees — ice and all — “quite a few would leave a cool ‘ghost apple’ behind,” he continued, joking the creations could also be called “Jona-ghosts.”

As of Friday afternoon, Sietsema’s photos of the ghost apples had been shared roughly 10,000 times.

“From the icy grip of the Arctic outbreak, to above average temperatures this week, which then lead to a day of freezing rain instead of the snow western Michigan is accustomed to.” said CNN meteorologist Judson Jones.

“Freezing rain will turn anything it touches into a glaze of pure ice. In this case, unpicked old apples.”

You could probably find a lot of ghost apples right now in any orchard in what’s known as the Ridge, a region near Sparta, Michigan, known for apple production.

“Most apples just fell off, ice and all. But quite a few would leave a cool “ghost apple” behind,” Sietsema said.

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Related Read : This Church Allows Homeless People To Sleep Overnight, Gives Them Blankets

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Acreage Cannabis Ad Rejected For Super Bowl By CBS

According to sports fans, this past Sunday’s Super Bowl was one of the most uneventful championship games in recent memory.

The halftime show or the advertisements didn’t even create much excitement this year, leaving many fans disappointed.

Leading up to the event, it was also revealed that CBS, the channel broadcasting the game, rejected an advertisement that was essentially a public service announcement for cannabis legalization.

Cannabis is legal for both medical and recreational purposes in Boston and Los Angeles, the hometowns of both teams participating in the game.

However, CBS rejected the ad, and turned down a potential $5 million in advertising revenue.
Below is the rejected ad:

A cannabis investment firm called Acreage, was behind the ad, but Acreage president George Allen says that this was intended as a public service announcement, to show the benefits of cannabis and share testimonials about how it has saved lives.

The commercial featured stories of many people who were helped by cannabis, including a child suffering from epilepsy and a man addicted to opiates.

Allen told Bloomberg the ad was meant to “create an advocacy campaign for constituents who are being lost in the dialogue.”

CBS responded to the proposal by saying that they do not accept ads on cannabis, and they do not know of any other channel that does.

It’s hard to compete with the amount of attention something gets when it airs during the Super Bowl. We certainly thought there was a chance. You strike when the chance of your strike has the probability of success — this isn’t a doomed mission,” Allen said.

Athletes For Medical Marijuana

Support for medical marijuana is growing among NFL players and other athletes, who see it as a safe alternative to addictive opiates.

Last week, former football star Joe Montana announced a massive investment in Calvia, a California-based cannabis business. Montana is among an unspecified number of investors who are putting forward a total of $75 million to help grow the already thriving company.

Montana says he believes in the healing properties of the plant that it is a potential solution for the opiate crisis as well.

NBA star John Salley recently bought a significant stake in PureCrop1, a plant-based pesticide company that is providing an alternative to the carcinogenic chemical pesticides sold by Monsanto. PureCrop1 is specifically designed for growing cannabis.

Sally’s involvement in PureCrop one compliments his other major investments, which include a vegan restaurant and the cannabis purity testing company GreenSpace.

The NFL released a report in July 2017, claiming that it was willing to study the use of medical cannabis for pain management. However, the results of that decision remain to be seen, and it appears that the NFL is still choosing to stay loyal to Big Pharma, at the expense of its players.

Yet, new medical benefits for cannabis are being discovered every day.

A study performed by Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University researchers finds that the non-psychotropic component cannabinoid cannabidiol (CBD) helps heal bone fractures. They administered the compound to rats with mid-femoral fractures and found that it “markedly enhanced the healing process of the femora after just eight weeks.”

The team had found in earlier research that our bodies’ cannabinoid receptors stimulate bone formation and inhibit bone loss.

Credits : Acreage Holdings

Source : Truth Theory

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Why Do So Many Americans Now Support Legalizing Cannabis?

Why Do So Many Americans Now Support Legalizing Cannabis?

American views on marijuana have shifted incredibly rapidly. Thirty years ago, marijuana legalization seemed like a lost cause. In 1988, only 24 percent of Americans supported legalization.

But steadily, the nation began to liberalize. By 2018, 66 percent of U.S. residents offered their approval, transforming marijuana legalization from a libertarian fantasy into a mainstream cause. Many state laws have changed as well. Over the last quarter-century, 10 states have legalized recreational marijuana, while 22 states have legalized medical marijuana.

So why has public opinion changed dramatically in favor of legalization? In a study published this February, we examined a range of possible reasons, finding that the media likely had the greatest influence.

It’s not about use, geography or demographics

Our study ruled out a few obvious possibilities.

For one, it’s not about marijuana use. Yes, marijuana use has increased. Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health show that, in 2002, about 10 percent of adults reported using marijuana the previous year. By 2015, 13.5 percent reported using. But that increase is too small to have had much of an impact on attitudes.

And it’s not about older, more conservative Americans being replaced by younger generations who are more familiar with marijuana. Both younger and older people developed more liberal views about the legalization of marijuana at a similar pace over the last 30 years. In this way, changes in attitudes about marijuana legalization mirror recent increases in support for LGBTQ individuals.

We looked to see if people who lived in states where it was illegal, but resided next to ones where it became legal, were more likely to have changed their views. But the rate of change has been no different in states that legalized marijuana than in others.

Likewise, the pace of change has been similar across political parties, religions, educational levels, racial and ethnic groups and gender. As politically polarized as the country may seem, when it comes to marijuana, Americans have been changing their attitudes together, as a nation.

Read: Why Is Marijuana Banned? The Real Reasons are Worse than You Think

We did find that a small part of the increase in support was related to more people disaffiliating with religion. The proportion of people who do not identify with a religion has increased some, by about 7 percent between 2007 and 2014. People who do not have a religion tend to be more liberal than others. However, this factor accounts for only a small proportion of the change.

Media medical framing

So what’s going on? What has likely made the biggest difference is how the media has portrayed marijuana. Support for legalization began to increase shortly after the news media began to frame marijuana as a medical issue.

We took The New York Times as a case study, looking at the number of published articles from 1983 to 2015 about marijuana. Just before the number of Americans supporting legalization began to increase, we found a sharp increase in the proportion of articles about marijuana that discussed its medical uses.

In the 1980s, the vast majority of New York Times stories about marijuana were about drug trafficking and abuse or other Schedule I drugs. At that time, The New York Times was more likely to lump marijuana together in a kind of unholy trinity with cocaine and heroin in discussions about drug smuggling, drug dealers and the like.

Also Read : Here’s Why Medical Marijuana Is So Necessary Right Now

During the 1990s, stories discussing marijuana in criminal terms became less prevalent. Meanwhile, the number of articles discussing the medical uses of marijuana slowly increased. By the late 1990s, marijuana was rarely discussed in the context of drug trafficking and drug abuse. And marijuana had lost its association with other Schedule I drugs like cocaine and heroin in the New York Times. Gradually, the stereotypical persona of the marijuana user shifted from the stoned slacker wanting to get high to the aging boomer seeking pain relief.

Of course, many Americans do not read The New York Times. But analysis of newspapers of record, like this one, provide insight into how the news media has changed its framing of marijuana, especially during an era when newspapers were still a primary news source.

Harsh criminal justice system

As Americans became more supportive of marijuana legalization, they also increasingly told survey researchers that the criminal justice system was too harsh.

In the late 1980s, the “war on drugs” and sentencing reform laws put a large number of young men, often black and Latino, behind bars for lengthy periods of time. As Americans started to feel the full social and economic effects of tough-on-crime initiatives, they reconsidered the problems with criminalizing marijuana.

Because support for the legalization of marijuana and concerns about the harshness of the criminal justice system changed at about the same time, it’s difficult to know what came first. Did concern about the harshness of the criminal justice system affect support for legalization – or vice versa?

By contrast, the cause and effect is clearer with respect to the media framing of marijuana. The news media’s portrayal of marijuana began to change shortly before the public did, suggesting that the media influenced support for the legalization of marijuana.

Once attitudes begin to change, it is difficult to know what keeps the momentum moving. Whatever the initial impetus, attitudes today are drastically more supportive, and legalization is increasing fast.

Source : This article was originally featured at The Conversation.

Read more ‘Cannabis Archive’ 

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Experts Say: People Over 40 Should Only Work 3 Days a Week

New HIV Infections In South Africa Drop Almost 50 Percent

South Africa has the largest HIV epidemic in the world.

Surprisingly enough, recent research by the Human Services Research Council (HSRC) recorded the rate of new HIV infections in the country has dropped by 44 percent since the last major study that was completed in 2012. This is a significant and unexpected improvement over what leading experts anticipated.

Dr Sandile Buthelezi, the CEO of the South African National AIDS Council, admitted to being surprised by the survey’s findings as she told The Telegraph:

“What this report tells us is that we are going in the right direction but we need to double our efforts. We are confident that we are doing something right but I think we can do better and we need to move faster.”

The survey found that in 2017 there were 1.8 million new infections worldwide and 231,100 of them were in South Africa. This is still far too many new infections even though it’s wonderful the number of new infections has decreased each year.

Dr Buthelezi said that within the five-year reporting period the rate of decline in new infections had begun to plateau which means that efforts to bring the disease under control have been “slipping off track”.

UNAIDS is the body set up by the United Nations to tackle the epidemic. They set a target for 2020 called 90, 90, 90. This is how it goes:

“By 2020, UNAID hopes that 90 percent of all people living with HIV will know their HIV status, 90 percent of all people diagnosed with HIV will receive sustained antiretroviral therapy, and 90 percent of the people receiving the drug therapy will have viral suppression.”

At this rate, South Africa along with the rest of the world looks unlikely to meet the UNAIDS global target – to record fewer than 500,000 new HIV infections a year by 2020.

South Africa had pledged to cut numbers to 88,000 so 231,000 Dr Buthelezi conceded is “very far from our target”. He said:

“What this report tells us is that we are going in the right direction but we need to double our efforts. From what was released today we are confident that we are doing something right but I think we can do better and we need to move faster”.

Globally, new HIV infections have declined by only 18 percent in almost a decade – down from 2.2 million in 2010 to 1.8 million In 2017.

“New HIV infections are not falling fast enough.” – Sidibe

It’s a step in the right direction but the rate of decline is going way too slow. Michael Sidibé, executive director of UNAIDS says:

“For every challenge there is a solution. It is the responsibility of political leaders, national governments and the international community to make sufficient financial investments and establish the legal and policy environments needed to bring the work of innovators to the global scale.”

The reports also found that new HIV infections were actually on the rise in 50 countries, doubling in eastern Europe and Central Asia.

There are 37 million people around the world living with HIV. That’s about 1 in every 200 people. Therefore, in a crowd (like a concert for example) of 30,000 people, 150 have HIV.

Also Read : Dr. Gallo: “I Invented AIDS To Depopulate Humanity”

There are new treatments out there helping people who are infected. AIDS-related deaths have also gone down worldwide due to the success of antiretroviral therapy. Michael Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, says:

“The success in saving lives has not been matched with equal success in reducing new HIV infections.”

Jumping back to South Africa statistics, rape and sexual violence is widespread in South Africa and account for as much as a quarter of new HIV infections among young women, campaigners say. But an even more significant factor, they claim, is the widespread practice of younger women engaging in sexual relations with older men because not only are older men more likely to be HIV positive than their younger peers, they are also less likely to use condoms.

The reason the women do this is that the country has an extremely high youth unemployment rate, which stands at more than 50 percent. According to campaigners:

“With little hope of finding a job, or forming a financially-viable relationship with their age-mates, young women often seek economic stability by pairing up with older, richer men, known colloquially as ‘Blessers’. Therefore it is only when south Africa can address societal issues that keep the young poor and marginalized that real progress in containing HIV can be made.”

Nevertheless, preventative measures do exist. Dr Buthelezi said:

“Structural interventions that address issues like poverty, drug abuse, keeping girls in schools — these have as much impact as medical interventions and will allow us to move much faster.”

As long as nations keep moving forward and the numbers continue to decline the epidemic is heading in the right direction.

The survey showing how South Africa was able to drop the number of new infections by 44% means there is hope. Things just need to move quicker now and more aggressively toward the UNAIDS 90,90,90 target.

Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security.

 

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This Indian Doctor Has Treated Over 2 Million People for Free

This Indian Doctor Has Treated Over 2 Million People for Free

Help Dr. Ramana Rao’s Village Clinic treat patients free of cost

Dr. Ramana Rao is well-known in India. The consulting physician and cardiologist is the man responsible for the health of many known actors, politicians, and even state ministers.

What really sets him apart, however, is his selfless effort of bettering the lives of India’s poor.

For the past 44 years, Dr. Rao and his family have been operating a free health clinic in T.Begur, a village of around 650,000 people in rural Bangalore, some 950 kilometers south-east of Mumbai. – Visit The Village Clinic for more details.

The world’s longest-serving free clinic and has been treating patients in Bangalore, India since 1974.

What began with only a handful of patients, has now grown into a project of massive scale, with between 700-2000 patients coming to see Dr. Rao and his team of 35 every Sunday.

The medical staff includes his wife and two sons (who are also doctors), ten dentists, six nurses, and one skin specialist. Some of the staff volunteering at the clinic are even former patients of Dr. Rao.

Patients come to the clinic from far away, and on most weekends the queue begins to form on Saturday night. “Every Sunday, the number of patients varies from 700 to 1200, and we did not even miss a single Sunday”, Dr. Rao told The Logical Indian.

And Dr. Rao’s philanthropic work doesn’t end here. Over the years, he has also built a shed for his patients where they receive a free lunch while they wait.

Apart from the free Village Clinic, he also installed 7,000 toilets in the surrounding villages, adopted 50 schools in the city and gives books, uniforms and other study materials.

Furthermore, his team has dug four borewells, which supply water to 60 villages in the area and also offers clothes and rice for the poor during festivals.

“The reason I became a doctor was to serve my community,” Dr. Rao says. “The Sunday Village Clinic is dedicated to help the section of society who have no means or access to quality health care.”

To run a clinic like this so consistently, in such huge numbers, requires much funding. He needs a lot of help to continue to run the clinic as he does.

The clinic is funded primarily by donations through India’s largest crowdfunding website  – Milaap. The funds raised are used to buy medicines, nebulizers, and injections for the clinic.

Since 1974 the doctor and his team have treated over two million patients completely free of charge. The medical staff includes his wife and two sons (who are also doctors), ten dentists, six nurses, one skin specialist, and volunteers.

Baba Jan, an auto-rickshaw driver from Gauribidanur, (some 60 km away) who volunteers every week said, “I came here for the first time eight years ago with my mother. I started volunteering seven years ago because I was impressed and I wanted to help.”

On a normal day, the consulting physician and cardiologist is the man responsible for the health of many known actors, politicians, and even state ministers. On a Sunday he is the philanthropist responsible for the heath of those stricken by poverty.

“It is poverty making our lines grow longer and longer. They can’t go to the hospital, they can’t even see a doctor that is how poor they are. They have no food, leave alone medicines,” he explains.

People travel from far and wide to see him. The radius has spread to virtually 110 kilometers. The pilgrimage begins the day before. On Saturday night the queue has already begun. By 3:30-4:00 am there are already around 300-400 people lined up waiting.

Not only does he give these people free medical attention, but he has also built a shed for his patients where they receive a free lunch while they wait for their consultation and treatment.

Apart from the free Village Clinic, his operation has also helped the community in other ways:  He has adopted 50 schools in the city to which he continues to give books, uniforms and other study materials too. And, during festivals, he offers clothes and rice for the poor.

 

Dr Ramana Rao was honoured with Padma Shri for medicine in 2010 and bagged Dr Abdul Kalam National Award for rural medical service in 2008. “I believe only a doctor can serve the humanity by curing them and reducing the suffering,” Dr Ramana Rao told The Logical Indian.

Be the reason he can continue to serve the ever-growing number of rural patients who line up in the queues with the hope to get cured. Support this cause through donation to his Raj Prakash Trust. Visit the website for further information.

Be the reason he can continue to serve the ever-growing number of rural patients who line up in the queues with the hope to get cured. Support this cause through donation to his Raj Prakash Trust. Visit the website for further information.

 

Source: Milaap | The Village Clinic | The Logical Indian

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