MPI NEWS
News
MPI will partner with Marathon County AOD partnership to discuss strategies and resources to prevent youth marijuana use.
April 1, 8:30am - 11:30am - Joe Eberstein: What Works in Marijuana Prevention
Joe Eberstein, from the Center for Community Research (CA), will offer strategies that communities have & can use to prevent youth marijuana use based on lessons learned from around the United States. (Held in the Center for Health Sciences Conference Center)
CCR and MPI are proud to become official Live Well partners. The proclamation for Center for Community Research on March 1, 2019, will be announced at the next MSF Quarterly Meeting. Board of Supervisor Nathan Fletcher and Director for East and North Central Regions, Petros Alemeslassie, will be in attendance to proclaim CCR as a San Diego Live Well Partner!!! This is very exciting news.
For more information regarding Live Well San Diego, click here.
SAN DIEGO (NEWS 8) - Youth advocates from two North County schools teamed up Saturday night with law enforcement to increase awareness about drugged driving.
Students joined sheriff's deputies at a DUI checkpoint in Poway where they thanked sober drivers for not putting others at risk.
"So we're out here making sure that everyone is doing the right thing and we're thanking them for driving safely," said Gabe Ricj who was part of a group of local students volunteering at the checkpoint to help raise awareness around impaired driving. "I've heard some stories of kids at my school who have been under the influence and gotten in crashes. (It’s) important to me (to) make sure that doesn't happen to anyone or their loved ones."
The legalization of marijuana and increased use of illegal drugs by young people is prompting San Diego to add those substances to a 15-year-old law that allows police to cite anyone hosting a party where underage drinking occurs.
The San Diego City Council’s public safety committee on Wednesday unanimously approved amending the city’s “social host” ordinance to include marijuana and illegal drugs in addition to alcohol.
If the full council approves the change later this winter, San Diego would join Escondido, San Marcos, Chula Vista and Santee as local cities that have expanded their social host laws.
The American Academy of Pediatrics called Monday for a major new effort to discourage children and teenagers from using e-cigarettes. According to AAP data, last year 20 percent of high school students, and five percent of middle school students, used e-cigarettes; that is a 75 percent jump overall since 2017.
MPI hosted a media event regarding the initial findings from the ABCD study. Marijuana is legal but that doesn’t make it safe for our teenagers who are in a period of rapid growth. Some researchers are concerned that using marijuana as a young adult can have harmful and long lasting effects on their health and well-being.
A few years ago, the National Academy of Medicine convened a panel of sixteen leading medical experts to analyze the scientific literature on cannabis. The report they prepared, which came out in January of 2017, runs to four hundred and sixty-eight pages. It contains no bombshells or surprises, which perhaps explains why it went largely unnoticed. It simply stated, over and over again, that a drug North Americans have become enthusiastic about remains a mystery.
Retails sales of marijuana began in California back in January. While the marijuana industry celebrates the increase in access to marijuana, we are ignoring an emerging public health issue.
Marijuana products available today contain much higher amounts of the psychoactive chemical THC than 10 years ago. Between 1995 and 2014, the potency of federally-seized marijuana has more than doubled from approximately 4 percent to 12 percent, not including concentrates and edibles.
While the industry downplays the risks associated with marijuana, new data and research on even low-potency marijuana products are helping us to understand the impact of pot use on a child’s developing brain.
The goal of the Marijuana Prevention Initiative (MPI) is to reduce youth marijuana use and increase knowledge of its negative impacts. To accomplish this goal the MPI collaborates with partners across San Diego County to bring awareness and education about: (1) local trends, (2) national research, (3) youth-related harms, and (4) public safety issues associated with marijuana use. This document provides selected county, state, and national data points regarding youth marijuana use and its related health and community impacts, organized by the four categorized referenced above. These data points provide relevant marijuana use/perception statistics to help inform marijuana prevention efforts currently underway across San Diego County. This report was made possible through funding from the County of San Diego, Health and Human Services Agency.
Many people believe that teen marijuana use is not harmful. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We live in California, where marijuana is now, as of Jan. 1, legal for recreational use. My four teens report that pot is already very easy to come by and that “everyone” uses it. More concerning to me: Many of my friends – fellow parents – believe that teen marijuana use is not harmful.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
First, the good news: Most teens don’t smoke pot or ingest edibles. That said, 41 percent of American high school seniors report having used marijuana or synthetic cannabinoids in the past year, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. That’s a very large minority. Do they know what they are doing? Here is what I wish all kids – and their parents – knew about pot:
Marijuana slows brain development in adolescence.
Pot inhaled through a vape device produces a more powerful high — and often with more deleterious side effects — than the smoked version, a new study finds.
At the same level of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, vaping led to higher blood concentrations of the chemical than smoking, as well as higher levels of cognitive and psychomotor impairment and a higher incidence of adverse effects, such as vomiting, anxiety, hallucinations and feelings of paranoia, according to the report, published Friday in JAMA Network Open.
In 1996, California preceded the rest of the United States in allowing marijuana use for medicinal purposes. Now, in 2018, recreational marijuana use is fully legal for individuals 21 years and over. This paper will outline the current and potential impacts of these policies.
The purpose of this report is to describe the impacts that the legalization of marijuana for medical use has had in California, as well as the impacts of legalizing marijuana for recreational use. By gathering and examining data, citizens and policymakers can better understand the implications and effects of marijuana’s increased presence in California.
Background Due to concerns about public health risks and other possible impacts of marijuana, there is an on-going debate in the United States regarding the effects of the increasing prevalence of marijuana in our society.
To view California's High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas report, click here.
Can be hard to tell between packaging and look of products
By Gary Robbins
Food, candy and drinks infused with marijuana have become commonly available in California since January, when the first licensed pot stores began to open statewide.
The products are among the more popular items sold by the dispensaries. The consumption of edibles also is being popularized by cannabis cooking classes and free online tutorials.
That means there will be more edible cannabis in people’s homes when the public celebrates Halloween on Wednesday.
A total of 610 drugs (4296 brand and generic names) are known to interact with marijuana.
- 129 major drug interactions (910 brand and generic names)
- 481 moderate drug interactions (3386 brand and generic names)
MPI will be busy in October and November with activities centered around Red Ribbon week. Red Ribbon week is a time to remember the hard work of our men and women in Law enforcement and bring attention to the impacts that drugs & alcohol have on our health and safety.
MPI will be conducting several school presentations and informational parent events throughout San Diego County. The first will be a parent presentation regarding changing marijuana laws at the Grauer school in Encinitas on October 25th. Followed by "Reality Week" in collaboration with Mental Health Systems - North Inland Community Prevention Coalition at Rancho Bernardo H.S. on October 31st. MPI will host two sessions to youth regarding marijuana's health impacts on development. Finally, MPI and Epiphany Prep Charter School in Escondido will host drug discussions with youth on Nov 2.
For more information regarding the events please go to the contact page and send us an email to get details.
Teenagers using cannabis are causing long-lasting damage to their developing brains, a Canadian study suggests.
It found the impact on thinking skills, memory and behaviour was worse than that of teenage drinking. The researchers, from the University of Montreal, urged teenagers to delay their use of cannabis for as long as they felt able. The study tracked and tested 3,800 adolescents over four years, starting from around the age of 13. Drinking alcohol and taking drugs, such as cannabis, at a young age is known to cause problems with cognitive abilities such as learning, attention and decision-making as well as academic performance at school.
MPI was proud to participate in Tulare Counties Marijuana & Opioid Prevention summit hosted by the California National Guard a member of the Tulare County Prevention Coalition. The event was on September 26th at Living Christ Church. Over 200 people from different fields in prevention, treatment and Law enforcement attended. Information and resources were distributed to organize the community around the growing threat of drug use among our children.
For more information regarding the Tulare County Prevention Coalition, click here.
Driving under the influence of any impairing substance is a major cause of motor vehicle crashes. Cannabis can affect driving-related skills, such as response time and the ability to divide attention. Cannabis use is increasing nationwide: a 2014 survey by the CDC found that there were 7,000 new cannabis users every day. Although the impact of acute cannabis use on driving is not clear, it is important that you and your patients understand the facts related to cannabis use and the potential effects on driving.
Background and Objective: Marijuana is the most commonly used recreational drug among breastfeeding women. With legalization of marijuana in some states and a 1990 study in which authors documented psychomotor defecits in infants breastfed by mothers using marijuana, there is a need for information on potential exposure to the breastfed infant.
When a San Diego-based mother posted an emergency alert on Nextdoor, a community discussion app, she hoped a Good Samaritan could help, according to court filings. Her son was hysterical after losing a flash drive with his homework near the local McDonald's, she wrote, uploading a photo along with the message. A neighbor quickly replied, explaining that the chewing-gum-sized object in the picture was not a flash drive: It was a Juul vaping device.