Drugmakers consider using venom to treat cancer, diabetes and pain

Captopril, an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor that imitates venom of South American pit viper, was approved by FDA in 1980

Could snake or insect venom yield the next big treatment for diabetes or cancer?

Researchers think so ⁠— and they’re spending lots of time with compounds found in the venom of animals such as scorpions, snakes and snails in the hopes they’ll yield new drugs.

In a feature for the journal PNAS, Amy McDermott explores the trend and its fascinating history.

The science behind venom-derived drugs is complex ( Getty )

“The pharmaceutical industry has a growing interest in venom, as some companies opt to return to drug discovery inspired by natural compounds, a trend that fell out of fashion about 40 years ago,” she writes.

Captopril, an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor with an ingredient that imitates the venom of a South American pit viper called jararaca, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1980. Today, it’s one of 10 approved drugs that mimic the compounds that make the bites of snakes and other creatures so effective.

McDermott explores venom’s fall from scientific favour, which researchers attribute to the complexity of the compounds. 

It’s difficult to target drugs to specific body systems without causing havoc in other systems, and researchers are facing thornier challenges as they try to harness venom’s best qualities ⁠— the ability to act on specific biological pathways.

Serious roadblocks remain, but they’re being overcome by a new generation of scientists who think they can tackle the chemistry challenge.

The science behind venom-derived drugs is complex, but McDermott makes it accessible ⁠— and points to intriguing possibilities for patients with cancer, diabetes, arthritis, pain and more. For now, those advances slither just out of reach. 

But if the scientists she interviews have anything to do with it, they’ll soon turn toxins into medical treasures.

(Source: Independent)

The everyday device in your home killing hundreds around the globe

When you think of things that might kill you, it’s unlikely that your phone springs to mind. We have bad news for you… your smartphone is killing you.

Perhaps because the Apple iPhone was only released in 2007, a lot of us have not yet grasped the full deleterious effects of ‘the device’, and the many similar not-so-smartphones the now clunky-seeming original spawned.

Countless numbers of people have been killed by their smartphones already, and we’re not talking about the tin-foil-hat brigade’s concerns about the effects of 5G, wi-fi and phone signals in general on our brains.

The most obvious example is all the people who are killed on our roads, not just because they were the ones stupidly looking at their phones while driving – Australians now believe it is the main reason for our rising road toll, with 32% of drivers admitting to reading text messages while driving, according to the Community Attitudes to Road Safety 2013 Survey Report – but because they ambled, zombie-like, into traffic while posting on Instagram.

The number of pedestrians killed on US roads has risen by a staggering 51% since 2009. In 2017, pedestrian fatalities in Australia jumped by 20% in a year, with police blaming the stupidity of smartphones.

If you haven’t noticed the number of people who try to cross roads while ignoring the approach of big heavy vehicles in favour of their tiny screens, it’s probably because you’ve been looking at your phone.

The RACQ would like to see new laws to fine people who cross the road while staring at a device. “We think that sort of offence is on its way. There’s no doubt about it,” spokesman Paul Turner said.

“Stand at an intersection in the CBD for half an hour and you’ll see five or 10 people just being saved or stopping themselves from walking out into traffic because they were looking down at their phone. When you tap them on the shoulder and they look up it’s as though they’ve been in some sort of daze because they are so engrossed in their phone.”

No doubt you’re congratulating yourself for not being like that yourself but, be honest, what is your relationship with your phone like? And even if it’s not getting you run over, how much harm is it doing you?

Dopamine and cortisol

Have you, for example, felt what’s known as ‘phantom vibrations’ from your phone? That sensation where your body is sure it’s detected a new message buzz, but you check and there’s nothing there? That strange and concerning sensation is caused by the state of hyper-vigilance you’ve no doubt found yourself in from time to time, when stressful/vital information is pouring into this now essential-for-life device, which is rarely more than a metre away from you.

The fact is, we are, as a species, becoming addicted to both the dopamine hits of satisfaction that our smartphones give us hundreds of times a day, while being simultaneously assaulted by the dangerous levels of cortisol they send coursing through our bodies.

That combination is affecting everything from the way we sleep to our attention span, our memory, our self-esteem, decision-making skills and our physical health. You’re probably aware that many apps, and phones themselves, are designed to be habit forming. Those Likes on Facebook and Instagram are designed to trigger happy chemicals in our brains, much the way poker machines do, and thus to make us want to keep checking them, endlessly.

No less an authority than Google noted in a report that: “Mobile devices loaded with social media, email and news apps” create “a constant sense of obligation, generating unintended personal stress”.

According to a study by a tracking app called Moment, the average American spends four hours a day staring at their phone. Unfortunately, not all the information our screens give us is positive, and when we’re getting, instead, irate emails from colleagues, for example, or other bad news, our bodies release cortisol, our fight-or-flight hormone.

Cortisol is designed to prime your body to react to physical threats – such as bears, or bullies – and it changes your body physically, upping your heart rate, frizzing your adrenaline and spiking your blood sugar. Unfortunately, your body also responds with cortisol when you’re being stressed emotionally. And smartphones can provide you with these moments, wherever you are, multiple times per hour.

“Your cortisol levels are elevated when your phone is in sight or nearby, or when you hear it or even think you hear it,” says David Greenfield, the founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction.

“It’s a stress response, and it feels unpleasant, and the body’s natural response is to want to check the phone to make the stress go away.” Checking the phone, of course, can just provide more bad news and thus you can get into a cycle that leaves you with chronically high levels of cortisol. And this can lead to all kinds of health issues, including heart attacks, dementia, diabetes and depression.

Dr Robert Lustig, author of The Hacking of The American Mind recently told The New York Times that “every chronic disease we know of is exacerbated by stress, and our phones are absolutely contributing to this”.

As bad as smartphones are for you, of course, you’ve only had it running your life for the past dozen years. Just think of what it’s doing to your children, and the entirety of the coming generations. Anyone over the age of 10 is already unable to imagine a world without smartphones, and as they grow into adolescence, they are likely to be gifted one of these dangerous yet vital devices by their own parents.

This is “like giving them cocaine or heroin”, according to David Gillespie, the author of Teen Brain – Why Screens Are Making Your Teenager Depressed, Anxious And Prone to Lifelong Addictive Illnesses – And How to Stop it Now.

Teens, addiction and anxiety caused by smartphones

Gillespie’s book is full of shocking insights, and data, which make perfect sense of the behaviour many young teens exhibit today, particularly if you’re brave or foolhardy enough to attempt to take a device off one. He points out that in puberty, as the prefrontal cortex expands, the human body turns off a system called GABA (Gamma aminobutyric acid), a kind of “general purpose braking system that stops us from becoming addicted to things”.

This is why the teen years are a terrible time to start drinking or smoking, or even having sex, and Gillespie points out that society has realised this, and had huge successes in those areas.

“Between 2007 and now, the rates of teenage pregnancy, and alcohol and cigarette use by teens all dropped – they’re all about half of what they were, it’s a huge achievement and I don’t know why we’re not talking more about it,” he says. “The rates of anxiety and depression for teenagers should also be halving but, instead, the rates of those things in teens have actually doubled over the same period.

“That tells us immediately that something is replacing those addictions. And what has replaced it is also addictive, as it has driven up mental illness in this life stage.” The reason, according to Gillespie, is that we are now giving every adolescent “devices that can run simulations of addictive behaviour, all the time”.

As he points out, software for smartphones and apps are designed to be addictive, to have the same “mesmeric effect” that poker machines have on those who are susceptible, only across a wider swathe of society. “There are millions of companies competing to be one of those five apps on your home screen that you click a hundred or a thousand times a day, and they want to find a way to get people to press that button by giving them a hit of dopamine every time they press it,” he says.

Teens are super susceptible, of course, but boys and girls are targeted in different ways. Young women, Gillespie’s research reveals, are rewarded by the drug oxytocin when “they are in a group of girls, and that group approves of them, they feel liked, and that gives them oxytocin, which is more powerful in girls than in boys”.

“A teenage girl is as sensitive as she will ever be to this and that’s why the creation of ‘approval porn’ has been so successful,” Gillespie adds.

“Until now, we’ve never been able to replicate this approval hit of having real people like you, but simulating that is what social media software does. All of the Facebooks, the Instagrams, they’re all high-speed simulators of social approval, and girls, really, really respond to that.”

Boys, however, are gripped by what Gillespie calls ‘danger porn’, because men are stimulated by risk and danger. “Which is why gambling is so popular; it’s that chance of losing, and the relief of surviving something that’s rewarding for boys – it’s also why they love roller-coasters,” he says.

“And a simulation of that is online gaming on your phone; the first-person shooter like Fortnite, those games are all designed around the concept of danger porn. It’s about survival and the relief of survival.”

Throw in the social aspect of being able to chat to your peers while playing, and the mobility of phone-based games, and you’ve got serious addiction on your hands.

As Gillespie says, these devices were designed from day one, by Steve Jobs and company, to be “beautiful, easy to use and hard to give up”. And, knowing how addictive they would become, Jobs famously declared that he wouldn’t let his own children near them.

“The Jobs thing came out by accident in an interview, he was asked how long he let his kids play with iPads and so on and he wasn’t expecting it and just blurted out that he wouldn’t let his children have them – what’s that saying? Don’t get high on your own supply,” Gillespie laughs. “But that’s become the trend in Silicon Valley these days, the executives instruct their nannies not to let their kids anywhere near these devices.

“And the research shows that rich people are less likely to give their devices to kids, because they can afford to pay humans to interact with their children instead. They consider it a low-class thing to give your children a screen.”

Regardless of what health effects you believe 5G networks might have in the coming years, it’s clear that the devices we’re already using, already addicted to, in fact, have had an enormous effect on society, and mortality, and they’ve only been around for little more than a decade. The device may yet prove to be a more potent example of humanity shooting itself in the foot than even the gun.

(Source: CEO)

How a boy from Vietnam became a slave on a UK cannabis farm

It was a horrifying death for the 39 Vietnamese nationals found in the back of a trailer in an industrial park in Essex, in October last year. The story shone a light on the subterranean world of people smuggling and human trafficking, reports Cat McShane, specifically the thriving route between Vietnam and the UK.

Ba is slight for 18. His body shrinks into a neat package as he recalls his experiences. We're sitting in a brightly lit kitchen, a Jack Russell dog darting between us under the table. Ba's foster mum fusses in the background, making lunch and occasionally interjecting to clarify or add some detail to his account of his journey here from Vietnam. She wants to make sure his story is understood.

Ba's lived here for nearly a year. He was placed with his foster parents after being found wandering, confused and scared, around a train station in the North of England, with just the clothes he was wearing. "You feel safe now though, don't you?" his foster mum asks, needing affirmation that the mental and physical scars Ba wears will heal with enough care.

His story is one both extraordinary, and typical of the growing number of Vietnamese men and women recognised as being potential victims of trafficking in the UK. For several years, Vietnamese have been one of the top three nationalities featured in modern slavery cases referred to the National Crime Agency, with 702 cases in 2018.

The Salvation Army, which supports all adult victims of modern slavery in the UK, says the number of Vietnamese nationals referred to them over the last five years has more than doubled. It's estimated 18,000 people make the journey from Vietnam to Europe each year.

Ba believes it was a Chinese gang that trafficked him to the UK. He was kidnapped off the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, where he was a street child, an orphan who slept in the bend of a sewage pipe. He sold lottery tickets for money, although older men sometimes beat him and grabbed his takings.

A 2017 Unicef report described Ho Chi Minh City as "a source location, place of transition and destination of child trafficking". And a 2018 report by anti-trafficking charities said numerous trafficked Vietnamese children had reported being abducted while living on the streets.

That's what happened to Ba. "An older man told me that if I came with him, he could help me earn a lot of money. But when I said no, he put a bag over my head. I couldn't believe what was happening," he says. He was then bundled into a small van, bound as well as blindfolded, his shouts stifled.

Somewhere along the way, Ba's captors changed, and now he couldn't understand the language they spoke. When they finally came to a standstill and the bag was removed, Ba found himself in a large, empty, windowless warehouse in China, and was told to wait. "I knew they were preparing to send me somewhere to work," he says.

During the months that Ba was held there, a guard regularly beat him. "I don't know why," Ba says with a shrug, "there was no reason." When he was caught trying to escape, his punishment was far worse than kicks and punches - the guard poured scalding water over his chest and arms.

"It was agony. I was shouting at him to stop but he didn't listen," he says. Ba became unconscious with the pain. "I just lay still for days. I couldn't walk. It was painful for a very long time."

His foster mum adds that his scarred skin is tight all over his body, and a permanent reminder of what happened to him.

Ba was then moved to the UK in a succession of trucks. He remembers the silence of the final container, where the human cargo hid among boxes. The quiet was broken only by the rustling of cardboard being ripped up, to be used as insulation from the gnawing cold. His long-sleeved top offered little protection.

"I was always scared on the journey, and very tired. I couldn't sleep because I was so worried. I didn't know what was happening to me. I wasn't told anything about where I was going."

In fact, Ba was destined to work as a "gardener" in the UK's illegal cannabis trade - which is valued at around £2.6bn a year. In an abandoned two-storey house surrounded by woodland, he was locked-up and told to look after the plants that grew on every available surface. It was a mundane vigil of switching lights on and off over the plants at set times and watering them every few hours.

But it was also punctuated by violence. When a plant failed, Ba was starved and kicked by a Chinese boss, who would aim for the burns on his chest.

Ba never received any payment for his work, and wasn't told he was earning to pay off his fare to the UK. He was a slave.

"How did I keep going? I kept telling myself to keep eating, keep working and to wait for the opportunity to run away," he says.

He finally escaped by smashing an upstairs window, and jumping to the ground. Then he ran for as long as he could.

"I was frightened, depressed and panicking. If I had been caught I would have been beaten even worse," Ba says. But he had to take that risk, because his life in the cannabis farm was "unbearable".

With no idea what direction to head in, he followed the path of a train line. He only had a packet of biscuits to eat. "I didn't even know I was in England."

The train line, predictably, led him to a train station - and to what was for him a very happy meeting with British Transport Police. "It had been a long time since anyone had been nice to me," he says.

Ba has now settled into British life. He recently won a prize at college for his grades, and celebrated his first Christmas. He'd never unwrapped a present before. The translator who met Ba when he was taken into police custody says the transformation is remarkable. She recalls how skinny and scared he was. "Like a rabbit in the headlights," adds his foster dad.

Ba doesn't know whether he'll be allowed to stay in the UK. His last meeting at the Home Office to discuss his application for asylum didn't go well. The official tried to persuade him that if he returned to Vietnam he'd be helped by the authorities, which Ba finds impossible to believe.

He is sure that if he is sent back, he will be trafficked again. That's a worry shared by Vietnamese trafficking expert Mimi Vu, who says that people who have been trafficked and returned are at serious risk of being re-trafficked, especially if their traffickers claim they owe them money.

It's the quiet that Ba likes about the tiny hamlet he lives in, filled with old stone cottages and sprawling bungalows. Crowds make him anxious; he's scared he'll see the man who held him captive in the cannabis farm and kicked his injured chest.

Chinh's scared too, but not of the people who smuggled him here to the UK. He's scared of the Vietnamese authorities.

These fears are grounded in bitter experience. The 17-year-old was forced to leave Vietnam early in 2019 to escape a 10-year prison sentence for distributing anti-government literature door-to-door. "I didn't think I would come out alive," he says.

There are harsh punishments for people who criticise Vietnam's Communist government. In a report last week, Human Rights Watch said that at least 30 activists and dissidents were sentenced to prison in 2019 "simply for exercising their fundamental rights to freedom of expression, association, and religion". That even includes writing something deemed anti-government on Facebook; Amnesty International says at least 16 people were arrested, detained or convicted in 2019 for this offence.

"[The year] 2019 was a brutal year for basic freedoms in Vietnam," Human Rights Watch's Asia director, Brad Adams, commented. "The Vietnamese government claims that its citizens enjoy freedom of expression, but this 'freedom' disappears when it is used to call for democracy or to criticise the ruling Communist Party."

Chinh's arrest was due to his family's membership of Vietnam's Hoa Hao Buddhist community. The religion is recognised by the government but there are many groups that don't follow the state-sanctioned branch, and these are monitored and forcefully suppressed by the authorities. It's the same for other unapproved religious groups. Human Rights Watch says followers are detained, interrogated, tortured, forced to renounce their faith and imprisoned "in the national interest".

Chinh lived in Hai Duong, a city in northern Vietnam. His dream, along with millions of other teenage boys and girls, was to be a footballer, and he avidly followed the Portuguese star, Cristiano Ronaldo. But he was also happy working on his mum's household goods stall, when he wasn't at school. He was very close to her, and to his grandfather, who lived with them.

In 2018 Chinh attended a demonstration with his grandfather. He recalls his nerves in the morning and the flags of 100 people waving in the wind as they chanted, calling for freedom of religion and the release of political prisoners. 

After that, Chinh struggles. "I find talking about that day very difficult," he says. Chinh's grandfather was arrested and sent to prison, where he died not long after. "When we visited him, he looked very weak," Chinh says.

According to Amnesty International, jailed activists are at risk of torture and other ill-treatment. Vietnamese prisons are reported to be unsanitary, with inmates denied adequate access to medical care, clean water, and fresh air.

His grandfather's treatment spurred Chinh to continue protesting but in early 2019 he too was arrested, for distributing flyers. He was held in a small, narrow cell for 10 hours and questioned alone. His faith helped to get him through, he says.

"Of course, I was scared. The police would come to the cell and question me about my family and why I had anti-government literature. They shouted at me when I didn't answer. I was very scared they might hit me." In court, he wasn't allowed to defend himself, convicted, and told his sentence would start when he turned 18. His mum then raised the money to pay an agent to smuggle him to the UK.

"My mum's last words were, 'Go over there, find someone to help you, and never come back.'"

At the airport, she handed him over to two agents, who kept his passport. "We got lots of flights and stayed at people's houses until we got to France," Chinh says. He hasn't a clue what countries he passed through, apart from Malaysia and Greece.

In France, one night, he was put into a lorry container. There was only one other man inside, but they didn't speak until they arrived in the UK, terrified of alerting a border official to their presence.

"It was very cold and it was very difficult to breathe, because it was a confined, small space," Chinh says. "I was lying on top of boxes piled up high on the lorry, almost to the top, so I only just had enough room to lie down. It was very dark. I just slept. I had nothing with me - no food, no water."

When the lorry finally stopped, Chinh was taken to a Vietnamese family, who fed him and gave him a bed for the night. "I can get you somewhere safe," his host said.

In the morning, Chinh was left outside the local Home Office building with a piece of paper showing his name and date of birth.

He remembers how strange he felt because he couldn't speak English. But he felt safe, he says, "because I was in the UK". The Home Office has recently granted him refugee status, which entitles him to remain in the UK for five years. Then a decision will be taken on whether he can remain indefinitely.

Chinh was lucky. His mum was able to pay his passage in advance.

When the bodies of 39 Vietnamese nationals were found in Essex last year, it was reported that these were economic migrants from some of the poorest regions in Vietnam, who had taken out loans of up to £30,000 in order to get here. Family houses had been used as security and they would have been obliged to pay off their passage once here, by working illegally in cannabis farms, nail bars and restaurants.

We may never know what the 39 people found in Essex had been promised, but it's likely that some of them would have ended up in slave-like conditions.

Jakub Sobik from Anti Slavery International says that Vietnamese people who have taken out loans to pay for their journey here are more vulnerable to being exploited.

"They start their journey believing they have paid to be smuggled in the search for a better life, but end up being victims of trafficking.

"The extent that they have to hide from the authorities makes it easy for traffickers. You are illegal and it is a criminal offence to be here. They can't risk being deported to Vietnam with huge amounts of money owed over their heads."

While males are typically siphoned off into cannabis factories, Vietnamese women are at risk of sexual exploitation. I have read an account given by a boy of 15, who said that while working in a cannabis factory he could hear the screams of women downstairs. He believed they were being sexually abused.

A young single mum, Amy, was raped on many occasions during her journey to the UK, and again after her arrival, until a health worker identified her as a potential victim of trafficking.

She had been excited to leave the family farm with her sister back in 2013, she told the charity that eventually started looking after her in the UK.

Two men had convinced her family to send the girls abroad to earn money. There was no upfront fee, so they would need to work to pay the fare. Amy left her young son with an uncle.

She was trafficked first to a clothes factory in Russia, where she worked for 10 to 12 hours a day without pay. She slept in a small room with about 10 other people, where she was raped repeatedly by the male workers.

After two years, she and eight others were taken overland to the UK, and told that if they worked hard they would be paid. Instead, after waking up alone in the lorry that brought them across the Channel (the traffickers had left her behind for reasons that are unclear) she was sucked into a fresh world of exploitation. She ended up being forced into prostitution in the home of a Vietnamese couple, which doubled as a cannabis farm.

It was only after becoming pregnant, and getting arrested in a raid on the house, that a midwife noticed that something was wrong and referred Amy to the National Crime Agency as an apparent victim of modern slavery. Then the Salvation Army found her a place in a refuge.

Now she's a mum again, focused on doing the best for her baby.

Chinh is living with a foster family. He is working hard on his English - and even the local Northern slang - and he remains a practising Buddhist. His 18th birthday, the day he would have been jailed, is fast approaching.

Ba still suffers nightmares and flashbacks to his time in the hands of traffickers. He is waiting nervously for a decision on whether he will be granted asylum. But he recently started counselling, and day by day, under the loving care of his foster mum and dad, he is beginning to feel safer.

The names Ba, Chinh and Amy are aliases

(Source: BBC)

Why Canada's cannabis bubble burst

More than a year ago, Canada made recreational cannabis legal. So why are people still buying it on the black market?

When Canada legalised marijuana just over a year ago, it seemed like anyone who was anyone wanted to break into the market.

The media nicknamed the frenzy Canada's "green rush", as investors like Snoop Dogg and the former head of Toronto's police force clamoured to get a slice of the multi-billion-dollar-pie.

But like the gold rush of the 1850s, the lustre would soon fade, leaving prospectors in the dust.

"It didn't take a rocket scientist to recognise that these stocks were trading on fantasy and not on fundamentals," says Jonathan Rubin, CEO of New Leaf Data Services.

Tweed is one of the brands owned by Canopy Growth, one of the country's largest legal cannabis producers

With decades of experience in the energy commodities markets, Mr Rubin saw the legalisation of cannabis in states like Colorado and California in the US (and later Canada) as a "once in a lifetime" opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a brand-new commodity.

"I had this epiphany that this is going to be a commodity just like any other commodity," he told the BBC.

What that meant was that like the price of wheat or pork, the wholesale price of cannabis was going to fluctuate with the market. So instead of investing in the cannabis itself, Mr Rubin started New Leaf to track the price of cannabis in states where it was legal. Investors and others in the industry pay for access to this data.

This business model has given Mr Rubin an interesting vantage point of how the market has unfolded.

In Canada, he says, the rollout has been disappointing.

"They haven't had the growth in sales and earnings that they've envisioned," he said. "I don't want to say it's a failure, but there's definitely frustrations."

Wholesale prices have dropped by about 17% since New Leaf started tracking data, which has kept profit margins tight for producers.

Sales have also slowed, according to Statistics Canada.

It's led to a rollercoaster ride for the stock prices of publicly traded cannabis companies.

In May 2018, Canadian producer Canopy Growth made headlines when it became the first marijuana company to list on the New York Stock Exchange.

Six months later, the stock price about doubled when it hit a high of $52.03 (£39.77) a share.

Now, the stock price is back to where it was, and their competitors have suffered similarly drastic losses.

Growing pains

There were early signs of trouble.

When cannabis became legal on 17 October 2018, there wasn't enough supply to meet the demand.

Long lines and backlogs of online orders plagued consumers. Producers weren't sure what strains would be most popular where, and kinks in the distribution chain were still being ironed out.

"Trying to understand what strains we should grow, in what formats and what quantities - we did a great job but we didn't nail everything," says Canopy president Rade Kovacevic.

A patchwork of provincial laws have also made it harder to get products to consumers. While it's easy to buy cannabis in some places, in others brick-and-mortar shops are few and far between.

This is especially true in Ontario, Canada's most populous province. Red tape and a cap on the number of cannabis retail outlets have made rollout slow. Retail licenses were awarded by lottery, and the province held the number of licenses at 24, to serve a population of 14.5m.

Where there was once a shortage, now producers have too much product, in part because of the lack of retail.

In September, Canadians bought 11,707 kilograms (25,809 lbs) of dried cannabis flower in Canada. But producers had a total of about 165,000 kilograms of finished and unfinished products ready for sale, or more than enough to meet the demand for an entire year.

Mr Kovacevic blames the lack of retail in Ontario for a lot of his company's woes.

"I think that lack of continuity of points of purchase across the country slowed the transition from the black market to the legal market," he said. "It was a challenge."

Black market still thriving

When the government announced its decision to legalise cannabis, one of its principal reasons was to reduce the black market.

But Statistics Canada estimates that about 75% of cannabis users still use illegal cannabis.

"There's a very strong resistance to the legal stores in the sense that a) it's more expensive and b) there aren't enough of them. They're not close to them, so they just deal with their local guy like they always have," says Robin Ellis, co-founder of Toronto retailer The Friendly Stranger and a long-time activist for cannabis legalisation.

There were only five retail stores open in Toronto in 2019, and they were all concentrated in the downtown, which meant many people had to drive miles if they wanted to buy legal pot.

Legal cannabis is also far more expensive.

The retail price of legal cannabis has gone up, from C$9.82 ($7.49, £5.73) a gram in October 2018 to C$10.65 a gram in July, according to Statistics Canada.

Meanwhile, the illegal price has dropped from C$6.51 to C$5.93.

The case for cannabis

Perhaps one of the reasons why sales have been lacklustre for producers is that, contrary to some health experts' fears, legalising marijuana didn't turn everyone into a pothead.

Over the past year, the percentage of Canadians who used cannabis grew from 14% to about 17%.

Use varies a lot by age, with people between 25-34 being the most likely to use cannabis, followed by those ages 15-24 (the legal age to use cannabis varies in Canada from 18-21). Older people are the least likely to have used cannabis, - but use has accelerated much faster for them than for other age groups, and seniors are the most likely to buy only legal weed, according to Statistics Canada.

This is in line with research in the US that shows that in states where cannabis has been legalised, usage among teenagers has actually decreased or stayed the same.

Mr Ellis, a long-time cannabis activist, says it's important to remember that despite the industry's growing pains, legalisation has been largely a success.

"I don't think Canadians fully understand the magnitude of this change. We didn't just make something quickly available - it took 25 years of hard work to get legalisation ," he says.

Legalising marijuana has also opened up a whole new industry for the Canadian economy.

Sales of legal dried bud blossomed from about 4,405 kilograms in October 2018 to 11,707 kilograms in September 2019.

The pot industry is now worth C$8.6bn, or about .3% of the country's GDP in 2018.

Turning over a new leaf

Things are looking brighter for the New Year, people in the industry say.

In December, the Ontario government announced that after a slow and fitful start, the province will open itself up to more cannabis retail. It will do away with the lottery system, the cap on the number of private stores and cancel some pre-qualification requirements.

It's welcome news to people who've been trying to get into the market.

"We're really looking forward," Mr Ellis says. His store, the Friendly Stranger, sells cannabis accessories, and he intends to open as many as 20 licensed retailers in the new year.

Producers will also be allowed to open up one storefront on site, similar to how some breweries can sell beer direct to consumers.

"If everything goes smoothly and they follow up, hopefully we'll see more of an equilibrium in terms of supply-demand balance," Mr Rubin says.

With a population of about 3m, Toronto has only five legal cannabis stores

More kinds of products will also be coming to the market soon. The government is legalising alternative cannabis products, like edibles and vapes. Those products are expected to hit shelves around Christmas.

Up until now, Health Canada has only permitted cannabis oil, dried flowers, seeds and plants to be sold to consumers.

Mr Rubin expects these new products to help retail sales grow by 30-40%. The formats are expected to be a hit, especially amongst people who've never tried cannabis before.

"There's going to be a lot of people out there who are going to want to try cannabis for the first time in a format that's not smoking or vaping," says Mr Ellis.

The new product lines are helping some producers attract investment. 

Constellation Brands, which makes Corona beer, owns a 38% stake in Canopy.

Mr Kovacevic, Canopy's president, says they will rollout THC-laced beverages by early 2020. These products are designed to have a precisely known, low-level dose of THC, which would produce a buzz equivalent to the effect of one beer. They will not contain alcohol.

The company will also start making THC-laced chocolates.

"I think it's a great opportunity," he says. "If you look at products like vapes and edibles, those are products that are ubiquitous in the black market, and Canadians will now have the opportunity to go to a legal store."

(Source: BBC)

Why are people disappearing in the Parvati Valley?

While enjoying the crisp air of Kasol on my solo trip last summer, I came across this poster about a missing Polish national, Bruno Muschalik, at a corner, and then again and again at every other corner. I could not help but research on why people like Muschalik and others were disappearing in the valley.

They say the valley eats up people, they vanish into thin air, with no traces found.

So who is Bruno Muschalik and where did he go?
Bruno a 24 y/o Polish national, working at Ernst & Young in Poland, was trekking solo in the Parvati Valley. He was last seen in Manali on August 8, 2015. According to his Facebook page, he was to go trekking in the Parvati Valley from August 9. He has been missing ever since. It has been three years now and I still see the posters stuck on the walls of Kasol, reverberating equal parts of hope and terror.

It sent a chill down my spine when I heard my cabbie talk about so many travellers (mostly solo trekkers from Europe and the US) who go missing and are not found, even after years.

Another very prominent case is of Justin Alexander Shetler, an experienced American trekker who went missing in September 2016.

Actions taken:
The External Affairs Minister, Ms. Sushma Swaraj probed into the matter, she had also sought reports from the CM of Himachal Pradesh. Shetler’s mother, terrified, flew down to India with Shetler’s London-based friend. They took a chopper over Parvati Valley and the Kheerganga trail looking for Justin, but all these efforts were rendered futile.

The most terrifying part of this story is that I had met him that summer, and his friend later in 2017. Justin came off as an easy going, lovable person who appreciated life. He had inspiring stories to tell and so much to give back to the world. I had immediately followed him on Instagram, and his posts regularly fed my eyes and my wanderlust. One day while scrolling through the app, I realised I had not seen any post from him in a long while. That's when I looked his profile up and saw the last post was this stunning picture taken at Mama Cafe in Kasol, on August 2016.

It shook me to the core when I came across a particular GoFundMe campaign that his mother had started.

Justin, a thrill seeker, travel writer and an avid adventurer who loved traveling in India and Nepal, vanished into thin air. Adventuresofjustin – Shetler's hauntingly beautiful memoir of travels in India, that will leave you spellbound and heartbroken at the same time.

Other recent cases
In the previous year, two French trekkers, Francois Xavier Camille, 21 and Valentin Gorges, 20 disappeared somewhere in the Dhauladhar ranges, and the authorities have now suspended their search operations.

These are only to name a few, locals say it is slowly becoming an insurmountable problem when people go missing and no luggage is found. Unanswered questions continue to haunt locals, the government, and the families of the ones assumed to be deceased.

Reports of missing trekkers have now become a routine affair, and the authorities have been issuing warnings not to trek with fake godmen who somehow manage to lure travellers into illegitimate drug purchase. They urge travellers not to travel solo in the woods where any step could easily prove to be your last, and where your fate is at nature’s disposal.

Who is to be blamed?
The valley, that mysteriously eats away people, drug abuse, the officials who couldn't find these missing travellers, or the thrill seekers themselves?

One thing is known for sure, that the Himalayas are huge, magnificent, and man is only miniature when compared to the powers of nature. It is only foolish to even begin to challenge the course of nature, and get swayed in the moment by rushing adrenaline, by hashish and by the urge to explore the deadliest of paths.

It is exhilirating to be adventurous and to be curious, but it is not okay to be foolish. It is not okay to be destined to a death where you leave fear and unsettled questions behind you.

Travel responsibly, the life of Alexander Supertramp is awe-insipiring, his adventures are phenomenal, but his death was as shattering as it could possibly have been.

“Happiness [is] only real when shared.” – Into The Wild

(Source: Tripoto)

'Chicken shop' drug gangs recruit children with food, inquiry finds

Excluded pupils particularly vulnerable to grooming, youth select committee told

Criminal “chicken shop gangs” are recruiting children to deal drugs with the offer of free food, a parliamentary investigation has found.

So-called chicken shop grooming was described in written evidence submitted to the youth select committee, which is investigating the UK’s knife crime epidemic.

Young people with experience of the criminal justice system said children who had been excluded from school were particularly vulnerable to exploitation.

“Some shared that their peers had been targeted by gangs outside of pupil referral units [PRUs], as well as outside sports centres,” the youth justice board of England and Wales reported in evidence.

“They also said that sometimes children are recruited through an offer of food (referred to as chicken shop gangs) and they felt that schools could do more to keep children in school as it could be a protective factor from gang involvement.”

Children’s charities confirmed the tactic was being used to lure children into a criminal lifestyle.

 Chicken and chips. Photograph: Graham Turner/The Guardian

The headteacher of a primary school in east London shared a YouTube video highlighting the dangers of chicken shop grooming, with children as young as seven being targeted. There are fears the technique is being used at takeaway restaurants in the area, including a local branch of McDonald’s.

A poster campaign targeting high school students, launched by London Grid for Learning (LGfL), a community of schools and local authorities in the capital, tells children: “There’s no such thing as free chicken! Friends of friends who buy you things often want something in return.”

LGfL’s online safety and safeguarding manager, Mark Bentley, said: “In terms of schools or parents who might think this wouldn’t happen in this leafy area, chicken shops are legion, and kids like to hit the chicken shop on the way home from school.

“It’s so easy for them to think, ‘oh, I can save a couple of quid’, and it’s easy to get sucked in.”

The Children’s Society said last month “county lines” drug gangs – which use young and vulnerable people as couriers to move drugs and cash between cities and smaller towns – were recruiting children as young as seven, although those aged 14 to 17 were most at risk.

Natasha Chopra, the charity’s London disrupting exploitation programme manager, said she had been aware of chicken shop grooming since she started working in the sector in 2008.

She said cuts to youth services had led to more children spending time in places where they could be targeted.

“Young people tend to go to places like fast food chains of a cheaper cost. Young people may use certain fast food chains as a place to socialise,” she said.

“In terms of exploitation, these exploiters know that these young people are going to be at a vast range of fast food chains. That’s when the ‘targeted’ stage comes in, because exploiters will actually watch and observe the young people.

“They will watch and they will check and think, ‘OK this particular young person comes in at this time, they leave at this time. Why are they not going home?’ That’s the way it will start with a conversation like, ‘Hi, here’s some chicken or here’s some chips’ and that relationship can form quite easily.”

Chopra said the next phase of exploitation could involve a child being offered £20 to act as a lookout for a criminal gang before becoming “hooked” on the experience of having access to money, moving up the ranks and feeling part of a family.

Once involved in a gang, children are coerced into staying through threats towards family members and friends, or with videos of them performing sex acts or inserting drugs into their bodies, she said.

In January the National Crime Agency (NCA) warned as many as 10,000 children could be involved in county lines drug dealing, with profits estimated to total around £500m a year.

Barnardo’s chief executive, Javed Khan, said: “Barnardo’s raises awareness among night-time workers, including those that work at fast food outlets, to identify children who may be vulnerable and help them to understand how to keep them safe.”

(Source: The Guardian)