ICYMI

Gabapentin Misuse and Abuse

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Last December, Ohio’s Board of Pharmacy began reporting sales of gabapentin prescriptions in its regular monitoring of controlled substances. The drug, which is not an opioid nor designated a controlled substance by federal authorities, is used to treat nerve pain. But the board found that it was the most prescribed medication on its list that month, surpassing oxycodone by more than 9 million doses. In February, the Ohio Substance Abuse Monitoring Network issued an alert regarding increasing misuse across the state.

A literature review published in 2016 in the journal Addiction found about a fifth of those who abuse opiates misuse gabapentin. A separate 2015 study of adults in Appalachian Kentucky who abused opiates found 15 percent of participants also misused gabapentin in the past six months “to get high.”

In the same year, the drug was involved in 109 overdose deaths in West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported.

Read the article.

Now slowly focus on the following sentences:

Gabapentin can enhance the euphoria caused by an opioid and stave off drug withdrawals. In addition, it can bypass the blocking effects of medications used for addiction treatment, enabling patients to get high while in recovery.

The Pleasures of Life without Social Media

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The fact of the matter is that we do not need the Internet, we do not need social media, and we certainly do not need “smart phones”. What are you, a brain surgeon, that you always have to be available in case of an emergency call? Listen to what people say when they use these “essential” gadgets, as I listen to the hordes on campus—the most typical utterances are: “Hey, what’s up? Yeah I’m on the escalator. Ok, see ya later”. Impressive. Clearly, it’s money well spent. It is almost as if individuals have become afraid of a moment of silence, possibly because they intuitively fear discovering that inside, they are empty…

If you are a professor, you learn that the years (or decades) spent acquiring knowledge in a subject area, plus all the resources devoted to the task, not to mention the training that went into preparing you, are worthless: everybody else always knows better, with their deep knowledge gained on the fly. Anti-intellectualism does not just come from outside the university’s walls. You get lectured at by snarky graduate students with deep insecurities who fashion themselves as activists, called “stupid” by barely literate undergraduate students who misspell their protest signs, and are immediately denounced as “racist” for the mere act of disagreeing with one of these imbeciles.

HT to WordPress and the Fabius Maximus websites.

This is the best essay I’ve read in a long time.  Please take the time to read the entire essay and share with family and friends who actually possess critical thinking skills.

And I thought that Twitter as a porno platform was bad…

 

 

Vape? No Thanks

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Study: Lead and Other Toxic Metals Found in E-Cigarette ‘Vapors’

In the study, published online in Environmental Health Perspectives on February 21, the scientists examined e-cigarette devices owned by a sample of 56 users. They found that significant numbers of the devices generated aerosols with potentially unsafe levels of lead, chromium, manganese and/or nickel. Chronic inhalation of these metals has been linked to lung, liver, immune, cardiovascular and brain damage, and even cancers.

NOT safer than cigarettes.  E-Cigarettes can explode too.

Full article here.

 

 

Aspen marijuana shops sold $11.3 million in 2017, topping liquor stores for first time

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Legal-pot purveyors hauled in $11.3 million in revenue last year compared with $10.5 million for liquor stores, marking the first time marijuana sales outpaced booze for the year in Aspen. The figures were provided Wednesday by the city’s Finance Department in its year-end sales tax report for 2017, which showed Aspen’s retailers combined to generate $730.4 million in revenue, 2 percent better than 2016.

Read the Aspen Times article here.

 

Barcelona Grapples with its Housing Crisis

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Even today, following months of political uncertainty in Catalonia, Spain is the second most attractive European country for real estate investment after Germany, according to the London-based real estate consultancy Knight Frank. For Spain’s central government this is a sign of success, and it has no intention of changing the law that helped fuel Spain’s rental bubble, in spite of all the damage it’s doing across cities like Madrid, Barcelona and San Sebastian.

The affordable housing problem is not limited to the US.

I’d usually recommend relocating to Oklahoma but…

Read these two articles here and here.

Barcelona Rental Market Is Out of Control

Rents up 50% since 2013, wages go nowhere, a third of residents earn less than €1,000/month.

Going to Mexico?

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Let’s not mention the 10 or 11 other states with Level 3 warnings of reconsider travel. 

Read the entire State Department advisory here.

Why isn’t the mainstream media all over this story?

Why doesn’t HGTV International House Hunters tell you about this risk?

Do not travel to:

    • Colima state due to crime.
    • Guerrero state due to crime.
    • Michoacán state due to crime.
    • Sinaloa state due to crime.
    • Tamaulipas state due to crime.

 

Dogs Are Smarter Than Cats

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The number of cortical neurons is a hallmark of intelligence, the Vanderbilt University team said. They found that dogs have about 530 million cortical neurons while cats have about 250 million. Humans have about 16 billion.

Source article here.

I’ve had cats and dogs as pets.  My cats did awful things when my first child was born.

My Australian Shepherd grand dog told me my dishwasher was on fire.

Case closed.