Invasion of Europe news…..
It is so mind boggling to realize that supposedly smart people in Europe (Merkel, Macron, etc) cannot see what has happened to them.
More babies please!
(And, come on, you can afford it! To save big don’t send them to an expensive college to be brainwashed!)
See my complete ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive here.
RELATED ARTICLE: South Carolina governor wants no refugees from six countries named in Trump travel ‘ban’
Transgender politics have taken Americans by surprise, and caught some lawmakers off guard.
Just a few short years ago, not many could have imagined a high-profile showdown over transgender men and women’s access to single-sex bathrooms in North Carolina.
But transgender ideology is not just infecting our laws. It is intruding into the lives of the most innocent among us—children—and with the apparent growing support of the professional medical community.
As explained in my 2016 peer reviewed article, “Gender Dysphoria in Children and Suppression of Debate,” professionals who dare to question the unscientific party line of supporting gender transition therapy will find themselves maligned and out of a job.
I speak as someone intimately familiar with the pediatric and behavioral health communities and their practices. I am a mother of four who served 17 years as a board certified general pediatrician with a focus in child behavioral health prior to leaving clinical practice in 2012.
For the last 12 years, I have been a board member and researcher for the American College of Pediatricians, and for the last three years I have served as its president.
I also sat on the board of directors for the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity from 2010 to 2015. This organization of physicians and mental health professionals defends the right of patients to receive psychotherapy for sexual identity conflicts that is in line with their deeply held values based upon science and medical ethics.
I have witnessed an upending of the medical consensus on the nature of gender identity. What doctors once treated as a mental illness, the medical community now largely affirms and even promotes as normal.
Here’s a look at some of the changes.
Pediatric “gender clinics” are considered elite centers for affirming children who are distressed by their biological sex. This distressful condition, once dubbed gender identity disorder, was renamed “gender dysphoria” in 2013.
In 2014, there were 24 of these gender clinics, clustered chiefly along the east coast and in California. One year later, there were 40 across the nation.
With 215 pediatric residency programs now training future pediatricians in a transition-affirming protocol and treating gender-dysphoric children accordingly, gender clinics are bound to proliferate further.
Last summer, the federal government stated that it would not require Medicare and Medicaid to cover transition-affirming procedures for children or adults because medical experts at the Department of Health and Human Services found the risks were often too high, and the benefits too unclear.
Undeterred by these findings, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health has pressed ahead, claiming—without any evidence—that these procedures are “safe.”
Two leading pediatric associations—the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Pediatric Endocrine Society—have followed in lockstep, endorsing the transition affirmation approach even as the latter organization concedes within its own guidelines that the transition-affirming protocol is based on low evidence.
They even admit that the only strong evidence regarding this approach is its potential health risks to children.
The transition-affirming view holds that children who “consistently and persistently insist” that they are not the gender associated with their biological sex are innately transgender.
(The fact that in normal life and in psychiatry, anyone who “consistently and persistently insists” on anything else contrary to physical reality is considered either confused or delusional is conveniently ignored.)
The transition-affirming protocol tells parents to treat their children as the gender they desire, and to place them on puberty blockers around age 11 or 12 if they are gender dysphoric.
If by age 16, the children still insist that they are trapped in the wrong body, they are placed on cross-sex hormones, and biological girls may obtain a double mastectomy.
So-called “bottom surgeries,” or genital reassignment surgeries, are not recommended before age 18, though some surgeons have recently argued against this restriction.
The transition-affirming approach has been embraced by public institutions in media, education, and our legal system, and is now recommended by most national medical organizations.
There are exceptions to this movement, however, in addition to the American College of Pediatricians and the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice. These include the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, the Catholic Medical Association, and the LGBT-affirming Youth Gender Professionals.
The transgender movement has gained legs in the medical community and in our culture by offering a deeply flawed narrative. The scientific research and facts tell a different story.
Here are some of those basic facts.
1. Twin studies prove no one is born “trapped in the body of the wrong sex.”
Some brain studies have suggested that some are born with a transgendered brain. But these studies are seriously flawed and prove no such thing.
Virtually everything about human beings is influenced by our DNA, but very few traits are hardwired from birth. All human behavior is a composite of varying degrees for nature and nurture.
Researchers routinely conduct twin studies to discern which factors (biological or nonbiological) contribute more to the expression of a particular trait. The best designed twin studies are those with the greatest number of subjects.
Identical twins contain 100 percent of the same DNA from conception and are exposed to the same prenatal hormones. So if genes and/or prenatal hormones contributed significantly to transgenderism, we should expect both twins to identify as transgender close to 100 percent of the time.
Skin color, for example, is determined by genes alone. Therefore, identical twins have the same skin color 100 percent of the time.
But in the largest study of twin transgender adults, published by Dr. Milton Diamond in 2013, only 28 percent of the identical twins both identified as transgender. Seventy-two percent of the time, they differed. (Diamond’s study reported 20 percent identifying as transgender, but his actual data demonstrate a 28 percent figure, as I note here in footnote 19.)
That 28 percent of identical twins both identified as transgender suggests a minimal biological predisposition, which means transgenderism will not manifest itself without outside nonbiological factors also impacting the individual during his lifetime.
The fact that the identical twins differed 72 percent of the time is highly significant because it means that at least 72 percent of what contributes to transgenderism in one twin consists of nonshared experiences after birth—that is, factors not rooted in biology.
Studies like this one prove that the belief in “innate gender identity”—the idea that “feminized” or “masculinized” brains can be trapped in the wrong body from before birth—is a myth that has no basis in science.
2. Gender identity is malleable, especially in young children.
Even the American Psychological Association’s Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology admits that prior to the widespread promotion of transition affirmation, 75 to 95 percent of pre-pubertal children who were distressed by their biological sex eventually outgrew that distress. The vast majority came to accept their biological sex by late adolescence after passing naturally through puberty.
But with transition affirmation now increasing in Western society, the number of children claiming distress over their gender—and their persistence over time—has dramatically increased. For example, the Gender Identity Development Service in the United Kingdom alone has seen a 2,000 percent increase in referrals since 2009.
3. Puberty blockers for gender dysphoria have not been proven safe.
Puberty blockers have been studied and found safe for the treatment of a medical disorder in children called precocious puberty (caused by the abnormal and unhealthy early secretion of a child’s pubertal hormones).
However, as a groundbreaking paper in The New Atlantis points out, we cannot infer from these studies whether or not these blockers are safe in physiologically normal children with gender dysphoria.
The authors note that there is some evidence for decreased bone mineralization, meaning an increased risk of bone fractures as young adults, potential increased risk of obesity and testicular cancer in boys, and an unknown impact upon psychological and cognitive development.
With regard to the latter, while we currently don’t have any extensive, long-term studies of children placed on blockers for gender dysphoria, studies conducted on adults from the past decade give cause for concern.
For example, in 2006 and 2007, the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology reported brain abnormalities in the area of memory and executive functioning among adult women who received blockers for gynecologic reasons. Similarly, many studies of men treated for prostate cancer with blockers also suggest the possibility of significant cognitive decline.
4. There are no cases in the scientific literature of gender-dysphoric children discontinuing blockers.
Most, if not all, children on puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones (estrogen for biological boys, testosterone for biological girls). The only study to date to have followed pre-pubertal children who were socially affirmed and placed on blockers at a young age found that 100 percent of them claimed a transgender identity and chose cross-sex hormones.
This suggests that the medical protocol itself may lead children to identify as transgender.
There is an obvious self-fulfilling effect in helping children impersonate the opposite sex both biologically and socially. This is far from benign, since taking puberty blockers at age 12 or younger, followed by cross-sex hormones, sterilizes a child.
5. Cross-sex hormones are associated with dangerous health risks.
From studies of adults we know that the risks of cross-sex hormones include, but are not limited to, cardiac disease, high blood pressure, blood clots, strokes, diabetes, and cancers.
6. Neuroscience shows that adolescents lack the adult capacity needed for risk assessment.
Scientific data show that people under the age of 21 have less capacity to assess risks. There is a serious ethical problem in allowing irreversible, life-changing procedures to be performed on minors who are too young themselves to give valid consent.
7. There is no proof that affirmation prevents suicide in children.
Advocates of the transition-affirming protocol allege that suicide is the direct and inevitable consequence of withholding social affirmation and biological alterations from a gender-dysphoric child. In other words, those who do not endorse the transition-affirming protocol are essentially condemning gender-dysphoric children to suicide.
Yet as noted earlier, prior to the widespread promotion of transition affirmation, 75 to 95 percent of gender-dysphoric youth ended up happy with their biological sex after simply passing through puberty.
In addition, contrary to the claim of activists, there is no evidence that harassment and discrimination, let alone lack of affirmation, are the primary cause of suicide among any minority group. In fact, at least one study from 2008 found perceived discrimination by LGBT-identified individuals not to be causative.
Over 90 percent of people who commit suicide have a diagnosed mental disorder, and there is no evidence that gender-dysphoric children who commit suicide are any different. Many gender dysphoric children simply need therapy to get to the root of their depression, which very well may be the same problem triggering the gender dysphoria.
8. Transition-affirming protocol has not solved the problem of transgender suicide.
Adults who undergo sex reassignment—even in Sweden, which is among the most LGBT-affirming countries—have a suicide rate nearly 20 times greater than that of the general population. Clearly, sex reassignment is not the solution to gender dysphoria.
The crux of the matter is that while the transition-affirming movement purports to help children, it is inflicting a grave injustice on them and their nondysphoric peers.
These professionals are using the myth that people are born transgender to justify engaging in massive, uncontrolled, and unconsented experimentation on children who have a psychological condition that would otherwise resolve after puberty in the vast majority of cases.
Today’s institutions that promote transition affirmation are pushing children to impersonate the opposite sex, sending many of them down the path of puberty blockers, sterilization, the removal of healthy body parts, and untold psychological damage.
These harms constitute nothing less than institutionalized child abuse. Sound ethics demand an immediate end to the use of pubertal suppression, cross-sex hormones, and sex reassignment surgeries in children and adolescents, as well as an end to promoting gender ideology via school curricula and legislative policies.
It is time for our nation’s leaders and the silent majority of health professionals to learn exactly what is happening to our children, and unite to take action.
COMMENTARY BY
Michelle Cretella, M.D., is president of the American College of Pediatricians, a national organization of pediatricians and other health care professionals dedicated to the health and well-being of children.
Our society and traditional values are at a crossroads. Gender issues and the decline of marriage and family stability is threatening society.
Sensitivity and political correctness are infecting our culture and reshaping our society. Government overreach into our families, local communities, and churches threatens our ability to live productive and free lives.
That is why it is our mission to ensure you receive accurate, timely, and reliable facts impacting our society today. Culture wars dominate the news, and for good reason.
The Daily Signal gives you the facts so you can form opinions, make decisions, and stay informed. And to do that we report clear, concise, and reliable facts impacting every aspect of society today.
We are a dedicated team of more than 100 journalists and policy experts funded solely by the financial support of the general public. And we need your help!
Your financial support will help us fight for access to our nation’s leaders and ensure you have the facts you need (and can trust) to stay informed.
Make a gift to support The Daily Signal today!
RELATED ARTICLES:
Camille Paglia: ‘Transgender Propagandists’ Committing ‘Child Abuse’
Rocklin Is Roiling after Trans School Lesson
EDITORS NOTE: Transition-affirming protocol tells parents to treat their children as the gender they desire, and to place them on puberty blockers at age 11 or 12 if they are gender dysphoric. Featured photo: iStock Photos. Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can’t be done alone. Find out more >>
A major new report, published today in the journal The New Atlantis, challenges the leading narratives that the media has pushed regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.
Co-authored by two of the nation’s leading scholars on mental health and sexuality, the 143-page report discusses over 200 peer-reviewed studies in the biological, psychological, and social sciences, painstakingly documenting what scientific research shows and does not show about sexuality and gender.
The major takeaway, as the editor of the journal explains, is that “some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence.”
Here are four of the report’s most important conclusions:
The belief that sexual orientation is an innate, biologically fixed human property—that people are ‘born that way’—is not supported by scientific evidence.
Likewise, the belief that gender identity is an innate, fixed human property independent of biological sex—so that a person might be a ‘man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’—is not supported by scientific evidence.
Only a minority of children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood. There is no evidence that all such children should be encouraged to become transgender, much less subjected to hormone treatments or surgery.
Non-heterosexual and transgender people have higher rates of mental health problems (anxiety, depression, suicide), as well as behavioral and social problems (substance abuse, intimate partner violence), than the general population. Discrimination alone does not account for the entire disparity.
The report, “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences,” is co-authored by Dr. Lawrence Mayer and Dr. Paul McHugh. Mayer is a scholar-in-residence in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University.
McHugh, whom the editor of The New Atlantis describes as “arguably the most important American psychiatrist of the last half-century,” is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was for 25 years the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was during his tenure as psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins that he put an end to sex reassignment surgery there, after a study launched at Hopkins revealed that it didn’t have the benefits for which doctors and patients had long hoped.
The report focuses exclusively on what scientific research shows and does not show. But this science can have implications for public policy.
The report reviews rigorous research showing that ‘only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.’
Take, for example, our nation’s recent debates over transgender policies in schools. One of the consistent themes of the report is that science does not support the claim that “gender identity” is a fixed property independent of biological sex, but rather that a combination of biological, environmental, and experiential factors likely shape how individuals experience and express themselves when it comes to sex and gender.
The report also discusses the reality of neuroplasticity: that all of our brains can and do change throughout our lives (especially, but not only, in childhood) in response to our behavior and experiences. These changes in the brain can, in turn, influence future behavior.
This provides more reason for concern over the Obama administration’s recent transgender school policies. Beyond the privacy and safety concerns, there is thus also the potential that such policies will result in prolonged identification as transgender for students who otherwise would have naturally grown out of it.
The report reviews rigorous research showing that “only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.” Policymakers should be concerned with how misguided school policies might encourage students to identify as girls when they are boys, and vice versa, and might result in prolonged difficulties. As the report notes, “There is no evidence that all children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior should be encouraged to become transgender.”
Beyond school policies, the report raises concerns about proposed medical intervention in children. Mayer and McHugh write: “We are disturbed and alarmed by the severity and irreversibility of some interventions being publicly discussed and employed for children.”
They continue: “We are concerned by the increasing tendency toward encouraging children with gender identity issues to transition to their preferred gender through medical and then surgical procedures.” But as they note, “There is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of interventions that delay puberty or modify the secondary sex characteristics of adolescents.”
The same goes for social or surgical gender transitions in general. Mayer and McHugh note that the “scientific evidence summarized suggests we take a skeptical view toward the claim that sex reassignment procedures provide the hoped for benefits or resolve the underlying issues that contribute to elevated mental health risks among the transgender population.” Even after sex reassignment surgery, patients with gender dysphoria still experience poor outcomes:
Compared to the general population, adults who have undergone sex reassignment surgery continue to have a higher risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. One study found that, compared to controls, sex-reassigned individuals were about five times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.
Mayer and McHugh urge researchers and physicians to work to better “understand whatever factors may contribute to the high rates of suicide and other psychological and behavioral health problems among the transgender population, and to think more clearly about the treatment options that are available.” They continue:
In reviewing the scientific literature, we find that almost nothing is well understood when we seek biological explanations for what causes some individuals to state that their gender does not match their biological sex. … Better research is needed, both to identify ways by which we can help to lower the rates of poor mental health outcomes and to make possible more informed discussion about some of the nuances present in this field.
Policymakers should take these findings very seriously. For example, the Obama administration recently finalized a new Department of Health and Human Services mandate that requires all health insurance plans under Obamacare to cover sex reassignment treatments and all relevant physicians to perform them. The regulations will force many physicians, hospitals, and other health care providers to participate in sex reassignment surgeries and treatments, even if doing so violates their moral and religious beliefs or their best medical judgment.
Rather than respect the diversity of opinions on sensitive and controversial health care issues, the regulations endorse and enforce one highly contested and scientifically unsupported view. As Mayer and McHugh urge, more research is needed, and physicians need to be free to practice the best medicine.
The report also highlights that people who identify as LGBT face higher risks of adverse physical and mental health outcomes, such as “depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and most alarmingly, suicide.” The report summarizes some of those findings:
Members of the non-heterosexual population are estimated to have about 1.5 times higher risk of experiencing anxiety disorders than members of the heterosexual population, as well as roughly double the risk of depression, 1.5 times the risk of substance abuse, and nearly 2.5 times the risk of suicide.
Members of the transgender population are also at higher risk of a variety of mental health problems compared to members of the non-transgender population. Especially alarmingly, the rate of lifetime suicide attempts across all ages of transgender individuals is estimated at 41 percent, compared to under 5 percent in the overall U.S. population.
What accounts for these tragic outcomes? Mayer and McHugh investigate the leading theory—the “social stress model”—which proposes that “stressors like stigma and prejudice account for much of the additional suffering observed in these subpopulations.”
But they argue that the evidence suggests that this theory “does not seem to offer a complete explanation for the disparities in the outcomes.” It appears that social stigma and stress alone cannot account for the poor physical and mental health outcomes that LGBT-identified people face.
One study found that, compared to controls, sex-reassigned individuals were about five times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.
As a result, they conclude that “More research is needed to uncover the causes of the increased rates of mental health problems in the LGBT subpopulations.” And they call on all of us work to “alleviate suffering and promote human health and flourishing.”
Finally, the report notes that scientific evidence does not support the claim that people are “born that way” with respect to sexual orientation. The narrative pushed by Lady Gaga and others is not supported by the science. A combination of biological, environmental, and experiential factors likely account for an individual’s sexual attractions, desires, and identity, and “there are no compelling causal biological explanations for human sexual orientation.”
Furthermore, the scientific research shows that sexual orientation is more fluid than the media suggests. The report notes that “Longitudinal studies of adolescents suggest that sexual orientation may be quite fluid over the life course for some people, with one study estimating that as many as 80 percent of male adolescents who report same-sex attractions no longer do so as adults.”
These findings—that scientific research does not support the claim that sexual orientation is innate and immutable—directly contradict claims made by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in last year’s Obergefell ruling. Kennedy wrote, “their immutable nature dictates that same-sex marriage is their only real path to this profound commitment” and “in more recent years have psychiatrists and others recognized that sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable.”
But the science does not show this.
While the marriage debate was about the nature of what marriage is, incorrect scientific claims about sexual orientation were consistently used in the campaign to redefine marriage.
In the end, Mayer and McHugh observe that much about sexuality and gender remains unknown. They call for honest, rigorous, and dispassionate research to help better inform public discourse and, more importantly, sound medical practice.
As this research continues, it’s important that public policy not declare scientific debates over, or rush to legally enforce and impose contested scientific theories. As Mayer and McHugh note, “Everyone—scientists and physicians, parents and teachers, lawmakers and activists—deserves access to accurate information about sexual orientation and gender identity.”
We all must work to foster a culture where such information can be rigorously pursued and everyone—whatever their convictions, and whatever their personal situation—is treated with the civility, respect, and generosity that each of us deserves.
COMMENTARY BY
Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation, where he researches and writes about marriage, bioethics, religious liberty and political philosophy. Anderson is the author of several books and his research has been cited by two U.S. Supreme Court justices in two separate cases. Read his Heritage research.
Our society and traditional values are at a crossroads. Gender issues and the decline of marriage and family stability is threatening society.
Sensitivity and political correctness are infecting our culture and reshaping our society. Government overreach into our families, local communities, and churches threatens our ability to live productive and free lives.
That is why it is our mission to ensure you receive accurate, timely, and reliable facts impacting our society today. Culture wars dominate the news, and for good reason.
The Daily Signal gives you the facts so you can form opinions, make decisions, and stay informed. And to do that we report clear, concise, and reliable facts impacting every aspect of society today.
We are a dedicated team of more than 100 journalists and policy experts funded solely by the financial support of the general public. And we need your help!
Your financial support will help us fight for access to our nation’s leaders and ensure you have the facts you need (and can trust) to stay informed.
Make a gift to support The Daily Signal today!
Recently, during a radio show on which I appeared as a guest, a caller posed a question I frequently get asked: “Do the administration of cross-gender hormones and genital surgery change a boy into a girl or a girl into a boy?”
The answer is simple: biologically, not at all.
Underneath all the cosmetic procedures, vocal training, and hair growth or hair removal lies a physical reality. Biologically, the person has not changed from a man into a woman or vice versa.
Sex is an indelible fact of a person’s biology. Specifically, it describes one’s biological makeup with respect to its organization for reproduction. As Lawrence S. Mayer and Paul R. McHugh explain in The New Atlantis:
In biology, an organism is male or female if it is structured to perform one of the respective roles in reproduction. This definition does not require any arbitrary measurable or quantifiable physical characteristics or behaviors; it requires understanding the reproductive system and the reproduction process.
The authors go on to note that “[t]here is no other widely accepted biological classification for the sexes.” Sex pertains to the two different ways males and females are structured for reproduction, and these structures are permanently engrained in one’s biology. They cannot be chosen at will.
A man can mutilate his body, but he can never transform it to be organized as a female—and vice versa for the woman.
This makes sense of the head-snapping (and false) headline many of us saw about a man having a baby. The “man” featured in the story is simply a biological woman who kept her childbearing anatomy intact.
My “sex change” surgery from male to female was performed by Dr. Stanley Biber in Trinidad, Colorado.
His unusual field of expertise drew clients from around the world and earned the small mountain town the nickname “Sex Change Capital of the World.” The surgeon estimated that he performed over 5,000 such surgeries during his career.
I lived legally and socially as a female for eight years, but I came to the realization that I wanted to go back to living as a man. To legally change my gender back to male, I needed to file a petition with the California Superior Court that verified I met certain criteria. (The process has since changed.)
My surgeon wrote a letter to the court stating that I met the medical criteria for the courts to legally change my birth certificate back to male. The very surgeon who earlier said that hormones and surgery had changed me to female, now admitted that it did not.
In the letter, he testified that the surgery and cross-gender hormones had the effect of neutering my external appearance and genitalia, but my internal biological structure and my genetics were still male.
That’s the key to understand: Hormones and surgical changes can affect one’s external appearance, but no innate biological change of sex occurs.
This truth should seem obvious, but discontented trans women contact me who say they didn’t know that they could never become a “real” woman. They are unhappy and opting to go back to the gender of their birth.
A 2004 U.K. Guardian article, “Sex Changes Not Effective,” points out:
“While no doubt great care is taken to ensure that appropriate patients undergo gender reassignment, there’s still a large number of people who have the surgery but remain traumatized—often to the point of committing suicide.”
Too many post-surgical patients contact me to report they deeply regret the gender change surgery and that the false hope of surgical outcomes was a factor. For children, the focus on encouraging, assisting, and affirming them toward changing genders at earlier and earlier ages, with no research showing the outcomes, may lead to more suicides.
A growing number of people like me, 50 years after the first surgery at Johns Hopkins University Gender Clinic in 1966, are advocating the scaling back of the radical, irreversible, often unnecessary genital mutilation surgeries.
Rene Jax, in his 2016 book, “DON’T Get on The Plane!” says, “Sex change surgery will ruin your life.”
Jax and I have had similar experiences. Both of us were approved for hormones and surgery to resolve our gender dysphoria, and after following the medically prescribed full regimen of hormones and genitalia surgery, and living as women, both of us came away with the same conclusions:
Based on the emails I receive, I would urge the person who thinks that gender change is the answer in their situation to delay any surgical changes, or at the very least to restrict any physical changes to ones that are reversible.
This is especially important for younger people who may want to have children one day.
Today in 10 states, only a verbal declaration and a doctor’s letter supporting the change are needed to legally change the gender on a birth certificate. Cross-gender hormones or surgery are not required. Only 10 states affirm that surgery and hormones do not change biology.
Studies show that two-thirds of people with gender dysphoria have co-existing disorders, such as depression and anxiety.
I’ve become an outspoken critic of gender reassignment surgeries because many people are not being treated for other co-existing problems first. Instead, they are quickly prescribed cross-gender hormones and shuttled on a path toward surgery.
But as noted earlier, this surgery cannot succeed in delivering what it promises. It will only mutilate the body, a far cry from the promised “sex change.”
Walt Heyer is an author and public speaker. Through his website, SexChangeRegret.com, and his blog, WaltHeyer.com, Heyer raises public awareness about those who regret gender change and the tragic consequences suffered as a result.
Our society and traditional values are at a crossroads. Gender issues and the decline of marriage and family stability is threatening society.
Sensitivity and political correctness are infecting our culture and reshaping our society. Government overreach into our families, local communities, and churches threatens our ability to live productive and free lives.
That is why it is our mission to ensure you receive accurate, timely, and reliable facts impacting our society today. Culture wars dominate the news, and for good reason.
The Daily Signal gives you the facts so you can form opinions, make decisions, and stay informed. And to do that we report clear, concise, and reliable facts impacting every aspect of society today.
We are a dedicated team of more than 100 journalists and policy experts funded solely by the financial support of the general public. And we need your help!
Your financial support will help us fight for access to our nation’s leaders and ensure you have the facts you need (and can trust) to stay informed.
Make a gift to support The Daily Signal today!
RELATED ARTICLES:
Almost Everything the Media Tell You About Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Is Wrong
EDITORS NOTE: According to the most widely accepted definition of “sex” and America’s most famous sex-change doctor, a true change of sex is biologically impossible. Featured image: iStock Photos.
A report by “CBSN: On Assignment” earlier this week illustrates the sad bleakness of Planned Parenthood’s abortion agenda.
National Review draws attention to the potential confusion from the second half of CBS’s “casually worded” headline, which reads, “Inside the country where Down syndrome disappearing” as if one might assume “Iceland has developed an innovative treatment for the chromosomal disorder.” [article continues below]
However, the report exposes a dark reality: in Iceland, nearly 100% of babies testing positive for Down syndrome in prenatal screenings are aborted. For comparison, an estimated 67% of pregnancies with a diagnosis for Down syndrome in the United States end in abortion.
Geneticist Kari Stefansson explained why Iceland’s incidence of abortion in these cases is nearly universal:
It reflects a relatively heavy-handed genetic counseling. And I don’t think that heavy-handed genetic counseling is desirable. … You’re having impact on decisions that are not medical, in a way.
The depravity of this heavy-handed counseling is not lost on Concerned Women for America CEO Penny Nance who said:
Iceland sounds like they are proud of the fact that they’ve killed nearly all unborn babies that had an in-utero diagnosis of Down syndrome. This is not a medical advancement. This is eugenics and barbarianism at best. These individuals have no less worth than anyone else.
What is the next headline going to be? That a certain country has eradicated all females. Oh wait, China has already been down that road. There is no limit to this train of thought of devaluing human life.
We would add that Planned Parenthood would be proud of the very same thing.
In 2016, Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, with the help of the ACLU, sued the State of Indiana to prevent the implementation of House Enrolled Act 1337, a law that prohibited abortions for genetic abnormalities including Down syndrome. HEA 1337 also mandated the remains of an aborted fetus could only be disposed of through burial or cremation, a measure that would possibly limit Planned Parenthood’s practice of selling body parts for profit.
According to Live Action, a pro-life organization, “Planned Parenthood does not object to abortion on the basis of the child’s sex or disability.” Live Action has also conducted investigations into Planned Parenthood’s promotion of sex-selective abortion which can be viewed here.
Indeed, Planned Parenthood’s record of preventing the prohibition of abortion on the basis of disability and sex is troubling. However, the fact that many corporations use our shopping dollars to fund these appalling practices is even more troubling, and it is important for conservatives and all who value life to hold these companies accountable.
Visit our Planned Parenthood Resource Page to see which companies have a direct financial relationship with the country’s largest abortion provider and contact them through their scorepages.
RELATED ARTICLES:
Trump Gets Key Win From 8th Circuit on defunding of Planned Parenthood
The Sordid History of Eugenics in America
Policy Science Kills: The Case of Eugenics by Jeffrey A. Tucker
How States Got Away with Sterilizing 60,000 Americans by Trevor Burrus
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the 2ndVote.com website. Readers may help 2ndVote continue creating content like this and educating conservative shoppers by becoming a 2ndVote Member today!
The Mark Steyn Club notes:
Longtime SteynOnline regulars will be familiar with the demographic thesis Mark outlined in his 2006 international bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. Almost the entire developed world is mired in deathbed demography from which no functioning society has ever recovered. Meanwhile, there is a demographic tsunami underway from the non-functioning parts of the world, manifest in the ceaseless flotilla of boats crossing the Mediterranean every single day (and nothing to do with civil war in Syria).
Mark’s book was a big success a decade ago and remains in print. But it is a melancholy fact that most people in the western world remain entirely unaware of this remorseless arithmetic or its likely consequences. So this brand new SteynPost is a kind of primer on recent demographic developments, and where they lead.
Click below to watch:
In 2010, the small town of Collegedale, Tennessee had the dubious distinction of having the highest prevalence of Type II Diabetes in the world. Without a single endocrinologist in the small town, those suffering from this preventable and treatable form of the disease were unable to gain access to the treatment they needed.
Dealing with this issue firsthand, a local employer who operates a donut manufacturing plant decided to dedicate a portion of his warehouse to be used as a health clinic. By hiring an endocrinologist from Chattanooga to travel to his warehouse a few days a week, his employees were finally able to receive the help they so desperately needed.
The employer reasoned that the prices associated with the hiring of an endocrinologist were actually less costly for the company than the insurance expenses related to the disease.
The donut maker’s free market solution solved the problem of constrained supply of medical professionals for his employees. But this disconnect between supply and demand exists far beyond Collegedale. In fact, the country is experiencing a shortage of doctors in virtually all specialties and every state, which begs the question, where are all the doctors?
A Choreographed Shortage of Care
Though few Americans realize it, health care is a monopoly. In the early 20th century, the American Medical Association (AMA) lobbied the Federal government to close all schools not approved by its own Council on Medical Education. They unfortunately succeeded and 30 percent of medical schools were closed within 30 years. The number of doctors has been artificially capped ever since.
The AMA also controls state boards of licensing, limiting the number of physicians in each state and preventing competitors from treating patients. The United States has 50 percent fewer practicing physicians per capita than Sweden or Germany. Unsurprisingly, US doctors also work fewer hours while earning much higher salaries.
Even as the US population and its demand for medical services continue to expand dramatically, the number of new doctors educated by “approved” schools and licensed by state boards hasn’t improved. In fact, two-thirds of highly qualified medical school applicants are turned away each year.
Licensing quotas and arbitrary caps set by state boards literally make it illegal to train a single additional candidate in the medical field. Inevitably, where there is a shortage, prices rise for everyone. This results in smaller and poorer markets being shut out altogether. Even if the additional physicians were “B list” doctors from sub par medical schools, smaller towns like Collegedale would still be better off with a “B-” doctor than no doctor at all.
Cartels Protecting Doctors
Both directly or indirectly, the AMA also controls the prices paid to physicians, the licensing of physicians, the accreditation of medical schools, admittance into medical schools, and the payment policies of insurance companies. The AMA runs on membership fees, and its mission is protecting the interests of current doctors, not the American public.
Fewer doctors mean higher salaries, less competition, and more negotiating power for physicians. This is allowed to happen because physicians, like any other group of citizens, are free to associate and express their interests through donations.
What should outrage all US patients is the collusion of our government under the guise of protecting the public interest by requiring licenses and letting a cartel of campaign donors say who can have one.
Not only can the cartel set prices but the taxpayer is also forced to fund the muscle to shut down and jail those caught trying to circumvent the government-protected monopoly.
Similar federal regulatory monopolies prevent generic drugs from competing with big brands, block the building of new health care facilities, and limit health insurers to two or three per state. Our health care options shrink as special interests’ regulatory control grows resulting in fewer drugs, fewer doctors, fewer plans, and fewer choices.
Less Government, More Choices
Like US consumers in all markets, the residents of Collegedale need the freedom to access more health care choices. Allowing lobbyists to block out competition limits everyone’s choices and forces them to pay higher prices for less access to care.
If Americans want real choice, they need to demand that Congress end the AMA’s control of medical school enrollments and licensing. If more Americans could become doctors without first asking the government’s permission, more Americans could receive medical care without the state’s help.
Travis Klavohn is a management consultant, political activist for limited government, and a resident of Georgia’s 13th Congressional District. Follow his politics blog at www.travisklavohn.com.
Dr. Laura Williams teaches communication strategy to undergraduates and executives. She is a passionate advocate for critical thinking, individual liberties, and the Oxford Comma.
Dr. Kelli Ward, candidate for U.S. Senate Arizona.
TEMPE, Ariz /PRNewswire/ — Today the Ward for Senate campaign has announced that the founder and top operative of the largest Super PAC supporting the President in 2016, Great America PAC, have joined the campaign. Eric Beach was founder and co-chair and Brent Lowder served as Executive Director of Great America PAC, which raised and spent nearly $30 million in support of President Trump’s candidacy in 2016. The two respected operatives will help lead Kelli Ward’s campaign to defeat Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona in 2018.
“Eric and Brent are highly accomplished political operatives with strong track records of success. They played an important role in the election of President Trump and are now committed to helping me to send Jeff Flake into retirement next year,” said Ward. “We are excited to have them join the team and know they will have an immediate positive impact on our campaign.”
“Kelli Ward is a strong, thoughtful leader and will be a hardworking, dedicated Senator in Washington that all Arizonans can be proud of,” said Beach. “Senator Jeff Flake has continually failed Arizona and is more interested in selling his new book by attacking the President than actually serving his constituents and getting things done. Arizona deserves far better from their Senator.”
Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart called Starbucks to see if new refugee hires (see my post earlier) will be tested for TB as part of their employment screening. Surprise! No response!
From Breitbart:
Starbucks held a hiring event exclusively for refugees in El Cajon, California on Tuesday, part of its recently announced commitment to hire more than 10,000 refugees over the next five years.
El Cajon is located in San Diego County, where more than 20,000 refugees have have been resettled by the federal government in the past nine and a half years since the beginning of Fiscal Year 2008.
A 2013 study from a research team led by Dr. Timothy Rodwell, “an associate professor and physician in the Division of Global Health at UCSD [University of California at San Diego]” that “analyzed data from LTBI [latent tuberculosis infection] screening results of 4,280 refugees resettled in San Diego County between January 2010 and October 2012,” noted that “San Diego County, in California, is a leading refugee resettlement site, and it also has one of the highest rates of active TB in the country, with an incidence rate of 8.4 cases per 100 000 people in 2011.”
[….]
In other words, the incidence of active TB among the 4,280 refugees who were resettled in San Diego County between January 2010 and October 2012 was 327 per 100,000, more than 100 times greater than the incidence of active TB among the entire population of the United States in 2016.
Wow! I didn’t know this next bit! Refugee contractors*** repeatedly tell the public that only those with latent TB are admitted to the US, but even if that is all we are admitting, that is still a risk for public health.
About four percent of the entire population of the United States tests positive for latent TB infection. Around 10 percent of those with LTBI will develop active TB at some point in their lives. The triggering mechanism to activate latent TB is not entirely understood, but high levels of stress, crowded living situations, poor public health practices, the presence of other diseases that lower the immune system, and behavioral conduct–such as smoking–appear to increase the chances of activation.
The 21.4 percent of refugees in the San Diego County study who tested positive for latent TB infection is about five times the national average.
Breitbart News contacted Starbucks to learn if their refugee hiring process will include mandatory testing for latent and active TB, but has not received a response.
Of course not!
See my ‘health issues’ category with hundreds of posts on refugee health problems including mental health issues.
For those who ask me all the time—what can I do? Write to the White House and tell the President to tighten up admission requirements for migrants with communicable diseases.
If terrorism doesn’t scare you, TB might!
*** For new readers, the International Rescue Committee is one of the Federal contractors/middlemen/employment agencies/propagandists/lobbyists/community organizers? paid by you to place refugees in your towns and cities listed below. Under the nine major contractors are hundreds of subcontractors.
The contractors income is largely dependent on taxpayer dollars based on the number of refugees admitted to the US, but they also receive myriad grants to service their “New Americans.”
If you are a good-hearted soul and think refugee resettlement is all about humanitarianism, think again! Big businesses/global corporations like Starbucks depend on the free flow of cheap (some call it slave) labor.
And, I have a question for you: As a volunteer are you given instructions on how to spot communicable diseases like TB in the refugee community you are helping? (See symptoms at left).
The only way for real reform of how the US admits refugees is to remove these contractors/Leftwing activists/big business head hunters from the process.
RELATED ARTICLE: 43 Percent Latent TB Rates Among Sub-Saharan Refugees in San Diego County Interviewed for Jobs at Starbucks – Breitbart
Two opinion pieces published this week, today in the Wall Street Journal and Monday in USA Today (see next story), challenge one of the marijuana lobby’s favorite assertions, advanced by Senator Cory Booker as the basis for a federal marijuana legalization bill he introduced last week.
Senator Booker’s bill, the Marijuana Justice Act, would encourage states to legalize pot for recreational use and withhold federal funds from those that don’t but incarcerate “low-income individuals and people of color for marijuana-related offences.” The senator says he believes nationwide legalization will end the racial disparity in US drug arrests.
Jason L. Riley, Wall Street Journal editorial board member, refutes this assertion. “Violent offences, not drug offences, drive incarceration rates, and blacks commit violent crimes at seven to 10 times the rate whites do,” Riley says. “Data from 2015, the most recent available, show that about 53 percent of people in state prisons (which house nearly 90 percent of the nation’s inmates) were imprisoned for violent crimes, 19 percent for property crimes, and just 16 percent for drug crimes.”
He says altering US drug laws would do little to change the racial make-up of people behind bars, adding that “marijuana offenders of any race occupy relatively few jail and prison cells, and the ones who do tend to be dealers.”
He quotes public defender James Forman who writes in his new book, Locking Up Our Own, “For every ten thousand people behind bars in America, only six are there because of marijuana possession.”
Read today’s Wall Street Journal editorial here.
USA Today opinion contributor Jeff Hunt, vice president of public policy at Colorado Christian University, also challenges the assertion that legalization will end racial disparities in the criminal justice system. He notes Coloradans heard similar promises in 2012 when citizens voted to legalize marijuana for recreational use.
He says black youth arrests for marijuana possession have increased 58 percent and Latino youth arrests have increased 29 percent since legalization, according to the Colorado Department of Public Safety. “This means that black and Latino youth are being arrested more for marijuana possession after it became legal,” he adds.
“In the years since,” he continues, “Colorado has seen an increase in marijuana-related traffic deaths, poison-control calls, and emergency-room visits. The marijuana black market has increased in Colorado, not decreased. And, numerous Colorado marijuana regulators have been indicted for corruption.”
Moreover, the state’s youth have the highest rate of marijuana use in the nation, 74 percent higher than the national average, he says.
“We’ve seen the effects in our neighborhoods in Colorado, and this is nothing we wish upon the nation,” he concludes.
Read USA Today opinion piece here.
Editorial note: The No More Drug War posters in the photo above are part of a campaign by the Drug Policy Alliance to legalize all illicit drugs. One of the organization’s platforms is based on its stated belief that Americans are guaranteed a constitutional right to use all addictive drugs, including heroin and methamphetamine.
The Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (NWHIDTA) has issued its second Marijuana Impact Report for the state of Washington since that state began implementing the recreational use of marijuana in July 2014. This massive report covers ten major areas; we highlight findings about youth here. Data for treatment admissions (above) pertain to the first quarter of 2016.
A few other highlights about youth include:
We are unable to provide a link to this new report today but will publish one as soon as the report is posted to the Internet.
About the Marijuana Report
The Marijuana Report is a weekly e-newsletter published by National Families in Action in partnership with SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana). Visit our website, The Marijuana Report.Org, to learn more about the marijuana story unfolding across the nation.
SUBSCRIBE to The Marijuana Report.
SUBSCRIBE to Spanish edition of The Marijuana Report.
About National Families in Action (NFIA)
NFIA consists of families, scientists, business leaders, physicians, addiction specialists, policymakers, and others committed to protecting children from addictive drugs. Our vision is:
About SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana)
SAM is a nonpartisan alliance of lawmakers, scientists and other concerned citizens who want to move beyond simplistic discussions of “incarceration versus legalization” when discussing marijuana use and instead focus on practical changes in marijuana policy that neither demonizes users nor legalizes the drug. SAM supports a treatment, health-first marijuana policy. SAM has four main goals:
Anne Hendershott looks at the decline in male fertility, due partly to the Pill. Clearly, it’s time to consider the sociology and science surrounding the culture of “reproductive rights.”
The recent research revelation that sperm counts for men living in the West have plunged by 60 percent since 1971 provides readers of P. D. James’s great dystopian novel, The Children of Men, with a prediction of an unsettling future for a society that can no longer reproduce. Set in Britain in 2021, James’s frightening fiction described a world of mass infertility among males – a world in which no children have been born in more than twenty-five years. In the novel, the last baby to be born is now an adult, and the population is growing steadily older. And, like today’s reality, James’s scientists have failed to find a cure – or even a cause – for the sterility.
Publishing their most recent findings in the journal Human Reproduction Update, the researchers – from Israel, the United States, Denmark, Brazil, and Spain – concluded that the total sperm count had fallen by 59.3 percent between 1971 and 2011 in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand.
Some scientists are claiming that “modern living” has caused serious damage to men’s health. Pesticides, pollution, diet, stress, smoking, and obesity have all been plausibly associated with the problem. But far fewer men smoke cigarettes than ever before, and the pollution and pesticide controls that the government has implemented in the past forty years have alleviated many of these risks.
Besides, during the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, men faced much greater health risks from factory work during a time when there were no OSHA regulations on air quality. There were few fertility problems at that time as families were large – and no one worried about sperm counts.
Click here to read the rest of Professor Hendershott’s column . . .
Anne Hendershott is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio. She is the author of The Politics of Deviance (Encounter Books).
Google lobbyists are blitzing members of the U.S. Congress to stop their efforts to combat online sex trafficking by amending section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) in the respective bills S. 1693 and H.R. 1865.
As currently interpreted by U.S. federal courts, Section 230 of the CDA grants broad immunity to Internet platforms for third-party posts, even to websites that intentionally facilitate sex trafficking online such as Backpage.com.
Research by Consumer Watchdog reveals that Google has provided millions of dollars to support Backpage’s legal defense. Much of that legal defense hinges on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA).
Moreover, a Harvard professor uncovered that in 2011 that Google earned over a billion dollars in revenue from unlawful advertising they had failed to block which included child sex trafficking.
Tech lobbyists are claiming that this law is an attack on free speech, but this is only an attack on criminal acts (read more myths vs facts about this legislation here.)
Google has an army of lobbyists and a trove of financial resources, so if you are fighting to defend women, children, and men from trafficking or prostitution or sexual violence then your voice is needed in this effort!
Ways you can take action:
Thank you for taking a stand!
RELATED ARTICLES:
KEEPING YOUR KIDS SAFE IN THE INFORMATION AGE by The Carlson Law Firm
Google Fires Diversity Manifesto Author James Damore For WrongThink
Google Fires Viewpoint Diversity Manifesto Author James Damore – Breitbart
Silencing ALL opposition voices: Inside The Media Matters Playbook | | Media Equalizer
The most rigorous study to date shows that college students in the Netherlands who are denied access to “cannabis cafes,” do better academically than their peers who are allowed to frequent them.
The Dutch have permitted marijuana to be sold and consumed in cafes that are strictly regulated, may not sell other drugs or advertise, and are swiftly shut down if they fail to comply with regulations.
The Dutch town of Maastricht, which is close to the borders of Germany, Belgium, France, and Luxembourg, experienced a problem with drug tourism. People from those countries came to Maastrict to buy marijuana legally; those from Luxembourg and France created most of the problems. So Maastrict authorities denied citizens from Luxembourg and France access to the cafes.
But students from all five nations attend Maastrict University. The town’s policy change gave researchers a natural experiment to determine whether legalization vs. prohibition in the same student body makes a difference in their academic performance.
In fact, it does. Students banned from the cafes, who were less likely to use marijuana and suffer cognitive deficits from its use, experienced a 5 percent increase in their odds of passing their courses. The beneficial effect was even more pronounced for students at risk of dropping out.
The authors conclude:
We have investigated how restricting cannabis access affects student achievements, finding that the performance of students who lose legal access to cannabis substantially improves. Our analysis of underlying channels suggests that the effects are specifically driven by an improvement in numerical skills, which existing literature has found to be particularly impaired by cannabis consumption. This article provides the first causal evidence that restricting legal access to cannabis affects college students’ short-term study performance. We believe that our findings also imply that individuals change their consumption behavior when the legal status of a drug changes.
Read Washington Post article here. Read research paper here.
As the assertion continues that marijuana is a safe and effective alternate to opioids for pain relief, the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) takes issue with the scientific validity of a new study that intensifies the claim.
“Cannabis as a Substitute for Opioid-Based Pain Relief,” a new study, “demonstrates several distortions that can and do arise with the current enthusiasm for cannabis as a panacea,” says William Haning, MD, editor-in-chief of ASAM Weekly.
Dr. Haning notes that Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research “is an online open access periodical published by an enterprise that captures specialty niches.”
He continues, “The article and the accompanying polemical editorial which asserts ‘that cannabis is a safe, non-addictive product,’ suffer from the illusion of balanced scientific inquiry.”
He goes on from there. Read his ASAM Weekly editorial here. Read Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research study here.
In an oddly titled article, which appears to blame drug testing rather than drug use, the New York Times reports that the middle-class factory jobs President Trump promised to bring back from overseas are going begging because applicants can’t pass drug tests.
“Indeed, the opioid epidemic and, to some extent, wider marijuana use are hitting businesses and the economy in ways that are beginning to be acknowledged by policy makers and other experts,” notes the article.
One expert says the drug issue keeps workers who are trapped in low-paying jobs from securing better-paying, blue-collar positions and a toehold in the middle class.
The Times, whose editorial board called for full marijuana legalization a few years ago, observes that “workplace considerations – not social conservatism or imposition of traditional mores – make employee drug use an issue.”
The owner of a boiler-making factory in Youngstown, Ohio, explains why. “The lightest product we make is 1,500 pounds, and they go up to 250,000 pounds. If something goes wrong, it won’t hurt our workers. It’ll kill them.”
Maybe traditional mores like safety concerns have value after all.
Read New York Times article here.
Medical marijuana laws vary greatly from state to state. A few require employers to accommodate workers’ medical marijuana use when possible. Most don’t.
This map demonstrates the current status of the differing requirements of state marijuana laws.
Read blog entry here (second story).
Escalating marijuana use in adolescence may lead to higher rates of depression and lower educational achievement in adulthood, a new study published in Addictionfinds.
Researchers interviewed 159 boys and young men who were part of a longitudinal study of males at high risk for antisocial behaviors and other problems based on low income, family size, and gender.
At age 20, each participant reported whether and how much marijuana they used each year since they started. Their brains were also scanned.
The “boys who started occasionally using marijuana around 15 or 16 years old and had a dramatic increase in use by the time they were 19 had the greatest dysfunction in brain reward circuitry, the highest rates of depression, and the lowest educational achievements,” say the researchers.
“Though the results do not show a direct causal link,” they say, “it’s important to note that even though most people think marijuana isn’t harmful, it may have severe consequences for some people’s functioning, education, and mood.”
Read Science Daily article here. Read Addiction abstract here.
Researchers at the University of Montreal, pictured above, find that going from occasional to weekly or daily marijuana use increases an adolescent’s risk of having recurrent, psychotic-like experiences by 159 percent.
Although marijuana causes many kinds of cognitive problems, “the development of inhibitory control was the only cognitive function negatively affected by an increase in marijuana use,” say the researchers.
“Our results show that while marijuana use is associated with a number of cognitive and mental health symptoms, only an increase in symptoms of depression — such as negative thoughts and low mood — could explain the relationship between marijuana use and increasing psychotic-like experiences in youth,” the lead researcher said.
Read Science Daily article here. Read Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatryabstract here.
Young people (ages 12-15) with chronic or severe depression are at elevated risk of developing a marijuana-use disorder in later adolescence.
Researchers at the University of Washington, pictured above, collected data from 521 students recruited from four Seattle middle schools and conducted annual assessments of the students at ages 12-15 and then again at age 18.
The scientists found that a “one standard deviation increase” in cumulative depression during early adolescence produced a 50 percent higher likelihood of marijuana-use disorder at age 18.
They were surprised to see that the prevalence of both alcohol-use disorder and marijuana-use disorder were higher among their students than national averages. What effect marijuana legalization in Washington may have had on these outcomes is not clear.
They point out that a similar study in another state that has not legalized the drug would clarify the issue.
Read Science Daily article here. Read Addiction abstract here.
Note:
After publishing our story about Georgia Representative Allen Peake last week, we came across a video on Haleigh’s Hope Facebook page in which Rep. Peake explains how he is violating federal law by distributing a Schedule I drug throughout the state. We posted the video on The Marijuana Report’s Facebook page. You can see it here.
The Marijuana Report is a weekly e-newsletter published by National Families in Action in partnership with SAM (Smart Approaches to Marijuana). Visit our website, The Marijuana Report.Org, to learn more about the marijuana story unfolding across the nation.
SUBSCRIBE to The Marijuana Report.
SUBSCRIBE to Spanish edition of The Marijuana Report.
As we’ve previously covered a number of times, the Hearing Protection Act (HPA) is a federal bill to reduce the burdensome and antiquated acquisition process for firearm suppressors. The bill would eliminate the excessive wait times (sometimes as long as a year) and the burdensome tax on transferring or making a suppressor.
Support for the HPA among gun owners remains very strong. The HPA has been one of the most viewed bills on Congress.gov since its introduction in January, and it has regularly been the most popular bill on the site. But, now more than ever, Congress needs to hear this support.
As members of Congress return to their home states and districts for the August recess, they often focus on constituent services, so now is a very opportune time to contact your elected representatives.
Please contact your U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative and urge them to support and cosponsor the HPA.
If they already are a cosponsor, please thank them for their support.
As the debate continues to rage in Washington, D.C., and around the country regarding the fate of Obamacare, one elegantly simple concept that would have a dramatic impact on healthcare costs is being drowned out by inflammatory rhetoric.
Out-of-pocket payment (OPP) by consumers for routine medical care would transform the system from one dominated by third party payers toward a model that would put consumers in charge of their healthcare dollars, and for the first time unleash market disciplines into the equation.
After all, we can all only imagine what our grocery carts would look like, not to mention our restaurant tabs, if a third party was paying for our food. Unfortunately, out-of-pocket payments have steadily trended down over the last 60 years and now account for only 10.5% of healthcare expenditures.
It is both stunning and disconcerting that the myriad of benefits that flow from a competitive, market driven system have never, in any substantial way, penetrated the healthcare and medical services arena. However, one striking exception to this competitive wet blanket is the $15 billion cosmetic surgery industry, the poster child for out of pocket payments, where innovation and price disinflation have been hallmarks for decades. Examples abound.
As Mark Perry has pointed out on his brilliant economic blog, Carpe Diem, over the past 19 years, the 20 most popular cosmetic procedures have increased at a rate 32% below the consumer price index (CPI) and 68% below the rate of medical services inflation.
Thus, the backbone of a productive reform plan must include a move away from third parties and employers controlling health care dollars toward individuals holding sway over their medical purse strings.
This would mean that the “employer contribution” that currently is used to fund corporate group policies would transition to an increase in an employee’s compensation, which would be funneled tax-free into a robust health savings account (HSA) that the employee would control for routine medical expenses.
As Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute has pointed out, “The employer contribution for health care is part of a worker’s earnings and averages $13,000 per family. Yet the tax code gives control over that money to employers rather than the workers who earned it.”
Importantly, this HSA would be paired with a high-deductible catastrophic policy and also be valid in the individual marketplace. Additionally, this would go a long way in helping to solve the portability issue that some employees face when changing jobs or careers.Essential to making these individual plans more attractive and affordable would be the abolition of both the “community rating” and “essential health benefits” mandates currently embedded in Obamacare policies. These concepts make a mockery of a legitimate, actuarially sound insurance market by shifting costs from older and sicker people to younger and healthier people, thus promoting adverse selection.
Without these constraints, families could focus on basic and affordable policies that would better match their needs and also begin building a “rainy day health fund” via their HSA accounts.
Regarding both Medicaid and pre-existing conditions, a strong dose of old fashioned, Tenth Amendment-oriented federalism is long overdue in dealing with these issues.
In fact, both from a philosophical and practical standpoint, they should never have come under the purview of the federal government and are best left to the individual states where diverse, vibrant, and innovative solutions could be implemented. This could include the establishment of reinsurance programs and high-risk pools for those with pre-existing conditions, and the phasing out of the open-ended federal entitlement status of Medicaid through a multi-year block grant program.
The current third party payment/community rating model for delivering healthcare is unsustainable and rapidly headed for the dreaded “death spiral,” which occurs when an escalation of sick people flock to the exchanges for insurance, while an increasing number of healthy people choose to leave the market. In fact, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini has recently acknowledged as much.
Make no mistake, Obamacare was designed to invariably lead to a government-run, single-payer model, with its global budgeting, rationing of care, and long wait times for vital procedures in tow.
Without swift and decisive intervention with a system based on patient-centered choice and market mechanisms, the end result will be a Veterans Affairs (VA)-like model that would combine the worst aspects of government inefficiencies and substandard care.
A quick glance at the dismal state of Great Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), Canada’s single payer scheme, or our own insolvent Medicare and Medicaid plans provides Americans with an acutely unpleasant hint of what is in store if a single-payer model does indeed transpire.
Mr. Bowen joined Bowen, Hanes & Company, Inc. in 1986. As the firm’s Chief Investment Officer and economic strategist, Mr. Bowen is responsible for the formulation and implementation of the firm’s economic and investment strategies.
