Actor Jim Carrey ridiculed President Donald Trump for making the Grim Reaper jealous with his latest painting.

“Grim Reaper officially jealous of Trump and GOP’s ability to double the death toll,” the piece said, with a picture of Trump and the Grim Reaper with a raised middle finger.

pic.twitter.com/fEhggYsfxn

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) May 11, 2020

NoelCaslerComedy

@CaslerNoel

·

May 10

Dude, you literally rent out the entire 20th floor of Trump Tower to China’s largest bank. Your daughter has more Chinese Patents than she does pairs of shoes and your company borrowed 200m from China. You do more business in China than most Chinese people do.

@realDonaldTrump

Quote Tweet

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

· May 10

.@CBS and their show, @60Minutes, are doing everything within their power, which is far less today than it was in the past, to defend China and the horrible Virus pandemic that was inflicted on the USA and the rest of the World. I guess they want to do business in China!

Trump is trying to pull his biggest con yet with the US economy — before everything falls apart

 May 11, 2020 By Amanda Marcotte, Salon- Commentary


Donald Trump thinks he can trick American voters into believing it’s a good thing that one in six workers is out of a job. That’s according to Nancy Cook at Politico, who reports that the mood in the White House was one of jubilation at hearing that the unemployment rate had soared to 14.7% — the highest since the Great Depression. That mood reflected “happiness that the figure wasn’t as high as it could have been,” Cook writes.


This allows Trump to use a strategy he often rolls out to trick the public into seeing his failures as a win: “Throwing out a huge number — like a future 25 percent unemployment rate, or 2 million deaths from the coronavirus — can, in turn, make lower figures seem like a relief.”

It’s a trick that Trump no doubt developed during his notorious business career, when he often tried to trick investors and banks into backing one failing venture after another by using trickery or outright lying, at least until the whole thing collapsed and he skated away, his personal assets intact, while the business went bankrupt.

Trump is trying to handle the American economy much the same way he handled his many failed business ventures: By lying about the numbers to make things seem better than they are, while moving money around with accounting tricks in hopes of fooling investors — or voters, in this case — into sticking around just a little longer, buying Trump time to figure out how he can escape personal consequences when the whole thing inevitably collapses.

In Trump’s business, that was a matter of driving his companies into bankruptcy while minimizing his personal losses. When it comes to the American economy, Trump plans to bamboozle the voters into thinking things are better, just long enough to get re-elected in November. After that, no doubt, he could care less if the entire economy completely collapses.

Trump has decided his path to re-election is to present himself as the savior of the American economy, fighting against the evil progressives who overreacted to the coronavirus pandemic with draconian economic lockdowns. But no one should be mistaken: This is a lie, like almost everything Trump says.

In reality, Trump isn’t the economy’s savior at all. He’s the main reason the economic devastation in this country is so bad in the first place. His current actions are only likely to make things worse, especially in the long run.

Trump may want to blame the current economic devastation on state governors, on China or on public health officials, but really, the blame lays largely with him. As Tim Dickinson writes in Rolling Stone, the lengthy stay-at-home orders are a direct result of Trump’s refusal to take the virus seriously and implement mitigation measures before things spiraled out of control.

That failure was twofold. First, the White House advised Americans, back in February, not to change anything about their daily lives. If we had all adopted social distancing then, there’s a strong chance that the viral spread could have been checked, preventing the more extensive stay-at-home orders that are currently laying waste to the retail sector and threatening the long-term survival of many businesses. But Trump, forever a short-term thinker, was incapable of adopting shutdown policies that might have avoided far longer and more stringent stay-at-home orders down the road. He bought himself a few weeks in February, but the price we’re paying is the loss of April and May — and probably many months into the future.

Second, and more important, the administration didn’t let the public have the coronavirus tests needed to safely reopen the economy. As Dickinson writes:

Blind to the virus’s penetration and unable to target mitigation where it was needed, the administration and state governors had to resort to the blunt instrument of shuttering the economy, says Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. And the lack of testing kept us in limbo. “Our economy is shut down because we still do not have adequate testing,” Jha says. “We have been woefully behind from the beginning of this pandemic.”

Trump could have saved the economy, but he didn’t, due to his laziness and short-sightedness, not to mention his misplaced confidence that he can BS his way through any situation. That 15% unemployment figure is hardly a victory — it’s a sign of Trump’s utter failures as a leader.

Nor can the administration claim ignorance. The Trump administration knows that adequate testing can prevent the need for draconian quarantines. Top administration officials — including Vice President Mike Pence, HHS Secretary Alex Azar and Surgeon General Jerome Adams — are not going into quarantine, despite exposure to the virus. They get to move about freely because they have access to regular testing, in some cases on a daily basis. But the rest of the country, thanks to Trump’s negligence, is deprived of the testing that we need in order to be safe, so we’re stuck at home.

All of this is likely to get worse. Trump continues to be short-sighted and largely focused on lying his way through this crisis, and has successfully pressured large parts of the country to “reopen” without remotely adequate precautions or testing. So it’s quite likely we’ll have another round of what happened in the late winter and early spring: The virus starts to spread rapidly, forcing more shutdowns and layoffs, drawing out the economic devastation far longer than would have been necessary under a more rational plan.

Trump isn’t interested in an actual economic recovery. He intends to use accounting tricks and lies to create the illusion of a healthy economy just long enough to drag him across the finish line in November. That’s evident in the White House proposal to raid Social Security for money to stimulate consumer spending in the here and now. As the Washington Post reported, “The proposal calls for giving Americans $10,000 upfront in exchange for curbing their federal retirement benefits, such as Social Security.”

This is tantamount to sacrificing the long-term economic health of the nation in order to inject just enough cash into the economy to get Trump to November, at which point he’ll almost certainly dump the American economy, just like he dumped every other business venture once it got too hard. Make no mistake, if a bunch of people find their retirement money drying up years or decades from now because of this cockamamie scheme, that will damage the economy big time. Trump, of course, does not care about the economic future of anyone but himself. He cares about getting to an Electoral College victory on Nov. 3, after which he can quit even pretending to care.

There are other sources of cash the U.S. government could tap that wouldn’t strip money from the retirement funds of ordinary Americans. For instance, the government could borrow trillions of dollars at the near-zero interest rate currently offered by the Federal Reserve and, when the crisis is over, pay it back by repealing the multi-trillion-dollar tax cut that Trump gave the wealthiest Americans early in his presidency. Indeed, that move would likely bolster the nation’s economic health in the long run, by getting more money out of the hands of the wealthy few and pushing it out into the larger economy.

Trump doesn’t actually want a healthy economy, any more than he wants Americans to have healthy bodies. He wants to create the illusion of both, just long enough so that voters — like the suckers who invested in Trump’s businesses only to see their money go up in smoke — re-up him for another term. Then he can keep on grifting and dodging legal trouble for his myriad crimes, which are his only important goals, while the rest of us watch thousands of people die and the economy fall apart around us.

White House banner mocked online with crafty photoshopping

May 11, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris- Commentary


The White House hung banners bragging about their testing successes.

“We have met the moment, and we have prevailed,” Trump announced.

When asked about the possibility of testing Americans as they go back to work, Trump explained that we’re close to being able to test all Americans.

“When will it be that Americans across the country will get tested every day as they go back to work?” asked the reporter.

“Very soon. I mean, really, very soon,” the president announced.

While the president said testing is a “very big important function,” it comes just one week after the president claimed testing is “somewhat overrated.”

In response to the banners flying high at the White House, those with Photoshopping skills took to Twitter to express their own thoughts for the banner, capturing what the president was really saying.

You can see those below

Photoshoppers have already fixed Trump’s sign.#TrumpIsALaughingStock pic.twitter.com/PUSwoQY2Xo
— Andrew Wortman (@AmoneyResists) May 11, 2020

Bold new coronavirus messaging from the Trump White House 
pic.twitter.com/Uh9kS66kLW
— Adam Blickstein (@AdamBlickstein) May 11, 2020


Fixed your sign, @realDonaldTrump.#WeHavePrevailed#AmericaFirst pic.twitter.com/smoLF1Vq95
— Zac Petkanas (@Zac_Petkanas) May 11, 2020


Some were more overt about it:
It's another banner day at the White House. https://t.co/wZ0HzMUDN8 pic.twitter.com/0bHQ0g4KUr
— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) May 11, 2020


TRUMP, 5/11/20: "We have met the moment, and we have prevailed."
BUSH, 5/1/03: pic.twitter.com/W9SGq1lY0a
Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) May 11, 2020

Coronavirus hasn’t killed globalisation – it proves why we need it

May 6, 2020 

In just a few months, COVID-19 travelled from China to more than 200 other countries, and has now killed more than 200,000 people. Some claim the pandemic sounds the death knell for globalisation – but in fact, it reveals the disasters that can arise when nations try to go it alone.

Examining where the world went right or wrong in its COVID-19 response may help mitigate another global crisis, climate change.

In the face of coronavirus’ global sweep, most national governments acted independently from each other, rather than in unison. Just as in global action on climate change, the responses of nations to the health crisis has largely been ad hoc, piecemeal and, in many cases, lethally ineffective.

Read more: Here are 5 ways to flatten the climate change curve while stuck at home

My recent research as an international business scholar has focused on finding the common threads of national cultures. My research shows that people around the world have many needs and aspirations in common, such as good health, education and employment. These are best fulfilled when world leaders work jointly with a global, rather than a national, mindset.

So let’s look at the lessons COVID-19 has taught the world, and how this might help the global effort to curb climate change.

Locals in Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation vulnerable to climate change. Like coronavirus, global warming does not respect borders. Mick Tsikas/AAP

Disunity is death

Following the COVID-19 outbreak in China, many countries imposed unilateral travel bans on Chinese arrivals, against advice from the World Health Organization.

The bans mirror the response of many nations during the west African Ebola epidemic which began in 2013. Research has shown that those travel and trade restrictions acted as a disincentive for nations to report outbreaks.

There are undoubtedly legitimate questions over China’s reporting on the coronavirus outbreak. However, travel bans may have made China more defensive and less willing to share vital information with the rest of the world.

Read more: Here are 5 ways to flatten the climate change curve while stuck at home

A shortage of vital supplies also exposed fractures in international cooperation. For example, France and Germany banned the export of medical equipment such as face masks, and the United States was accused of intercepting a shipment of medical supplies en route to Germany.

But where the world has cooperated to stop the spread of COVID-19, the benefits have been obvious. Collaboration between global health scientists has helped identify the virus’ genome sequence, and grow the virus in the lab.

Similarly on climate change, international unity is required if the world is to keep temperatures below 2℃ warming this century. But international climate meetings frequently end in disunity and despair. Meanwhile, global emissions creep ever higher.

Medical supplies from China being unloaded in East Timor. International cooperation is vital during the pandemic. ANTONIO DASIPARU/EPA

The butterfly effect

One person practising social distancing during the pandemic might think their effect is negligible. But coronavirus is highly infectious: on one estimate, a single person with coronavirus could eventually infect 59,000 others.

Similarly, many countries seek to avoid responsibility for taking climate action by claiming their contribution to the global problem is small. The Australian government, for example, repeatedly points out it contributes just 1.3% to the world’s emissions total.

But on a per capita basis, Australia is one of the world’s highest emitters. And as a rich, developed nation, we must be seen to be taking action on cutting emissions if poorer nations are expected to follow suit. So actions Australia takes will have major global consequences.

The developed world has a moral obligation to act on climate change, regardless of its emissions contribution. Federico Gambarini/EPA

Act quickly

In the two months it took the virus to spread from China and become a global pandemic, other nations could have readied themselves by amassing test kits, ventilators and personal protective equipment. But many nations did not adequately prepare.

For example the US was slow to implement a widespread testing regime, and Japan did not declare a nationwide state of emergency until mid-April.

Read more: From the bushfires to coronavirus, our old 'normal' is gone forever. So what's next?

Of course the world has had a far longer time to adapt to and mitigate climate change. The time lag between emissions and their consequences is years, even centuries. There has been ample opportunity to take progressive and thoughtful corrective action against climate change. Instead, the crisis has been met with complacency.

As the COVID-19 experience has shown, the longer we delay action on climate mitigation, the more global, costly, and lethal the consequences.

US President Donald Trump, right, with Vice President Mike Pence. The US response to coronavirus has been criticised as too slow. Doug Mills/EPA

Challenges ahead

As others have noted, a major supplier of swabs used for coronavirus testing is based in Italy, and a German company is a primary supplier of chemicals needed for the tests. Many counties rely on foreign suppliers for ventilators, and an Indian firm – the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer – says once a COVID-19 vaccine is ready for mass production, it will supply large volumes to the world, at low cost.

It’s clear that international cooperation is critical for effective mass testing and treatment for the virus. Nations must work together to improve production and distribution, and resources must be shared.

So too is cooperation needed to deal with the worldwide economic downturn. The global recovery will be long and slow if nations adopt sovereign mindsets, putting up barriers to protect their own economies.

With the coronavirus as with climate change, working together is best way to secure humanity’s safety, health and well-being.

Author
Sunil Venaik
Associate Professor of International Business, The University of Queensland

Mexican Doctors Fighting The Coronavirus Are Being Attacked From All Sides — Including By Their Own President

Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been forced to apologize after insinuating that doctors were greedy.

Karla ZabludovskyBuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From  Mexico City May 11, 2020,

Henry Romero / Reuters

MEXICO CITY — As COVID-19 cases climb in Mexico, a row has broken out between the president and medical groups after he accused some doctors of only being in it for the money.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been criticized by former health ministers for botching the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. At a press conference on Friday, López Obrador turned on his critics, saying that under previous administrations, the first question doctors would ask their patients was not about their condition, but how much money they had. He did not specify how he knew this, who the doctors he was talking about were, or whether they worked in the public or private sector.

The accusation prompted at least 23 colleges and associations across the country to demand a public apology, calling it “irresponsible” and “shameful.”

“This is offensive to the entire medical guild,” the Mexican Association of General Surgery said in a written statement. “It is not a moment to criticize, disqualify or censure” healthcare.

For some, López Obrador’s claim was no surprise, as he often rails against the “neoliberal” governments that came before him. He uses his daily press conferences to attack critics and the media, and has consistently underplayed the coronavirus health crisis — he was still out hugging supporters and touring the country well after his own experts advised people to stay home.

After coming under fire, López Obrador tried to walk back his accusation at Monday's press conference, saying that if doctors took his statement to mean he thought they were looking to enrich themselves, “I offer them an apology.” He then went on to say that the socialist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara had been a doctor.

Protests over the lack of protective gear have broken out in several states as dozens of health workers have contracted COVID-19. Shortages hobbled the healthcare system even before the pandemic hit, after López Obrador ordered steep budget cuts that delayed surgeries and led to layoffs. Last year, Germán Martínez, the head of the social security institute, which provides healthcare access to more than 12 million Mexicans, resigned after calling the cuts “inhumane.”


Alfredo Estrella / Getty Images
A health worker holds a sign reading, "I am a nurse. I fight for you and for my life #stayathome," during a protest in Mexico City on April 13.

Dozens of health workers have been subjected to verbal and physical attacks, including a nurse who was doused with bleach by a stranger as she walked home from work and an emergency room doctor who was detained by police as he tried to drive into his neighborhood. In the State of Mexico, people broke into a public hospital and punched medical personnel they accused of injecting patients with deadly solutions to kill them.

“No other country in the world has seen their medical staff as abandoned as we’ve been here,” said Francisco Moreno, an infectious disease expert at Mexico City’s ABC Hospital, a private hospital. “The prime example of that has been given by the president.”

López Obrador’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Most unsettling for many in the medical community here is the sense that they are in the dark about the magnitude of the crisis in Mexico. According to health officials, there are 35,022 confirmed cases and 3,465 deaths, but complaints of widespread underreporting have cast doubt about these numbers. With about 1,000 tests per 1 million people, Mexico has one of the lowest testing rates in the world, according to the private research firm Statista.

Officials maintain that about 75% of hospital beds with access to a ventilator nationwide, and 38% in Mexico City, remain available, but doctors are doubtful. In Mexico City, virtually all of these beds in private hospitals are in use, according to Moreno.

Last week, reports by El País, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times pointed to a significantly higher death toll in Mexico than the government has reported.

José Narro Robles, who served as health minister under the previous administration, has called into question Mexico’s official COVID-19 count, warning that many cases are being reported as influenza or atypical pneumonia.

When asked about these accusations on Friday, López Obrador waved them off as political wrangling and said that prior to his government, corruption had reigned in the healthcare system.

But López Obrador is facing reports of corruption within his own government. A company owned by León Manuel Bartlett, the son of one of his allies, has come under investigation for selling overpriced ventilators to the state, at the cost of $65,000 each — rather than the $20,000 they cost before the crisis broke out — according to Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad, a civil anti-corruption group.

Karla Zabludovsky is the Mexico bureau chief and Latin America correspondent for BuzzFeed News and is based in Mexico City.

As states weigh human lives versus the economy, history suggests the economy often wins

April 29, 2020 

A 1620 engraving depicts tobacco being prepared for export from Jamestown, Virginia. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Image

Policymakers are beginning to decide how to reopen the American economy. Until now, they’ve largely prioritized human health: Restrictions in all but a handful of states remain in effect, and trillions have been committed to help shuttered businesses and those who have been furloughed or laid off.

The right time to start opening up sectors of the economy has been up for debate. But history shows that in the wake of calamities, human life often loses out to economic imperatives.

As a historian of early America who has written about tobacco and the aftermath of an epidemic in New England, I’ve seen similar considerations made in the face of disease outbreaks. And I believe that there are crucial lessons to be drawn from two 17th-century outbreaks during which economic interests of a select few won out over moral concerns.
Tobacco, a love story

During the 16th century, Europeans fell in love with tobacco, an American plant. Many enjoyed the sensations, like increased energy and decreased appetite, that it produced, and most who wrote about it emphasized its medicinal benefits, seeing it as a wonder drug that could cure a variety of human ailments. (Not everyone celebrated the plant; King James I of England warned that it was habit-forming and dangerous.)

By the early 17th century, the English grew increasingly eager to establish a permanent colony in North America after failing to do so in places like Roanoke and Nunavut. They saw their next opportunity along the James River, a tributary of Chesapeake Bay. Following the establishment of Jamestown in 1607, the English soon realized that the region was perfect for cultivating tobacco.

The newcomers, however, didn’t know they had settled in an ideal breeding ground for the bacteria that cause typhoid fever and dysentery. From 1607 to 1624, approximately 7,300 migrants, most of them young, traveled to Virginia. By 1625 there were only about 1,200 survivors. A 1622 uprising by local Powhatans and drought-induced shortages of food contributed to the death toll, but most perished from disease. The situation was so dire that some colonists, too weak to produce food, resorted to cannibalism.

Aware that such stories might dissuade possible migrants, the Virginia Company of London circulated a pamphlet that acknowledged the problems but stressed that the future would be brighter.

And so English migrants continued to arrive, recruited from the armies of young people who had moved to London looking for work, only to find scant opportunities. Jobless and desperate, many agreed to become indentured servants, meaning they would work for a planter in Virginia for a set period of time in exchange for passage across the ocean and compensation at the end of the contract.

Tobacco production soared, and despite a drop in the price due to the overproduction of the crop, planters were able to amass substantial wealth.
From servants to slaves

Another disease shaped early America, even though its victims were thousands of miles away. In 1665, the bubonic plague struck London. The next year, the Great Fire consumed much of the city’s infrastructure. Bills of mortality and other sources reveal that the city’s population may have dropped by as much as 15% to 20% during this period.

The timing of the twinned catastrophes couldn’t have been worse for English planters in Virginia and Maryland. Though demand for tobacco had only grown, many indentured servants from the first wave of recruits had decided to start their own families and farms. Planters desperately needed labor for their tobacco fields, but English workers who might have otherwise emigrated instead found work at home rebuilding London.

With fewer laborers coming from England, an alternative started to seem increasingly attractive to planters: the slave trade. While the first enslaved Africans had arrived in Virginia in 1619, their numbers grew significantly after the 1660s. In the 1680s, the first anti-slavery movement appeared in the Colonies; by then, planters had come to rely on imported slave labor.

Yet planters didn’t need to prioritize labor-intensive tobacco. For years, Colonial leaders had been trying to convince planters to grow less labor-intensive crops, like corn. But enamored by the allure of profits, they stuck with their cash crop – and welcomed ship after ship of bound laborers. The demand for tobacco outweighed any sort of moral consideration.

Legalized slavery and indentured servitude are no longer familiar parts of the American economy, but economic exploitation persists.

Despite the heated anti-immigration rhetoric that has come from the Oval Office in recent years, the United States continues to rely heavily on immigrant workers, which includes farm workers. Their importance has become even more apparent during the pandemic, and the government has even declared them “essential.” After Trump announced his immigration ban on April 20, the executive order exempted farm workers and crop pickers, whose numbers have actually grown under his administration.

So even before states were weighing whether to reopen nonessential businesses, these laborers were on the frontlines, working and sleeping in close proximity, immunocompromised due to chemical exposure, with little access to proper medical care.

And yet rather than reward them for performing this essential work, some in the government are reportedly trying to slash their low wages even further, while giving farm owners a multi-billion-dollar bailout.

Whether it’s a plague or pandemic, the story tends to remain the same, with the quest for profits eventually prevailing over concerns for human health.

Author

Peter C. Mancall
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

THE CONVERSATION

Pediatricians seeing a growing demand for medical cannabis for kids

May 10, 2020


There are only a handful of conditions in which evidence supports the use of medical cannabis in children. (Shutterstock)

Most Canadian pediatricians are shying away from medical cannabis for patients, knowing that it can hurt the developing brain and that there isn’t much research to guide them.

But physicians say they are getting increasing requests for cannabis from parents, for a growing list of conditions.

Dr. Adam Rapoport, medical director of the pediatric palliative care team at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, says, “This is mostly driven by parents, and doctors have fallen behind.”

Lauren Kelly agrees. “It’s happening and we’re playing catch-up.”

Kelly is a pharmacologist and scientific director of the Canadian Childhood Cannabinoid Clinical Trials, a national research consortium. Her group is working quickly to develop answers to questions about cannabis for children. “The use of it has far outpaced the evidence, and that’s the biggest challenge.”

Fifty per cent of pediatricians surveyed in 2017 had at least one patient who had used cannabis for medical reasons in the past year. But the cannabis use is not stemming from prescriptions (called physician authorizations). Only four per cent of pediatricians said they had authorized medical cannabis for one of their patients.
Research still lacking for many conditions

Since then, pediatricians like Dr. Daniel Flanders, director of Kindercare Pediatrics in Toronto, say that requests have grown only more frequent and the reasons for the requests more diverse.

Flanders is asked about medical cannabis at least two to three times a week for issues such as chronic pain, mental health issues, arthritis, ADHD and sleep problems.

In a survey, only four per cent of pediatricians said they had authorized medical cannabis for one of their patients. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

But there are only a very few conditions for which the science is solid when it comes to using cannabis in children.

Pointing to a handful of well-executed randomized controlled trials and a recent systematic review of the literature on medical cannabis for complex pediatric seizure disorders, Dr. Evan Lewis, a pediatric neurologist in Toronto, says there is very good evidence supporting its use in certain seizure conditions, such as Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, Dravet syndrome and tuberous sclerosis.

“Outside of that, it is kind of extrapolating from the evidence and using less robust evidence in the literature,” he says.

That’s not stopping some parents and physicians from pushing the boundaries.

It’s a path worth taking in some cases, Lewis says.

Lewis is now using cannabis for other types of seizures, and also authorizes cannabis in select cases for a range of conditions such as migraines, concussions, sleep problems, autism, tics, movement disorders and behavioural problems in children with neurological conditions. It’s also being used in Canada for symptom relief in palliative care, chronic pain disorders, spasticity, incurable malignancies and ADHD.

But Lewis says that the research is not as high-quality as he would like, and for many conditions, does not exist at all.
Dosing issues

Another difficulty is that standard dosing has not been established and experimental cannabis protocols often use purified cannabidiol (CBD), a compound in marijuana with no psychoactive effects.

This type of CBD-only preparation is not available for patients in Canada, so physicians have to choose products that contain both CBD and the compound delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is psychoactive and gives users a high.

A parent holds a bottle of cannabis oil used to treat her son’s seizures caused by Dravet syndrome. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

Dr. Richard Huntsman, pediatric neurologist at the University of Saskatchewan, is part of a team trying to solve the problem of dosing regimens for children with complex seizure disorders. In addition to establishing a target dose using oils, his study also measured CBD and THC levels in the blood and showed that these levels remained low. The study used an oil that contained 20 parts CBD to one part THC.

“People are very worried about their kids getting high,” he said, but based on these results, he adds, this is “not so much of a worry,” at least in this population.

And contrary to common belief, he found that the medication appeared to help with cognitive function, instead of impairing it. He is cautious though, and warns that the study was done in a small number of children.
Guidelines in development

With the cannabis landscape changing quickly in Canada, doctors are looking for advice. The Canadian Paediatric Society plans to publish guidance documents this summer, according to its cannabis working group co-chair, Dr. Christina Grant, an adolescent health specialist at McMaster Children’s Hospital.

In the meantime, she says that every day, she advises teens in her Hamilton office that cannabis is not a good treatment option for anxiety and depression.

“The effect is the opposite,” she says, noting that one-sixth of youth who experiment with cannabis, even for self-medication, develop cannabis use disorder.

While physicians await the recommendations, Kelly says that her research consortium has launched five new clinical trials of medical cannabis in kids, and other Canadian research groups are quickly trying to play catch-up as well.

“I certainly don’t think it can be the cure-all. It’s not magic. But there are some areas that are showing promise … we should be investing in research,” says Kelly.

Author

Michelle Ward
Academic Pediatrician & Journalist, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

THE CONVERSATION