116
Yes, the claims are approximately true.
From a 1976 study:
Two stages of Vietnam drug use are identified-a period of increasing marijuana use followed by the 1970 influx of highly potent heroin to which 1/5 of the enlisted troops were addicted at some time during their tour. ... Since 95% of those who were addicted to narcotics in Vietnam have not become ...
93
A similar claim is often made, but limited to the use of marijuana. For that, the Washington Post has a good overview. The results for overall drug use are similar to those results.
Drug use by race/ethnicity
The dataset that is used most often to evaluate claims like this is the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
You can view the data here for 2011....
74
You can just buy adrenochrome, e.g. here from Sigma-Aldrich. It's somewhat expensive for a relatively simple chemical, but not as expensive as it would have to be if the only way to acquire it would be by extracting it from the blood of frightened humans.
It can be synthesized by oxidizing epinephrine (also known as adrenaline), which is available pretty ...
67
It's somewhat simplistic view that dopamine is directly proportional with pleasure. This was a mainstream hypothesis in the 1980s, but has fallen out of favor:
The idea that dopamine was a mechanism for pleasure is known as the ‘dopamine hedonia’ or ‘dopamine pleasure’ hypothesis, and was originally proposed by Roy Wise: “dopamine junctions represent a ...
44
First of all I will assume that by sugar we mean sucrose, which is the common table sugar.
Here is the structural formula for sucrose:
Source: Wikipedia - Sucrose
If you are not familiar with chemical structures for organic compounds, note that every "corner" in a chemical structure like this is considered to be a carbon atom (C), even if it is not ...
43
Snopes.com includes it as a legend and includes a large number of other possible reasons with the most likely one is that most people do it because they think it looks cool.
All across the United States, you'll encounter discarded shoes hanging from wires, poles, and trees. Theories as to what these shoes signify abound, but, contrary to what one hears, ...
37
Is it true Coca-Cola once contained Cocaine?
Yes, yes, yes; it did.
When created, Coca-Cola's two key ingredients were cocaine and caffeine. Guess how the name Coca-Cola was derived? Since the cocaine was derived from the coca leaf and the caffeine from kola nut; the name lead to Coca-Kola; but later for marketing purposes, they changed the name Coca-Kola ...
34
The first part of the statement is probably true.
The second part is highly misleading. What the actual paper of the time shows is that 5% of former addicts became re-addicted (basically meaning daily use) in the first year, but the number increased to around 10% in two years, and to 12.5% in three years. Furthermore, if we consider relapse as reuse rather ...
25
"One element away" is pretty much nonsense, and there are lots of kinds of sugar. Let's ask a more targeted question:
Are some sugars closely related chemically to cocaine or any other drug?
Yes, but it's not cocaine. It's the most commonly used recreational drug, alcohol.
Ethanol, the alcohol in beverages, is
H H
| |
H - ...
22
From the DEA drug factsheet for marijuana:
No death from overdose of marijuana has been reported.
19
This is a thorny question, both because it is a politicized issue, and because the effects of cannabis use while driving are less well studied than the effects of alcohol, and appear to include a number of confounding factors.
Overall, my survey of the literature suggests that there are two questions, which have (surprisingly) different answers:
Does ...
18
As far as I can tell all the articles refer back to Fair Trials, a real charity with a focus on access to fair trials around the world.
Their original article as far as I can tell is not on their website anymore but can be found at archive.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160602220644/https://www.fairtrials.org/press/charity-issues-urgent-warning-to-all-...
16
The meme claims that:
children who are vaccinated are 85% more likely to inject heroin than those who are not.
Because the claim didn't mention which type of vaccines will cause heroin injection, and had the slogan "protect your children from vaccinations", the meme's target was all vaccines, therefore paraphrasing the claim would lead to:
Any vaccine ...
15
As an ER physician who routinely uses fentanyl to treat acute pain in patients, I can confirm that 250 mcg (0.25 mg) would be a potentially lethal dose in some circumstances.
When I use fentanyl to treat pain a usual starting dose would be roughly 1 mcg/kg given intravenously. Because fentanyl acts rapidly and wears off quickly, we can give multiple doses ...
13
Yes, this was studied in Medical Marijuana Laws Reduce Prescription Medication Use In Medicare Part D Health Affairs July 2016 vol. 35 pages 1230-1236 :
In states with medical marijuana laws, pain medication was reduced by 1,826 daily doses filled per physician per year.
Ultimately, we estimated that nationally the Medicare program and its enrollees ...
13
Bananas contain no known psychedelic substances, so any "high" that is experienced is purely psychological.
The book Rooted in America: Foodlore of Popular Fruits and Vegetables gives a short overview over the topic:
For a few months in 1967 bananas made he headlines as the latest ingredient for a psychedelic trip. Underground newspapers in Berkley, New ...
10
SWATs are used more often for drug warrants than to deal with any violent crimes
An ACLU report © 2014 titled War Comes Home --
The Excessive Militarization of American Policing says that in their statistical study of 800 SWAT deployments
conducted by 20 law enforcement agencies during the years
2011-2012, 62% were for drug searches (including marijuana)....
10
According to Fentanyl seizures at US-Mexico border up 750 percent:
The amount of fentanyl seized by border agents has skyrocketed in recent years, from two pounds in fiscal year 2013 to approximately 1,485 pounds from Oct. 1, 2016, to Sept. 30, 2017
Matthew Barden of the Drug Enforcement Administration is cited as saying:
300 pounds of fentanyl is ...
10
The USC webpage states
MARIJUANA USE CONSEQUENCES
The well-confirmed danger of smoking marijuana is lung damage and lung cancer. As examples:
1 joint = 5 cigarettes in terms of amount of carbon monoxide (CO) intake.
1 joint = 4 cigarettes in terms of amount of tar intake.
2 joints = 20 cigarettes in terms of microscopic damage to ...
9
Marijuana, alcohol and actual driving performance found that a 0.04 g/dL alcohol concentration resulted in minor impairment, while 200 mg/kg THC resulted in moderate impairment, and the two combined even at lower doses resulted in the most severe impairment.
It really depends on what dose you're trying to compare.
9
Shoes (probably not those ones, specifically) mark a gang's turf. This practice is in decline, however gangs selling drugs, is not. Source, living in Chicago.
"It might appear to be a juvenile prank, but it's not," said Matt Smith, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation. "My experience is that it's somehow announcing ...
9
GHB is a fairly safe medication as long as it's not mixed with alcohol or other depressants, which can be fatal. An overdose can cause deep, unresponsive sleep with lowered respiration, but even at high doses it doesn't depress respiration enough to be dangerous (this is distinct from alcohol and opiates, which cause increasing respiratory depression with ...
9
Although he does not state it clearly, Hayes is working under a definition of addiction that is tied to societal outcomes, in contrast to mere physical dependence. Here's the contrast from NIH's "Principles of Drug Addiction Treatment" (3rd ed.):
Is there a difference between physical dependence and addiction?
Yes. Addiction—or compulsive drug use ...
8
Apparently it is true. Interview with John Erlichman:
https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, ...
8
Decreased quality is a well studied effect of prohibition:
Still another effect of prohibition is increased uncertainty about product quality. Government quality regulation does not exist for illegal commodities, and buyers cannot complain about quality without incriminating themselves.
The Economic Case Against Drug Prohibition
Author(s): Jeffrey A. ...
8
Probably Not
There is no evidence to suggest that the CIA actually sold drugs in the US. There is plenty of evidence that they worked with groups that trafficked drugs like the Contras and Vietnamese elements. There is also evidence that drugs were smuggled on board planes owned by Air America, a CIA front company. But there is substantial evidence that ...
8
In short, Partially.
This appears to be referencing the famous Rat Park addiction experiments. Prior to this study, the scientific evidence matched pretty much what is still commonly believed, that certain drugs are addicting and anyone can become addicted and will have a hard time stopping because of chemical/biological dependencies. Rat Park tried to ...
8
I'm calling it a hoax.
Besides Wikipedia calling it a "presumed" drug and Snopes debunking it as you already found out, Erowid, which is a reputable and complete aggregator of psychoactive-related resources, it's calling it out as a hoax
Without undeniably clear evidence that people are actually inhaling the gasses from human waste (outside of some ...
8
There's a lot of literature on this apparently, and I've only looked at one (55-page) 2018 NBER paper. There is some (correlational) evidence that the "pill mill" crackdown contributed to the switch to heroin, although this paper favors the oxy reformulation as the key event.
We attribute the recent quadrupling of heroin death rates to the August, 2010 ...
8
I suspect that might be based on estimates using as proxy the US seizures of fentanyl at borders (points of entry more precisely). If we use that method, the claim is only nominally correct, i.e. in terms of quantity of cut product. If product purity is taken into account however, shipping by package/air (supposedly directly from China, but this bit is ...
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